Dr Perpetua Neo is the quintessential multi-hyphenate. A leadership psychologist and coach, she obtained her Master of Philosophy in Criminological Research at Cambridge and her doctorate in clinical psychology at University College London. She continues to work with Cambridge on growing mental health without compromising high performance programs; is the spokesperson and mental health advisor for Global Anti Scam Organisation; has advised on Stanford Business School’s Neurodiversity Project, amongst others. She coaches Type A+++ senior leaders, elite sportspeople and entrepreneurs with demanding lives, to hit KPIs and solve leadership problems, without burning out.
My childhood
I remember a childhood filled with activities—I’d ask my Mom to enroll me in all sorts of classes from ballet to computer and buy me all kinds of books. The thing that worked for me was being ambitious. Achieving grades made my eyes sparkle; also I was brought up with two diligent, clever older cousins. To do well, I had to find some unorthodox solutions. I bargained with my mother—I told her that if my teacher took three hours to explain a concept I could splice in ten minutes, then could I promise her I’d study on my own, score my distinctions, and she’d write me a letter of excuse? That way, I could sleep in too. Of course, I kept my end of the bargain and delivered.
Family life
My dad is fast-paced. He used to be nicknamed ‘the flying horse’ by his friends for his walking speed and is incredibly impatient. If you were to put my brother and I together, I would speak at three times the speed, no one would understand us, and it would still be too slow for me. And so I’ve had to come to peace with how others think I’m too fast, but I think I’m too slow.
My father is very structured. That helped train my unstructured ADHD brain, which used to be scattered, forget things, and flit from the surface of one topic to another. I now have this ingrained checklist and flowcharts of what to do in every situation, so I’m on top of things. Total lifesaver.
My mother is the calm one in the family. She wanted to make sure that we had an education and a future. She supported me in whatever I wanted to do, like my unorthodox suggestion, as long as I was a good person. To her, it didn’t mean that skipping school meant that I was a bad person, as long as I produced the grades! Sometimes I have a little giggle with her, on how her gamble paid off.
School days
I never worried too much about my grades, knowing I could always achieve, even in the things I wasn’t naturally that talented at. However, I didn’t like continuous assessments or coursework, because I didn’t feel any urgency and so would show up not doing my homework, or sounding absolutely stupid. It made me feel idiotic in the moment. When it was time for exams, my ADHD brain would kick into Happy Deadline Mode and that would deliver.
ADHD at Work
As an adult, I break everything down into deadlines and sprints – just enough to give me some adrenaline and excitement, but not the kind where I would just do everything at the last minute and then crash and burn.
I can definitively say that all the amazing things in my life come from using my ADHD—don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, right? I write for New York wellness giant mindbodygreen, The Huffington Post, and have a book released in May 2022 with Simon & Schuster. Do you know how I honed my writing? I trained to write about the most mundane things and random stuff about food on Instagram. That kind of single-minded obsession comes from my brain wiring.
Managing ADHD
❇️ Accept and leverage your ADHD wiring – As you reflection on your ADHD wiring, you will realise that you have a lot of higher-level skills, and your basic skills are missing. Like, how to take care of yourself, how to be with other people, or how to sleep healthily. Then I learnt this dictum 既来之则安之—if I’m already here, the only way is to accept it, and then we can start to do something about it.
In ADHD, if you learn to use your higher-level gifts—like the ability to hyperfocus and break out of previous cages in your head and the world—to catch up on the basic algorithm stuff that is so important to your day-to-day vitality, then you win—in writing, in relationships, and in life.
❇️ Self Awareness is important – Be very self-aware about what or how you’re feeling instead of performing Cognitive Photoshop and lying to yourself. In Singapore and generally in Asia, we are excellent at suppressing ourselves—it’s not about giving in and being a victim of our feelings. Rather, it’s about acknowledging that I’m feeling a certain way right now, it’s not comfortable, but I’m going to regain control by looking it in the eye. And, I’m going to regulate my brain by breathing three deep breaths. Then I’ll take it from there. If you don’t fly on aeroplanes where terrorists hijack the system, then you shouldn’t be running your brain when it’s being hijacked by your primitive fear centre.
❇️ Don’t let labels define you – There are some things you’re wired to be fabulous at, and others, not quite. That doesn’t mean you discount the things you are good at, or call yourself lazy or undisciplined, because these labels are the poltergeists in your house that you don’t know, but haunt you. You use your gifts as a way of catching up with the things you fall short in. You find ways to organize your brain and your lifestyle, to get you to where you need to be.
❇️ Trust yourself – It’s quite common for neurodivergent people to be bullied. Because you don’t trust yourself, knowing deep down there’s something not quite normal about you, it’s easier for you to outsource authority. What happens is you then learn to gaslight yourself, and you become what toxic people identify straight away as juicy prey.
❇️ Choose role models – Consider your role models. For me, they are Richard Branson who has ADHD, the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew who was dyslexic, and Leonardo da Vinci, my favourite polymath. Focus on the people you respect greatly, take in their lessons and journeys, and add your own essence in.
❇️ You are uniquely You – I meet a lot of people who don’t believe I’m neuro-atypical. I used to get defensive; but I soon realised the futility of having to regress into my younger self to prove that point—and to what end, pity? Besides that, there’s no stereotypical ADHD Look—it’s not chromosomal! We have so many subtypes.
❇️ Self-Mastery – Being neurodivergent is NOT an excuse to get away with things like bad behaviour or having poor integrity. It’s about understanding how you’re wired, so you develop self-mastery. Instead of killing your demons, you make them work for you. I like that, a lot.
Complete this sentence: ADHD is…..
ADHD is hard until you learn how to use your gifts to sand off the rough edges
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