From Shame to Strategy: Alan Brown on Advocacy After Diagnosis
In 1992, a struggling advertising executive in Manhattan walked into his Upper East Side doctor's office with what he thought might be a revelation. His boss had just been diagnosed with ADHD, and the symptoms—the scattered thinking, the time that evaporated, the constant feeling of running to catch up—sounded eerily familiar. The doctor listened, nodded, and delivered his professional opinion: "ADD is a myth created by the media. You just need to do more crossword puzzles."
Alan Brown took that advice seriously. For five years, he became exceptional at the New York Times crossword puzzle—almost able to complete the notoriously difficult Saturday edition. His ADHD, however, remained completely uncured.
This week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast, Alan Brown—now known as the ADD Crusher—returns after nine years to unpack a question that haunts nearly everyone with ADHD after diagnosis: Now what?
Because here's what nobody tells you: getting diagnosed is the easy part. The hard part is learning to ask for what you need without drowning in shame. The hard part is figuring out how to advocate for yourself when the very act of asking feels like admitting defeat.
Alan walks us through a discovery that transformed his career: the moment he refused a shared office space and, instead of being fired or labeled difficult, ended up with a private office overlooking lower Manhattan. It wasn't magic. It wasn't luck. It was understanding something fundamental about advocacy that most people miss entirely.
The conversation reveals two deceptively simple mindset shifts that unlock the door to effective self-advocacy. The first: replacing "I suck at this" with "I'm trying." The second: swapping "I should be able to" with "I am willing to." These aren't just feel-good affirmations—they're the difference between staying stuck and making progress.
But there's a deeper pattern here in the concept of "expansionist thinking"—the ADHD superpower of seeing connections and possibilities everywhere—and how it becomes weaponized against us. One small failure explodes into "I suck at everything." One unmet expectation spirals into complete self-doubt. Understanding this pattern is the first step to interrupting it.
Throughout the conversation, a central question emerges: When are you at your best? Not when do you think you should be at your best. Not when does everyone else seem to be at their best. When are you actually, genuinely at your best? Answer that question honestly, and you've identified every accommodation you'll ever need.
Alan shares his upcoming presentation at the ADHD conference in Kansas City—"Ten Simple Mindset Shifts for More Doing and Less Stressing"—and offers his free ebook at ADDCrusher.com: "Five Things We're Doing Every Day That Make Our ADHD Worse."
Because it turns out the real question isn't whether you deserve accommodations. The real question is: what becomes possible when you finally ask for what you need?
Links & Notes
-
Pete Wright
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Taking Control, the ADHD podcast on TruStory FM. I'm Pete Wright, and I'm here with Nikki Kinzer.
Nikki Kinzer
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.
Pete Wright
We are—it's ADHD Awareness Month. If you haven't heard, it's ADHD Awareness Month, and we're all very giddy about it. And we are continuing our series of our ADHD Awareness Month episodes with a guest who—it's like almost to the day as we record this—it has been nine years since we've had this guest on the show. It is our great shame that we have not had this guest on the show many more times over the last nine years. We're gonna—I think I could say confidently—we need to fix this going forward. Before we dig in though, just get ready, because it's all about advocacy in ADHD. Before we dig in, head over to takecontroladhd.com to listen, subscribe to the mailing list, get the latest episode delivered each week. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest at Take Control ADHD. And of course, if you want to really connect, join the ADHD Discord community at takecontroladhd.com/discord. It's the easiest way to jump into the conversation with others who get it.
Nikki Kinzer
Actually, that's it.
Pete Wright
But really, if this show has ever made you feel less alone in your ADHD journey, join us on Patreon. Patrons get new episodes a week early. They're longer, more fun. There's probably—I'm sure there's more fun—and access to members-only Discord channels and exclusive events with Nikki and me. You know, it's more than supporting the show in a complicated economy, helping us put shoes on our feet and food on the table, but you're really also joining this inner circle of people who really do get it. So just visit patreon.com/theadhdpodcast to learn more. And thank you for your support. The man, the myth, the legend, the ADD Crusher himself, Alan Brown, is back with us. Alan has helped, I don't know, is it up to a bazillion people come to terms with their productivity and their ADHD?
Alan Brown
Three point two bazillion, three point two.
Pete Wright
Three point two bazillion.
Alan Brown
We just checked the stats yesterday.
Pete Wright
I'm so glad you have your finger on the pulse of this, Alan Brown. Welcome back to the show, buddy. It's good to see you.
Alan Brown
It's great to be here. Great to see both your fabulous faces here.
Pete Wright
Okay, this one was a Nikki pitch. Nikki said immediately, we're gonna do advocacy. So Nikki, set us up. What are we talking about today?
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah, well, you know, the first couple of shows that we did around October ADHD awareness have been around getting the diagnosis, what that looks like, getting a better understanding of what that means.
Pete Wright
What happens.
Nikki Kinzer
But that's exactly where we kind of leave off—you get the diagnosis, but now what?
Pete Wright
But now what?
Nikki Kinzer
How do you know what you need?
Pete Wright
And I would add—
Nikki Kinzer
How do you know how to advocate for yourself? How do you know what to say to the people you work with, to the people you live with? The relationships that now kind of make sense of why maybe they were strained, right?
Pete Wright
Right.
Nikki Kinzer
Because of this ADHD that you didn't know about. But advocating for oneself, which I have seen with my clients, is—it feels intimidating.
Pete Wright
I don't think—
Nikki Kinzer
There's a lot of fear around judgment and imposter syndrome. Are they gonna find out that I've been faking this this whole time? You know, right? Like all of this fear and RSD. What if they reject the diagnosis? Because we've heard that before too from listeners and from clients where parents don't believe they have ADHD because they don't believe in ADHD.
Pete Wright
Right.
Nikki Kinzer
They don't think it exists. And so there's just all of these things to unravel and I thought, gosh, Alan would be a perfect person to have a conversation around this with because he does advocate for himself and for his clients and for all of the different things that he does. And he's talked about mindfulness and self-esteem and all of these things that I think get wrapped into being an advocate for yourself. Like you have to believe, right, that you can have accommodations and it's your right to. But if you don't believe that, it's pretty hard to ask for something when you don't believe that you are worth it or that you should have it because everybody else is doing it on their own. Right? Does that make sense? It's just an important conversation to have, I think.
Pete Wright
Yeah, I think so too. Alan, I mean do you remember the before your diagnosis versus after?
Alan Brown
Oh my goodness. Yes. Although I was one who was diagnosed later in life. I was diagnosed at the age of 36 or so. And my childhood—nothing really was spotlighted for me. I'm inattentive, I wasn't hyperactive too much. I was the class clown. I think part of that was because we moved around a little bit. I was born in Florida. We spent a year in Philly, and then we moved to Jersey. And so I never really—and I think that's an important thing to remember too, and I'm really starting to put that together in my head—I never really had a connection with other kids. I always kind of felt like the outsider. So the real feelings of "oh my god, what's going on here" came in my adult life where it took me 10 years to get a four-year degree. I slid into a lot of alcohol abuse and drug addiction. And then when I finally got a real job at the age of 30—a low entry level advertising agency job—that's when I really started to notice, wow, everybody else is sort of in the fast lane and I'm over here in the granny lane, you know, getting passed and my turn signal is stuck on and people are yelling at me as they're getting promoted, going "get out of the way!"
So that's when it really hurt. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what was wrong. And I'll just real quick, I'll give you a little lesson in self-advocacy. In 1992, so I'm like 31 years old, I had a boss who was diagnosed. And again, I was just sort of floundering along. I wasn't—there was no trajectory for me. But I was hanging in there. And my boss got diagnosed, and he got diagnosed, of course, because his son was diagnosed, right? And so he's telling me about this, about how, yeah, my son Ricky got diagnosed and he described this and described that and I said oh my god that's me. So I got diagnosed and now I'm being treated and I said oh my god that's me, you are me, I am you. And I go to my doctor at the time—and this is in a big New York ad agency, my doctor was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—and I said, Doc, I think I might have ADHD. And he said, and this is a direct quote: "Alan, ADD is a myth created by the media. You just need to do more crossword puzzles." Upper East Side of Manhattan. Right? This is four years before, I think it's four years before Hallowell's book, Driven to Distraction, came out, but still—to be told this after my boss having just been diagnosed by another doctor who seems to think that ADHD is a real thing. So I wish I had had, you know, a little bit more understanding about self-advocacy because I would have gone back in and said dude you need to refer me to somebody or whatever because another five years went by where I just thought I need to do more crossword puzzles. And I'll tell you, and then I finally got the diagnosis. That's another kind of story. But I got really good at the New York Times crossword puzzle.
Pete Wright
This is my question. How's your crossword game? I'll bet you are amazing.
Alan Brown
I was killer. I was almost able—you know, the Saturday—I don't know if you notice, but Monday's the easiest puzzle, and it goes Tuesday's harder, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Saturday is the most difficult puzzle. And then Sunday is kind of a free-for-all fun puzzle. People think that's the toughest—it's not. But I was almost able to get the Saturday puzzle done on a regular basis. But again I really thought that—
Nikki Kinzer
Wow, you took that advice to heart.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Alan Brown
I did because—and I'll tell you why, because this came from a doctor, right?
Nikki Kinzer
Like you were like, I'm gonna do this.
Pete Wright
That's your game.
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah. Right.
Alan Brown
We believe our doctor. And I thought oh my goodness, if I just do this, I can become smarter and stop forgetting things, stop being kind of dopey, get more organized, remember, you know, all this stuff. So that's why I pursued the crossword puzzles. I really thought it was a legitimate way to make my brain start working again.
Pete Wright
There's a—I feel like there's a lot to unpack there that won't be of great utility for our audience, but my god, crossword puzzles. That's a thing I'm gonna—that's gonna live rent-free in my head for a while. The thing that I think is—you know that I have to deal with, and I'm curious your reflection on this—is once you learn that ADHD is part of your identity, how do you approach the meta shame that so many people deal with? Because first is the shame that you have to understand you have this thing that maybe has only been associated with negative experiences in your life. Like for me it was—the ADHD role models I had looked like punishment when I was a kid, right? It looked like they were being dragged out of class all the time. Accommodations felt like badges of shame, not of honor. And when I was diagnosed also late, I was twenty-nine, when I was diagnosed, I had to first deal with that—the fact that this is a thing that is now, this albatross is now around my neck. What am I gonna do? Who am I now? But then the act of asking for accommodations is like icing on the shame cake. It's a whole separate thing that you have to deal with, you have to get over in order to be able to ask permission to be who you are. And I'm interested to know how you approach that at 36.
Alan Brown
You know, at first there was the, oh my goodness, there is something wrong with my brain wiring, which the psychiatrist who finally diagnosed me in 1997 said, you know, this is what it's about. This is why it's happening, et cetera. And I thought, wow, this explains why my brain doesn't work. I don't have a brain that actually works. It's like having an engine with three spark plugs missing, right, in my car. And so there was some shame around that. But I think for me I was lucky because having been a drug addict—and I was a bad drug addict, man. I was living in Jersey City and I was going to Harlem for my drugs. This is at the height of the crack epidemic. And here I am a white kid. Now I have sort of olive skin and I could speak Spanish pretty well. So I could go—and this is mainly Dominicans that were in this area where I bought—so I could kind of sort of get away with it, but still, there were every day five, ten people just getting their brains blown out for a $10 vial of crack and I was going there. So what I think—that ugly history and the alcohol abuse, the 10 years to get a four-year degree and all that, and also having had a hint back in '92 that, hey, you know, you've got this legitimate thing, it sort of outweighed the shame thing because it's like, oh my God, now I have an explanation for all this behavior.
That said, I still went to the office every day and fought—had to fight the fight and still see all these people around me, these colleagues around me just sort of blasting through things. "Hi Dad, I love you. Blah blah blah. Yeah, I just got promoted. Blah blah blah. Yes, I'm leaving the office at 4:45. Yeah, blah blah blah." You know, and I'm sitting there still slugging it out until 8 p.m. or whatever. And I gradually started to put together some brain hacks and the medication. We got the right medication, all that. And that smoothed out and I ended up really kind of being able to work smoothly and make some serious advances in the ad industry. But my sort of initial—the shame thing—and also the accommodation things which I know we'll talk about. I could see, I love how you said that, Pete, that the asking for accommodations was another layer of icing on the shame thing. And that was probably the only other time where I got a little bit of the shame. And we'll get to that, I'm sure. But yeah, that's my account of the shame, which thankfully was sort of mitigated by the, oh my God, thank God I have an explanation for this.
Nikki Kinzer
When we were introducing you, I said mindfulness and I realized that I meant mindset because I watched a presentation that you did, I think it was for ADDA, around mindset or it might have been at the conference. I can't remember. But you were talking about mindset with ADHD and how important, you know, we shift that from that shame and that negative self-talk to something different. Can you talk a little bit more about what that looks like? Because that feels like that's the grounding before you can ask for any kind of advocacy.
Alan Brown
Well, the presentation was probably Five Simple Mindset Shifts for More Doing and Less Stressing.
Nikki Kinzer
Oh, okay.
Alan Brown
And my guess is that maybe you were the host that night of the ADDA webinar.
Nikki Kinzer
Probably, yeah.
Alan Brown
And you know it's funny, my quick ADHD story here. So that was supposed to be my presentation to the conference last year, 2024. But I had my—as always, I had my proposal already two months before it was due and all that. And I thought I'd submitted it. And when the notifications came out and my colleagues were saying, hey, yeah, I didn't get accepted, or yes, I will be presenting, I was like, why didn't I get? And I emailed Ari Tuckman and I said, hey, what's going on? He said, "Alan, you didn't submit anything." I said, are you kidding? No, I definitely—I go into the website and I see there's my proposal sitting there in draft form.
Nikki Kinzer
Oh no.
Alan Brown
I never hit the button. I never hit the submit button.
Nikki Kinzer
Oh no.
Alan Brown
So anyway, so that presentation I'll be presenting in November in Kansas City. It's called Ten Simple Mindset Shifts for More Doing and Less Stressing. And what I did then is also I did a few presentations with an abbreviated version of that. So I'm just so glad you asked about the mindset thing because—and I talk about, you know, there are of course general mindsets, you know, there's a general mindset about advocacy, there's a general mindset about self-acceptance, et cetera. But what I'd like to do a lot is play with mindset shifts that are sort of more near-term and more functional. And so I'll give you a couple of examples. One of my favorites is "I suck at this." I suck at—I'm terrible at this. I can never do this. And we beat ourselves up. You know, we're—you name it, we're late all the time, or we don't know how to figure out technology, or we suck at writing, we suck at doing our job. Right? We just—I'm not good at this. And so we end up with this narrative that says I suck.
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah, not good.
Alan Brown
I suck at this. I suck at everything I do. And I, you know, with your clients, with my clients, I hear this, and we're often helping them to rework these limiting beliefs, et cetera. And so, you know, sort of coming from Carol Dweck's work at Stanford with the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset, I mean you think about "I suck at this, I suck at that"—that's worse than a fixed mindset. That's self—you know, lambasting yourself. That's grinding yourself into the ground. It's not just, well, it is what it is. But if you can just remind yourself whenever this kind of mindset sets in that you're trying—"I'm trying, I'm saying, you know what? I tried. I sat down. I worked on this thing for 45 minutes. Yeah, I sucked at it. Or yeah, it took me way too long or whatever that is. But I tried." That's a different mindset. And that aligns well with the growth mindset, which is "I just haven't figured it out yet." I don't know if you saw that wonderful TED talk by Carol Dweck. She just talked about the power of yet. "I haven't figured it out yet." And so I just try to use that mindset.
Pete Wright
I think you said something that triggered a thought for me, which is that the danger of something that we with ADHD tend to be very, very good at, which is expansionist thinking. Like we're really good at seeing something and seeing all of the possibilities, right? This is fireworks. Like we're really good at seeing this thing and what it could be and what that could be. And the perils of expansionist thinking when you're stuck in an "I suck" mindset is how quickly you can go from "I suck at this" to "I suck at everything," right? Everything that is connected to this one thing that I suck at, I am going to destroy with my great power of negativity.
Alan Brown
Did you call this the expansionist mindset?
Pete Wright
Yeah. The expansionist mindset.
Alan Brown
Wow. I could—this is possible and look at all these possibilities and we've got that great synaptic thinking that grabs ideas from all over and this really sort of puts a fine point on the "I suck" because we go from this, oh, this is going to be great. I can do this, I can do that. And then we end up with the "ughs," you know, and we're like, why do I get myself all hyped up about this? I end up sucking at it. Why do—and then of course we get psyched up for another thing, but that's a high-low that really, really hurts, right?
Pete Wright
And we don't need it in our lives. We don't need it in our lives. Which I mean I guess that brings us back to, if I may, if I may delicately drag us back toward the idea of what advocacy can do to mitigate the "I sucks" when you figure out how to get over the icing of shame of asking for it.
Nikki Kinzer
Well, shame, and also I think from what I see from a lot of people, especially students, because I work with college students too, and you know, one of the first questions I always ask them when I first work with them is, are you getting accommodations? And it's so surprising to me how many are not until I advocate to advocate for them. Right? Like let's talk about why you haven't, let's talk about what the process is. How can I help you with this process? Because so many of them feel like, oh, I should just do it on my own—I should just be able to do this.
Pete Wright
Yes, I shouldn't need help.
Alan Brown
Yes.
Nikki Kinzer
I don't need—I shouldn't need help.
Alan Brown
I should—oh my God.
Pete Wright
Right.
Nikki Kinzer
I should be able to take the test in an hour. I mean, right? Like you guys, Alan, you're like, yeah, yeah, you understand, you get it. Like where's that coming from?
Alan Brown
Well, listen, I just—I don't want to—I want to come back to where you are, but you just led me right into the other mindset shift that I wanted to talk about.
Nikki Kinzer
Oh, good.
Alan Brown
Because it has to do with "I should be able to." So the mindset shift is shifting from "I should be able to do so-and-so" versus "I am willing to do so-and-so." And this really—it doesn't apply so much to the everyday, what's wrong with me? Why can't I do this? You know, et cetera. But it's great for like for exercise or moving toward any goal or all the things that we think we should be able to do. And I'll just give you the simplest example. "I should be able to go to the gym four times a week." You know, work out or "I should be able to run this many times a week. I should be able to clean up my diet, or I should be able to"—whatever those shoulds about let's just say personal health. What I learned when I was getting physical therapy for one of my many motorcycle crashes. Yes, yes, this one was the rod in this collarbone. I already had the—I got the plate and bolts over here and I got the rod over here.
Pete Wright
Jesus, Alan.
Alan Brown
It's all in a race. I'm not an idiot on the street. It's all racing. But getting physical therapy for this one and my physical therapist is this incredibly built woman, clearly she's an athlete. I asked her what kind of athlete are you and she says, "Well, I'm a triathlete." I said, wow, so do you do a lot of triathlons? "Yeah, I did three last year." I said, great. When's your next one? She said, "Well, I'm only doing one this year." I said, why's that? You're a triathlete. She said, "I'm not willing. I don't want to, you know, do this. I don't want to put in the time." "I'm not willing." So here's someone who's a serious athlete who says, "I'm not willing to do that. So I'm not going to try." And I thought, okay. And what she is willing to do is do one. She's willing to do one. So she doesn't set herself up with "I must do three" or "I should be able to do three. I did three."
So it's the same thing for us. If we—and I work this with clients all the time who just want to start getting some kind of motion and exercise in their lives because we know it's good for our brains, et cetera. And I know I'm getting out of the advocacy, but this is sort of a self-advocacy thing, right? So identify what it is you are willing to do. What would you be willing to do? Maybe it's getting out to walk around a block three times a week. Fine. But identify what you're willing to do and stop saying "I should be able to," because all you do is end up doing the "See, I suck at this. See, I can't do—I can't do the regular thing. I can't be consistent." All right, so I just wanted to sneak that in there, Nikki.
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pete Wright
I'm really glad you did because what you just described is—you unlock, once you understand quite clearly what you're willing to do, you have a better idea of what you need to ask for to enable you to do it.
Alan Brown
Oh, well said.
Pete Wright
Doesn't that seem like—it seems like once she is able to say, "I'm not willing to do more than one," but because I am committed to one, here's what I need to enable me to do that.
Alan Brown
Yeah.
Pete Wright
Right. I might need someone to pick up some shifts so that I can practice. I might need to, you know, there might be some coaching that I need to ask for to enable me to be better and do the best that I can at this one thing. That's pretty powerful.
Nikki Kinzer
It is interesting what you're saying though, Pete, because I think the clarity is what's so difficult to get to—is what is it that I need? But if we stop looking at "I suck" as a whole and really get to, okay, what am I saying that I'm sucking at? Well, I can't get to the gym four times a week. All right, wait, okay, so what are some other—what can—what am I willing to do? Well, I can walk around my cul-de-sac, you know, once a day. I'm willing to do that, right?
Pete Wright
You could aspire to cul-de-sac, yes.
Nikki Kinzer
But I mean it does change the mindset, right? I mean it does shift from "I can't do anything" to "but I am willing to do this" and I can get more clear about why I want to go to the gym four times a week by walking in the cul-de-sac and kind of thinking about what is my intention here, right? Like not losing the meaning of why I want to do that in the first place.
Alan Brown
You know what else that does, Pete, in my mind is that it helps us identify boundaries. And we are all weak on our boundaries, right? So to be able to say, "I am not willing to do this," you know, just here in my own little world, "I am willing to do that." That can be a little starting point for you starting to build and hold better boundaries between you and other people.
Nikki Kinzer
And I want to go back to the self-advocacy because I think that, you know, when thinking about this conversation I actually was thinking more about how do we ask other people for help, but you have actually made a really good point, Alan, is how do we help ourselves with our own advocacy? And I remember being at a conference a few years ago and Terry Matlin was speaking and she was talking about how getting a housekeeper is an accommodation. It's not a luxury. And that blew my mind because I'm like, yes, that's so true. It's an accommodation because I don't like to keep house. I don't have the time for it. It's not something that I'm good at. But yet if I find somebody that can come in and help, that's an accommodation. That's advocating for myself.
Pete Wright
There is an orbit to mood that comes with offloading those kinds of things. I did the same thing with honestly yard care. I hate it so much. And finally my wife is like, what happens when you go out to mow the lawn and trim stuff is it reverberates through everything else that you do, right?
Alan Brown
What this screams to me is we take longer to do everything. And so anything we don't have to be doing, we shouldn't be doing. I mean, housework, the same here, you know, landscaping. Whenever there's something broken, I don't try to figure it out. I just, you know—I'm lucky I have the wherewithal, but most folks have enough wherewithal to hire a handyman to do this. I don't have time for that because I take so long to do everything that I do. So I've got to preserve. And that is—it's just a great example of self-advocacy, yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
Well, and I have to say, having a husband who will try to do everything on their own and fix everything, it doesn't always get finished. So if we can look at it as an accommodation, then you're more likely that the yard's going to get finished and the painting's going to get done.
Pete Wright
But it's so interesting, right? It's an accommodation to allow me to do other things. Because you're right. Like when it was yard day for me, it was all day. I would check out one day a week was a day that I was just not available. And a crew can come here and in 15 minutes do what it would take me eight hours to do. And I relish that because of what it enables me to do—the stuff that I'm actually good at, the stuff that I want to do, the stuff that I can contribute to the world in a positive way. And that is a really important part of advocacy, self-advocacy, that I hadn't considered because most of the time we're asking for—we're advocating for ourselves to enable us to do the thing that we're advocating for help doing, right? We need to take longer in tests. We need to—if we're in college or something like that, right? We need ergonomic desk setup at work. We need a quiet location, we need headphones, whatever it is. But in this case, I'm advocating just to not have to do this thing that I honestly, objectively suck at, which is the yard. Like, let me do the stuff I can contribute positively to.
Alan Brown
I think Tim Ferriss was one who said "I'm always looking to pay people for things that I shouldn't be doing." Now that's a luxury to be able to do that, but it's just a great mindset to have. Like, you know, what can I—or delegating for that matter? Delegating to family members, delegating to colleagues, et cetera. I wanted to—you just reminded me of the first time I asked for an accommodation at work. And this was—sadly I started in the advertising business when I was basically 30 years old. And it wasn't until, oh my goodness, I think it was 20 years later that I finally asked for my first accommodation because I didn't—I didn't know what advocacy was. I didn't know that there was such a thing as an accommodation. This is before I got into the ADHD space as a coach and as a creator, et cetera. So I just didn't know.
I was at the last agency I was at, which I was at for like 13 years, great agency, small agency. And we were moving from one side of Fifth Avenue over to the other side and down a few blocks to a new space. And the president of the agency grabbed me out of my office in the old office and said, "Come on down the street. I want to show you our new office and everything and help you, you know, we'll figure it out. I'll show you where your desk is." And he took me to a corner office which had three desks in it. And he said, "So you'll be here and so-and-so will be there and so-and-so will be there." And I said, "Ellis, I'm not going to be able to work in this office. And you can post me here, but I'll be down the street. I'll be at the coffee shop or whatever. I cannot work with"—and I was also a little bit more, quite significantly more senior than one of the guys and a little bit more senior than the other guy. But I stuck to my guns. I said, "I just won't be"—and I wasn't nasty about it. I just said, "I'm not able to work with this kind of ambient noise and the conversation, all the movement." And I ended up with a huge office, a floor below that, with an amazing view of lower Manhattan. So there you go, folks.
Nikki Kinzer
It worked out for ya.
Pete Wright
Okay.
Alan Brown
Keep advocating for this. And you know what really—and I ended up thriving. This is—from that point on, and it wasn't just the office, it was also because truly—and I don't like to use this word lightly—but my ADHD was really starting to get crushed and that's what inspired the ADD Crusher thing is that I really had control. I was coming into the office now at you know at 8:30 and I was walking out at five. And at some point I was going home to Brooklyn and working on ADD Crusher in the evening. So I was doing the, you know, the startup in the evening and all that. And having that space, that quiet space, that one accommodation made all the difference in the world for me.
Nikki Kinzer
Did you happen to tell them about your ADHD or were you more just around "this is not an environment I can be in"?
Alan Brown
You know, I was lucky that I was in the advertising business because once I got diagnosed I didn't disclose to anybody other than people who were friends at the office. But what was kind of neat was in the advertising business, I started to see my fellow ADHDers.
Pete Wright
Yeah, right.
Alan Brown
You know, the guy—
Pete Wright
It's like Neo in the Matrix at some point, right?
Alan Brown
I started to realize that the president of my agency that I mentioned, Ellis, that gave me the bigger office, that he was totally ADHD. But I also knew that he was able to overcome it with just sheer—he just had an IQ that was out of this world. And he was able to IQ his way through things. He was sort of a mess and all that. But so I did talk about it with him in the last couple years I was there, particularly since I learned that one of his children was diagnosed also. So we just talked, but there was never a thing where I came out and said, "Hey guys, I'm just letting you know I'm ADHD. I may need some things." Again, even at that point, I didn't really—even when I asked for that accommodation, I didn't know what accommodations were.
Nikki Kinzer
Right, right.
Alan Brown
I didn't know. So folks—
Nikki Kinzer
You just saw this environment and knew that it wasn't gonna work for you.
Alan Brown
That's it. And so I just want to say to our listeners, if you haven't known that you're allowed to ask for accommodations, you now know.
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah, yeah.
Alan Brown
Thanks to this. Now there are some different opinions on how and whether to ask, which you guys may want to talk about. You probably heard Hallowell talk about it.
Pete Wright
But this is really from both of your perspectives because I think, you know, it's easy if you come from a space like high school and higher ed where you were diagnosed and there is a channel for asking for accommodations. You know what you need to ask for. You know what made you successful in doing hard things when you were in college. If you're diagnosed as an adult and you're already on the job, nobody trains you how to ask for an accommodation. Nobody tells you even what your options are, right? In large part, you were lucky that there is an open office, a floor down below, that you could be in, right? In some universe that's like kismet that you don't have to go through the rigmarole to get official accommodations. And I'd love to know from both of your perspectives in working with people who are in this boat. What is a best practice for learning how to ask for accommodations? What do you ask for besides "I need headphones at my desk"? Like what are your choices? What are your options? How do you get good at this?
Nikki Kinzer
Well, I think first of all, it comes back to the clarity of what you need. I don't think you can go into a boss's office or even like a professor—you can't just say "I need accommodations" without having something to show them, you know, to tell them or say, "This is what I need."
Pete Wright
Yes. Please present me with the menu of my possible accommodations.
Nikki Kinzer
Right. Yeah, because that's not gonna happen, especially in the workplace, that's not gonna happen.
Pete Wright
Yeah.
Nikki Kinzer
So I think you've got to know yourself and you need to learn more about your ADHD and how it impacts you.
Pete Wright
Right.
Nikki Kinzer
And that might just be some reflection, right, of what do I really need to succeed in this job and is it possible? Because in the workplace the line of what you can have and can't have is very blurry. In the school it's very clear, right? But in work, it's not. It's up to the workplace and, you know, whoever that is, your boss or your HR, to say "this is a reasonable accommodation." I don't think you have to label your ADHD. I don't think you have to say, "I have ADHD, this is what I need." But I do think you can do what Alan did and come in and say "I'm not clear about what my—I'm not clear of what your expectations are after this meeting. So I need to sit down with you and I need us to really talk about what are my priorities for the week." So instead of trying to guess or feel like you should know that information and you just lost it or didn't pick it up, you are asking to have that one-on-one meeting to clear up any kind of miscommunication. So you can ask what you need without saying it's an accommodation too, right?
Pete Wright
Yeah. Well, I think what you're latching on to is exactly what we were saying before. If you have clarity of boundary, you can have clarity of request.
Nikki Kinzer
Mm-hmm. Right, right.
Pete Wright
If you know exactly what it is that you're doing. It's not like "I need an accommodation, I need an assistant to do all the paperwork that is central to my job." No, that's probably not a good field for you or a good function in your field.
Nikki Kinzer
Now there's so much technology that could actually help with that person, right? Like so now you're thinking, okay, I've got all these notes I have to do, but wow, I have Text Expander that I could possibly use. I have, you know, Notability and things where I can record a conversation and it comes back with bullet points.
Pete Wright
Voice dictation, yeah, right.
Nikki Kinzer
Like now you've got these accommodations that—wait, maybe I can still do this job, but I gotta figure out what the structure is. I gotta figure out what I need. And then I need to ask, you know, "Can I have Text Expander on my work computer?"
Pete Wright
Yes. Yeah, that's a specific accommodation you can ask for.
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah, but I think that you're gonna have better success the more specific you can be. And then there's some companies that are gonna say, no, it's not secure enough, you can't have it.
Pete Wright
Yeah. Well, I want to—Alan, I want you to weigh in on this, and I have another specific question I want to tie into based on your experience and working with clients, which is first, you know, how do you define these boundaries to become expert at asking for your own accommodations and your own advocate, but also to what end is your responsibility in helping those who don't live with ADHD understand your place of advocacy and potentially become advocates themselves?
Alan Brown
I want to come back to that and you may need to remind me of that. I want to circle back to a couple things that Nikki said. First, Nikki began this whole segment with "you need to first decide what you need." And there's a great question that I shared last night with one of my coaching groups, which is, "When am I at my best?" When am I at my best? And I know I'm at my best when it's freaking quiet, when there's no movement around. I could go on and list—there's a whole bunch of things that I've identified. This is when I'm at my best. And I sort of use that as my guide. That's a great way to identify what quote unquote accommodations you might need. And the reason I put the accommodations in quotes is because this is another thing that Nikki alluded to. And she may have heard the same presentation that I did where Ned Hallowell was at a chat conference years and years ago, who was the first one I ever heard talking about advocacy and whether or not to seek accommodation formally in the corporate environment, in the work environment. And what he said—and this is a good number of years ago, but I think it still is good advice—he says, you don't necessarily need to go and declare ADHD. Unless there is something very severe or very actionable where a company is being difficult with you, because you are protected by the, at least in the US, by the ADA, Americans with Disabilities Act, where you know if you declare your ADHD and you have a proper diagnosis, et cetera, the company is obligated, et cetera.
But much like I did where I just said, "I can't work with two other people in the office. I just won't be able to," so I got the accommodation. So the thing becomes, and this is again from Hallowell—identify the things you need that will help you. And you mentioned, Pete, headphones or you know certain ergonomics. Just say, "Hey, you know what? I work best when blank. Is there any way we could work that out so that I could have that?" I would also, another little thing that I did was I would often—this is before I got my big office—I would go and work in an empty conference room. I just let everybody know, "I'm going to be over there." Or I would go to the coffee shop. "I'll be at the coffee shop for the next two hours" or whatever.
Pete Wright
Of course. Yeah, I think you're hitting exactly on what we want to get to, which is yes, advocacy for yourself at work is fuzzy. And it's also a question of base humanity at work, right? Like if you just ask for what you need as a human being, your workplace generally is going to want you to be successful and to supply you with the things that are gonna make you successful. You don't have to shout from the rooftops, "accommodate me and my ADHD" to get those things. But the flip side of that is, you know, is there a responsibility as somebody who is advocating for themselves to help other people understand advocating for ADHD? Is it too cloying to call them allies for ADHD?
Alan Brown
Hmm. That's a great question. I think the best thing that we can do is share our lived experience. It doesn't have to be painted in big dramatic strokes or anything, but I like telling people, for instance, that well first of all I take longer to do everything because my brain is going all over the place and I have to keep dragging it back and it takes energy and time to be able to just do that. But also, for instance, I will be reading a paragraph and then thinking, so—what I'm doing is I'm reading a paragraph and thinking, okay, that maybe goes down here or something. And then I go down the page and that paragraph that was in my mind has disappeared. It's gone. I have no idea what it was I was just thinking. Now, everybody experiences this to some degree with all the information. But when that is a thing that happens 43 times a day, that's a way you can help people understand how difficult it can be.
You can also talk about how—you can talk about time blindness and just explain, yeah, I can be engaged in something and completely—and I know this happens to everyone, but this happens to us in particular because of the lack of available dopamine or whatever you want to share about that. I think another real important thing to share too is the science that we know from fMRI that shows that there is less available activity in the frontal cortex than in the neurotypical brain. That's a great thing because nobody can argue that, although some might, but that's another story.
Pete Wright
Well, I mean those people maybe just need to do more crossword puzzles. Sorry. I can't even—I can't even.
Alan Brown
Well done, Pete. Well done.
Pete Wright
Hey, Alan, you're great, man.
Nikki Kinzer
This was great.
Pete Wright
Thanks for being here.
Alan Brown
Thanks for having me, both of you.
Pete Wright
Tell us—
Nikki Kinzer
We could continue this conversation but we need to stop because there's still—yeah.
Pete Wright
Yeah. At great peril to the rest of our day. But tell us—you're always up to so much. Just give us—what are you working on right now? What do you want to plug?
Alan Brown
Well, I definitely want to plug the conference. Finishing up—I'm tidying up my PowerPoint because it was already written a year ago.
Nikki Kinzer
Yeah, that's right.
Alan Brown
So I'm just finishing up.
Nikki Kinzer
You are well prepared.
Alan Brown
So yeah, so listen, we are the three of us big advocates for the ADHD conference happening in Kansas City. It's the best thing you can do as an ADHDer. There's also a virtual conference in February that was just announced. So it's—just if you can't make it in person. But yeah, I'm doing a lot of writing. I'm actually working on my presentation for next year which is going to be about ADHD and our low self-esteem. And other than that, you can find me at addcrusher.com and that's where you can also get a couple of real cool freebies that I've got. I've got an ebook that many of you have heard about already, and Nikki's probably heard about it 83 times, which is Five Things We're Doing Every Day That Make Our ADHD Worse. And trust me, we're doing them all. I share ways to stop doing those. And that's it. ADDCrusher.com is where you can find me. And feel free to shoot me an email and yell at me if you want.
Pete Wright
All right. All right.
Nikki Kinzer
He'll take it.
Pete Wright
Links in the show notes.
Nikki Kinzer
Thank you so much.
Pete Wright
Links in the show notes. Thank you.
Alan Brown
Thank you guys.
Pete Wright
And thank you everybody for downloading and listening to the show. As always we appreciate your time and your attention. Don't forget, if you have something to contribute to the conversation, head over to the Show Talk channel. That's where we'll be in the Discord server. And you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the deluxe level or better. Patreon.com/theadhdpodcast. On behalf of Nikki Kinzer and Alan Brown, I'm Pete Wright, and we'll see you right back here next week on Taking Control, the ADHD podcast.
