How ADHD Pulled This Entrepreneur Out Of $600k Debt (with Galel Fajardo)

Sitting in a parking lot after leaving the bankruptcy attorney's office, $600,000 in debt written off, home gone, Galel Fajardo told himself no one would ever hire him again.

Galel Fajardo is a business coach, digital marketing consultant, and fractional CMO with 23 years of entrepreneurial experience and a Master's in Performance Psychology. He specializes in helping high-performing entrepreneurs, especially those with ADHD, whose businesses look successful from the outside and feel like a prison from the inside. His clients have doubled their revenue, with one scaling from $2.5M to $10.1M in three years, not by working harder, but by building the right structure first. He coaches from the only credential that actually matters: he has lived every problem he teaches.

What he learned through that experience, his ADHD diagnosis, and years of coaching shapes how he thinks about execution, delegation, and the internal stories that stall growth.

This episode covers the specific frameworks Galel uses in his own business and with his clients.

What We Cover:

• Why the systems that work in your 20s tend to fail once a business reaches real complexity and what to replace them with
• How Galel uses AI as a ruthless critic rather than a yes-machine to pressure-test ideas before committing resources
• The structural reason ADHD brains are strong activators but need an external check to finish and execute
• Why transparency about ADHD with your team tends to improve delegation rather than undermine authority
• How Galel identifies the belief underneath an activation problem and works with clients to shift it

Connect With Galel Fajardo Website: https://www.galel.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

I've got over almost $600,000 worth of debt that had to get written off in bankruptcy. I am now officially branded a failure, and there's the court proceedings to prove it.

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. Before we get started, if you're a business owner making over 100K in a service business and you know that your ADHD is stopping you from getting the results that you want, then it might be time to build an operational layer. We do it for you for your ADHD brain. We find people, install people, get operators set up. Just click the link down below to do a free business build-out with me to see if you're fit and we'll get started. Today I am super excited to be joined by Galel. Galel is a high performance coach and a fractional CMO who helps overwhelmed entrepreneurs build highly profitable businesses that deliver freedom instead of burnout. A graduate from the University of California with a master's degree in performance psychology, he coaches established business owners on creating better systems, sharpening marketing and sales, and reclaiming their time and energy. He has worked closely with Craig Valentine, who we've also had on this podcast and Early to Rise, supporting seven and eight figure entrepreneurs who want to scale without sacrificing their health or family life. Galal, it's great to have you on the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, I was, as we were saying before the call, people were um I was talking to people, who should I talk to? Who should I talk to? Entrepreneurs who have ADHD, and people were saying, you got to talk to Galel. Galel's the guy, you got to talk to Galal. So take me through your own ADHD experience.

SPEAKER_02 1:43

Yeah, so like many adults, I did not know I was ADHD. I thought, quite frankly, I thought, oh my gosh, there's something wrong with me. Like I've got a brain tumor or something. Like I was literally going to the doctor saying, I'm having trouble. Like all these things in my business came to a head where I was losing things and I was ruining relationships with clients because I was forgetting things. And the systems that I had as a teenager and in my 20s were completely failing me in my 30s, which just happens with age, right? Your short-term memory. I remember my schedule was all in my head as a teenager. So I, and again, you have less things going on. And then as I got into my 20s and 30s, I started realizing like what I what's gotten me here is not going to get me to where I need to go. And just things started falling apart in my business life. And a friend of mine said, you know, you should probably get checked out for ADHD. And so I went to the doctor and sh the psychologist took me through a battery of tests and said, Yeah, you're off the charts, ADHD, specifically with impulsivity. And I took it to my mom, who's a physician, and I said, Mom, did you know I was ADHD? She goes, Of course we knew. We've known forever. And I went, This would have been really helpful information for me to have as a kid, you know, and growing up. And so that diagnosis led to a journey of self-discovery. And as I tell my coaching clients, the human beings that are most self-aware are those people that success will come faster because when you can realize where your weaknesses are and what you're struggling with and get help for those things, that really starts to open up doors very quickly.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And it's great when you have those people who can just show you the path. So describe to me that feeling of realizing you had ADHD and then looking back at your life and having to remap everything based on that. How did that feel for you?

SPEAKER_02 3:45

The first feeling was shameful. I felt a lot of shame associated with just the way that I had burned certain relationships, ways that I had burned work relationships. Because ADHD people, because we lack dopamine, norepidephrine, serotonin, where we one of the downsides that I've recognized is that we seek conflict sometimes. And so I look at places where I was working and I would seek conflict subconsciously to create some kind of rush. And I'm like, a lot of those things were just made up in my head. And so my brain would kind of put these connections together. I would dislike somebody, and then that would lead to me losing a job. And so there was a phase when I had lost my business and was working and had had to work to support my family that I felt like I couldn't keep a job because I was always eventually like getting bored and then starting conflict. And so there was a lot of shame when I finally went back to look back at all those issues that I had created these problems in my career that could have been avoided had I had the self-awareness, the knowledge, and just the coping mechanisms for that.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Yeah, it is crazy looking back. And I I asked you that because I think everybody has that experience of remapping and being like, oh, that wasn't because they sucked, or that wasn't because I just hadn't found the perfect thing for me yet, or this wasn't, you know, the right like the these things were the you know, the fact that my brain was just being like, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on in the background the whole time.

SPEAKER_02 5:26

Yeah, so so the feeling of shame was pretty strong. I I want to say I didn't get depressed afterwards, but I felt this sadness, this sadness in that I had felt as if I'd wasted many opportunities as a result of this condition. And then I was lucky to be surrounded by people who were there to like lift me up. Like I have a good tight circle of people who I can be really open with. And then as I started talking to people about it, as I was like open, I remember I had a conversation with a gentleman who is uh owner of a, you know, this this company is worth half a billion dollars. And I told him, I was just diagnosed with ADHD and I don't know what to do with it. And he said, Welcome to the club, Galel. Like, that's awesome. It's a gift. And I said, What do you mean it's a gift? I feel like this is a disaster. And he said, No, if you channel it correctly, why do you think I was able to build this business? If you channel it correctly and learn how to use it, it becomes an ultimate strength. And that became a catalyst for me to changing how I looked at it from this disability that most people call it to actually a strength. And then now I've I've embraced it, I'm open about it, and now I coach people and some of them who who have ADHD, but mostly I coach myself.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

Yeah, I think there is, you know, somebody was mentioning the other day there's a shift happening for a lot of people right now. There was a time where ADHD wasn't really known, it wasn't really spoken about, it was something that you had when you were a kid. Then there was this sense of like, oh no, this is a thing, and people got diagnosed and learned about it and figured it out. And now there's a conversation coming through that's coming, you know, especially in the entrepreneurial space, I see it now. People saying, you know what? I think I have it, but I don't think that I'm gonna call it a disability. I think I'm gonna call it a part of my being and how I work.

SPEAKER_02 7:19

Absolutely. Yeah, and and I I would tell people one of the biggest things that I learned through my master's education in performance psychology is that so many times in life, in order to change something, the human just needs to arrive at a decision. The sooner that we can arrive at a decision, where then we can employ all of our psyche, our emotion, our body into that decision. And it's adopting a new persona, adopting a new mentality that you're gonna step into. And so for me, and and what I encourage everybody that's listening, if they're struggling with ADHD, is no, I'm now thriving with ADHD and here and finding evidence to how you can start thriving with it. Once you identify that new identity and can step into it, that's where a lot of things really start to change.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

100%. And we're gonna talk more about how you run your business with ADHD in a minute. I think it's really good. I I do want to ask you, this is a question really for me, is you know, when we think about ADHD, you know, one we we're going through in our podcast right now, we look at the research behind ADHD and we also look at different business uh idioms or metaphors. One of them that we've been talking about recently is this idea that money loves speed. And with ADHD, one of the benefits of ADHD is speed. You know, the impulsivity comes with a positive, which is that we move really fast. But the downside is that we move really fast. So if you're coaching somebody, maybe even yourself, like you said, about this idea, how do you stay in the balance of that?

SPEAKER_02 8:58

Absolutely. So one of the things that I have recognized about us is that we are great at coming up with ideas, thinking about them, and then, you know, jumping first without thinking about what's down below. And so now with maturity, experience, and having coached hundreds of people, I realize like, hey, there's a lot of details that need to get filled in, right? So we're really good at like if we're painting a picture, at like creating the outline, knowing what colors we want to have, but we don't know how we're gonna put them together on the canvas. And so the key is making sure that you're filling in the details, understanding that you're gonna, yes, act with speed. Like, like my biggest issue that I have with with clients is that a lot of people are so scared to take action. And I'm trying to tell them, hey, you can do this, take action, right? Money loves speed, or like Craig Ballantine says, success loves speed, right? And so, yes, we need to take action, but then we need to fill in all the details. And so, as part of the process, there needs to be a checks and balances where we know the big picture, but then we need to have somebody else or have a system for creating the details of the actual plan. And this is where I really love AI because AI, the more that it learns you, can start to fill in those gaps for you. Or if you have a team member or somebody else, a mentor, somebody that can help you fill in those gaps, a coach, right? Help you fill in those gaps that will ask you the questions, like, okay, that's a great idea, Galel, but when is this going to get completed by? Okay, Galel, after you do this, what's the next step? What's the next step after that? What does success look like, right? How do we define success and filling in all those gaps? Then we really start to get some momentum.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

Yeah, 100%. And it's it's it is interesting, you know, you mentioned AI. I've definitely been teaching my community about this idea of the pre-mortem. It was actually Dan Martell, I heard him talk about it a couple of weeks ago, asking, you know, an AI that knows you well. Like, hey, imagine I have this business idea and it doesn't work. Why is that?

SPEAKER_02 11:13

Yeah, I'm a big, big proponent of having AI and making sure that like my prompts when I'm like just ideating, is I say that you need to be a ruthless critique, you know, critiquer of this idea. Tell me the ways that you view it'll work, and then also tell me ways that you think could be challenges where it couldn't work. I don't want you just to simply agree with me. And the other thing that I have done, like like with regard to AI, is I'm using like pretty advanced setup where I'm using Obsidian plus Claude Code, and I had Obsidian interview me and learn about my weaknesses and learn about the fact that I'm a really good activator, but I struggle with finishing things. And so when it's planning with me to understand that and know that that's a weakness of mine. And so now it has full context of my team and who can help me do these things to actually take things across the finish line.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

That's really cool. Obsidians moved into that sick and brain AI space because I used it before AI came out. And yeah, that that's great. So tell me, you you're doing this, you you realize you have ADHD, you're working for yourself. Like, when did you become the coach and CMO that you are today?

SPEAKER_02 12:26

So in 2007, 2008, that we had the global financial crisis. I owned a mortgage company at that time with my wife. We had put in our savings into it, we had grown this uh large business, and then suddenly we couldn't lend money anymore. And I lost my business practically overnight. So a lot of business owners, their fear is to not make money for a month. Like, just imagine if your income stopped for a month, my income stopped for an entire year. I had no money for a year, and so my worst nightmare came true. I lost all my money, I had to declare bankruptcy. We lost our home to foreclosure, and we just literally saw everything that we had built go away. So depression, anxiety, it was very bad. And in once I hit that rock bottom and I got counseling and I got help to kind of bring me out of that, I began to study the human brain a lot more. And I realized that I had had faulty systems, put so much pressure on myself, never allowed myself to really take a break. And this was a combination of both burnout and anxiety and depression, all rolled into one. And I decided I was never going to allow myself or anybody else to experience the same pain and struggle that I did. I wanted to go help people. So I decided that I wanted to become a coach to help other people because people would hire me when I was in the mortgage industry. People would hire me. They would pay me, hey, can I can I have you coach me with my mortgage business for an hour? I'll pay you X number of dollars. And so I started realizing that I enjoyed coaching and I'd coached baseball. And so I was like, I can apply the same thing in business. And then when I tried to find a coaching program, nothing would fit. Then I saw this master's program on performance psychology. I I did that. And then ever since then, I've been coaching basically full time since then. The CMO work came after I lost my mortgage business. I was really good at marketing, had a background in uh in digital marketing. And so I was building the marketing business while going to grad school. So this the marketing stuff helped pay the bills while I went to grad school. And then now I do a combination of both.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

No, that's awesome. And it's funny, you say you said imagine if your um whole business went away. I ran a frozen food company during COVID, and the government like made making food illegal.

SPEAKER_02 14:57

That would be somebody's business. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Yes, we went for it.

SPEAKER_02 15:01

Even though firsthand.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

We're doing it. We're up. That's not even a thing now. Yeah, and it's a lot. Uh luckily I knew I had ADHD at that point. That was probably very helpful. But yeah, okay, so you move into this space. Now I can imagine there's lots of feelings around this. You know, you've had that business, you grew it, you put all this investment, all this money into it, you lose that. Like you said, it's the worst case scenario. And now you've you're growing something else. Was there a feeling? If you describe, you know, if you take me back, was there a feeling of like, I don't know if I can trust this or were you all- 100%.

SPEAKER_02 15:41

100%. I didn't know if I could trust myself, right? I I was scared to death because I had built this business. I took a risk in starting this business. So I was mentored by somebody else. I was in his company, and then I took this risk to go out on my own and start this business. And we had had a falling out, which was my fault, by the way. He and I are now very dear friends years later. But at that time, when I was in my early 20s, we had a falling out. I left the business to start my own. And all I could think of was, well, he was right. He told me to not do this, and I did it anyway. He was right, I was wrong, I'm no good at this. What the heck? Right. And so I was embarrassed, I was ashamed, all these different things. And, you know, just facing the music, right? The fact that like now I've got over almost $600,000 worth of debt that had to get written off in bankruptcy. I am now officially branded a failure. And there's the court proceedings to prove it, you know, and I thought no one will ever work with me ever again, knowing that I declared bankruptcy. And that has become that story has been changed where now people go, okay, this guy's weathered storms. If he can weather this storm, he can help me through my storm. And so it's it's become one of the greatest gifts in my life.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

You know, now that you are in the coaching space, like when did you start to realize that this was gonna, this was gonna work? Like you had this new business.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

I'll I'll tell you where it was. It was because there's a few different things that led up to this. So I'd hired Craig Ballanty to coach me. And I'd been a longtime follower of Craig's, and so I hired his coaching company to coach me. And it was about halfway through that coaching program when I started advertising, you know, what I was doing, and I started getting people inquiring about it. And then when I had Craig's head coach, Daniel Woodrum, who's become a dear friend of mine, when he offered me a coaching role inside of the company, and I was still kind of skeptical, like, oh gosh, I yeah, I mean, I'm I would love to do this. I just don't know how good I'm gonna be at this. And then when with my first client, we started seeing actual wins, and I saw my client lighting up with success and seeing what's happening in his life. That was kind of the light bulb moment for me where I realized, you know what, I actually have the ability to do this, and this is what I should be doing. I need to be doing this. And ever since then, you know, it's just been reaffirmation by helping other people and seeing their wins and just being a little part of their journey that makes me it brings me the greatest joy seeing people I work with achieve success.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

Yeah. And I know some of your people that you work with and they say wonderful things about you, which is very cool. We've had Kat on the program uh before.

SPEAKER_02 18:37

She's a rock star. Love Kat.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

So cool. So when you're moving into this, you know, do you now have a structure? Like what is your what is the inside of your business looks like?

SPEAKER_02 18:48

Yeah, so I have structure now. Uh it's not to say that there aren't hiccups that occur or or little wrenches that get thrown into things every once in a while. But I will tell you that having structure is so important because I have people I can rely on. And so I, one of my weaknesses is the details. So I have an executive assistant. You know, I tell people as a standard, if you are going to make six figures as a business owner, a non-negotiable, is that you have an executive assistant. Because that you find an executive assistant, not just who you get along with, but somebody that can help understand you and has worked with people that have ADHD. That's a huge, huge plus. So, my very first executive assistant, she had worked as a nanny for two, like for a family that had two children that were near uh neurodivergent. One had autism and one was ADHD. And we know there's there's lots of overlaps between the two of those, right? And so she said, I'm very familiar with it, you know, not intimidated whatsoever, and had an interview and it was great. So she worked with me for about a year, year and a half. And then my next assistant, same thing, had had experience with helping somebody with ADHD. And she's been with me now for about three years. And so the key here is telling the people that you're hiring that you have ADHD. Be open and honest about it and say, I struggle with details, I struggle with organization, I struggle with over-scheduling and over-committing myself. I need your help to help me create the guardrails. So some of the systems I have are that everything that I assign to any team member does not give, I don't give verbal instructions. I have to make written instructions because there's a disconnect between what's in my head and the words that come out. And when it's written down, now my team can look at what I've written and say, Galel, you gave poor instructions. You said this is what you wanted, this is what we delivered, right? And so I have become a better leader because of it, because now I say, This is what I need, here's what I need it by, and this is what success looks like right here. When we can be very clear communicators, that's we make everybody's life easier. When we don't communicate well, again, because we see the big picture, it creates frustration and all that. And so part of my systems is making sure that I'm assigning tasks and that they're written down and that I use Loom videos and I show exactly what I'm looking for when I want things. That right there would probably be the number one system, right, for delegation and making sure things get done in my business is Loom videos and uh Monday.com and assigning stuff to my team.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Yeah, shout out to Monday.com for sure. And it is it is such a big part of it, you know. So many times when you're working with somebody, it's that delegation piece, that communication piece, that leadership piece. And a lot of, you know, we talked about it before that that shame is always around the corner when you have ADHD around like, do I share just how non existent my Systems are.

SPEAKER_02 22:01

Yes. And I'm going to tell you as a coach, I'm going to say, yes, be open about it. It will make your relationships better. My wife and I, this year in August, will celebrate 22 years of marriage. And one of the reasons why we have been able to stay married all this time is because we communicate with one another. We talk about all aspects of our marriage. Every aspect of our marriage, we talk about them. We don't imply anything. We don't hope that they understand. We are very explicit with one another about things, things we want, things that we need, things we want to try and adapt. And so I would encourage everybody to be like that, have that level of communication. So my wife, instead of just being passively aggressive, you know, or angry but not saying why, she will say, when that pile by my side of my bed starts to grow, she'll say, Galel, the side of the bed is starting to pile up again with things. Can you please clear that up? Because it creates stress for me. You're right, Emily. I'm sorry. And then I take care of it. Right? Same thing with your team. I let them know. I struggle when it comes to the details. I need you to have my back and make sure you help me identify my blind spots. If we're open with the people that we work with, their job is to hopefully make our lives easier.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

Yeah. And I think that openness is so important. And I'm I love that more and more people are doing it. You know, when I first started, people would never say, like I was like, I coach business owners, and everybody would be like, cool, which ones? And I'm like, no one is saying, no one's coming forward. And now more people are sharing, and that it means that you can tell your EA, or you know, we we we help sometimes with hiring for people. And so, you know, we can be there helping with the recruitment process, and they can know that this is an ADHD focused organization and it doesn't feel weird.

SPEAKER_02 24:00

Yeah, it's it and and I think the stigma is is largely going away, especially that now we are seeing the effect that social media has on the human brain and how humans' attention span has gone down, right? And so you'll find a lot of people who say, Well, I'm a little bit ADHD, or ADHD doesn't exist because everyone has attention and focus issues, right? I think you're seeing this conversation approaching worldwide of people who know they are struggling to stay focused, they have some attention and focus issues, even if they don't fall under the DSM five, you know, diagnostic criteria for ADHD, there are issues with attention and focus, and people need to have guardrails, and that's why they're gonna need coaches to help them out with that.

SPEAKER_01 24:45

Yeah, 100%. 100%. So tell me about a specific system. We've talked a little bit about obsidian and clawed code. What is the system that you have implemented in your own operations that have given has given you the most mental bandwidth?

SPEAKER_02 25:02

This is gonna sound overly basic, just so you know. But the concept of a brain dump is probably one of the best things I've ever learned. So I learned this from my mentor, Craig Ballantine, and that is where at the end of your day, you can open up a notebook. And I prefer writing. Open up a journal, a notebook, and you just write down everything that's on your mind. And it could be things in very innocuous things too. I need to go buy double-A batteries, I need to make sure to change the cat's litter box if you've got a cat. I need to make sure to wash this, you know, this and that, prepare for this meeting. To why did my mother not, you know, come to me when my knee was scraped at nine years old? Right. You know, like they all these things that the eight, like our brains with ADHD, we will remember these random flashes of things that come to us. It's a blessing and it's a curse, where we can remember a lot of things. And there's certain things that of our life experience we don't want to remember, or things that we said that were embarrassingly cringy or embarrassing, or things that you said that nobody else remembers, but you remember clear as day. And so taking that time to absolutely unload as much as possible out of your brain, onto paper, onto a journal, that system provides for clarity. And then once you've dumped all that stuff, then it's going, okay, what are the most the one to three most important things I need to get done the next day? Identify those one to three things and make sure you have that identified. If you started every day with a clean slate where you get the junk out of your brain and you identify what one to three things have to happen the next day, and you start the next day with the discipline, willpower, intention that you need in the morning, right, to tackle those one to three things, you're absolutely unstoppable because you know exactly what you need to do. Most people start behind the eight ball because they wake up and they go, Okay, what am I gonna do today? And they're already, they're already sunk. You need to know what those things are because of the way the human brain works, where our subconscious, while we're sleeping, our subconscious is solving problems for us. So if we already identify what the plan is for the next day, and let's say it's writing a chapter of a book, right? And so I've literally gone to bed, woken up, and I sit down at the computer and I know exactly what I'm gonna write because my subconscious started writing it for me. And so that right there would be the simplest, easiest, best system that has helped me just have this clarity of thought, way less anxiety, way more focus and intention because I already know what I'm gonna work on.

SPEAKER_01 27:51

Yeah, 100%. And so let's say you've got a client and they've said, right, I'm on it, Galel. Like I've done your services, I I have this clarity, I know that I need to change. What is usually getting in the way for them from actually getting them to do it?

SPEAKER_02 28:08

It could be a variety of things. It's so first off, it's usually nothing external. It's usually generally speaking, it's internal. So it is that there's a story that they're telling themselves, right? The story is could be as innocuous as I can't stay focused in order to achieve success, or this probably won't work for me anyway. And so they have that lack of belief, and therefore, when they activate, they're just kind of barely activating, they're not really taking a big leap, or it can be stories that they have from you know, just programming that says, I'm not good enough for this, I don't deserve this. And so if somebody is having difficulty activating, like getting started, what I try to do is work to find out what is the story that they're telling themselves, because that story carries great weight.

SPEAKER_01 29:06

Yeah, I love that. I just recently had near um EL on the podcast talking about the beliefs and the idea that our beliefs have such a huge impact on us, and they they are adjustable, like they're not always fat.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

They are absolutely adjustable. The the best description I had was when I visited a pastor of mine to help me with counseling. And there was a moment in my childhood that it occurred when I was about nine to ten years old that was incredibly traumatic for me. And so, based on that situation, he walked me through an exercise where I looked at it through a different lens. And after we did that, then we revisited this. And many people who've gone through counseling have probably dealt with a very similar exercise. But what he described was we're taking the tape, right, the physical cassette tape that exists, and we're splicing out the negative parts and we're replacing it with a better example, a better interpretation of what took place. So it's no longer as negatively charged as it was before, but it's actually more neutral now because we're seeing it through a different lens, right? And it's not necessarily rewriting the story to make it a happy story, but still something negative happened, but we were seeing it through nine-year-old eyes. And so for me, when I was going through counseling at this time, I was probably about, you know, 25 years old. He said, as a 25-year-old, I want you to go in there in that situation. What would you be saying to yourself during this time? And again, this was through the nine-year-old lens, now adding a little bit of wisdom to it, I got to see it in a different perspective, in a different light. And so, so many of us, every one of us, carries things like that from our past or even things today in professional career that I have learned that if I can look at it from just a different lens, can I adjust the vision of which I'm approaching this to be able to see just a different way? How could this serve me as opposed to holding me back? And I've been able to just use that as a massive way to reframe certain things and be able to start getting past some of these stories that existed for me for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Well, we have a couple of questions that we like to ask everybody. So I'm gonna ask you what is a professional achievement that you're the most proud of?

SPEAKER_02 31:30

The professional achievement that I'm most proud of is just watching the success of my clients. Specifically, there's one client I've worked with the last four years. His name's Bob Ferguson. He's from Pennsylvania. Bob is an incredible human being. When he was described to me, they said, Galel, just know he's a little bit different than you are. So you got to know me. Like here in the US, I'm I love to go fish and I love to go hunt and all those types of typical American type things, right? Love to eat steak and all that. He is a vegan and he is an animal conservationist, they said. And I went, this is gonna be interesting. This is gonna be like oil and water. Turns out this guy is like a brother to me. We are like long-lost siblings, and we focus on all that we have in common, not the things that we have different. And we've found such great commonality. He's gotten me to fall in love with snakes and reptiles, whereas before I maybe didn't have that level of respect for them. And uh I've learned about veganism and I've learned about you know how he trains as a vegan. And so on the personal side is amazing. On the business side, take helping him take his business from 2.5 million to 5.1 million to 7.4 million, and then just this past December, he surpassed 10.1 million in revenue. Over the four years that we've worked together, it's been amazing. It's been such a joy for me to see having other clients who've doubled revenue. I have one client who last year, when she started working with me, she was around 300K in revenue. This year, she's likely to surpass a million dollars in working together for the last couple of years. That's a very like that just brings me such joy on the professional side. Just to be a 1% part of that story makes me immensely happy.

SPEAKER_01 33:13

Yeah, 100%. And what about on the other side? Do you have a professional embarrassment or failure that you've had and and how did you handle it?

SPEAKER_02 33:21

Oh, yeah. Losing everything, declaring, declaring chapter seven bankruptcy. I was embarrassed. I was, you know, written about this. I'm in the middle of writing writing my first book. And so I recently wrote the experience of leaving the attorney's office, sitting in the parking lot, and weeping next to my wife as I sat in the driver's seat. And she said, What's wrong? She says, This is all over now. And I said, No, it's not over. This is gonna follow me forever. I will forever be the guy that declared bankruptcy. I said, No one will ever want to work with me ever again. And she goes, Oh no, you're being too harsh on yourself. Like, this is just part of your story. And it was great wisdom from my wife at the time. And she always gives me great wisdom. And it became an element of my story that I proudly share now. That I had such a huge public failure. And I managed to stay faithful to my principles, stay faithful in my faith, right? My faith in God, my stay faithful to my wife, to my principles, and not not sink down to another level because of that. But instead, it was like rocket fuel for me and my business, hitting that lowest low and very embarrassing moment in my life turned out to be a huge, huge win for me long term.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

Yeah, yeah. And take me through, you know, if you had a quote that you say a lot, that, you know, kind of like you share with others uh for your life, what would that be?

SPEAKER_02 34:53

Well, this is gonna be very unconventional and not the most professional.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

We're called unconventional organizations, so you're getting yes.

SPEAKER_02 35:03

So for me, I I am a Christian, okay? So my so as part of my Christian faith, I rely on certain, you know, biblical uh scriptures. And so I will oftentimes share things with clients in a non-biblical sort of way, but sometimes I'll just say, hey, look, this story is straight from the Bible. I'm not trying to impose anything. But for me, it's the book of Proverbs, which I think is just, you know, it just carries ancient wisdom. And it was, it's basically that, you know, in all your ways, acknowledge him and he will direct your paths. And so for me, I have, you know, again, I love everybody, I respect everybody's, you know, points of view. They don't need to believe in what I believe in or whatnot. But for me, if I focus on my highest principles, which for me are following God, I believe God directs me in the right way to take care of people. So I have helped people of all different backgrounds. If I stay true to my beliefs and and what the right thing is, the right thing is gonna happen. And so for me, that is kind of been a guiding principle for me when I'm dealing with, you know, ethical type things, right? Like, oh, you know, this referral came in, but they also know this person and this, that. What would be the right thing? The right thing, stay stay true to your principles, Galel. Bring it out in the open, talk about it, right? Follow that because at the end of the day, all things that are secret became become public, right? Like, just follow your guiding principles and everything's gonna work out. And so that for me is is a big guiding principle.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

Thank you for sharing. I really appreciate that. And thank you for being here, Galel. Tell everybody where they can find you.

SPEAKER_02 36:41

Yeah, you can find me uh online at galel.com, g A L E L dot com. I send out stuff on my email list every couple of days, tips on how to manage ADHD AI stuff, marketing stuff, some of the stuff that I'm currently working on. And then you can also see me on Instagram, which is just at Galel Fahardo, my first name and last name.

SPEAKER_00 37:00

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. If you liked it, leave us a five star review. It helps other people learn more about us. And thank you so much to our wonderful team for making us sound good, look good. We couldn't do it without you.