About Me

I aced it at school. Well - I aced it in exams. School in general was more of a mixed bag, as my school reports testify with such nuggets as:

"She is highly intelligent, creatively gifted, musical and instinctively astute. Her difficulties have absolutely nothing to do with anything intellectual but can be ascribed purely and simply to bouts of complete chaos."

"Caroline is an excellent mathematician... but a terrible student."

"Caroline is a consummate waster of time."

"She just has to motivate herself to go to her desk and then to sit there until her work is all done."

"I don't know about doing her homework on the top of a bus, but it wouldn't surprise me if Caroline did her homework walking to school, in the bath, or anywhere else equally remarkable."

After school and throughout adulthood - as a Cambridge graduate, fashion production co-ordinator, songwriter, performer, workshop leader, qualified teacher, assessor, SENCo - it has often felt like if someone were still writing reports on my work life, or my general life admin, they would read in a similarly contradictory and exasperated way as those old school reports - and not understanding why I could be so brilliant at times - and at others so "rubbish" - left me questioning whether I was lazy despite appearing so hard working, whether I was stupid despite allegedly being so smart, whether I was incapable despite a wide array of achievements and successes.

Do you recognise this*?

Now that I understand my ADHD, being a total contradiction no longer surprises me. That inner critic has piped right down and we are even becoming friends...

Do you want that?

ADHD Coaching helped me find that - and now I am passionate about passing that on to others like you.

* Researchers and experts in ADHD report this charming and infuriating contrarianism as a core ADHD trait.

Ned Hallowell describes this in his wonderful book ADHD 2.0: "It helps to think of ADHD as a complex set of contradictory or paradoxical tendencies: a lack of focus combined with an ability to superfocus; a lack of direction combined with highly directed entrepreneurialism; a tendency to procrastinate combined with a knack for getting a week's worth of work done in two hours; impulsive, wrongheaded decision making combined with inventive, out-of-the-blue problem solving; interpersonal cluelessness combined with uncanny intuition and empathy; the list goes on"