When my husband and I were raising all five offspring, the house was abuzz with all sorts -- we were the family everyone wanted to be with, open, authentic, fun and 'out the box'.

My journey to coaching through an ADHD lens began a few years ago following several psycho-educational diagnostics revealing ADHD in one of my children, an early adolescent at the time.

No educational figure had thought to suggest such an exploration in fact, we'd bounced from professional to professional several years earlier and mostly, were told our parenting wasn't adequate and everything would simply sort.

And so, my exploration to appreciating both the joys and challenges of this often misunderstood and judged neuro-developmental condition, inadvertently began.

Numerous books, psychologists, school after school, sadly left me and she bereft, until I stumbled upon ADHD coaching. Desperate, having exhausted every kind of therapy and medication, I thought that’s the ticket, magic wand here we come. Timing wise, I was sorely wrong.

My loving, perfect child with a brilliance of individual thought rejected the idea of coaching because she’d contracted therapy fatigue coupled with a serious bout of skepticism that ADHD really wasn’t a thing and enough negative feedback for a lifetime – of course with such a concoction, neither support nor discovery of strengths was needed.

Yet, I was intrigued, hyper-focused on getting to the bottom of this neuro-biological condition I learned quickly, is generational and hereditary.

Within two months I’d signed onto ADDCA’s specialized ADHD coach training. Transformative it was, impacting this mother of ADDers in ways language cannot quite capture - my first couple of sessions I was struck by lightning - suddenly, I made sense, my entire life made sense.

I felt the tingles of relief, comfortable in my uniqueness and all it brings to this world, yet deeply contemplative about those aspects of my life I had found so challenging, and in some profound ways, still do.

All those frequently attributed remarks like super-energetic, eccentric, creative, different, unexpectedly, provided some explanation.

As did the fact that I couldn’t focus in school and as a result, underachieved in school, or indeed in anything subsequently that didn’t truly ignite and excite, - it too suddenly made sense. I wasn’t the cliché climbing the walls / badly behaved child, but inattentive to anything that didn’t interest me, getting started and getting some things done could happen but mostly to deadline and pretty much only with a creative element.

Dancer, journalist, experienced PR, somatic movement teacher, professional volunteer/carer - these inherent pastimes and livelihoods have all been expressions of my unique spirit - yet with the unlocking of an even deeper awareness of who I am, self-actualisation has enabled me to live even more aligned to my passions, values and beliefs. Who I am now is who I’ve always been, only now it’s with vital consciousness, so long to the shame.