There.. I said it. Now, don’t get me wrong, your spoon is fine, but mine is THE spoon. 🔥 In our house, it is known as “The Spoon of Plenty” and it is perfect in every way. The exact right weight. The exact right curve. The perfect balance of sharpness & smoothness. I didn’t choose it. It chose me. Now, I know that this might sound a bit strange to some, but others will understand when I say that if it gets lost in the drawer, it’s not “mild inconvenience,” it’s a small personal crisis. If someone else uses it, unless specific permission has been granted, or is offered for someone to feel better because of the “magic, regenerative properties” that it possesses and grants the user, it feels like betrayal. I know that it shouldn’t matter, and that there are 11 other spoons in the drawer, but those are decoys. Impostors. Tribute spoons, if you will. This isn’t fussiness. It’s sensory consistency. When a neurodivergent brain is already managing a lot of input, relying upon one less unknown (hello, familiar weight and texture) is genuinely regulating. It’s the same reason that you’ve got a go-to hoodie, a specific route to work, a playlist on repeat. So there’s no shame in the spoon loyalty. Protect it. Name it if you have to, but just remember that there can be only one.. the rest are just tributes. 🥄🎸 Long live the spoon. All hail “The Spoon of Plenty” 🙌

It's results day for me today for my ILM Coaching & Mentoring qualification, and even though I'm not quite there yet, my assessor gave me some really good feedback. Because I'm a client short, I knew that I was never going to pass this time, but I still had to put in what I had already done, and my assessor said this: "Your response so far is excellent, James. You have considered to such a detailed extent the benefits that were realised by client one. Please do the same for client two, and you could also account for how the coaching activity with your clients benefitted you, too. Great work so far, please continue with this high-quality standard!" Having this type of feedback from people who are already respected in the field is really reassuring me that, even though I know I have more to do, I'm still going in the right direction and that the quality I'm delivering is exactly what I had hoped it would be.

In the UK we have The Dragons Den, but I think in the US, there's a similar programme called Shark Tank, and one of the well known sharks is a woman called Barbara Corcoran. Now, obviously, I don't know Barbara's story, as well as I know her UK equivalents, but apparently, Corcoran failed her way through school. Dyslexic, restless, one of the children that the teachers wrote off, and by her own account she had twenty jobs before she turned 23.. any of this sounding familiar? Then she started a real estate company with a $1,000 loan and a boyfriend who told her she'd never make it without him. Wrong. She built The Corcoran Group into one of New York's biggest real estate firms, sold it for $66 million, and became one of the original Sharks on Shark Tank. She wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until she was an adult. Not as a teenager struggling in class, not as a young founder hustling her first listings, but well after the business was already built. But here's the bit I think matters most 🤔 Barbara doesn't talk about ADHD like something she had to overcome, but talks about it more like it's the fuel that drives her. The risk-taking, the fast decisions, the refusal to sit still and wait, none of this was her overcoming her brain, but was merely her brain, doing exactly what it does, finally pointed at something that fit. It kind of goes back to one of my previous posts, reaffirming the whole point of the care label, not the worn one. Nobody ever needed to see "ADHD" stitched on the outside for her to succeed. She just needed to stop trying to operate like everyone else's brain — and start building around her own. If you would like to read more about Barbara's story, and some other inspiring entrepreneurs who think differently, then click here 👈 And here's a question for you, where in your life are you still trying to force your brain into someone else's system, and what would it look like to build around it instead?