Turning a "Talks Too Much" Kid into a Founder Who Closes

The conversation she wasn't supposed to be having

"I was supposed to be working on the flight. Instead I spent the whole time talking to the person next to me, and now I have a sales call with them next week."

She told me this like she was confessing to a failure, one that went all the way back to her report cards that always read, "Talks too much in class.” The sales call barely registered because of the shame she had internalized around her ADHD.

She had a real gift for ideas (she could sketch a fundable business over coffee and make you want to invest on the spot) and an equally strong tendency to talk herself out of them. A voice in her head kept pointing her somewhere more respectable, telling her to go work for someone else, earn the PhD, win the contract with a large, stable, well-known organization, and then let that name vouch for her.

The respectable path stopped making sense

For a long time the respectable plan felt like the only serious option. Then one of the household-name organizations she had thought was her dream client landed in the headlines for the kind of culture and ethics collapse that instantly erases wealth and reputations. Watching that unfold shook her belief that institutions could ever be her safety net.

Even after she created a business idea that was genuinely fundable and started building toward it, the doubt stayed. She still beat herself up for her burst-and-crash rhythm, even though she understood, at least intellectually, that she was never built for grind culture.

Working through the lows

Being a founder is a roller coaster, and much of our work was about navigating the lows. We worked on the all-or-nothing thinking that turned temporary (although significant) setbacks into proof she wasn’t capable as a founder. We worked on the gap between what her attention and energy were actually built for and the linear, heads-down model of productivity she kept measuring herself against. When the doubt rose, we narrowed the focus to the next concrete step rather than the whole mountain.

Over the months she got better at catching the story while it was still running. A setback stopped being a verdict on her abilities and became a challenge she could look at with some curiosity. She learned to trace her stuck moments to causes she could name and address, which made the doubt easier to move through and the next decision easier to reach.

Holding her ground as a founder

She is a brown woman and a founder carrying significant caregiving responsibilities, and she needed a coach who understood that she was not going to set that part of her life aside to build her business on someone else's terms. Part of our work honored the full reality of who she was rather than treating her caregiving as a problem to be solved around.

The rest was about her boundaries. She got sharper at asking for what she needed and at noticing when a client or partner was trying to slot her into a supporting role instead of recognizing the founder in front of them. She learned to spot who genuinely backed her vision and who would keep pressuring her to make it smaller, and she chose her partners from the first group.

Where she is now

She is in her first round of funding and on schedule to hit her target. The gift for ideas is still there, and so is the relational instinct that used to feel like a distraction. These days she trusts both. When she lands a lead from a conversation she never planned, she books the follow-up without apologizing for how it happened.