Integrating ADHD with Cameron Gott

Cameron opens fresh off teaching a class on coaching neurodivergent leaders — and the insights on impact and awareness are still buzzing. As someone who learns by teaching, he brings that energy and learning straight to the podcast, picking up the thread from last week's conversation on navigating pushback in the context of change.
This week, Cameron names something he noticed in his own tone last week: defiance. And while a little defiance can be fuel, too much of it keeps us isolated, alienates potential allies, and puts all our energy into fighting back rather than moving forward. Enter the HMS Defiance — a vessel worth refitting, not scrapping.
Cameron explores the tricky dance between acknowledging others' valid frustrations with your ADHD and not losing sight of your own experience in the process. He digs into relationship dynamics — particularly in ADHD partnerships — where the focus so often lands on the impact of ADHD on others, rather than the storm happening inside the person with ADHD. Two things can be true, and real change starts from the inside out.
The invitation this week: push your agenda forward not through anger or resentment, but by articulating your experience, advocating for support, and finding — or building — a community that sees you. Refit the ship. Choose your crew wisely. And decide what destination you're actually sailing toward.

In this episode, ADHD leader coach Cameron Gott explores what it means to face dismissal, discounting, and rejection from others while living with ADHD — and why that experience cuts so deep. Building on last week's discussion of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), Cameron shifts focus to real external pushback: the subtle and not-so-subtle ways people discount, diminish, and exclude those who are changing or simply trying to survive.
Cameron identifies the toughest spot of all — facing pushback while standing still, stuck in pure survival mode, with no sense of forward momentum. Rather than waiting for the pushback to stop (it won't), he invites listeners to redirect that energy toward even the smallest vision of change. He explores why ADHD makes this so hard — from the gap between awareness and action, to the disorientation of not knowing "which way is up" — and offers practical anchors: articulating your experience and needs, setting healthier boundaries, leaning into your islands of competence, and daring to imagine a more supportive community. The central message: if pushback is inevitable, don't face it standing still.

All those battles — with yourself, your brain, the people around you — cost something. Every skirmish is bandwidth that isn't going to what actually matters to you. And few battles drain the tank faster than rejection sensitivity.
This week ADHD coach Cameron Gott takes on RSD directly, and upfront: this is not a popular take. He draws on his own history with rejection sensitivity to map the conditions that make it worse — overwhelm, lack of structure, imposter syndrome, a meaning-making machine running at full speed in the wrong direction. Individually, these are hard. Together, they compound in ways that aren't linear. One plus one plus one isn't three. It's eight.
He also introduces a reframe worth sitting with: what context is your rejection actually living inside? Fear? A need for acceptance? Isolation? When you can name the context, you stop floundering in the deep end and start looking upstream.
A heads up — this one may hit close to home. 

For ADHD brains, the edge isn't just a danger zone — it's where we activate. It's where things get defined, where focus finally shows up, where we can feel most alive. The problem is that living permanently on the edge of our cognitive and emotional limits is also the fastest route to burnout.
This week Cameron explores why ADHD makes us so vulnerable to burnout — and so drawn to the very conditions that cause it. He pulls in the research of burnout specialist Nick Petrie, whose work reveals something counterintuitive: rest alone doesn't break the burnout cycle. The people who truly recover don't just change how long they rest. They change how they work, who they are, and what they believe about themselves.
Cameron also introduces David Rock's SCARF model — status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness — as a quiet checklist for what's eroding when stress starts climbing, and why role clarity might be one of the most underrated tools for keeping burnout at bay.
Plus: the difference between feeling alive and feeling stimulated, why they're not the same thing, and why that distinction matters more than it sounds.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us with ADHD ended up in the passenger seat of our own lives — reacting, responding, hooking our wagon to someone else's prefrontal cortex — while the bus careens down the road with no one clearly at the wheel.
And then there's the battle with acceptance itself. For ADHD brains, that fight can quietly drain the very cognitive bandwidth we need most — spinning in the "what ifs", the "if onlys", the constant renegotiating with a reality that isn't going anywhere. It's one of the most expensive unwinnable fights we pick.
This week Cameron reads an article he wrote but never submitted — never been heard, until now — on what it actually means to take ownership of your ADHD. His argument: ownership is the ultimate gesture of acceptance. Not defeat. Not a label. A springboard.
The bus metaphor runs through the whole episode: what it means to stop lunging for the wheel, how to do an honest walk-around and check for dings and dents, why you'd want to enroll in bus driving school before taking on a metaphorical downtown Manhattan, and how to decide who gets to ride up front with you.
Cam's Equanimity Class in May

Some days you go to pull out the big hauler — the engine that moves your best work forward — and the barn door won't budge. Not because you're lazy. Not because you don't care. The energy just isn't there. This week Cameron gets honest about a Monday that didn't go according to plan, and what he's learned — over years of practice — about the difference between fighting your brain and adjusting your expectations. That distinction matters more than it might sound. Fighting the brain keeps you locked in cognitive rigidity, and the story that follows is rarely a kind one. Adjusting expectations is something else entirely — it's a skill, a practice, and on some days, an act of genuine resilience.
Cameron also revisits the Sisyphus problem: what happens to your 'boulders' when you set them down, and why having a trustworthy landing place to put them is so important.
Finally, Cam shares research on happiness and the benefits of movement and positive psychological practices, a central element of his Equanimity class just for women later this spring. The men's class will be in the fall.

What does it actually mean to flourish with ADHD?
In this episode, Cameron digs into the recent body of research on the positive attributes of ADHD, including a recent 2025 study out of Bath, UK identifying creativity, humor, spontaneity, hyper focus, and intuitiveness as key psychological strengths. But as always, you get Cam's take — including his honest critique of where the research falls short and why the binary of "struggling vs. flourishing" misses the full picture.
One of the biggest themes in this episode is energy — specifically, where it goes and what you get back from it. People with ADHD are wired to respond, react, and show up for others. That responsiveness can be a genuine gift. But it also means we can pour enormous amounts of energy into battles we can't win, relationships that drain us, and tasks that don't move anything meaningful forward. The result? We leave too much energy on the table — and have little left for the things that actually matter.
The integrators Cameron works with — the ones quietly doing remarkable things — have started to change that ratio. They're bringing their attention, creativity, and drive to something in their wheelhouse, something with real stakes and real meaning. Not perfect. Not always. But enough to feel the return on their investment.
Cameron also revisits Henry, the client who inspired this podcast, and traces his journey from burnout and adrenaline-driven urgency to a life built on love, purpose, trust, and joy. Along the way, Cam shares his six steps to meaningful change and makes the case for moving beyond a performance-only model of measurement.

When Cameron was teaching high school math, his students ran a quiet game: get Cam talking about something interesting, and the lesson never happens. It worked more often than he'd like to admit — until he was three quarters through the year with half a syllabus to show for it.
Challenge accepted. He learned, the hard way, how to define what done looked like before the class got away from him.
That's what this episode is about. Knowing when you're done. Giving a task a shape, a boundary, an ending — and actually stopping there.
Cameron walks through the final two C's of his Six C's of Completion: Completion (what is good enough, right now?) and Celebration (the pause, the reflection, the self-hug you probably skip). Plus the cube model for planning your day with transition time actually built in.
For anyone who pushes until they collapse — and wonders why done never feels done.
Equanimity Group Coaching Class
 

Do you finish your to-do list but still feel like you've accomplished nothing? You're not alone — and there's a reason for it.
In this episode, Cameron explores one of the most under-talked experiences in ADHD: the relentless, exhausting pursuit of something you can never quite reach. Whether it shows up as constant busyness, racing thoughts, or perpetually moving the goalposts, this drive isn't a character flaw — it's wired into the ADHD brain.
Cameron breaks down why the need for stimulation can hijack every other need in your life, what the neurobiology of dopamine has to do with it, and — most importantly — how to start giving shape to what "done" actually looks like for you.
Drawing on a Malcolm Gladwell insight defining sports as the "willing acceptance of arbitrary constraints," Cameron offers a reframe that could change how you approach your week: you get to set the rules of the game you're playing.
In this episode:
Why ADHD can feel like a hyperdrive that won't turn off
The difference between chasing stimulation and pursuing aliveness
How perfectionism and cognitive inflexibility keep the goalposts moving
A practical framework for defining "done" — so you can actually rest
If you've ever come home at the end of a packed day and felt completely empty, this one's for you.

What if the restlessness, risk-taking, and novelty-seeking that comes with ADHD isn't a character flaw — but an unmet need? In this episode, Cameron introduces the concept of the "sixth need": stimulation. Drawing on the five need models of Maslow's hierarchy and Glasser's Choice Theory, Cam makes a case that conventional needs models are missing something essential for the ADHD brain.
With characteristic candor (and some wonderfully ill-advised stories from his early 20s involving small sailboats and ceiling fans), Cam explores how an unrecognized need for stimulation can quietly hijack your week — sending you chasing shiny objects or avoiding anything that might add more noise to an already overloaded system.
The good news? There's a three-step path forward: awareness, embracing the need, and integration. Because the goal isn't to suppress your need for stimulation — it's to channel it into the meaningful, high-impact work you actually want to be doing.
Part of the ongoing series on using the week as a unit of time.
Cam's Hierarchy of ADHD Needs
Cam's Group Coaching Offering Equanimity