Unlocking The Entrepreneurial Brain, with Amber Swope

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Dan Sullivan. I'd like to welcome you to the Multiplier Mindset Podcast. Today's Multiplier Mindset is a real treat for me to comment a little bit on her story and her adventures as an entrepreneur. And this is Amber Swope. I know Amber really well. I've talked to her a lot over the years. Amber is a marvelous person to chat with. The thing I want to zero in on a little bit on her comments is ADHD or ADD. I'm ADD, but I'm not ADHD. I'm sort of a quiet ADHD person, but my brain isn't quiet at all.
 
So I've been coaching entrepreneurs for 50 years. I started in 1974. The main reason is that I bore very quickly with anything that's repetitive. So I'd been a writer at an ad agency and I was good enough to keep my job. I could have done a whole career writing ads, writing commercials. But we started off for 15 years. I would just sit down. What I suspect now, as I've heard Amber's story, I was getting hired because the person was ADD and they just couldn't get their thoughts so that they could see an action straight and it was a sensible action chain that would lead to their accomplishment of their goals. So I've got Amber beat a bit here because I didn't find out that I was ADD until I was 66.
 
So it was 10 years after she found out. And this was at the Amen Clinic. And Daniel Amen has done a really terrific job of simplifying people's understanding of ADD. I didn't go there for myself. I went there because I suspected a large number of the clients in Strategic Coach, the entrepreneurs, were somewhere on what I'll call the ADD spectrum. There's about seven different ways in which it manifests itself. So even there, people are different how they experience it, and they respond to it differently. They had this really long questionnaire. It was 200 questions, and they asked everything about your family. They asked everything about, you know, what were your parents like? What were your siblings like? And then, how is your life described a day?
 
And then you had three days of testing. They do brain scans when you're resting, when you're active, how you respond to things, how you concentrate. Do you have memory, good memory? So then at the end of the three days, you have a session with a psychiatrist. So all the consultants are psychiatrists. And the woman said to me, you're really, really strange. I've had talk with all of our consultants here, and we've never seen such a difference between the answers to your questions online and what the tests tell us. So you look like you're very organized. You don't seem to be having any stress. Your life seems to be very orderly. But when we look at your test, it's a 10-ring circus going on with all sorts of strange animals.
 
So she said, can you explain why there's such a difference? And I described what we do in Strategic Coach and the thinking tools that we create. And I described the thinking tools. I actually had a sample of one with me. And she says, well, everything you ask them is to write in small boxes. And she says, you give them time periods. Fill in this box. Here's 30 seconds. Here's two minutes. But she says you're chunking everybody's experience. She said, so I don't know who else you created all these tools for, but you definitely created them for yourself. And I began to think that every tool that we create in the program I test out on myself because I'm experiencing some sort of problem related to perseverance, related to concentration, related to memory. So that gave me a tremendous amount of insight into why this Strategic Coach really, really works.
 
And as Amber tells her story, the person said, here, here's a prescription for you. And it was Adderall. But I didn't take it, and I had much the same attitude as Amber does on drugs. You know, it's speed, actually, it's amphetamine. But if you have ADD, it does just the opposite. If you didn't have ADD and you took the drug, it speeds you up. It makes you sort of jumpy and erratic. But if you're ADD, it actually slows you down. The world goes quiet. It was truly terrific. But what I've noticed recently is that I'm creating thinking tools in Strategic Coach that actually accomplish the same purpose. So I'm actually off Adderall now for the last year and a half because the more I know about Adderall, the more I can create thinking tools which really help.
 
But I would say easily 50% of everybody in Strategic Coach is somewhere on the ADD scale, and they're certainly not employable people. I wouldn't hire me, so it's really great. But I want to talk a little bit more about what Amber does, because Amber has a phenomenal ability. And I didn't know so much about her book company, but I knew about the main company, and she's a digital architect, okay, so you have a website where people have to navigate on your website and in many cases you want to purchase something or you're asking for information and everything else. What Amber does is she takes the fewest number of steps that you have to go through to get what you want. I just want to put in a plug. I think she is in that business.
 
And I think her other business that she talked about, the business of determining what kind of structure would be proper for the book that you want to write. I think it's because the ADD actually gives her a lot of creativity. I think it gives her a very, very unique way of looking at complex situations. So I liken it to card games, that if it's an honest card game, everybody gets random cards. And it's not the cards you get, it's how you play the cards. So more and more, I think that ADD is becoming a powerful advantage if you're in the entrepreneurial world. If you realize that you're only supposed to do a certain type of activity, you know more and more, this is my role and I can take on bigger projects if I create teams around me.
 
The central concept in Strategic Coach is that every individual and especially entrepreneurial individuals, are born with a Unique Ability that you're always doubling down on, okay? You would do this whether you got paid for it or not. It's a way of solving problems. It's a way of achieving goals. And it's different for every entrepreneur. You can take 10 ADD entrepreneurs and they would have a different Unique Ability. Where I feel a great deal of pleasure of Amber's story is that we've created a community that are each unique, but they have in common their great desire to create solutions in many different ways for their entrepreneurs. She comes across as just an extraordinarily caring and useful person. And I'm so happy that the thing that used to make her feel crappy about herself has been relieved and now she's been able to turn it into a very, very positive and very, very valuable way of creating value for other people.
 
Amber Swope: Hi, my name is Amber Swope. I have been at Strategic Coach about 12 years and I have currently three businesses. The first and the primary business I have is called Data Strategies. My second business is called Intellectual Property by Design. My third company, which is the newest one, Bored Leopard, is the company where I help professional women decode their brains to lead more fulfilling lives. I'm doing this through public speaking. I'm going to be sharing my ongoing ADHD journey with others. And taking folks through the three steps of identifying ways that your brain could be different and why that matters. Learning the steps to understand if you have ADHD or another neurodivergent condition. I hate the word condition, but that's what they use. And to discover what that could mean for you. And then if you do, if you cross that threshold, leveraging the seven steps that I have discovered on my journey to work through that and understand what that can mean for you so that ADHD can become your superpower and reframe that experience for both yourself and the people in your world.
 
I don't do it alone. That's the first thing right there. I started off as an accidental entrepreneur. I had no aspirations to be an entrepreneur. And then in July of 2008, I was laid off from the tech company that I was working at and there were no jobs in July of 2008. And so I put my shingle out and gave myself a job. And then that progressed to where the recession ended and I would have job interviews, but I would never take the job. And I finally had to acknowledge that the reason I didn't take the job is that despite my discomfort with being my own boss, I really hate being told what to do. I think of it as having a healthy skepticism of authority. Previous employers have not shared that view.
 
Not surprisingly, I acknowledged that this is what I wanted to do and then I struggled. I am not good at bookkeeping and all that stuff so I of course had cash flow issues and then someone in Coach who was in my industry referred me to coach and then I joined coach and I discovered Unique Ability and those tasks that I thought were just dreadful, that I can't do, that I have zero interest in, and that I would have felt bad paying someone else to do that terrible work, that's their Unique Ability. Mind blown, right? I had no idea. And when you say it, it sounds pretty simple and obvious, and I still needed to be told and shown. And that was the first step to hiring my first person. I hired someone to do my books for four hours a month. And then nine years later, when she retired from my company, she was working 20 hours a week.
 
So I not only got to work in my Unique Ability, which is creating opportunity in terms of creating opportunity for me to not have to do that work, but I also was able to create opportunity for her to grow in, you know, design a position that was totally around her Unique Ability and give her a place that she really enjoyed working for nine years. I want the triple win. It needs to be a win for me. It needs to be a win for the other party And then it also needs to be a win for who we can serve with the combination of our skills. I will give you my definition of Unique Ability, which is not necessarily the standard one perhaps but Unique Ability is the result of taking the Kolbe A Index to get an understanding of what you are naturally best at the areas where you don't necessarily value it because it's like breathing to you and you simply assume that everyone can do it because you can do it.
 
What's so fascinating about this is that the other side of that coin is that the things that you are not good at, we don't necessarily offer ourselves the same grace, you know, instead of saying, oh, I'm really good at this. And this other person is really good at that. We put it together and we can do amazing things. At least traditionally, it's been, you need to be good at everything, which is not realistic. And for me, it was a big unlearning of the, beating myself up over trying to be good at things that when I got my Kolbe score, it very clearly indicated that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be successful at those things like accounting.
 
So the genesis of IP by Design was during COVID. We were on one of the 10x calls and Dan was jokingly chiding one of the long-term Coach participants about not having written a book. And that person said, well, I don't know what kind of book to write. And it was like a siren went off in my head. It's like, I know what kind of book you should write because there's patterns to books, and different book patterns by their type and their purpose support different business goals. And so I, within a month, started a second company and started doing analysis on book types. And I've currently identified five that entrepreneurs tend to write and the patterns that are within each of them. Because you can go to someone and they can help you write a book, but if you're not clear about what you want to accomplish with it, you might write the wrong book. And you might spend a lot of time and money to create a book that doesn't serve your end business goals. And I feel like I have the decoder ring for that.
 
So I started in the Coach program when it was just Signature and then over time there was another tier added, which was the 10x for the 10 times multiplier level and I'm a slow learner. I watched it and was buying it. And then one of the things I noticed is that when I was in a Signature workshop with folks that were there for a 10x workshop, either the day before the day after the conversation was different. And I was like, oh gosh, I'm ready for that next level of conversation. So in my mind, Signature is tactical. Here's how to get some Free Days. Here's how to understand who can help you with your business and more on the day-to-day operations. And then 10x is more strategic. I'm going to take a step back and really look at where my business is going, where it could be going, who I can partner with.
 
And it's not about what's going to happen next week. It's about what's going to happen next year or the next two quarters or something like that. And to me, I needed both. And so I love being in 10x and also then backing it up with the Signature Program to help me actually implement the great ideas and clarity that I get from the 10x workshops. I, like many people, was extremely disrupted with COVID. I went from being on the road 50% of the time, having a lot of interaction directly with people and collaborating, which is my happy place. Being able to work with people, to combine our skills, to create new things. At the end of the day, I come home tired, but energized. It's the activity that makes my heart sing.
 
And from cold turkey, being at home, not seeing anybody, my husband was going off and leaving work, and I was at home alone with a Zoom call as my only means of connection with people. And that was, first of all, a big adjustment. But second, over time, it started to really impact my mental health. Fortunately, I have great relationships with the people I serve, and one of my clients, who's a friend, suggested that perhaps I might have ADHD. I scoffed at that because I'm like, oh, that's what boys get. But she was persistent because she had observed the erosion of my systems. I like to make systems, you know, I see the whole world in spreadsheets or workflow process diagrams, right? And so I, by nature, had developed systems, but those systems were developed for a different world than the one I was sitting alone in my office all day, every day.
 
And she knew me. And so she said, well, there's this online quiz. I'll take it if you'll take it. Oh, I'm a sucker for a good quiz, right? So I took the quiz. I went and talked to my medical practitioner and got a formal assessment, which turned into a formal diagnosis. And that moment just redefined everything for my life. It's like going to the optometrist and, you know, they drop the lens in place. This lens or this lens, this lens or this lens, and they drop the ADHD lens in place. And it doesn't give me 20-20 vision, but the lenses just keep dropping into places. I learn more about what ADHD is and how my characteristics, I don't like to call them symptoms because it sounds like there's something wrong. There's nothing wrong. I'm not broken. I just need to know more about how my brain works and then be able to refactor my systems into rituals and routines that give me a framework to take my ADHD brain and use it as my superpower. That is an ongoing journey.
 
And one of the things I did want to mention is the Coach community had just gotten the diagnosis. I was in my session and I shared in one of the small group discussions that my medical practitioner really thought I would benefit from being on medication. And I don't like medications. At that point in time, I was on no prescription medications. And I also didn't want to lose who I am. My superpower is the fact that I am very creative. I make connections that other people don't see—that pinball brain that I have when I make a connection and the lights go and the buzzer sounds and I have that and you know most of the people in the room don't and I didn't want to lose that and I shared that because the community at Coach is truly that. It's a community not only where you can get input and feedback from others around entrepreneurial challenges.
 
But to me, this was an entrepreneur, just how do I work? How do I think about my businesses? And how do I lead my team? And one of them shared that one of their family members had started taking a prescription and that it didn't change who they were. It simply was a focusing agent to help them be able to better access the power of their brain. And I owe that person a great debt of thanks to be able to have shared that because then I did go on medication and it has really made a huge difference. And it was the start of my treatment journey, which I think of treatment as not just medication, but in terms of better rituals, exercise, sleep, and other types of ways to, again, not fix your ADHD, but to understand it so that it's the benefit to your world that it can be.
 
A lot of the things where I felt a great deal of shame and disappointment and frustration, it wasn't that I didn't try hard enough. It wasn't that I was lazy or just a failure. It's that I was being asked to do things my brain doesn't do. And I didn't know it and they didn't know it. And that next summer was really emotionally turbulent because I was really angry. I was really angry that I had to wait until I was 56 to find that out. And so that year was a very disruptive year for me and my businesses. But when I told my team I was going to try going on the Adderall, and I said, in two weeks, I'm going to ask you if you notice a difference. And then two weeks later, I said, hey, do you notice a difference? And they're like, yeah, you stick to the agenda in the team meetings. And when you ask us a question, you give us time to answer it. I'm like, so Adderall? And everyone's like, yes, stay on the Adderall.
 
So my world is very different now, in part because I understand my brain better, but it's a learning experience. Like every week, pretty much, I learn something new about ADHD and about myself. One of the other important things, though, was sharing this with other people. So, you know, I obviously shared it with my husband and it redefined the way we negotiate some of the chronic repeat situations where we've had conflict. And once we looked at it through the lens of, I'm not just being a pain in the butt, or rude or inattentive or insert any of the disappointing things that he interpreted my behavior to be, but rather this is a situation where my ADHD impacts my ability to engage in the way he expects. It wasn't us against each other. It was, okay, here's a situation where you obviously have a challenge. Let's figure out what we can do to mitigate it.
 
And that's totally taken a huge amount of repetitive stress out of our relationship to the point where he's actually joined my company. We would never have been able to work together if we hadn't had this understanding that the diagnosis gave me and sharing it with other people. So, for instance, I have a neighbor who I care a great deal about. He's having surgery. He told me about it. I know it's important. It's important to me. I see her I'm like, so you're having surgery. She's like, tomorrow. Oh, and I go into that instinctive shame reaction that I had my entire life for forgetting things that are important and she says but I know that it's not a reflection of how important it is to you because I know how your brain works, and that is worth its weight in gold to know that the relationships that I value are not going to be unintentionally damaged because of my inability to express my investment in the way that our society expects it to be expressed.
 
And that's why I tell people it's not enough to know, you got to share it. And it's not something to be ashamed of, because when everyone's on the same page, everyone has a better experience. The diagnosis of ADHD happens when you have one of the symptoms, not one, many, a certain number, a threshold, and I believe that that's being revised or been revised over time, in a level of severity where it negatively impacts your life. Everybody loses their keys. Well, most people, not everybody. My husband never loses his keys. Many people lose their keys you know, forget appointments, have difficulties with time management. Sometimes, like episodically, something's going on in your world that disrupts your world. It's going to ripple through and there are going to be things that get dropped.
 
For people with ADHD, it is not infrequent. It is the norm where we struggle to do these seemingly easy things and it impacts our ability to hold a job. Adults with ADHD are 60% more likely to be fired. It's really in the severity and the way that, again, I don't like the word symptoms. So these characteristics can impact your world, you know, not just at work, but your relationships. And a number of people I've spoken to when I share my diagnosis, they share that, oh, my partner was recently diagnosed and we were on our way to a divorce until they got that diagnosis. So it's not the occasional forgetfulness or, you know, being late, it's the chronic. And that's just in general for anyone who gets diagnosed with ADHD.
 
For women, it's even more so where, first of all, we get misdiagnosed or not diagnosed more often because we present with most often the more inattentive form of ADHD as opposed to the little boy who's running around the room screaming and disrupting the class. But what that means is that when you get misdiagnosed, it's for anxiety is the most often. It's over 50% of the women who get diagnosed or misdiagnosed or also have anxiety. And one of the things that was striking to me once I started learning about this, because once I found out that, oh, my brain, it's not me being a failure. There's this, how my brain is wired. I need to know more about it. The statistics out there are horrifying.
 
So one of the ones that particularly was amazing to me is that girls with a combined type of ADHD, which is that you have inattentive as well as some of the hyperactive, are at least three times more likely to attempt suicide than their neurotypical peers and are more than twice as likely to engage in self-harm. So first of all, it's not just about you. If you have a young woman in your life who is struggling emotionally or physically or mentally, and the practitioner is suggesting depression, anxiety, ask about ADHD. Because it's not that they might not also have that, but if they have ADHD, there are treatments for that that are different. And you could save their life, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that.
 
The other thing is that 46% of women with ADHD who have given birth suffer from postpartum depression. If you have a woman in your world, or you are that woman, and they are struggling with PPD, it might be worth investigating whether ADHD is part of that. They can go and try and treat the depression, but if the depression is a symptom of ADHD, then you're going to treat the symptom and not the cause. And let's say that you are able to get past the PPD, then they still have the rest of their life in front of them with trying to operate a brain that they don't know how it works. And that will then show up in all the myriad of ways, emotional dysregulation, impulsiveness, lots of shame, anger, inability to connect with others. And that's not the world that they want to be in. And it's not the world you want to be in.
 
Well, now that I know that I have ADHD, I can stop spending energy masking. I didn't realize how much energy I spent masking. And masking is the practice or strategy to comply with neurotypical behavior expectations. So I fidget and I would spend a lot of time trying not to fidget. And so I'm sitting there like, okay, I'm trying to listen to them. Oh, I can't rock. Oh, I can't fidget. I need to stop swinging. And then I lose track of what they're doing. Now I just sit and, you know, if I'm moving, if it's bothersome to the other person, they can tell me and I can try and exert some energy there. But I want to be using my energy for the ways in which I can serve them, not trying to control the fact that I'm fidgety. That's the first one.
 
The second way I would say is that I really sat down with my team and done a deep dive into Unique Ability. I did the Unique Ability workshop with Julia and getting that clarity on where I will be most successful as an entrepreneur and then clarity on where I need to not get distracted because one of my characteristics with ADHD is what my husband calls my seagull syndrome. Oh, look, shiny thing. And I'm gone. It's gone. And then I don't come back. But rather to say, oh no, here's where I need to be so that I can bring my hyper focus, which by the way is a superpower. I can get something done. If you give me the time and the space to go to that other world, that is my brain. I will come back with something that someone else might take weeks to build and I can do it in four hours, but I need to not try to avoid hyper focus. Before I was trying to avoid it because I go to this other world and then I would miss important things. It wasn't that I didn't think that that doctor's appointment that that person had wasn't important.
 
And so I was trying to remain present in this world and that's not where my brain is powerful, so making sure that I schedule blocks of time and understanding when I am most creative and the mode in which I am most creative so that I can optimize for that. Because that's how I serve people better, right? I create more opportunity when I empower myself instead of metering myself. Like on rental cars, some of them have a meter that won't let you go over a certain speed. I was doing that with my brain because of these unintended consequences. And once we understood that, we could mitigate the unintended consequences in a different way. And I can put the pedal to the metal with my brain now. And that is so empowering.
 
This is again, back to why you share this, because the diagnosis changed the relationship with my husband, where he wanted to, like, he'll be talking with me directly and then he will see my eyes go. And instead of getting frustrated, like, why aren't you listening to me? He'll say, okay, where did your brain go? Is it something important? Do you need to follow that? Or can we focus on this other thing? The name of my third company came from a conversation with my husband. We were sitting at dinner and, you know, chatting about the end of the day. And I went and he's like, what? I'm like, what do you mean what? He goes, where did you go? I'm like, well, I was just thinking. He goes, you're like a bored leopard. You're just relaxing. And it looks like nothing's happening. But the moment there's movement, you're going to be off and following that thing that moved. I'm like, Yep, that's me.
 
And that's why I named my ADHD advocacy company Bored Leopard, because I have a brain of a bored leopard. And, you know, leopards are pretty fierce. They're pretty awesome. They aren't going around going, gosh, I wish I wasn't a leopard. No, they're very happy. They're ruling the savannah, right? By getting the diagnosis and sharing it, again it changed the dynamic but it was funny the look of panic on his face because he's like oh, where did you go? But then you know we just laughed about it as opposed to him getting hurt that I wasn't paying attention to what he was trying to communicate and then me going into a shame spiral. You know, we were able to just not have that to laugh about it and then come up with a new company name.
 
Before I joined Strategic Coach, I would go to bed on Sunday night and after about 20 minutes wake up and because I instinctively thought that there was something that was due for a client on Monday morning that I had forgotten about. ADHD, who knew? Then when I joined Strategic Coach and implemented The Entrepreneurial Time System, every Monday is a Buffer Day. I do not have client deliverables on Mondays. Then if I have forgotten something, I have an entire day to reorient, work with my team, and make sure that we are set up to deliver excellent service to the people we serve. And that is where the most basic, I sleep on Sunday nights because of Strategic Coach. And I got that the first year in the Program.
 
And then it just got better. Then I was able to start getting Free Days and understanding that although I have a home office, I should never just stop by and I'm just going to check email. No, no, no, no. And so we moved the office to an area of our home. I mean, I have to walk into it. It's not something I just go by because did I mention I'm easily distracted? Oh, shiny thing. No, no, no. I had to physically move my office and understanding that on Saturdays and for me, Saturdays and Sundays are my Free Days every week. And honoring that, and again, sharing it with my husband. On Fridays, I tell him at what time I will be stopping work, and he shows up in my office, and instead of being, I thought you said, because now he knows I'm maybe not paying attention, he reminds me, very politely, that at this time, you said you'd be willing to stop working because your Free Day starts now, and that's our time.