Debunking ADHD Lawyer Misconceptions | Understanding Neurodiversity in the Legal Profession

in addition to being a debilitating and confusing disorder for lawyers ADHD is also extremely isolated in this video I'll be debunking some of the more common misconceptions about ADHD and again with the Dual aims of validating the experience of ADHD lawyers and educating our neurotypical colleagues with an eye toward eliminating the stigma that exists in the legal profession welcome back if you're new to this channel I'm Annie little I seef certified career coach and former lawyer and since 201

2 I have been helping hundreds of lawyers to find and land jobs they actually like and I just always like to start off these videos with a reminder as to why it's important for everyone in the legal profession to get a better understanding of ADHD and that is because statistically speaking if you work in the legal profession either you or somebody you work with has ad8 and I say that because the data we currently have suggests that anywhere between one in 5 to eight lawyers has ADHD and by compa

rison the prevalence of ADHD in the adult population in general is 1 in 20 I made a completely separate video about all of these statistics and Basics behind ADHD which you can check out if you haven't already now as I was debunking some of these misconceptions about ADHD I was starting to notice a p pattern about maybe why certain misconceptions exist about ADHD for purposes of this video I want to focus on the fact that people with ADHD have an interest based nervous system so bear with me for

just a second this is like easy easy Neuroscience I just said ADHD people have an interest based nervous system this is different from a neurotypical nervous system which is importance or priority based and the differences are related to the triggers that induce focus and motivation so with the neurotypical nervous system which is by far the most common the triggers for motivation and focus include things like importance priorities and potential rewards and consequences makes sense right but wi

th those of us that have an ADHD nervous system the triggers for motivation and focus are completely different they are urgency interest Challenge and Novelty and you might be thinking well yeah those things motivate me too and I'm neurotypical this is not to say that neurotypical people are not also motivated by these types of things but what's important to know is that ADHD people are never motivated by importance priority or potential rewards and consequences alone sometimes and here's where

I think a lot of misconceptions arise sometimes it appears that we are motivated by importance-based triggers like we do respond to those things in the way that you would expect from a neurotypical person but what's happening there is that there's usually just a coincidental overlap between an importance-based trigger and an interest based trigger that is giving us the response that you're looking for so that can look like people with ADHD being capable of understanding and responding to those t

ypes of important triggers and then when it comes to a time where we don't respond to those like we may have in the past because one of those interest based triggers is missing we are often deemed willfully disobedient or lazy but as we go through these misconceptions I'm going to try to explain why that is actually not what's going on and just a total disclaimer before I dive into these I want to be clear I held many of these misconceptions about ADHD up until two years ago when I got my diagno

sis at age 40 so there is no judgment implied okay so the first one is the misconception that people with ADHD lack attention this makes sense because the name of the disorder is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and it's just an unfortunate misn because ADHD brains actually have an abundance of attention and what ADHD actually is is the inability to regulate that vast amount of attention we have and prioritize where we direct our primary focus I say primary focus because I'm going to be

real with you we are almost always going to be focusing on more than one thing at a time another common misconception is that ADHD means not intelligent but there is actually no correlation between IQ and ADHD in any direction for purposes of this video I will be talking about high Achievers with ADHD because lawyers lawyers are high Achievers so some examples of high Achievers with ADHD uh that you might be familiar with are Richard Branson Steven Hawking Walt Disney Bill Gates and although he

didn't have a formal diagnosis at the time pretty much everyone can agree that Einstein definitely had ADH so again to be clear not all people with ADHD share this trait of being a High achiever and in fact academic struggles are still a significant diagnostic criteria with commonly used assessment so if you're a higher who didn't get diagnosed until much later in life or maybe you suspect you have ADHD but you have never gotten a diagnosis it's often due to this misconception that high Achiever

s cannot have in EHD looking at you fellow gifted students and this next one is really painful really hurtful to those of us with ADHD and that is that ADHD is overdiagnosed here's the thing boys have been and are often misdiagnosed with ADHD that has always been a problem what has also been a long-standing problem is that girls and women have been undiagnosed since forever so yes while ADHD diagnoses have been increasing in recent years it's due to the late diagnoses of women and timely diagnos

es of girls which is actually something that we can celebrate this other misconception about ADHD that people with ADHD are lazy so before I explain that I want to ask you would you call Michael Phelps lazy or Simone biles lazy what about Michael Jordan or Mel Robins I ask because they all have ADHD yeah based on what I've gathered from lots of different definitions of lazy laziness refers to a lack of willingness to do something or put forth effort to achieve a goal yeah that's not what's happe

ning inside an ADHD brain when you see us not doing something that you think we should be doing because really what's happening is we want to do what needs to be done and for reasons that sometimes we can't even understand or articulate we are unable to do this preeminent expert on ADHD Dr Russell Barkley explains this really well as there being a break between the part of the brain that knows what to do and so that's in my head being like Oh my God why are you such a piece of garbage you can't

just even wash the dishes I want the dishes washed and the part of the brain that is in charge of the doing in charge of the execution of this task it's like that's what's happening so yeah it's extremely frustrating to the people in our lives and it's extremely confusing and frustrating to those of us with ADHD just imagine what it's like if you don't even know that you have ADHD I don't even have to imagine because that was me for 40 years of life and so I have my own misconception about ADHD

it was so confusing to me that I would struggle to initiate simple tasks or projects we could easily handle more complicated things and also had like a long list of laudable achievements and accolades but because I didn't know that I had ADHD and I didn't understand how ADHD affects motivation and focus I ched it up to some unidentified moral failing that I had of course led to shame and that of course led to fear that I would be found out as a bad lawyer or a bad person so when that toxic swirl

of anxiety and self-loathing reached like a critical mass my brain would release this flood of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortis that to help me do what I needed to do but living under a Cascade of stress hormones for 40 years intensified my anxiety disorder that I did know about and negatively affected My overall physical health because what anyone's brain needs in these situations is dopamine and the big takeaway here is that for lawyers with ADHD the triggers for focus and motivatio

n are categorically different from neurotypical triggers and with some reasonable adjustments to the workplace ADHD lawyers can be even more successful than they already are because I want to be clear here there are many lawyers who are objectively successful and also have ADHD but for those of them who don't yet have a diagnosis or do not yet have the appropriate support to get their triggers to produce dopamine as opposed to stress hormones just imagine how much more successful they can be not

only that it comes with the added benefits of reducing the stigma so that people can be upfront about their disability it reduces rces the frequency of frustration among their colleagues Cs and it reduces the higher than typical incidence of burnout that ADHD lawyers currently experience being a burnout whether you're a neurotypical lawyer or not if you're a lawyer you've probably dealt with burnout to one degree or another and so if you want to learn more about what causes lawyer burnout spoil

er alert not you the individual lawyer causing it and how you can manage it you can check out my free guide there's a link in the description below and I hope that with a better understanding of ADHD we can dispel all these misconceptions and make the legal profession a better place to work for every