The most important thing to know about me is that I am here for you. I want to help you do find and do more of what gives you joy, by helping you tame the ADHD things that steal your time and energy.
For the first 27 years of my life, I was the smart kid who kept disappointing myself and frustrating everybody else because I was never “living up to my potential.” I was diagnosed with adult Attention Deficit Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder in 1996. Eventually, I learned that “living up to my potential” was a foolish goal. Instead, I wanted to live fully and well, with purpose and joy, regardless of what anybody thought my “potential” was.
Even though I’ve always loved learning, school wasn’t always the greatest place for me and my not-yet-diagnosed ADHD. I discovered the magic of academic life at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (where kind teachers recognized I was clever and that I needed to spend more time studying). I have a BS in mechanical engineering from Brown University, where I failed and repeated several classes (while hiding this fact from my friends) and graduated by the skin of my teeth. I have an MBA from UNC Chapel Hill (where faculty had to beg me to finish my master’s project before the five-year deadline).
In my decades after school, I’ve worked as an engineering consultant, a management consultant, and now as a coach. Along the way, I’ve built a rewarding career in ways I never could have if I hadn’t learned that people with ADHD do things differently. I now have decades of experience learning how to work with my own ADHD, and learning how to help my clients work with theirs — to manage the parts that drag them down, so that they can fly with the parts that lift them up.
Like many people with ADHD, I have a personality that doesn’t fit in a neat category: I am both practical and inspired. Spiritual and agnostic. Serious and goofy. Creative and analytical. None of these pairs are contradictory. I embrace the philosophy of “‘And’ not ‘But'”.
And the most important thing to know about me is that I am here for you.
— Phil Marsosudiro, adhd/academic coach
