I was taken aback as I listened to the bubbling, confident young woman across from me describe life before her diagnosis and coaching. Her giggling and teasing appeared so inherently part of her that the image of her being sluggish and disengaged seemed absurd.  

 

“They used to get angry at her for daydreaming and zoning out,” her mother tells me. “Now they complain that her energy disrupts the class.”  

 

Matipa Katso is a wonderfully wired young woman with ADHD. As a little girl, she boiled over with energy. If her mother had been asked if Matipa was neurodivergent when she was six, she would have thought it was probable. But as she grew, she became more and more tired and distracted.  

 

She was easily frustrated and would fight with friends over seemingly insignificant issues. “I couldn't go to (youth group) with my friends or do anything after school because I just wanted to sleep,” Matipa says. I asked her if that was frustrating for her.  

 

“No,” she said. “I got my sleep.”  

 

The breaking point came at a parent-teacher conference. Matipa’s mother describes sitting across from her daughter's teacher, fuming, and listening to him tell her something was “wrong with” her daughter and that he couldn’t help her.  

 

“My instinct was to tell the guy there was something wrong with him,” she says, rolling her eyes.  

 

But that meeting led to Matipa spending the morning with an educational psychologist and, eventually, getting her diagnosis. “To be perfectly frank with you, getting that diagnosis allowed me to release a lot of resentment,” Mum confessed. Academic pressure, specifically during the COVID lockdown, had caused frustration and rifts in the Katso household. But things began to change quickly when Matipa started coaching.  

 

“You should see her in those sessions,” Mum shakes her head. “She’s completely engaged and focused.”  

 

And life began to shift for the household. She learned how to communicate better with her parents and friends.  

 

“My one friend told me I must be going to therapy,” Matipa laughed. “I learned to eat better, and now I have too much energy again.”  

 

But Matipa says the most impactful thing has been learning to identify when she hits the "wall of awful"—a concept from ADHD expert Brendan Mahan, which explains how daunting task initiation can be when the ghosts of past failures hang over your head. Learning how to find footholds to get over the wall and just start is essential to developing executive functioning skills.  

 

“Most of the time, I experience the wall,” she says, “but now I know it’s there, and I know what to do.”