Solopreneur-ing with ADHD
Part Two: Emotional Regulation, Resilience, and Leaning Into “The Bright Side of ADHD”.
Managing symptoms of ADHD can look like setting alarms to manage time, limiting distractions, and making changes to your lifestyle to help you find deeper focus and flow. It can also look like managing the symptoms of depression and anxiety, which 47% of those with ADHD also experience.
David Kopp is our second Groover in our Solopreneur-ing with ADHD series. Here’s a little bit more about him: David is a creative engineer living in Los Angeles and New York City. Despite barely graduating grade school, high school, and dropping out of college after his first year, he managed to achieve success in a wide range of creative and technical fields, and now spends his time as a creative entrepreneur and advisor. He’s passionate about education reform (for obvious reasons)!
In this interview, he shares how he overcomes the stigma associated with neurodivergence, unlocks his creativity, and thrives as a solopreneur with ADHD.
Groove: Can you tell us about your experience with ADHD?
David: Growing up, I was a handful, and in school my second grade teacher made a comment to my parents that, “David has a hard time staying focused and can’t sit still.” When my mom had me tested, interestingly, I was assessed with having an organizational deficit, but I didn’t test positive for ADD or ADHD. To this day, my mom and sisters have no idea how. When I asked my family if they’d take an online ADHD assessment test on my behalf (to remove my own bias) my sister Kris said ‘I don’t have to take the test. We already know you have it.’
Because I was never diagnosed, I was never medicated for ADHD, I always had a hard time focusing in school and pretty much anything else. That’s been my early experience, and it was very frustrating to try to live up to the expectation to be able to sit still, and to be like everybody else. There weren’t really fidget toys back in the day. And society, in general, wasn’t sensitive to people with ADHD. So, I disrupted class and got sent to the principal’s office a lot.
As a young adult, I had a hard time staying focused and that meant that I never completed school. All the arrows pointed to me not being a good fit for school. So, even when I went to college (a conservatory acting program), I only stayed for a year. I did well in it, but not well enough to continue for various creative reasons.
Because of my ADHD, I cast a very wide net in my professional career, which ended up serving me later on in life. After several years of accumulating general expertise in many areas, I thought, “What if I bundle them into one kind of consulting service?” That’s what I did. For the last 15 years, I’ve run my own agency where I’ve been a full scope, full service marketing slash creative consultant. I was able to grow my business because when you do a lot of things, you can kind of capture a lot of different kinds of referrals. Now, I’m basically a chief creative officer for a tech startup, and I do some advisory roles. It’s been really wonderful and I’m really lucky to have kind of landed here.
Groove: What are the biggest challenges you face in your creative and career pursuits with ADHD? At the same time, do you feel that ADHD can help you in your creative or career pursuits?
David: The biggest challenges that I face in my creative and career pursuits with respect to ADHD is that regardless of what you’re doing, you’re always going to have some mundane tasks to complete. Organizing, scheduling, answering emails, and administrative tasks become very challenging with ADHD.
The bright side of ADHD, though, I think is actually quite substantial. I don’t think I could be the kind of creative person I am without it. One of the things that I think ADHD does is it forces you or your brain to jump from issue to issue. It’s also making connections between what you’re thinking about as well. For example, If I’m thinking about a song and a particular part of the song, maybe a chorus, it will make me think about or associate to another song.
So, my creative experience becomes one of a very fast connection between things. I think that’s a really undervalued and misunderstood thing about ADHD is that that part of your brain can be leveraged, and I’m not sure if this is true for other people, but for me part of being ADHD is that that connectivity happens so fast that the ‘editor’ goes away because it doesn’t have time to get a word in. So when I’m in a creative mode, hyper connectivity is a huge asset.
Groove: What strategies and methods do you use to overcome the challenges of ADHD?
David: The first and most important, and the thing that took me the longest to learn, is to not give into feelings of guilt and shame. With mental health, shame and guilt are force multipliers, they make symptoms worse, and prevent real healing.
It’s interesting — shame is an emotion that is a response to external forces, but guilt is a self imposed emotion that, I think, we give ourselves in order to release ourselves from the responsibility of change. For me, I’ve learned that I need to release myself from feeling guilty about the struggles I have with ADHD in order to really deal with myself and my life in a more positive way.
The other strategies and methods I use are pretty straight forward. For sensory management, I find it really helps for me to have some kind of a fidget toy with me (a deck of cards, a fidget spinner, or a squeeze ball). I also use noise canceling headphones and listen to brown noise (which my fellow Groover Lashonda Brown also loves). Yard work is the bane of my existence — so brown noise really helps when the leaf blower is going — all the extra noise just washes away.
Groove: How does Groove help you stay more focused and help you get into the flow?
David: I find that having a place to go, be it in person or in an app, where I can channel my intentions, get the support of a community, and have a structure around time boxing is enormously helpful. Because without having something like an app to go to, I’m left to my own devices, and I don’t have a place to say “this is what I’m doing, and this is how I need support.” Not to plug Groove, but this is what Groove offers: community, structure, and intention.
Groove: Is there anything else you would like to share? 🤗
David: My most important thing is this: if you’re feeling shame around your mental health, just know that you don’t have to feel that way. ADHD is tough, and one thing you don’t need on top of that is to feel ashamed of yourself.
Looking for more Groovy content? Check these out:
- Solopreneur-ing with ADHD (Part 1)
- The SEO Solopreneur’s Kit
- Or, if you’re looking to make working solo ➡️ social, cruise on over to groove.ooo to join our beta community 🏄🏼
