Why Neurodivergent Entrepreneurs Struggle (and Succeed) with Cheryl Woodhouse

 Welcome to the Outsmart, A DHD podcast. I'm your host, Jamie Catino, board certified occupational therapist. Two-time Ted Speaker, A DHD coach, A DHD, advocate and Reality Show, contestant. Now let's talk about A DH. D.

 Hello, gorgeous humans. How the fuck are you doing today? Today I am interviewing Cheryl Woodhouse. Oh my gosh. I am obsessed with them. They are one of the lost girls born in the eighties, schooled in the nineties, labeled as trouble before. They even studied neurodivergence in girls before they even considered that.

The reason I have. So much potential, but struggled to stay focused and organized in class was because I was different. Not bad. My first exposures to the world of employment taught me that I don't fit. So I went into business for myself. It would be almost 20 years before I realized that my struggles weren't character flaws.

They were differences that upwards of. 30% of entrepreneurs have, and I set out to educate and support as many as I could. Now I run solo school, the world's only business school for neurodivergent founders and freelancers, as well as tactile design co and accessible and accessibility research and consulting firm.

My goal to end income inequality for neurodivergent folks one business at a time. Cheryl, I am fucking excited to talk to you. You are the single reason I have this goddamn podcast. I have to tell everyone really quick. I the re she really is the reason I have this podcast. I was talking to her in my dms, telling her about how I was really overwhelmed with the idea of starting a podcast.

Where the fuck do I start? And she told me exactly. Here, use this software, do this. Don't even worry about editing, just. Put that fucking Zoom file in and start there. And because of that it helped me to get the fuck over myself to even be here. So thank you for all that you do, and I can't wait to talk more about you.

Yeah I'm really excited to be here. It's actually a cool full circle moment and as someone for whom object permanence is like a really big part of my neurodivergence. Yeah. Forgetting that you have a podcast and then being reminded I'm the reason it exists and that I get to be on it was so fun.

It's such just such a freaking cool moment. I. I have to know. Okay. So there's a lot that happened between, being one of the lost girls and was labeled, I am, I'm gonna take a wild guess. Not even just disorganized, but lazy, didn't try hard enough, doesn't care. All of those, all those really amazing things that you're labeled before you understand your diagnoses to now running a very successful business.

Can you tell me like what the fuck happened in that period of time between the two? Yeah, so one of the most common experiences for us Lost Girls happened. I hit the part of school where I could no longer just wing it and use pattern recognition to get straight A's. And dropped out.

Yeah. That happened. I went back, I got my adult grad was thinking of law school, didn't do that. Just floated around. I tried employment. For a short period of time. That didn't work out very well for my brain. Yeah. Between, my persistent drive for autonomy and my lack of understanding of various social cues and my executive functioning issues, and.

Just in general not liking the vibes, yeah. Yeah. I stepped outta that environment. I was 16 years old the first time I got paid to write sales copy based off of some courses I had learned, and it was 20 bucks to write an email. That's all it was. But I was hooked from that moment. I was like, there is no way I'm going and working a job.

I just got paid 20 bucks to write an email for some dude on the internet. Like I was gonna say do you realize how fucking badass that is? That is 16 years old. You already learn how to monetize a skill that is so badass. I was very lucky. My dad also neurodivergent, had spent literally his entire life trying to figure out how to be in business for himself.

So I had a great role model and I had the idea introduced to me that I could do that. But unfortunately, because the resources for how to grow a business are not made for neurodivergent folks, he never managed to figure it out. I did very luckily. So yeah, that's basically what happened. I went from there to freelancing, consulting, turned it into an agency, ran all that for almost 20 years, and then my contractors started asking me, how the heck do you get all these clients?

You're getting more clients than me. I don't get it. How does this work? So I started teaching them, and now I'm here. You are very humble when you talk about your badass read because you're like, I got lucky. And I'm like, yeah, okay. Cheryl, you fell out of a fucking coconut tree and you just got lucky and you figured it all out.

No, you worked your ass off and probably fucked around. Find out. Failed a lot and found threw that, found the successes. So I'll just, yeah, there was a lot of that too. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, tell me about like solo school and who exactly you serve. Is it people that are like, oh, hey, I just, I want to get more clients.

Like who? Who are the people that make you super excited to work with? I. Oh, the people I get super excited to work with, it's neurodivergent folks who have been following all of the normal advice and have realized that even if it works, it's not sustainable. It's those people like, like you, when you're like, I wanna start a podcast, but everyone who's trying to teach me how to start a podcast is telling me that I need this complicated software.

And to hire an editor and a production assistant, and I need all these cool graphics. And 15 different things. Yep. Our brains run away like a freight train with the overwhelming size of a task already. Yes, we do not need help doing that. No. But everybody out there is selling something about how to do it or to do it for you, and so most of the information on how to do things in business.

Is coming from that POV and therefore not very fricking helpful for us. Yes. And so I love working with people who are like I, my dopamine comes from Facebook and I spend most of my time on there, but I think my clients are on LinkedIn, so that's where I'm told I should go. And I'm just like, no, fuck that.

Your clients are on Facebook too. Yeah. It's not the same ones. But they're on there. They're getting dopamine from it too. Let's go find them on Facebook and use your muscle memory that takes you in there every day anyway to do your engagement work. The fact is, we have been all told so many times that the way that we're trying to do something is wrong. And what I find working with neurodivergent folks is that is just not true. The way that we try to do things breaks their systems. Yes. So they don't like it. Yes. But it's not wrong. And often it's the only way that's actually gonna work for us.

Most of the people who come into my programs don't actually need that much info or knowledge. They need permission to do it the way they already know it'll work for them. Ooh. That's huge. That is huge because until you get that permission, you're not even going to attempt to try to figure out a way to accommodate yourself to do it in the way that you want, and therefore you're gonna perpetually fucking fail, be burnt out and cry a lot.

I. I did. Yeah. Anyway. Or avoided the task completely. Like you not starting your podcast, right? Yeah. You end up in total task paralysis because it looks like this huge thing and you can't conceive of how the way you think you could do it could actually work. You probably had already thought of can't I just use a Zoom recording?

Isn't there a way to make it work easier? Yep. But until I told you that I had done that and nobody died, you didn't feel like you had permission to do that. And it's so true when you do something without someone giving you permission, sometimes it does feel like you're not gonna be okay after like genuinely, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. And it's it's a combination of RSD and all sorts of other dysregulating forces we don't need to get into. But yeah, doing things differently when you've been told your whole life that you're different and that the difference makes you bad is a scary thing to do on your own.

Yeah. So I spend most of my days providing information that isn't really information, it's. Permission masquerading is information that is super duper badass. Do you work with your clients in a, like one-on-one setting? Is it group settings? Do you do both? Tell me about that. So for the most part, I run office hours.

So inside solo school we have like courses and workshops and recordings and tools and all these sorts of things. And then once a week I sit in there for three hours and the room is open. And you can't be late. It's impossible because you can just hop in when you're ready and if you have time constraints, you let everybody know.

And we all socially share the responsibility of allowing people to go first when they need it, because we get to go first when we need it. Yeah. And yeah, you just get your help, you get your questions answered. You get to have a meltdown. There's lots of crying that happens in that room. You get support from your peers.

You get whatever you need from me, and then you go on about your merry way. That's it. That is so badass. I was gonna ask how, because knowing the person you are, you're only going to give the very. Tangible high touch support. And I wanted to ask like how you married, like the, like high touch support and being able to serve so many people at a time that's so badass.

Can I borrow that idea, Cheryl? For in the future, whenever I wanna run a program, anybody can borrow it. It's. So much better of a group model than the usual. Okay, our call is from this hour to this hour. Yeah. And you have to submit your question ahead of time and we don't wanna hear any of your context.

And if you're not present in the room when your question is called, we'll just give you an answer and it'll be on the recording. Oh, and by the way, 90% of our answers are, go watch this video. That's not actually helping anybody, you guys, it's. Yeah, sorry. That's a real shoebox sort of situation for me or soapbox.

No that's beautiful. And these are the type of things that we need to hear. Like even as an A DH, ADHD coach myself, I'm always trying to think of how to be more accessible, like more how to better help the clients and being able to relay that information in an accessible way. Fuck, that's step one.

Like just the very idea that you can't be late, like telling people, you can come to these calls and you can't be late. And they're like, oh no, I'll be on time. I'm like, no, you actually can't show up whenever you want. Yeah none of those times are late. You can show up in the last 10 minutes, I'll squeeze you in.

I don't care. Yeah. And they just. Like they visibly exhale and relax. Absolutely. I'm I know I have exhaled when someone had told me that, when a coach told me that, I'm like, oh, okay. Okay. Fantastic. I am so curious. Do you ever run into the struggle of, there's so many people that are looking for your individual support that a three hour call like isn't long enough here?

I'm already problem. I'm already thinking of the problems that are gonna happen. I'm paying problems for my. Fucking course that hasn't even launched yet that I don't even know what the fuck. But I am curious if you ever run into, it started as a one hour call and it was a two hour call until the beginning of July.

Okay. So as more people have come in, you just make it a little bit longer time. Yeah. And then people naturally spread themselves out. I didn't wanna make it all day to begin with. Yeah. Because then it just feels overwhelming. When do I come? I don't know. Yeah. But now, as people are getting used to the systems and things like that.

It's three hours on Tuesday afternoons now, because there's enough people to fill three hours on Tuesday afternoons now. And people come in right at the beginning and in the middle and towards the end and whenever they feel like they need to. Eventually, it's gonna be all day on Tuesdays. And I'm gonna break it into a couple of themes, but also say, break the themes.

I don't give a fuck if that timing works for you. Come, yeah. So that people know. If there's decision paralysis about when to come because it's too big of a window, here's some guidelines about what I will be talking about when, okay. And it's just I'm just gonna keep increasing the size of the container.

We also have a bunch of other coaches in there. So I've got an a DHD coach that works with people. Usually on Wednesdays we've got a graphic designer who helps people fix all their shit in Canva when it doesn't look like they want it to look. Oh my gosh. We have a bookkeeper every Thursday. We have an AI coach that also does, she'll do AI coaching and then every other week.

Instead it's either movie club or book club. Okay. She likes doing that. Yeah. We got a communications coach. We've got a movement coach that just helps people like make little adjustments to their workday so that their hyper mobile bodies feel better. Oh my gosh. It's also not just me feel fielding these things, but all of them have the same structure.

Two hours. Show up when you can. You can't be late. Enjoy. That is the most badass fucking thing I think I have ever heard. This is, oh my gosh. This is the coolest freaking thing. Okay, so I have to ask yeah. What did solo school look like in the beginning of solo school? Yeah, so I, when I started solo school, it was a bunch of workshops.

That's how I first started. I would sell like one workshop and you can come to the workshop. And then when I had a group of people that were like coming to multiple workshops in a row, they bought like August and September and October, and then I was like, okay, black Friday. I'm gonna let them buy like a one year pass and get all of my workshops for next year.

Yeah. So I sold the one year pass and I was like, okay. They bought that, people liked it and they showed up to a bunch of the workshops. I'm gonna add a coaching call. And it was, at that point it was like one hour every other week, uhhuh and a whole bunch of people bought into it and two people showed up.

Yeah. And I was like, this is a bummer. This is a bit of a letdown. Yeah. And so there was a period of reshaping things and adjusting things and doing research and asking questions. And then I launched it bigger and I was like, okay. This is the price, it's an entry level price. You get all of these things and you get this adapted new version of it where I made it weekly instead of biweekly.

And the calls weren't on a specific focus anymore. They were office hours and there was a bigger library of past workshops and there was more structure in the curriculum. And poof, 20 members over Black Friday, that one year. That's so nice. And so now we've got, I think we've got about 65 total members in the platform right now.

Holy shit. Not all of them are active. Some of them are lifetime members that are just on pause right now doing other things, or they got what they needed now they're, they're hanging out. We've got probably about 20 that are pretty active in the community show up at least, every couple of weeks and do things.

But yeah it, I've, I fucked up the first one. It's membership models are a lot like pancakes that way. Yeah. Yeah. Ain't that the damn truth? I figured that out when I did a lifetime membership and I'm like. Oh, this isn't what exactly I thought it was going to be. So I'm like still trying to figure out what that's gonna look like for me too, quite honestly.

Yeah. What type of, I'm so curious of what type of business owners and freelancers are in solo school. I can imagine that there isn't a, just, isn't just like three different industries. I'm just curious of a few different types of people who have joined solo school. So we got lots of B2B service providers, lots of freelancers, consultants, some coaches.

We've got someone who owns like a micro bakery, a gluten-free vegan micro bakery. Ooh, for like allergy families. And it's hyper-local. They can't even ship online, but they have gotten. So much outta being in the program, like completely changed all of their operations and everything's all of a sudden sustainable and scaling.

It's amazing. Yeah. We've got a movement coach who works with people so that they can get ready for their trips. Big life changing $20,000 round the world trips. You don't wanna waste that kind of money, not being able to walk through the town squares in Greece and things like that. Yeah. So she helps people get ready for them.

You know who else we got? We've got leadership coaches, we've got, most of our coaches are also in the program. So we've got the graphic designer, we've got the healthy human in coach, we've got the bookkeeper, and, yeah, the AI stuff, I mean we just we got everything all over the map, but there is, gosh, I'd say at least 50, 60% are still like the freelancers, the service providers in the B2B space.

Yeah. 'Cause that's where I started, right? That's what I knew the most. So those are the people who relate to my story the best, the B2B. So I was so curious about that because for a long time I had this idea of, you. Primarily work with businesses who are B2B. They're looking for that, those huge long-term contracts.

And I was always obsessed with your content, but I thought, oh, okay, I'm B2C, so I guess wouldn't be, and that's not the case because you serve B2B, you serve B2C. That's so badass. Oh my gosh. What you do is so much more than like business mentorship and coaching. Holy fuck. You're like, here.

Listen, if your entire life is fucked, I'll, we can unfuck it over here in solo school. That's how it's feeling. I don't, I wouldn't market it that way, but there's definitely been some life on fucking that has happened. Yeah. Some, one of my favorite members, there's one, a lot of my favorite moments in solo school are things that are more like, okay, I was able to do this thing in my life because of this skill that I learned here.

Or I, I was in an RSD spiral over something with my friend and I pulled out of it because of this thing I learned here. It's so much more than just business, but that's in part because business is the best personal development work you're ever going to do. I was going to ask you, did having a business kind of force you to do a lot of healing and look at a lot of shit?

Because I look at who I am now and who I was three years ago, and they are two completely fucking different people. Did it, last week too. It still does. Like every, everything you do in business you grow, you learn, you adapt. You are so frequently confronted by your own limitations, your thought patterns, and the impact of those things.

Because when you run a business, like everything that you do has a downstream impact on how the business functions. Yes. And that's not even just like everything you do in the business, how frequently you take bathroom breaks, impact how many calls you can have back to back in a day, or whether you can do that at all, which impacts your overall schedule and therefore your client capacity.

Every single thing that you do impacts the results you get in your business and how your business functions. Yeah. And you can literally be sitting there oh, I wanna do this blog post this week, and end up trying to unpack why this weird thing that happened on the playground in grade school is still impacting you to this day.

Yep. Process that trauma and move on because a visibility wound happened in dodgeball, it's, this stuff happens. And as a parent of three kids, I will tell you it is more of a personal growth journey than even that, which is Oh wow. That's a lot too. Yeah. Yeah. My, my kids have four paws and they bark at me.

So I have not a, I'm not a mother to human children honestly mo, partly because I never had that urge, but also the. I go overstimulated so fast. I'm like, yeah, I think maybe I would be a slightly terrible mother with how much I would yell, and I don't wanna do that, so I'm gonna be self-aware and not have them.

But that's so interesting to hear your perspective of being a business owner forced you to grow even more than being a parent did. Oh yeah, absolutely. One, I've run a business longer than I've been a parent, so there's that. Yeah, 100%. But also a lot of the healing I did in my business made me a better parent.

Being able to regulate myself and get down to work on the days where I had to and super didn't feel like it. Yeah. Meant that I was more able to regulate myself instead of snap showing at my kids when I was, overstimulated or, had something else going on like. All the things that came from personal development around business have helped my parenting.

And so yes, there's still things that I learned from being a mom and having kids that I couldn't have learned from business, but I definitely have learned more from trying to run a business than from having kids. That's super duper badass. So as someone who was late, I'm assuming late diagnosed from your bio, when did you find out that you have A-D-H-D-I?

Oh, this one's super fun. That very first kind of before solo school, I ran a different group program. I called the Accelerator and it was very tightly focused around a curriculum. It followed the usual model, right? Here's our calls twice a week, come in and get individual help. Yeah. Follow the curriculum and I'll help you do that.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And when I ran the pilot of that. In 2021, almost everybody in the group was diagnosed A DHD or autistic. And I was like, wow, it's so great that all of these neurodivergent people trust me to help them. That is hilarious. It, how long did it take before you were like, huh? Yeah, this sounds familiar.

It took getting sent some very nice tiktoks and reels, Uhhuh. Yeah, by some of said clients, and then I was like oh, that's, oh yeah. So I was actually, I didn't even realize at the time, but I had been diagnosed as neurodivergent when I was 16 because I was misdiagnosed as bipolar two. 'cause what happens in the, early two thousands when a teenage girl walks into your office and says sometimes I can't do things, and that makes me sad, but other times I can do all the things and I feel really good.

Yeah that's bipolar it. They didn't really bother to double check whether I could do all of the things, sometimes, even when I was sad and whether I sometimes couldn't do the things even though I was happy. Yep. Which is a DHD. So yeah, I spent years on medication that did not help me at all and made a lot of things worse, but I didn't know that bipolar was technically a neurodivergent diagnosis in the first place either.

I. Yeah, I lived with that and trying to figure out what that meant for all those years. And then I took a couple of assessments online. Actually the first one I was like, oh, hubby, I think you might be a DH adhd. You should take this. And he took it. And I was like, that's weird. I'm gonna take it and just make sure it's not like skewed or something.

And I took it and I scored way higher than him Uhhuh. And I was like, this thing's broken. Yeah, you're like, this cannot be accurate. There's no way. Yeah, exactly. And then, a little more unpacking of the internalized ableism and a little bit more of the working through things.

And then I went to my doctor and I was like, okay. So I went back and looked at my report cards and I think you should know this about me, and got a referral to a psychiatrist. And two years later I was formally diagnosed as combined type A DHD. Okay. At how old were you at that point in your life? 37.

37. 37 fucking years before realizing, before knowing, before properly being diagnosed as a DHD, holy shit, that's a long time to go without knowing how to accommodate yourself. Yeah. And 21 years in business. Three kids, my gosh. Yep. When did you go through a grieving process when you found out? Absolutely.

Yeah. And it was less grieving oh no, I'm a DHD. It was more grieving. Imagine if they had figured this out when they kept putting me in the special ed room in school and telling me to, organize my homework. If they'd supported me properly, then maybe I would've gone to law school or maybe I would've done this differently.

I went through like a mourning of the loss of That's so much potential. I was told that I had, yeah. Yeah. I went through a very similar process too. I did not know that when I was a young child, I was diagnosed with a DHD. My parents did not like, have a conversation with me. My dad was pretty much, he was very hands off when it can come to any parenting.

My mom, who was very hands-on I remember. Being like at the doctor because, I guess apparently I was having issues even though I was an AB student at that time. But that doesn't mean that you're not having issues and her being like, okay, you're gonna take this medication. Not having a conversation about you have a DH, adhd, da dah da.

So here I was thinking, because no one filled in the gap of. Oh you're trying to tell me something's wrong with me and that's why you're putting me on medication. So I refuse to take it even though I wish so badly someone could have had a fucking conversation with me because a d ADHD medication was the last like missing puzzle piece for me personally.

I know for a lot of people it doesn't work, but for me personally, that was like the last missing puzzle piece to being able to fucking function. Yeah, so anyway, I am curious of what your thoughts are. There's a really low success rate for business courses. Like what, like 5% yeah. Why do you think that is? As someone who, obviously you have a much higher success rate because you're a bad bitch and you know exactly what's, how to help your people. Why do you think it's such a slow success rate? It's actually because I don't know exactly how to help my people and no one else does either.

That's true. I am willing to listen to them and learn and adapt and allow multiple paths to completion. I'm not going to put my need to systemize things so I can scale to infinity ahead of the needs of the people in my program to actually get value from it. Ooh. Yes. So that's a huge part of it right there.

That, and they're all just, they're all following all the school models and poorly at that. We all did well in school as long as we could, fake it till you make it. We weren't engaged, we weren't learning anything. We were just getting good grades. Yeah. It wasn't actually. We weren't absorbing the information, we were passing the tests because we could.

And they're following those same models. Most courses are nothing but a glorified YouTube playlist with a q and a call where you're shamed for showing up with an actual question. Like it's true. It's so fucking true. Yeah. So it's amazing to me that some of them get 5%, quite frankly. Yeah. Yeah. And also we don't need one more fucking bro marketer putting up a.

A course out. Can we just stop? I don't give a fuck about your three step system. Shut the fuck up. I don't wanna hear it. Yep. All of those types of courses can go right on the shelf next to all of the bestselling books about the tech bro who made billions of dollars and discovered empathy.

Oh, okay. I'm gonna admit something here before I really understood. Understood what the fuck Ableism. Internalized ableism, and. S realize that the best selling books are written by privileged white neurotypical men. I read so many of them looking for fucking answers in my life, trying to improve myself 'cause I've always had a desire for that.

And probably a lot of it was just rooted in never feeling I was good enough. So therefore, what do you do? You read a fucking personal development book because that will help you develop, they say. I wish I could unread all of those fucking books, Cheryl. The unlearning I am doing is taking so much labor than the reading those stupid fucking books you know what's amazing?

I have two very important things to say on this one. Most of those books are actually written by neurodivergent women who are ghost writing for those douche PAGs in the first place. Oh my gosh, really? But having to regurgitate all of those ideas. If you have a spare a hundred thousand dollars in no time, but you wanna appear on a bestselling list, what are you gonna do?

Over 60% of ghost writers are women. Oh my. Gosh. And how many writers do you know that are neurotypical? Honestly, like prolific writers. Where did all the hyper Leic kids go? Yeah. Oh my gosh. So there's that, but the other side of it, aside from all of the ableism and classism and privilege that's in these things, women reading men's personal development is something that I do not advocate for pretty much ever. Yeah. Ever since I learned. That the thing that men need to learn to grow and develop as people is the thing that they are not socialized into, which is empathy. It's selflessness, it's giving, it's caring about other people.

Instead of putting yourself in your status first. Yep. So all of the personal development books that end up on those bestseller lists, because they help men are teaching them to be selfless. And give more and care more about other people. Yeah. Do you know what every woman needs to unfucking learn?

Oh my gosh. Preach, fucking preach, right? Yeah. So stop reading men's self-help and personal development books because the lessons that they need to learn. Or to have empathy. To give to other people, to care about other people, to notice that other people exist in the first place. And the lesson that you need to learn is that you have been overdoing that your whole life and you actually matter.

Yeah. Yeah. Be more cunty. Be more cty. Yes. As you said. So true. I have the mug. Oh my gosh, I'm obsessed. I was on Amazon. I have to literally just order it 'cause I'm like, oh my gosh. I was obsessed with that mug when I saw it. It's so true. All of these personal development books are just teaching any female reader that's reading it to give more and more.

And we're already. Spreading ourselves so thin, overstimulated as fuck. Yep. Especially for those of us who are neurodivergent. A DHD, autistic, yeah, it's a recipe for a disaster. Absolutely. We already, as neurodivergent women, we have toxic levels of self-awareness. Yeah. We know what's wrong with us, and we already feel insecure about how much we're giving because we keep getting messages that we're not giving enough.

And so when we read. Self-help and personal development targeted towards people who actually do need to be more selfless and have more empathy and give more of themselves and center themselves less. We internalize that message and we do more giving until we. Burnout and crash. I always think of Wayne Dyer used to say that the first phase of your life is about gaining status and the second phase of your life is about creating meaning and connecting with others.

And I was like no. Like I haven't been status seeking. I've been trying to help others the whole time. Oh shit. I guess helping others must mean something more than what I'm doing, so I'm gonna have to wait until I get to that point in my life. Yeah, it's a prime example of how. Men and the way that they're socialized they really internalize different messages about what personal development and growth means to them.

And so we need different messages than they do. One freaking thousand percent. Which leads me to my next question. Why do you think it takes neurodivergent folks so long to find their way in life in business? I'm not gonna pretend like I ha am beginning to have it figured out, but I have a lot more figured out now than I did 10 years ago.

But fuck, it's been a journey and I'm curious of your perspective on that. Yeah, I mean it's a combination of things. Late diagnosis being a huge one. Like they didn't even study what Neurodivergence looked like in girls until well after 1993 when they mandated that women be included in medical research in the first place.

It took lag. Is that when it was fucking mandated for women to be included in medical research? 1990. Fucking three. 1993. Oh my gosh. And the reason we were not included prior to that is because our hormone cycles would introduce a variable into the research that they could not control for.

Therefore, we were seen as too erratic to bother studying.

Yeah. I can feel the rage searing through you. And I feel similar because it's those very hormone cycles that actually make our needs different. In the first place. 1%. Yeah. Yeah. And there was 1993, they mandated that we actually be included in research. There was some early research in the psych world about girls and A DHD and girls in autism, but it was very limited.

They basically thought at that point still that autism didn't happen in girls and that A DHD was very rare. And so that weighs into it a lot. There's just in general. An entire generation of women who grew up without an awareness that they could be a DHD or autistic in the first place. So they don't know the reason for their struggles.

They used other labels instead, like disorganized, lazy, procrastinator, just all of the bad things, right? Yeah. And then you couple that with the general lack of information about neurodivergence in the general public to begin with. And then there's the whole thing where they seem to think it disappears when you become a grownup for whatever reason.

Like you grow out of neurodivergence somehow. Yeah. Which is another sexist thing because the reason boys grew out of A DHD is because they married personal assistants. No shit. It's a fucking neurodevelopmental disorder. You're not growing out of shit. That's why it drives me insane. Why is there an idea of adult A DHD bitch?

You had a DHD when you were born and you still have it now. It's not adult. A DHD. Your needs are actually very similar to when they were when you were a kid. You might just meet them in a slightly different way because you're an adult. Living in an adult in, in, in society. As an adult. It's the, it's wild.

But this is why I started doing adult IEPs, honestly, because in school they, if you get a diagnosis, they'll go through your whole list of everything and come up with all the things that the school can do to support you, how your homework needs to be done, different, the way you can get up and walk around class, all that kind of stuff.

And then you're an adult and you're trying to run a business or work in a job, and who's there to tell you what you need, who's there to help you actually look at yourself for five seconds and figure it out. Absolutely no one. Yeah, and absolutely nothing. And it is horseshit. It is horseshit. When you say adult, IEP, is that your like name for helping people to accommodate themselves or are you saying it in a more formal way?

So it's not clinical, but it is a way of building an individualized entrepreneurship plan or employment plan. So we use the term and we're basically creating a self accommodation plan for your business. So we talk about what types of content you should be creating based on your strengths. We talk about sensory needs and how they show up at work.

Yeah. So that you can stop turning on the big light when you're in meetings. And being dysregulated because of it. The biggest thing that comes out of the IEP assessments for most entrepreneurs that I've been doing these with is actually, I. Oh shit. No wonder I'm further behind than I think I should be.

Look at everything I have to deal with. Yeah. Yeah. Not surprising at all. The occupational therapist to me is like getting so nerd, like nerdy. When you're talking about sensory needs. I'm like, oh, girls. Talk about it more. It's so important. So fucking important. It's so important. There is not a single person I have spoken to doing these evaluations where I've been like.

So if you're sitting in your office wearing an itchy sweater with the big light on and slightly too cold, how focused are you on your call? And they're like, I'm fine. They're like, actually, I thrive in that environment. Thank you so much for asking. Yeah, exactly. It's like I, I get more people, like I wear joggers and if there's a tag in any of my shirts, cut it out.

And also, right now you're lucky I'm not naked. That's what I had. Yeah, a hundred percent. I just bought some new workout shirts and at the gym I was just like. Fuck, I didn't take the tag off of this. I have a seam ripper, so I will take the tag out before I wear anything because I just can't stand it.

Growing up. My mom cut the tags out of all of our shirts preemptively because it bothered her as well. Yep. Yeah. If your sensory needs aren't being met, you're not getting fuck all done. No. And even I've been having a lot of conversations lately. This is a new area of research for me. So I'm not even finding that much elsewhere about it, but considering as entrepreneurs are financial security it's related to our sense of security. And I think for neurodivergent folks that sense is like literally a sense, like we experience it in a sensory way. And so if we are financially insecure, if our revenue is up and down, if we don't have some sort of stable anchor client or recurring revenue or something that just regulates and grounds us a little bit.

Yep. And then you add an itchy shirt or a bright light. Or a cold temperature like we can. Actually go into a full down, full on sensory meltdown. From just the background noise of the financial insecurity, creating the lack of sense of security and safety. With the other sensory things.

I know before I have been working with a financial coach and she's been incredible. And she works specifically with neurodivergent, oftentimes A DHD and autistic humans. Yeah. And working with her and having a plan, I'm not making we're, or as collectively as a. Couple. We are not making any more money now than we were when I started working with her.

But the way that it's structured is in a way that I know that all my needs are being met plus, and the sense of security that has given me it, the ability to focus versus thinking about that 17,000 times a day, it was compulsive like that can absolutely derail you. Absolutely. It's basically feeling financially insecure, even if you're not financially insecure.

Yes. That sense of security Yes. Can feel if you don't have it like an itchy sweater, like it literally can be that distracting. Yes. 1000%. Okay, so I'm super curious, since you've been working with neurodivergent business owners, do you feel like. Neurodivergent business owners have a higher or lower success rate in business.

I'm so curious because I know that you're someone who has unpacked a lot of ableism, and I'm gonna take a wild guess. You're not one of these, your a DC or autism is a superpower, blanket statement type of people. At all. So I'm really curious of your thoughts on this. I think I. It really depends on your definition of success.

Ooh. Because if we look at the success rate of neurodivergent entrepreneurs in hitting like multi-billion dollar sort of goals. Yep. Actually there, there's a pretty decent rate of neurodivergent folks up there at the top. You pretty much have to make. Business and making money, your special interest and your entire life.

That makes sense to get to that point, right? Yeah. Look at Warren Buffet. He's squirreled in his little hole, only ever thinking about stocks and bonds. It's the equivalent of dinosaurs or trains for that guy. That's why he's rich. Yeah. And then we have the middle group where it's, 10 million to a couple hundred million.

That's probably like a normal prevalence of neurodivergence, right? We get the kind of well normal in entrepreneurship, which is actually about 30% of us are neurodivergent. Yeah. And then you have the ones on the smaller end of the spectrum where they're running a business that's not as big, and by some definitions, that is not success if you're not making multiple six figures or millions of dollars.

That's not success by a lot of cultural definitions. But if you ask the people who are making $50,000 a year in a business, they can run four hours a week while feeling regulated and not have to answer to a boss whether they are successful at achieving their goals. I actually think we have a pretty damn decent rate of success.

I love that you use that number. I went my first couple years in business, I felt like I was on a fucking on a hamster wheel, and the first year was around 1500. The second year was like 3,500, and then the last year was like 47,000. And I was. Taking, but I even then, I was taking home more than I was working three days a week as an occupational therapist, but I didn't have to I didn't have to report to anyone.

I was able to accommodate myself. I felt like more successful doing that than I even did as full-time as an occupational therapist making six figures, I felt like more successful. So I love that you use that analogy. Yeah it's why I work with Microenterprise primarily. I don't want to work with a lot of, big business founders.

That's their journey. And I'm not judging it. Like it's great. I'm on a journey like that myself. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with it. And I. For a lot of people, success just looks like not getting the Sunday scaries. Yes. Success just looks can I pay my bills and like maybe go on a couple vacations, have that sense of financial security and work less at something I don't hate. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that having that base too can help you to decide if you do want more than that too. Yeah. Like you said, zero judgment one way or another. I spent 20 years doing it. The other way in the beginning is because I was a teenager and in my early twenties and, the bar was more fun than, making a couple of million.

And then I spent years raising my babies and I was focused on spending more time with them and being more available to them. And now they're teenagers and when I'm available to them, they cringe. I have more time and more flexibility and freedom in this season of my life to focus on a different goal, but.

My definition of success has shifted, but I've almost always met it being in business for myself. Yeah. Which is so badass. Do you realize how badass that is though, Cheryl? No. Okay. It really is. It's so badass. I think it's just the coolest thing that you started this journey so young and found a way to meet your needs in business that's super duper badass.

Especially because you had to be pretty much your own first client of figuring out how to figure out how to figure it out. Yeah, I was really clueless, but I figured it out and then I figured it out again, and then I figured it out again, and then I forgot a bunch of stuff and then I lost my house, and then I figured out a whole bunch of stuff and then I got a house back and I've been good ever since.

Holy shit. Yeah. I didn't know, I didn't realize that you went through that type of journey too. Oh yeah, absolutely. When I was trying to build a business using all the traditional advice, Uhhuh, I was trying to do all the right things, omnichannel marketing, be everywhere, cold outreach, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I straight up, lost my house, got evicted, had to move in with my in-laws, pregnant with my second child. Holy shit. Yep. Threw it all out the window, decided if I was gonna do this again, I was gonna do it my way and have more fun. Started niche hopping, started connecting with people, started finding reasons to connect that weren't just by my shit.

And yeah, poof, here we are all these years later. It was a good choice. That's so badass, Cheryl. That is super duper badass. And. Okay. Coming back to solo school. School, a little bit word on the street is that you're doing a live run through of solo school. Yeah. Can you talk to me about that as I just like salivate over here just at the idea of it.

Okay. So like I'm making some adjustments to the curriculum. We have this basic core curriculum that guides everything, okay? So there's. In my mind, there are four stages of business. There's ideation, which is like where you're trying to figure out what you're selling and you don't have it firmed up yet.

And there's validation where you're trying to sell the first five of the same thing. If someone can buy five of five, people can buy the same thing five times. Then you've hit validation. I. Beyond that, you get into repetition where yes, you've sold the same thing five times, but now you would like to regulate your nervous system by having lead flow that's a bit more stable and predictable.

And then eventually you'll be pushing people away and turning people down and beating people off with the stick, hopefully. And then you need to figure out how to scale the lead flow, the conversion flow, and the delivery. That's your expansion phase, and so each of those four phases has five activities that you need to do within them.

The first one is figuring out your pricing and you know who you're gonna go after with this iteration, even though your niches can change and they can mean different things to different people and your pricing settled, all that kind of stuff, and so on and so forth. Through all the stages, I've got a bunch of this stuff developed.

But also I have time blindness and object permanence. And so actually getting the things developed has been quite challenging. And so I decided rather than continuing to try and force my way through into doing these things and just muscling through, I would use a principle that I learned a few years ago called Fiddle stands for Fuck it, do It Live.

Oh, I love that Fiddle. Yes. Fuck it. Do it live. I love that. Okay, so you're doing it live. Yeah. And that's almost a exactly way to help you with the executive dysfunction and the overwhelm, and that's so awesome. Exactly. And so every week there will be a new, interactive activity teaching you one of those kind of core five things that you need to do to move through to the next stage of business.

They're all action focused. They're all building actual assets for your business. We use examples to learn the concepts and internalize them and play with them. So we've got a fictional business you'll be playing with, and then you implement it on your own. We've got, q and a, but it's really, it's much less q and a e than most group coaching spaces.

Yeah. It's more like professors, open office hours sort of situation every week to support those things and to review the work that you're doing and see how it's going so I can continue improving the course materials. And we're just running through all 20 weeks of that curriculum starting in September to take people through the four stages and teach them what they need to do.

That's so freaking awesome. I love how you have molded your business to not only accommodate your clients, but also to accommodate yourself too. I mean that I'm would imagine that is one of the reasons that you have become so incredibly successful. Yeah. And the intersectionality between your needs and your client's needs is really where the rubber meets the road in accessibility.

Yeah. Because you can sit there all day long and talk about how people should have multiple paths to completion, or what their communication needs might be, but if you don't acknowledge that some of those things aren't gonna be accessible to you and set boundaries and be clear about what you can and can't do to accommodate people so they can make the choice on their own.

Whether working with you is the right decision or not. Yep. You're not gonna get very far. No, and I was stuck in that for quite some time. I was so focused on, oh, I have to be accessible to everyone, making it completely fucking inaccessible to myself. And that's been quite a difference. And now someone's just oh, I don't.

That won't work for me. That's okay. You'll find what works for you somewhere else because the way that you're needing is not a way I'm able to give you. And that's a way. Yeah, exactly. And being upfront about that is so important. Yeah. Yeah. Because there are a lot of shitty people out there that will oversell something that they really cannot deliver on or can't deliver it well, and a hundred percent, yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So if somebody wants to join solo school, you sent me the link, I believe, and I'm gonna put it in the show notes. And I'm salivating just looking at it. I'm gonna be looking at the sales page. That's so badass. Is, can you say what the price of solo school is or would you like them to go into the link and look at it there?

So I am actually in the midst of a price change 'cause we're not bundling a bunch of other stuff with it anymore. Okay. So we're able to make the price more accessible now. So I'll actually, gosh, leave that as a little surprise on sales page. Okay. I love that. I love that. Cheryl, thank you so much for joining me.

I. I just feel so privileged to be able to have this conversation with you after I've been so fun stalking you on Facebook. Stalking in oh my gosh, this is the baddest bitch I've ever seen type of way. Stalking with consent, like I was, I'm on your page too. Say consent consensual stalking.

This has been such a fun conversation. Thank you for sharing so much valuable information and validation With everyone listening. I super duper appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you for having me. So many really awesome topics came up. I actually can't wait to listen to this and pull some of the nuggets back out and turn them into more content.

I love it. I love it. Alright, my friends. Until next time. Bye now.

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It would mean the world to me. Thanks, my friend. Until next time.