#92🤷🏽 You're Not the Problem, You're the Solution
Breaking Free from ADHD Self-Doubt and Anxiety.
Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog for navigating the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.
I am an ADHD and product management coach helping you change one belief and take one action each week.
🐼Do you work in Tech and are tired of struggling? Get ADHD and job skill coaching with Tech Atypically.
Part 5 of the Finding Happiness Series
🦋The Takeaways
Belief: I assume I’m the problem when I see others not experiencing the same pain.
Reality: If you’re feeling the pain, likely, others are too.
Action: See yourself as the solution, not the problem.
⭐️Introduction
Have you ever sat in meetings feeling like the only person who doesn't understand? Everyone else nods along while you suppress burning questions and thoughts.
You stay quiet, fearing you'll look stupid. You hope someone else voices your concerns to validate them. When no one does, you leave feeling like the dumbest person in the room. You feel like a burden to the team. This happens to me multiple times a day. But it's a false belief.
Today, I'll share how to stop seeing yourself as the problem and start seeing yourself as the solution.
😵💫The Belief - The Burden/Benefit Binary
One of my deepest self-limiting beliefs is that my existence is either a burden or benefit to others—nothing in between.
I'm either dragging people down or helping just enough to be tolerated. Even when I'm helpful, I fear it could change at any moment because I'll inevitably mess up. It's not if, but when. This fear of being discovered drives me to simultaneously overachieve and underperform.
This anxiety, imposter syndrome, and self-loathing underpin my ADHD experience. It's a voice constantly whispering I'm not enough, making me doubt my thoughts and feelings.
Add Tech's stack-rank culture, growth-at-all-costs mindset, and constant layoff threats, and you've got a recipe for fragile self-worth with an anxiety cherry on top. If you are an immigrant with a visa tied to employment, the paranoia feels almost reasonable.
While this burden/benefit mindset might help survive, it's no way to live.
🤝The Reality - You're Not Alone
If you're feeling something, others likely feel it too. My flavor of ADHD comes with a gift: heightened empathy and the ability to connect seemingly unrelated things. I'm sensitive to others' needs and often see connections in their challenges before they do—traits that make me a strong product manager and coach.
If a meeting or process causes you anxiety or frustration, others probably feel it too. What makes it harder is the weight of "shoulds":
I should participate in this unhelpful stand-up
I should add another unproductive meeting
I should confidently push back immediately when I disagree
For me, these "shoulds" compound until I'm either an anxious mess or an inattentive apologist. Thanks to tough love from a former manager, I learned to see myself as the solution instead.
🛠️The Action - See Yourself as the Solution
When you see yourself as the solution to the problems at work, you break the cycle of seeing yourself as the problem. Here are strategies to help break that voice
Let the voice out
The voice of anxiety is loudest when it’s in your head. Externalizing it from your thoughts is always a quick way to quiet it. It could be writing it on paper, saying it out loud to yourself, telling a friend, your pet, slacking a co-worker, or whatever way that it gets out of your head. You’ll often find that the response is your thought is not that far from others. That it’s not that bad of an idea and you are not a bad person.
See yourself as the superhero or solution to helping others
Whatever anxiety rager is going on in your head, remove yourself from the scenario. Allow yourself to see the situation without the bias of your anxiety and fear. What does it look like now? What are the real drivers to the scenario and what can you do as the hero coming in to help?
Breathing and Self-Affirmation Exercise
Here’s an exercise to help you practice self-acceptance and feel the changes in your body when you do it.
Put your open hands on top of each other on top of your heart
Find your heartbeat
Close your eyes
Breathe in slowly and deeply
As you exhale, say “I do enough”
Breathe in
As you exhale, say “I have enough”
Breathe in
As you exhale, say “I have enough”
Feel your heartbeat slow as you practice each line. Repeat 2-3 times as needed.
✨Conclusion
I still struggle with self-acceptance and "shoulds." Just this morning, I felt it in a new meeting with a new boss and team. The first 10 minutes were rough. But I reminded myself my job was to help organize chaos. People welcomed new processes because they knew the old ones weren't perfect.
I allowed myself to ask "Why not?" Why not try something new? It couldn't make things worse. Even if it did, we could revert to old ways. That anxiety monster is always there ready to catch me. So why not?
Be the hero in your story for once and tell the anxiety to shut up.
🐼Get ADHD coaching for the job, behavioral challenges, and executive communication all in one place.
⏭️Next Week
An expert and I talk about accepting happiness.
"One of my deepest self-limiting beliefs is that my existence is either a burden or benefit to others—nothing in between."
I noticed recently that this is how I feel when driving. I act like it's everyone else's road, and I'm just in their way. It's such an unhelpful thing to think, but man does it feel good to know that others feel it in their own ways, too. Well put, and thanks for sharing!
I love this post and think it is absolutely important for ADHD workers, particularly younger folks just entering the workforce. I haven't felt the same crippling self-doubt, but I have noted that invariably, like the elementary school teachers say, if one person had a question, likely many people had the same question. One insecurity I do have still is meeting length. Anti-meeting sentiment is so high that sometimes people resent the question askers for prolonging meetings. So my tactic there is to generally quiet down my burning questions in the last twenty minutes of any meeting. Since people expect me to contribute, I think they know that my silence is a cooperative effort to get things moving out the door.