How to Position Your Business When Your ADHD Brain Keeps Changing Its Mind

There are two reasons to reposition: the market changed, or you got bored.

The first is strategy and the second is novelty-seeking wearing a very good disguise, and they're indistinguishable in the moment they arrive.

The idea usually arrives on a good day. You're in the shower, or driving, or half-listening to something else, and suddenly you can see it — the sharper version of what you do, the language that finally fits, the angle that makes everything you've been fumbling to explain click into place. It doesn't feel like a whim. It feels like clarity. Like the fog lifted and you can finally see what your business was supposed to be this whole time. And maybe it is that. Occasionally it is.

But if you've had that same experience three or four times in the last two years, each time convinced it was the real one, it's worth asking a harder question: is this strategic clarity, or is this the part of your brain that finds new ideas delicious, dressed up in strategy language? Because those two things feel absolutely identical from the inside. That's the entire problem, and no amount of thinking about it harder in the moment will separate them.

The short version (TLDR)

There are two reasons to reposition: the market changed, or you got bored. The first is strategy and the second is novelty-seeking wearing a very good disguise, and they're indistinguishable in the moment they arrive. Most positioning that "failed" was never actually wrong — it just never got repeated long enough to be recognised. So the fix isn't finding a better position. It's building commitment structures sturdy enough to protect a good-enough position from your own instinct to improve it, while giving that instinct somewhere useful to go instead.

The two reasons people reposition

There are really only two, and they lead to opposite decisions.

The market changed. Your clients started arriving with a different problem. The category you were in got crowded, or evaporated, or split in two. Someone you'd have sent people to five years ago is now doing something else entirely. Something outside you moved, and your positioning no longer describes where you actually are.

You got bored. Nothing external shifted. You just ran out of interest in your own message, and the new idea offered relief from that.

The first is strategy. The second is your novelty appetite making an executive decision it isn't qualified to make.

Here's the uncomfortable part: the second reason is more common, and it's better at arguing its case. Boredom rarely announces itself as boredom. It shows up wearing a very convincing costume — insight, evolution, finally being honest about who you serve. It comes with genuine excitement, which your brain reads as evidence, and it usually appears within a week or two of finishing something big, when the interesting work is done and what's left is the repetitive part. That timing is the tell, and almost nobody notices it in the moment.

Positioning rarely fails because it was wrong

This is the reframe I'd most like you to take from this piece. When a position doesn't work, the assumption is that it was the wrong position — badly chosen, insufficiently specific, aimed at the wrong people. So the fix seems obvious: choose better. Get sharper. Find the real one. But most positioning that "didn't work" never actually got tested. It got about nine months, a handful of pieces of content, a website update, and then it was replaced by the next one before anyone outside your own head had a chance to register it.

Positioning doesn't fail because it was wrong. It fails because it never got repeated enough times to become recognisable. Think about what recognition actually requires. Your audience needs to encounter your position repeatedly before it sticks — most people need eight or ten exposures before they could describe what you do to someone else. Referral partners need longer, because they're not just recognising you; they're staking their own credibility on being able to explain you accurately. And AI systems, which are now a substantial part of how people find practitioners like you, are reading your entire published body of work and looking for a consistent signal about what you're known for. Change the core claim every year, and all three of those clocks reset to zero.

Being findable for something specific is how to create a stand-out, sought-after, profitable business based on your expertise. It's like moving house every eighteen months and wondering why you don't have the kind of neighbour who'd lend you a ladder. Nothing's wrong with any of the houses. You just never stayed anywhere long enough for anyone to learn your name.

The obvious objection: what if it really was the wrong position? Sometimes it is. But notice how rarely anyone tests that properly before deciding. The evidence for "wrong position" is usually thin results — not enough enquiries, not enough conversions — and thin results have a long list of possible causes. Insufficient volume. An offer that doesn't match the claim. Pricing that filters out the people the positioning attracts. Simply not enough time elapsed. Positioning is the most conceptually interesting item on that list, which is exactly why it gets blamed first and the duller explanations go unexamined.

So before concluding the position was wrong, it's worth asking what else would have to be true. If you've said the same thing consistently for two years to a growing audience and it still isn't landing, that's a real signal. If you've said it inconsistently for nine months to roughly the same people, you don't have a positioning problem yet. You have a repetition problem that hasn't been given the chance to become evidence either way.

What genuine repositioning looks like

I've done this once, deliberately, in 2024. Before that, I spent years building under a brand that spoke specifically to women entrepreneurs, and it worked. But I had reached a point where even though my positioning was “working,” I recognized that a gender-focused business was something I had outgrown. My podcast audience was made up of people of all genders, and even though I marketed exclusively to women, men and non-binary folks were still signing up for free consultations and wanting to work with me. The composition of my client roster showed me the facts - my positioning no longer matched who I wanted to work with and who wanted to work with me. The people booking calls, doing the work, and getting results were no longer only women, and continuing to market under a name that told a large share of my best-fit clients this wasn't for them had become a real cost rather than a theoretical one.

So I rebranded to ADHD-ish™ — once, at a specific inflection point, in response to something that had genuinely changed outside of me. Two things worth noticing about that. It was driven by evidence, not appetite. I could point at who was actually in the room versus who the brand was addressing, and the gap was measurable rather than a feeling or an intuitive hunch. And it was expensive. It reset recognition I'd spent years building. People still occasionally find me under the old name. That cost was worth paying because the mismatch was real — but it's exactly why I'm not doing it again in eighteen months. I will be addressing my need for novelty in other ways that don’t damage the brand I have worked hard to create.

The fix is commitment structures, not a better position

If you can't tell the difference in the moment — and you can't, reliably — then the answer isn't better in-the-moment judgement. It's building structures that make the decision when your judgement is compromised. Four that actually work:

Set a minimum term. Your current position isn't eligible for review until a fixed date, chosen in advance. Two years is reasonable for a core position. This doesn't stop you having ideas; it stops ideas from becoming decisions on the day they arrive.

Schedule the review instead of waiting for the urge. Put an actual date in the calendar where you formally assess whether the position still fits. Urges arrive on your worst days. A scheduled review happens whether or not you're currently bored, which is exactly what makes it useful.

Keep an evidence file. One document. Every time you see a real market signal — a client saying something that doesn't fit, an enquiry for something adjacent, a shift in who's booking — it goes in there with a date. When the urge to reposition arrives, you're reading accumulated evidence rather than reconstructing the last three weeks from memory. If the file is empty, you have your answer.

Get another pair of eyes and ears involved. No positioning change becomes final without one person outside your own head who knows the business and is willing to disagree with you. The urge to reposition is remarkably persuasive when the only person evaluating it is the person having it.

None of this is about suppressing what your brain does well. It's about putting a container around it sturdy enough that a genuinely good position gets the years it needs to compound, while the ideas keep coming and land somewhere they can be useful.

Do the gut check first, before the full audit

If the urge is live right now, one question first: did something outside me actually change, or did I just get tired of my own message? Answer it honestly, and most of these decisions resolve themselves in about a minute. For the ones that don't, there's a fuller diagnostic here.

And if the urge is really about wanting something new to make rather than something new to be, that's not a problem to suppress — it just needs somewhere better to go. That's covered here.

Durable brands aren't built by people who do things perfectly

The entrepreneurs whose positioning you admire didn't get it right on the first attempt. Very few people do. What they did was protect a decent position from their own instinct to abandon it, for long enough that the market learned it. That's the whole trick, and it's far less glamorous than the version where the perfect articulation arrives one morning, and everything falls into place.

Positioning is the first pillar of The ADHD-ish ™ Method for a reason: nothing downstream of it — packaging, pricing, promotion — can compound while the thing they're all built on keeps moving. I’ve talked about this on the ADHD-ish ™ podcast with my client, Kim Van Lue, and how we repositioned her business for both novelty and sustainability.

If you're sitting on a repositioning decision right now and can't tell which kind it is, that's a good use of an hour with someone who isn't inside your head. If it turns out to be the right time to reposition, let’s talk about whether working with The ADHD-ish ™ Method and me are right for you by booking a free consultation.‍ ‍