I'm curious, what time does everyone's routine look like in the morning, do you even have a routine, and what time do you start work ? I dont have a specific set routine, but most days seem to work like: 6.30am - Wake Up & make a coffee. 7am - Check Emails, Calendar & meetings 7.45am - Take kids to school. 8.15am - Another coffee. 8.30am - Start Insta for clients. However, looking at this, I also recognise that there's no exercise in there at all, and no real buffer before I start working, just wake up, caffeine, react to emails, school run, more caffeine, straight into client work. Maybe this explains why some mornings my brain feels like it's already running, before I've even chosen a direction. 🤪 So here's a question 👉 Does anyone else's 'routine' look more like a sequence of reactions than an actual plan? and if you do build in movement or a proper start-of-day ritual, what does that look like, and did it actually help?

Hey James, Me again! 👋🤪 I've just realised that I am also free on Thursday mornings. Are your calls usually co-working or brainstorming/chatting?

It was great to catch up today @James Sopp Thank you both for all your ideas and suggestions - lots to think about!

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?