To coaching women with late diagnosed ADHD
If you prefer audio to reading, click the YT video ^^
So we're going to try something different here where I am going to take a piece of my own advice, lean into my own zone of genius [which is audio] and actually do this post as an audio! I will transcribe it to create this blog and we'll see how it goes. I thought it would be interesting to talk a bit about how I was able to hone in on my own coaching niche.
When I began going down the coaching road; trying to see what people did, how the business is done, what the business actually is, or anything about it at all; I realized that I hadn't found much info or storytelling around how coaches niched down. This was a big part that I wanted to understand, like how did people get to their niche? What is the purpose of a niche really? Do I absolutely need one?
Let's go back a step
So, I sat and thought about this noting that the majority of my career, about 12 years or so was spent in community management and development. Although I'd been doing community driven work for some time, I still had to get support in discerning the common threads of my life experiences to recognize that my niche or speciality was even called, community management.
By the time I started calling myself a community manager, I had been doing that work for at least five to seven years, but it wasn't called that during that time. The industry hadn't caught up with that term. It really had me think about ::
how you show up in the world,
what you do with your time,
what you bring to the table,
how it's uniquely yours.
Maybe there isn't a name for it [it = the unique special sauce that you do with ease]. Maybe you get to create that for yourself, but a lot of the work is around going inward to really see what's aligned within you and then pulling it out into this real world, right? So it's not inside anymore, it's now external for the world to taste. And even for me with community management, I realized that I was more of a front end community development and relationship building sort of person.
As opposed to the backend, admin, statistics, measurement, role which just wasn't my forte. I could do it, but it was certainly my zone of competence [as opposed to excellence or genius]. I definitely spent a lot of time on YouTube back then as well as asking for support and finding very meta communities I could join as a community person.
Yet, a golden thread has always been there but I hadn't paid it much attention and it was the fact that, I'd peppered in mentorship throughout every role I've had. Whether paid or volunteer; I leaned most toward mentor & partnership.
That's always tended to be something that I did, even when I was in high school, I tended to be in those mentorship roles. I loved doing that in college as well, where I got to mentor high school age kids as they were coming up. Currently, I take a long weekend every Spring & Autumn to coach college juniors & seniors around social impact & entrepreneurship. It's something I've always enjoyed, but I never really thought about it as a career path.
This is the golden thread that I'm talking about when coaching people as well; take some serious solitude to be retrospective with yourself. Where do you tend? What default activities have you done for years without question? What things do you ensure you always have space for in your life? These are the answers that will support you in honing in.
In that COVID moment, I did keep some of this in mind as I began to pivot my career from community toward coaching, yet still relatively uncertain with the direction [the how, again]. I just knew that I was starting to be pulled in a different direction and I knew this feeling all too well.
What I Knew
I knew that I had been coaching and mentoring for years already. I knew that I loved to partner with people to really widen their lenses so that they could begin to see their own masterpiece. That gives me so much fulfillment! It's where selfishness becomes selflessness IMO.
And then I also knew that I liked to research:
How to run this business?
What types of things to offer?
How do people do this?
How have they done it over time?
What I didn't know was, am I going to get certified or not? Do I care about a credential or not? Am I going to niche? What even is that? I didn't know much about business development and operations or running my own business. Albeit this is about my third time being an entrepreneur [lol], yet that doesn't necessarily mean I know what I'm doing. I'm just learning a little bit more every time and learning a little bit more of the types of people I can ask for support from, to make incremental progress.
And I also didn't know what success really looked like. I feel that we're definitely in this space of coaching now where, at least on my timelines, life coaching is super trendy. People are not necessarily walking their talk in my perception. I think there's a lot of fraudulence being shared from this industry that's causing harm, leaving a lot of people wanting more as well as leaving many people confused at the services they're actually receiving.
I think shows like Twin Flames on Netflix has really soured the coaching taste for many folks. So there were a lot of these unknowns as I started to rabbit hole into research, but I wanted to share my relative timeline into how I got to the point I'm at now, which is allowing my niche to expose itself to me. What I've gleaned so far is: partnering with women to start untangling ancestral wounding as it relates to awareness and boldness in health, somatic understanding, and neurodivergently radical acceptance.
As I have delved more into my own learning about me, I have found more resonance in the people that I want to serve and partner with.
I want to really work with people in optimization as opposed to stigmatization, especially when it comes to being embodied and owning who they are.
The Adventure
It truly begins when I attended this transformational and performance leadership program a la, Lifespring / MITT / Landmark [if you're interested in this portion, find more with this post]. However, Atlas is based in the west coast, is a nonprofit, and is really where I elevated.
Long story short, I went in completely blind as to what was going to happen there. By the time I graduated the program, I started to see myself in full, where I was showing up for myself and others, how I was showing up in the world, what my gaps in belief around myself were, what subconscious masks I was wearing, and so much more. In that space, a lot of people that I worked with were asking me if I was a coach and how can they hire me. I thought, Hmm, that's interesting. So let me research this a little.
In Atlas, there's a space where you get to make a big goal that you want to achieve by graduation. I thought, let me research this coaching thing and see if there's some way this can become a big goal. Because I was starting to get disenchanted with community work and the way that it was moving into a strictly online space. It felt like, one must be good at everything, including social media [not my forte]. And it's just such an energy intensive type of work that I just didn't know if I had it in me anymore.
Inkling #1. So I chose to research and find 10 different types of coaches online that I could set up an informational interview with and just riddle them with questions. After about 2 calls I thought, okay, I do want to do this.
And the dual edged sword is that there are a thousand ways that you can have a coaching business. It's kind of the Wild, Wild West because it's relatively unregulated here in the U S. Through my initial research, I realized that regulation mattered to me. So that narrowed down finding a certification program that was also accredited by the International Coaching Federation, because I thought I'd want the the option to get my credential at some point [a certification and a credential in the coaching world are two different things; something I also hadn't known] and I know I won't be going back to uni for a masters in something related.
Lots of coaches have neither. Some have just a certification, which means they received training. And then others decided to go through the rigmarole of testing, sending in examples of sessions + having them reviewed and having a supervisor, asll to primarily express that our coaching training is aligned with an international standard of ethics.
Inkling #2 . When I chose my training school, it was destined. And I knew I made the right choice because I won this lottery that happened to be going on in that school within the first month of choosing. So what was going to be a $12K course ended up being just $2K for me. So I thought, okay, this is great and is a solid omen.
I chose the leadership track because it's something has always been visible in my life. I feel [and have been told] that I am a natural leader, I come from a family of [first responder] leaders, and my dad is even a retired police captain. He instilled leadership in me since I was able to talk and it's simply remained a really integral part of how I view the world through my lenses.
During all this and as I decided I would go forward with credentialing [since I thought it would behoove me to have some paperwork backing my lack of official experience; something I now don't believe but alas] I wanted to finally get my, diagnosis for ADHD primarily because I wanted to get an accommodation for the exam [LOL].
Did I know that I had ADHD? Yes. Did I care to be diagnosed? Not really.
I wanted it for this sole examination purpose. Upon learning about my definite ADHD with an official diagnosis and the question of 'how I've done life for so long without meds' hmmph, I also found out I have PCOS and pre diabetes. Cue, rabbit holes.
If you're familiar with neurodivergence, our crew can go down a rabbit hole!! Shocker, we tend to be more well resourced than your average Joe, because we are so particular in going down our hyper focused abyss of endless research until satisfied.
Inkling #3. I started learning more about ADHD and executive function. I started learning more about the connection between the infradian feminine rhythm, which is a 28 day lunar cycle as opposed to the circadian rhythm 24 hour cycle, the connection to high cortisol in women, and how the connection with endocrine disorders in women, just like PCOS.
So I started going down this intersectional rabbit hole, which is the exact juncture of where I want to work with women with ancestral healing, somatic understanding, and neurodivergent radical acceptance. Especially in the West, we are simply not taught or shown how our bodies, our rhythms, our stressors, our typical states of being are interwoven. It feels freeing to put my stake down in an area that is visceral for me and can bring significant impact. Sometimes it's really difficult for late diagnosed [or anyone really] to start with which direction to take, is it neurodivergence or embodied trauma or the endocrine system or changing my diet. I'm particularly good at initiating and lining out direction once I have adequate information; so I know deeply that this is a pivotal space for me.
Doing the Doing
It became so much more clear how many aspects of my own life are so symptomatic of executive dysfunction. I passed my ACC exam and then I tried several different ways to make coaching happen because I didn't have another job. This was not going to be a side hustle. This was going to be my main hustle.
And there's another aspect of my ADHD! I get a visionary idea and I jump in to the 20 foot side of the pool without walking down the stairs with the handlebar on the five foot side of the pool [LOL]. So I jumped in and learned as I went. I hired my own coach as well and that's where I really learned how to determine what my success can look like, not what society or my timelines say.
It was the mapping out of what success can look like for me. It was starting to consistently go to breathwork as a participant [I also facilitate holotropic breathwork]. It was starting to do visualization exercises that allowed me to open the door to what possibilities could look like. It was journaling and voice memoing to myself what my masks are and how they were sneakily showing up day to day. It was taking at least 10mins. nightly to put my legs up on the wall and breath deeply [my meditation]. This was the rigorous work I kept up with to hone in and refine.
I stopped following a bunch of coaches on my social media so I wasn't inundated with all these other people's visions. I just wanted my own vision.
Inkling #4.Then I ended up working [still do] for a deep work body doubling company called Flown where there I was facilitating, which is definitely a zone of genius, but I also got to create an ADHD focused group coaching program.
And this has been the game changer. This is how my niche, the one I'd been slowly walking toward blindly, became clear. Why don't I put together a type of mastermind esque space, a way for people to work on dismantling typical neurodivergent pain points like rejection sensitivity, self distrust, planning and prioritization woes, heightened anxiety and social anxiety, conflict avoidance, demand avoidance?
I thought, what if I created the ways that I've worked with those aspects myself? Expressed in a way that I can share it with others and see if it sticks. So then I did it for the first time and it was resounding yes from the people that I was working with.
Then I popped in dates for another two containers and they sold out quickly. Now I thought, okay, one, there's a need here two, I think what I'm sharing is different in that it's a juicy combination of having a somatic basis, so we're using our body, we're reconnecting with body, which people with neurodivergence tend to be deeply disconnected and dysregulated from. We're adding in shadow work or subconscious work, so ontology, and wrapped up with some tools that I created that have supported me immensely along the way [without a diagnosis and without meds, for decades].
I've created tools to help me work through my own ADHD since I was a child, having no idea that that's what I was doing. And again, another view of that golden thread that's been woven since you started breathing. So I simply collated all those tools and made them into a mastermind, peppered with embodiment and shadow work. Exactly the program I'd want :). Inkling #5.
My niche had to come from within me.
And now the people that I want to attract into my space are late diagnosed women of AuADHD. Whether they be entrepreneurial, homemaking, or professional matters less, but more so that they want to show up more fully in their world. That's what I want to see. The conversations that I want to create around this type of business:
are ancestral, feminine, and generational wounding,
quantum physics, philosophy, and spirituality,
alternative perspectives on health maintenance and management.
the infinite knowledge held in our bodies or somatic work,
subconscious work,
radical acceptance and vocalization of self,
consistency in commitment and excellence as opposed to perfection.
These are the things that I want to be about. I had to take some real time, six months to a year, to really hone in on who I want to work with, but more importantly who do I want to be when I'm working such that it doesn't feel like work and it feels like a calling.
This timeline, with the inklings, was a way for me to simply illustrate that it wasn't just me alone figuring it all out. I needed support. I did group coaching myself, hired a 1:1 coach, took courses, got certifications, went on long drives with bae, brainstormed with trusted friends and attended to my own community by showing up within it. The niche didn't fall into my lap, I nearly tripped over it as I gave myself time, rest, and space to let it take up some space.
I hope that you let space in and see what magic unravels.
Hey, I’m Viki; a lass of many facets. The quick version is, I’m a resilience coach who empowers neurodivergents from living in states of TENSION to living in states of INTENTION. With a trauma informed lens, I support women through coaching, breathwork and communal events.
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