Dani Donovan returns with the unfiltered story behind The Anti-Planner’s explosive success, burnout, and hard-earned lessons. Hear what happens when your biggest win creates unexpected chaos—and how you find your way through it.

Every rebrand or new offer feels, in the moment, like strategic clarity finally arriving. It rarely is. More often, it's novelty-seeking.

Repositioning because the market genuinely shifted is strategy. Repositioning because you're bored is dopamine-seeking behavior. The two feel identical from the inside.

Diann's own trajectory is instructive here — a real rebrand happened once, deliberately, at a specific inflection point (the shift away from an identity that no longer fit). That's different from chasing the twentieth "aha" idea in eighteen months.

ADHD-ish ™ Blog: When I reflect on some of the things I’ve said yes to in my business, I have to laugh at why I called them decisions at all. Some were genuine strategic moves, others were leaps of faith, and many were simply dopamine-fueled impulse I called intuition. In this post, I'm exploring a distinction that's become the core of my work—the difference between options and opportunities—and more importantly, why ADHD decision making, especially for entrepreneurs, makes it nearly impossible to tell them apart in real time.

A rebrand every 12-18 months isn't unusual for an ADHD-run business — it's close to the norm, and it's rarely examined as a pattern in itself.

New frameworks, new language, and new positioning are genuinely stimulating to generate. That excitement is real, and it's also unrelated to whether the previous positioning was actually wrong.

Every rebrand resets the compounding effect the previous positioning was just starting to build. Audiences, AI systems, and referral partners all need repetition to recognize an identity; a rebrand erases the count and starts it over at zero.

This post is a walkthrough on the what, why and how of novelty seeking pretending to be business strategy and what to do instead when your dopamine-starved brain thinks its time to start over.

Brand consistency advice assumes a business owner who doesn't get bored with their own message. That assumption doesn't hold for a lot of ADHD entrepreneurs, and fighting the boredom directly rarely works.

The goal isn't to stop wanting variation. It's to find where variation is safe to indulge (sub-frameworks, content angles, offer structure) without touching the core positioning that needs to stay stable.

Recognition — by an audience, by referral partners, by AI systems reading a body of work — takes repetition measured in years, not months. Every genuine reset restarts that clock.

This post breaks down what's allowed to change often (content angles, examples, sub-frameworks) versus what stays fixed for a much longer horizon (the core category claim, the core methodology name, the core positioning statement).

This isn't about suppressing the ADHD brain's need for novelty. It's about building a container sturdy enough to hold the core position still while everything else moves.

Not every urge to reposition is wrong — sometimes the market really did shift. The problem is most ADHD entrepreneurs can't tell the difference in the moment.

Client feedback consistently naming the same gap; a shift in who's actually booking calls; a market-level change that shows up in more than one place at once.

The urge shows up right after finishing a big piece of work; it's accompanied by excitement about the new idea rather than dissatisfaction with results; nothing external has actually changed.

The practical test: Sit with the urge for a set period (a specific number of weeks, not "a while") before acting. If it's still there and still backed by evidence, it's strategic. If it's faded or was only ever backed by excitement, it was novelty.

This is a diagnostic skill worth building, not a character flaw to manage.

Hiring a COO for a small business — or an operations manager, or an online business manager (essentially a really good VA) — is the most reasonable-sounding but fundamentally wrong move I see business owners with ADHD make. It looks logical. It looks like the next best step. It looks like the thing a “serious” business owner does. And a significant percentage of the time, it's an expensive way to postpone dealing with the real problem.  

And before you come for me, let me be clear. I'm not anti-operations. I recommend operational hires all the time. But the order matters more than most business owners realize and getting it backwards costs them double.

If you hired an ADHD business coach and things didn't work out the way you imagined, and you've come to the conclusion that you're the problem or the coach wasn’t “the one”, I'd like to offer an alternative explanation. 

I hear this a lot, usually in a first conversation, typically delivered in the flat voice people use for things they've decided are their fault. “I've worked with three coaches. Maybe four, depending on whether you count the group program.  Maybe I’m just not coachable.”

Chances are you are coachable and maybe you've been hiring the wrong type of help, repeatedly, for a reason that makes complete sense once you see it.

If you're trying to figure out the difference between an ADHD coach and a business strategist, there's an excellent chance you’re not just doing research or obsessed with semantics. You're most likely six months to two years into coaching that genuinely helped and you've hit a wall you can't quite name. You're doing the things. You're doing them consistently. And something is still off.

I want to tell you what that wall is, because it’s not your imagination and it’s also not what you might think it is. 

You wrote it. That's the part that makes this different from every other marketing problem you have.

The post existed. The launch email was finished, and it was good — better than most of what you've actually sent, and even your inner critic agrees with that. It sat in draft mode while you told yourself you wanted to look at it again with fresh eyes. Then it sat another day. Then the timing wasn't right anymore, and eventually you deleted it or quietly repurposed the good parts into something smaller and safer.

If you've ever felt a genuine flood of relief when a launch got postponed, an email wasn’t sent or an offer never made it out of draft mode, you already know what this article is about. Take a deep breath, skip the shame spiral and keep reading. 

Almost every marketing system you've been sold was designed by someone neurotypical or a neurodivergent having a good week.

They had the idea, tested it while they were energised and interested, saw it work, and wrote it up. What they probably didn’t do was stress-test it against a week where getting dressed was the sole accomplishment. So the system arrives in your red-hot hands with a hidden requirement in the very fine print; this works if you can show up like I did when I made it.

Then you have a low stretch  (low mood, energy and motivation) — and every entrepreneur with ADHD traits has them, including me, and the system produces nothing. Not less. Nothing at all. Because it had no version of itself that runs at reduced capacity.  The one I call the MVV - Minimum Viable Version. 

That's not a discipline failure. That's a system that doesn’t take fluctuating capacity into account, and fluctuating capacity is something you can count on with ADHD, so we might as well count on it and plan for it. 

At some point in the last few months, you looked at your own marketing and thought: this is stale. I've said this a hundred times. People must be sick of hearing it. I need a new angle.

That thought felt like strategic insight. It almost never is.

What it usually is: your appetite for novelty, which has nowhere useful to go at the moment, redirecting itself at your messaging. And messaging is a terrible place to spend it, because the thing you're bored of is very likely the thing that's finally starting to work.

There are two ways entrepreneurs and small business owners with ADHD typically get it wrong when it comes to marketing, and they look like opposites from a distance. 

The first is chasing everything at once. Four social media platforms, a newsletter, a lead magnet, a networking group, and a podcast started in a burst of enthusiasm and abandoned a few months in. It feels like coverage. It's actually one energy source spread so thin that all of it goes silent at the same time.  

The second is locking onto a single channel and treating it as the whole strategy. That one at least produces results — up until the week you can't produce anything, and then your visibility drops to zero with nothing underneath it.

Neither is actually a system. Both are one drop in capacity away from total collapse.

Every piece of marketing advice aimed at ADHD entrepreneurs assumes the problem is willpower — post more, stick to the calendar, build the habit. That's backwards. The problem isn't that you can't be consistent. It's that you built a promotion strategy that requires a version of consistency your brain was never going to sustain, on a schedule that ignores how your energy actually moves.

In this episode of the ADHD-ish™ Podcast, executive coach Kim Van Lue shares how embracing her neurodivergence helped her pivot from generalist to specialized six-figure business owner. Listen to the full episode today to transform your own workflow.

ADHD-ish ™ Blog: I never shy away from complexity—whether it's talking about neurodiverse brains or the new tech shaping our lives. When it came time to talk about Di AI, an ADHD AI coaching tool I created and have poured so much of myself into, I didn't want a cheerleader. I wanted a discerning, thoughtful skeptic with both feet firmly on the ground. Enter Dr. Elizabeth Meyer. As a professor, researcher, and one of my former coaching clients, Elizabeth came to this episode not as a fan, but as someone with a "love-hate" relationship with Generative AI—someone perfectly equipped to interrogate what Di AI could actually offer.

Kristina Flynn reveals how decades of misdiagnoses shaped her ADHD journey and fueled Story EQ. Listen now to discover why overthinking is your brand’s unfair advantage and claim the power of your own narrative today.

ADHD-ish ™ Blog: If you're an entrepreneur with ADHD, you already know how many "hacks," life tips, and motivational speeches we're bombarded with. They tend to sound the same: work harder, try more, get organized, plan, focus. After years doing this work with entrepreneurs like you—and, honestly, after years struggling and triumphing with my own ADHD—I've learned that what actually helps us isn't more willpower or better reminders. It's structural change. 

Ever wonder why every exciting opportunity turns into another commitment? Discover why dopamine tricks your brain, learn the “screen door” decision filter, and listen now to start making smarter yeses that protect your time, energy, and business.

ADHD-ish ™ Blog: When I first connected with Kathryn Bird, she genuinely seemed to have it all: traveling the world, running a highly successful business, celebrated as an expert in her arena, even stopped by strangers like a celebrity. But as is so often the case with ADHDers, the external perception couldn't have been further from her internal reality. She described it as "feeling like a swan"—serene on the surface, but furiously paddling underneath, continually battling a sense of drowning in her to-do list and never earning the space to rest or enjoy personal time.