ADHD Imposter Syndrome: Owning the Process That Works for You

If you’ve ever felt that quiet, low-grade fear that someone might look a little too closely at how you do your work, realize you’re doing it differently, and call you out for doing it “wrong,” this episode is for you.

This is a sneaky version of ADHD imposter syndrome that comes up often for high-achieving adults, and it deserves its own conversation. We’re getting things done. Our results are real. And we’re still quietly convinced there’s something wrong with how we got there, simply because our process looks different from the people around us.

So we spend energy performing productivity the “right” way. And that performance pulls directly from the capacity we could be putting into the actual work. The mental overhead is real, and it has a real cost.

Today we’re looking at that cost, and more importantly, at what becomes available when we finally stop hiding the processes that actually work for us.

In Episode 353 we’re exploring:

• A specific flavor of ADHD imposter syndrome that shows up around your process, not your results
• The workhorse vs. thoroughbred energy framework, and why so many ADHD brains naturally work in sprint-and-recover cycles
• Why we learned to hide the workflows that actually support us
• The difference between a process that needs improving and one that simply needs your permission
• What changes when you stop spending energy managing how your work looks, and start putting that energy into the work itself

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Listen to the episode above or stream it on your favorite podcasting app. Prefer to read? Keep scrolling for a full summary and all the key takeaways.

Episode 353: ADHD Imposter Syndrome: Owning the Process That Works for You (Transcript)

A Specific Flavor of Imposter Syndrome

The classic version of imposter syndrome involves fearing you’ll be exposed as a fraud despite your accomplishments. The familiar thoughts sound like: “I just got lucky,” “they’re being nice,” “right place, right time,” “it must have been a fluke.” The underlying fear is that people will find out you don’t actually deserve your success.

The version of ADHD imposter syndrome we’re talking about today has similarities, but also a few important differences. In this version, your work is genuinely good. Your results are real. The imposter thought arrives specifically around how you got there.

You did it the “wrong way,” so somehow it doesn’t fully count.

Your work is solid, and you’re still convinced you’re getting away with something because the way you work looks different from the neurotypical standard you were measured against your whole life. Maybe your workflows are unconventional. Maybe you’re less consistent on certain tasks than your teammates. Maybe the hours when your brain actually fires on all cylinders don’t fit inside a traditional 9 to 5.

The results tell a completely different story from what the imposter thought is insisting. And that gap, between what your results say and what the thought says, is exactly where this particular flavor of ADHD shame lives.

The Workhorse and the Thoroughbred

To understand why this happens so often for ADHD brains, it helps to look at two natural energy patterns.

A workhorse thrives on steady, consistent effort. They show up day after day, make incremental progress, and rest and recharge at the end of each day. Think of someone who dedicates thirty focused minutes to the same task every morning, five days a week. The workhorse’s rhythm builds momentum through consistency and predictability.

A thoroughbred works in sprints. They go deep, fast, and intensely for a stretch of time, and then they need real, deliberate recovery before they can sprint again. When a thoroughbred is in the zone, they can accomplish an extraordinary amount in a short window. And then they must rest. When that recovery gets skipped or rushed, burnout arrives fast and can knock them sideways for days, weeks, or longer.

Both patterns are completely legitimate. Both produce quality work. They’re just different energy architectures. And many of us move between them depending on the task, the season, the project.

For a lot of ADHD brains, the thoroughbred pattern is home base. We sprint hard. We need real recovery on the other side. And when we add up the blocks of focused, high-intensity work we’re actually producing, we’re often generating as much or more than our workhorse counterparts. The schedule looks different. The output is comparable.

The problem is that we’ve been trained in a world where the workhorse is the default. The school day runs from 8 to 3. The workday runs from 9 to 5. Consistent, steady, daily effort was presented as the professional standard. Which means that for thoroughbreds, working differently got coded early and quietly as working wrong.

The Curtain We All Carry

Whenever I start working with a new client — especially high-achieving adults with ADHD — I find that most of us are carrying at least one process we feel a little embarrassed about. Something that actually works for us and produces results we’re proud of, and that we’re still hiding from the people around us because it doesn’t look the way we think it’s supposed to.

Here are some real examples from clients:

• Staying up until 10 or 11 at night to do creative work, because that’s when the brain finally quiets and focus really locks in
• Writing out every single word of a lecture, because that scaffolding supports working memory and allows for more genuine presence while teaching
• Holding all meetings while walking, because thinking happens better in motion
• Creating outer accountability for anything that matters, because knowing others are expecting them makes showing up so much easier

Each of these processes works. Each of them produces real results. And many of the people using them have been quietly carrying a sense of shame about it for years, convinced that if anyone looked too closely, they’d be found out.

That shame is an imposter thought. And imposter thoughts are remarkably good at disguising themselves as simple observations about reality, which is exactly what makes them so hard to examine and so effective at keeping us stuck.

Why We Learned to Hide

This pattern starts early for most of us.

Most ADHD adults grew up in systems built entirely around the workhorse model. The message, whether it was ever said out loud or not, was that responsible, capable, professional people show up consistently, produce the same amount every day, and work the same hours. That entire structure was designed with the workhorse pattern as the default, and it absorbed us into the belief that deviating from it meant something about our character.

For ADHD brains, the absorption wasn’t just of the schedule. It was of what it meant to deviate from it.

Imagine being in a thoroughbred sprint from Monday through Wednesday: intense focus, long days, flow state, creating something incredible. And then Thursday arrives and your body genuinely needs a full break before it can do any more cognitively demanding work. Your brain starts whispering: “That’s not what everyone else does. Why can’t I just do a little work each day like the rest of my team?” So you push yourself right into burnout, all because you internalized the rhythm that was never yours to begin with.

That belief, that working differently means working wrong, gets written in pretty young. Once it’s there, it shapes everything. When we finally find a process that actually works, our first instinct is to doubt it or hide it, because it doesn’t match the template we were handed.

And then comparison makes it all harder still. When we look around, it looks like everyone else is operating on a steady workhorse schedule. We assume that schedule is the standard and ours is something to work around or apologize for. But here’s something worth sitting with: we can’t actually see anyone else’s process. We see their output, the polished result, the finished deliverable. We don’t see the workarounds they’ve been quietly using for years, the failed attempts before this one, or the struggles they carry in other areas of life.

We compare our full, honest, sometimes messy inner experience to everyone else’s outside performance. And when we do that, of course our process looks wrong, because we’re holding our complete reality up against a performance that everyone else is also putting on.

There’s a Difference Between a Process That Needs Improving and One That Needs Permission

This distinction matters, so let’s spend a little time here.

Sometimes a process genuinely does need work. There are real areas, around planning, prioritization, procrastination, perfectionism, where support and adjustment can make things meaningfully easier. That kind of growth work is valuable and absolutely worth pursuing.

And sometimes the process works beautifully. The real work in those cases is simply giving ourselves permission to use it.

One client shared that she’d hit a wall while creating a new webinar. The ideas weren’t coming, the recommended frameworks and step-by-step approaches from a course she’d taken weren’t flowing, and she felt genuinely blocked. So she called a friend and talked through what she wanted to say. By the end of that phone call, the whole webinar had taken shape in her head: what she wanted to say, in what order, with a clarity she hadn’t been able to access before.

She realized that the step-by-step framework wasn’t the problem. Her brain needed to talk the webinar into existence before she could write it. Verbal processing was her entry point into the work, and once she discovered that and gave herself permission to use it, everything else opened up.

The process wasn’t wrong. The process was working exactly as her brain needed it to. What shifted was her permission to use it.

What Becomes Possible When You Stop Hiding

Another client offered a beautiful example of this from a slightly different angle. She’s a voice actor working in a creative, deadline-driven industry. Her best work happens in sprints, with days of genuine recovery needed before she can sprint again. Her schedule is also shaped by things outside her control: vocal health, recording environment, unpredictable external noise.

Traditional deadlines were creating a lot of panic and shame for her, even when she was delivering genuinely excellent work. The pressure of a specific date was heavy to carry alongside all those other variables.

So she made one shift. She stopped agreeing to specific deadlines and started communicating what she calls target dates instead. She explained to her clients what that meant: essentially the same logistics and the same level of professionalism, with a slightly looser structure that gave her room to work with her creative rhythm, her sprint-and-recover cycle, and the realities of her recording life.

It created a completely different nervous system experience.

What she discovered, and what I want to offer you, is that honoring how you actually work and showing up with clear expectations can exist in the same room. Those two things are completely compatible.

Every bit of energy we spend forcing ourselves into a structure that doesn’t fit, or hiding the process that actually works, goes somewhere other than the work itself. The mental overhead of the performance, the quiet hum of shame underneath, all of that has a real cost. And it comes directly out of our capacity to do good work.

When we pull back the curtain and allow our process to work for us, that’s when things start to shift in a real way.

Redefining “Professional” on Your Own Terms

Part of what makes this so hard is that the word “professional” has been thoroughly coded to mean one specific thing: consistent, steady, workhorse-style output. The thoroughbred pattern, working in bursts, doing things in a non-linear way, needing real recovery time, got coded somewhere along the way as undisciplined. Even irresponsible.

And yet here’s what I find myself coming back to again and again with clients: professional means clear expectations, steady communication, and delivering great work, even when the rhythm looks different. It means knowing how you work best and building around that so you can show up fully for the people who count on you.

That’s what my voice actor client is doing with target dates. That’s what the client who schedules her deep creative work for late at night is doing. That’s what the client who writes out every word of her lecture is doing. They’ve each built a genuine definition of professional that fits their brain, and from that place they’re delivering work they’re genuinely proud of.

You’re allowed to write your own definition too. You’re allowed to create your own playbook for how you approach your work, on your own terms, with your own language for it. And having that playbook, even if it lives only in your own head, changes the experience from “getting away with something” to “showing up with intention.”

The Belief Work

What we’re really talking about here is belief work, and I want to name that directly.

When I’m coaching my clients, I’m always thinking along three paths: strategic support, mindset support, and emotional support. We need all three to work effectively with our brains in a way that’s sustainable and that we can stick with for the long haul.

This idea of identifying, claiming, and even celebrating the processes that work for us, even when they look different from what we were taught, falls squarely in the belief category. (If you want to go deeper on how perfectionism and imposter syndrome show up together in ADHD brains, Episode 239 is a great companion listen.) When we skip that work and don’t challenge the belief that we’re “doing it wrong,” we hold ourselves back. We force ourselves to keep trying the “professional” approaches that leave us missing deadlines, depleting our energy reserves, and showing up in ways that don’t reflect who we actually are or what we’re actually capable of.

Consider what shifts when someone tries on a different thought.

Imagine a person who does their best creative work late at night. Their mind finally quiets, the house gets still, something genuinely unlocks. They’ve always known this about themselves, and for a long time they carried it quietly, scheduling early morning work sessions they could never fully access, performing a version of productivity that didn’t actually support them.

Now imagine that same person tries on a different thought: working at night is how my brain works best, and I can build around it.

That one shift changes the emotional texture of everything. They sit down at 11pm feeling something closer to self-trust. They’ve chosen this window deliberately. They know it works. And from that place of trust, the actions follow naturally: protecting those late-night hours, communicating availability in a way that’s honest and grounded, putting energy directly into the work itself.

The result is often genuinely better output. More focus, less friction, the work flows. They show up as a more present, more capable version of themselves, because they’re working with their brain.

The situation stays exactly the same. What changes is the thought, and everything downstream follows from there.

Strategies matter enormously, and our mindset and emotional work play an equally critical role. Because a strategy can be exactly right, and if the belief underneath is still whispering that you’re doing it wrong, you’ll keep undermining the very thing that works.

A Closing Invitation

Somewhere in your life right now, there’s probably a process that’s working. Maybe it’s the way you prepare for creative work, or how you structure your afternoons, or the unconventional order in which you tackle your projects. Maybe it’s something you’ve been doing quietly for years that produces genuinely good results, and that you’ve never quite let yourself fully claim, because it doesn’t look the way you thought it was supposed to look.

I want to invite you to spend a little time with that this week and get curious. Here are four questions to sit with:

• What’s a process in my life that actually works for me, even if it looks a little different from what I think I’m supposed to be doing?
• What do I currently think about that process? When I picture someone else seeing how I do this, what feelings come up?
• How do I show up when I’m carrying those thoughts and feelings? What does it cost me when I spend energy managing how my process looks rather than simply using it?
• What would I want to believe about this process instead? What thought feels more true to what I actually know about myself and how I work well?

You don’t have to answer all of these at once. Even sitting with one of them for a few minutes can start to shift something. And if you notice any evidence this week that your process is working, a moment where things flowed, where you did good work, where you showed up well, write it down. Let your brain start building a case for the new belief, one small piece of evidence at a time.

All right, friends. Thanks for being here. I’m genuinely glad you found this.

If today’s episode resonated with you, I’d love for you to share it with one person in your life who might need to hear it. Send it to them in a text and just say, “I was thinking of you.” And if you want support applying what you learned today, one of the best places to start is my free quiz to discover your ADHD Overwhelm Type. In less than a minute, it will help you discover the unique way overwhelm shows up for your brain, the patterns it creates, and some powerful first steps to move from stuck into action.

Resources From This Episode:

• Ep. 140: ADHD Imposter Syndrome – The 5 Competence Types & How to Challenge Them
• Ep. 287: ADHD Energy Levels – Workhorse vs. Thoroughbred

Work With Me:

• Join We’re Busy Being Awesome (group coaching)
• Learn more about private coaching here
• Discover Your ADHD Overwhelm Type – Free Quiz!
• Enroll in Overwhelm to Action – step by step course for ADHD Brains

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• Discover my favorite ADHD resources
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