The ADHD Skills Lab

The Best Way To Build Your Company Around Your ADHD Brain (With Chris Wang)

• Skye Waterson • Season 1 • Episode 179

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0:00 | 38:37

You spend years building workarounds for your own brain, then realize you could build your company the same way.

Chris Wang did exactly that.

As co-founder and CEO of Shimmer, an ADHD coaching platform that has delivered more than 90,000 coaching sessions, Chris was diagnosed with ADHD at 28 while building the company. Instead of treating her personal systems and her business systems as separate problems, she applied the same coaching frameworks, structure, automation, and strength-based development directly to how Shimmer operates.

In this conversation, Chris shares what that looked like in practice: what she automated, what stayed human, how she structured fundraising as an ADHD founder, and why she stopped trying to build the company differently than she was learning to manage herself.

Connect With Chris Wang

Chris is on instagram: @adhd.christal and you can learn more about Shimmer at www.shimmer.care

What We Cover

  • Why Chris applied her ADHD coaching framework to company operations
  • The automation that removed admin work for coaches
  • How she decides what should stay human and what should be automated
  • Her fundraising system for managing outreach, follow-ups, and rejection
  • Why strength-based delegation changed how her team works
  • How personal ADHD systems became Shimmer's operating model

 P.S. Losing work because the admin layer around your business can't keep up with you? Invisible Systems is a 90-day done-for-you sprint where I (Skye) extract the processes from your head, build the operating layer, and find the right person to run it. Six spots left at the founding price, book a call at https://www.unconventionalorganisation.com/

SPEAKER_00

If someone is really struggling with specific logistical things instead of like working with them on getting better at that, we'll try to ask, okay, like, is there an automation that we can build? Is there someone we can offload this to? And then let's spend most of our time talking about how you're great at podcasts. And if you're great at podcasts, how can we get you on more podcasts? So the more that we can place our team members and members and coaches in situations where they can leverage their strengths, we'll all do better as a company.

SPEAKER_02

Hello everyone, and welcome to this episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. Before we get started, we have a couple of spaces left for our Invisible Systems program. If you're a business owner who struggles with ADHD, you're making over a hundred K in a service business and you know that it's time to get your operational layer sorted. Click the link below to book a free business build-out and we will build your operational layer for you and for your ADHD brand. Today we are joined by the wonderful Chris Wang. Chris is the co-founder and CEO of Shimmer, the leading coaching platform for teens and adults with ADHD. They have supported over 90,000 coaching sessions to data. She also leads Indie by Shimmer, a free ADHD support app that launched this January and looks very cool. I was just checking it out. After being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult herself, Chris founded Shimmer to help build a more neuroinclusive world. She has been recognized as Forbes 30 under 30 honoree for her work transforming ADHD support. So Chris, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00

Yay, thank you. I was so excited.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, me too. So take me through a little bit for you. When did ADHD become something that you knew about? Because you were diagnosed as an adult.

SPEAKER_00

I was diagnosed when I was 28, so four-ish years ago. And it was not very long before that that it got onto my radar. I obviously, if you're watching this, grew up Asian. I am Asian. Most mental health topics don't really rear its head unless it's kind of really a big problem, or you grow up and become an adult and go out into the real world and then discover it for yourself, which I kind of fall into the second category. So I discovered it during I heard of ADHD during business school when I had a lot of ADHD friends. And they kind of said I had ADHD way before I'd actually questioned it. And I heard it and then I forgot about it. And only until I started my first business, and I was first time ever not being in an extremely structured environment. So it was my first time, even though I was adult already, I had really structured jobs before that, very structured corporate jobs. And so it didn't really occur to me until I lost all that structure. And not only did I have to set structure for myself, but I had to set structure processes for other people on my team as well. So it was kind of a mess when that did happen. But as things sometimes do happen this way, I started getting Instagram reels and carousels that just kept, I guess I just kept clicking like on them. And that's when I started the perfect storm of a lot of issues with work paired with me seeing more and more of those videos. That's when I started going down the rabbit hole, looking at the actual symptom list, getting the diagnosis, which once I kind of seriously started questioning it, it it was pretty quick that it actually ended up happening.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's really interesting. And so you mentioned, you know, having to work with other people. You obviously were dealing with your own ADHD management while you were building and leading Shimmer specifically, and you, you know, left your masters to do it. I left my PhD to do this business. So I I really related to that. So what were the systems that you were building to help keep the company moving as you were figuring out your own ADHD?

SPEAKER_00

I think I was really lucky in that, or I guess luck is the wrong word because I created it. But um, when I got diagnosed, and as I started going through and discovering coaching and discovering all the strategies, it was like I was getting coached on myself, but also because I was starting Shimmer at the same time, because I saw the problems with ADHD coaching, is that I was also learning those things and then applying them at the same time to my business, to my team. So it felt like, and I was learning about my ADHD and also starting to create content within our email systems and everything. So it really felt like buy one, get one free. I was going through this process myself, and I was going through this, my business was going through the process. So, for example, when I first started coaching, the first thing that really happened, which isn't really like a direct intervention, was just normalization of how I saw the world. It was the first time where I would say something to my coach, and instead of me being like, I don't know if that's weird, they'd be, they would laugh and be like, ha ha, yes, I get that. That happens to me too. And so I started kind of trying to think through for my business. So that would mean my team, the members, the coaches that were managing, like how we can recreate that feeling through content, through anything else that's in the business. So there was like that more emotional aspect of normalization, of like reducing the shame through just being seen and understood. And then I think the other piece was probably like the more tactical piece is I I mean, I mentioned that the number one challenge I was having was around structure. So that was what I was working on in coaching. And so whenever we thought about, okay, well, what does my week look like? How do I set habits that link to each other? How do I time block? How do I think about a quarterly versus a weekly? I was taking those same principles and applying them directly to my business. So, for example, I would think through, okay, like on a quarterly basis, on a monthly basis, like what meetings do we need, what metrics do we look at, what problems do we solve? And then slowly, slowly start to automate those things for both my life and for business. Cause I kind of, or for my business, I kind of thought of it. It kind of like it's interesting. Once you have a business, it kind of feels like a baby and feels like your baby. And so as you're learning these things, you're kind of like applying it to your baby as well.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I mean, I have three babies and it still feels like a baby. So I totally understand that. And yeah, I can imagine during those early days, people are like, but tell us, like, what does this customer want? And you're like, oh, I I know, I've got it. So tell me, like, how big is the infrastructure in your business today? Like, how does that work? Because you have a lot of coaches. How many other people are working behind the scenes in Shimmer?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so we're actually a really small team. It's funny when someone would message us and be like, oh my gosh, the CEO responded. I was like, Well, there's not that many of us to respond, but I'll take the compliment. There is about five or six, depending on how you count it, that are like on the operational team. And then we have a bunch of coaches, of course. We have 50-something coaches now. We're a pretty lean team. We try to, I mentioned automations a few times, but we try to run as much as possible in terms of automations to make it as efficient as possible. And then also on the coach side, every time we always ask our coaches like, if you're doing anything annoying, doesn't matter how small it is, please tell us and tell us exactly like what buttons are you clicking, what are you doing, so we can either eliminate that task completely if it's unnecessary, or figure out how to automate it, or give you some sort of tool that you can do it in bulk. And so we're constantly asking those questions for both our coaches and the internal team. So it's a small team that's running all of the the mess and the mess and beauty that it is.

SPEAKER_02

That's impressive. That's impressive. So yeah, give me an example then. Can you give me an example of something that you have removed from the systems of your business? Something that you thought was necessary in Dow doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so a lot of the things, things that we think about are like which things should be completely automated versus which things require a human touch, because that's what makes coaching so special. That's one of the many things that makes coaching so special. But like one example of where it required a human touch but was taking a lot of time was that in a session, a coach would say, Hey, um, okay, this thing for you is happening on Wednesday. Like, what how can I help keep you accountable or how can I celebrate if this happens for you? And then the coaches would go to their calendar, put a reminder, and then go back and make that text and log on on a Wednesday. And that sounds like a little bit annoying, but not too annoying. But if you have lots of clients, it is easy to forget. And then you destroy that trust when you say you're gonna do something that you don't. So we ended up building directly into the system a way that right after the session, you can set automation. So you can say, okay, like message this person on Tuesday and Thursday, and you can type in the message. So it's a message you came up with, it's not like an automated AI message. And you can even set, like, if they do respond already, if they say something beforehand, cancel it so you can like set all the rules already so that you can trust that unless a client messages you throughout the week, you should be able to do all the proactive stuff directly after the session while it's still fresh in your mind. And that's really important for our coaches because most of them have ADHD. So they are also dealing with a lot of logistical challenges and executive functioning challenges around ADHD as well. So that's one that we kind of ended up choosing a solution that was like half human, half automation. But a lot of the things where it deals with scheduling, legal, finance, like all of those things, we try to just completely automate it out so that it just will be able to detect when certain things happen and then check in with you if it's the system's not really sure. So that the coaches I the ideal situation is that they should be doing minimal to no admin work that doesn't require a human touch.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. And do you know how many coaches you have on the team at the moment?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so there's about 50, somewhere between 50 and 55.

SPEAKER_02

Wow, that's that's really impressive. It sounds like you're, you know, you're very much leveraging, and I was looking at, you know, what you have had launched in January as well. You're very much leveraging AI, but from a from a human perspective as well.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so it's something that I like our team thinks about a lot. Um, obviously everyone's like kind of talking about AI now, and there's so many ways it can go wrong, but there's also so many ways it can go right. And it's kind of like divorcing yourself from AI being just one thing to like, how can you use this as a tool to amplify things that humans are great at, and to be able to also just take away things that humans are not that great at and would never want to do, like all the setting reminders following up, like all those things humans don't really want to do. And it takes away time and energy. And by the time you get to the part where it does require human effort, you're like, oh, I've spent so much time on this already, I don't want to do this anymore. So we try to use it very, I guess like intentionally. And then there's also moments too with new members or members who are newer to their ADHD that maybe they aren't ready to talk to a human about certain things. So there is a good amount within the system that is asynchronous so that you can process some things, think about it, maybe get some feedback or summarization, helping you shorten it down a bit so that when you come to the coaching session, you are a little bit more prepared, but you are guided through that preparation process instead of just like a lot of times what happens is that members are expected to do homework or expected to do exercises beforehand. But then once they actually pick it up to do it, if if they do pick it up to do it, they aren't really guided through the process unless they're in a coaching session, which can be expensive for a lot of people to have every part of the process facilitated by a human.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. No, I love that. I I used to be an ADHD coach, and I found I remember people would come in and they'd be like 100% overwhelmed, you know, that conversation about like when people come to you, why are they coming? And it was just like they'd be like, I don't know, I have ADHD, that's it. Like, that's the whole sentence, basically.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, no, definitely. I think the really cool thing about AD, like our business, ADHD coaching, your business is like ADHDers are they're ADHDers, but they're all so different. I mean, all humans are, but ADs, I feel like, especially. And so not only are they so different, but they're so different along where they are on their journey. And so I think one thing that AI can do really well is to help meet right away, meet someone where they're at, and then be able to help guide them a little bit through the process so that when you actually do arrive, you're prepared. You don't need to waste time in the session with like some of the more logistical things or questions that could be answered, not by a coach, so that the coach can directly jump into things around relationship building, around maybe doing your first like face-to-face exercise because they're prepared and they're ready to go.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, no, I love that. I love that. So take me through then the fundraising side of it. So we've had a few people on, we've had people on to about helping with fundraising. We had Sharon Pope on, and she talked a little bit about her fundraising. It's a scary idea. And so I'm always curious for people who have gone through it to sort of demystify it. What are the things you wish people knew about the practical side of fundraising?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think there's so many ways to fund your business. And so just to kind of contextualize, we are venture-backed and we went through YC and then we mostly raised money after YC. So it's a very different, I would say, like, if we had just gone off the out the gate and directly fundraised, it probably would have looked really different. When you go through an accelerator, they generally do a lot of work in helping you prepare. And also there's like a timeline and a cohort that you're with. So when they say, okay, now you're fundraising now, everyone around you is fundraising. So you have different support by being in that process. I always recommend if you are going the VC backed route to join accelerators. It doesn't have to be YC, just any accelerator, especially if you have ADHD, because it builds in that accountability and helps you with the process of it all. But given our context, we took a very structured like sprint process for fundraising. So we basically, I was taking seven to eight fundraising calls per day for weeks on end. So for my type of ADHD, it actually was a really good fit because I knew it was a process that was like time-bound and I was hyper-focused on it. And they kind of tell you to give your co-founder and the rest of your team like the rest of your task because it's me a full-time job. So the way that we did it, I was hyper-focused on it, had really quick timelines, quick decisions. And one of my AHD-related strengths is around like thinking on your feet, talking to people in person, kind of the charisma part of part, the part of things. And so for me, it was a good fit. The part that wasn't really a good fit that was difficult was definitely around the logistics. It's a lot of conversations to manage in a very short amount of time, a lot of follow-ups, a lot of documents in all different places, and you should remember who you've told what to. So for me, I think the two like tactical, most helpful things for me were definitely I use this app called Superhuman for my emails, and you can save snippets and it automatically reminds you to follow up. You can send an email back to yourself in like you can say two days for it to return if this person doesn't respond. So I actually think that a lot of the principles that we've built into the coaching platform has been borrowed from my time with Superhuman because I was like, this is so great. So that was definitely one. And then the other one that was really helpful was Notion. I know everyone uses Notion differently, but the most helpful thing for me was like having the database of all the investors that we're reaching out to, what the status of was it. And then for me personally, the most helpful that I do, not just for investors, but I do for all conversations, is I have a doc that is in the database with their name on it, which tells me who introduced me to them. And then it has a toggle for every single conversation we've ever had. So people always get impressed because I'll talk to someone like two years after the last time I talked, they'll be like, Oh, last time we talked, you mentioned you went to Italy for a friend's wedding. How did that go? They're just like, What? How did you remember that? I was like, Yeah, I'm good at notion. And I started doing that because I have zero memory. My brain doesn't remember anything. But now that since that process is built on itself, if I ever need to remember a conversation or what I said to someone at a certain date, I will directly just go to their doc and go to the toggle of like when that conversation was. So I guess like, yeah, the hard part was logistics. And then the easy part for me was the people and like the compression of timelines so that there was a lot of urgency.

SPEAKER_02

No, that's a really, really good shout. I use Notion as well. I use the AI recording function that recently came out. I don't know if you use it and it transcribes it. It's it's it's great. As long as you press record, that's the key.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, no, it's crazy that we lived pre-recording, but I have to be really careful because sometimes I still take notes when I record because I for a while I thought, okay, if I just record this, I don't need to take notes. But it didn't really work for me because one, I would never re-watch a recording unless I really need to, like we think we're going to, but then we don't. And then the key points that it pulls out is often different than what resonated with me or what I want to remember, especially if it's about like a human and a thing I want to remember about the human. So I still now I sometimes record, but I always still take notes, and I still find my notes better than the recording, but I might just be resistant to change, maybe. I do both.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, I'm taking notes right now. I have a remarkable and I use that a lot for the notes. It's been really, really helpful. I got it since like my academic days.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, nice. I I don't think I've ever heard of that. That's it's like the device is called a remarkable.

SPEAKER_02

It's called a remarkable, it's a digital notebook. Digital notebook, so you can just write. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I have my notion just like on the I always have my notion like on the right half of the screen, and then I have like the video on the left half of the screen.

SPEAKER_02

Amazing. I love that we're getting into the deep tactical systems. This is this is exactly what people want to hear. Awesome. So you know, you had that. I want to know now, like let's talk about delegation. So we'll start with your co-founder. The thing that Sharon mentioned was having a co-founder is a really big part of venture funding, at least from the advice that you get at Y Combinator. She sort of said, you know, it almost counts against you kind of not to have a co-founder. Did you already have a co-founder coming in? Did you decide to work with somebody? How did you go through that process?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I am such a big proponent of having a co-founder. I think it really depends on the type of business you have and who you are and what your strengths are. But for me specifically, I'm not technical and I can't. Well, now with vibe coding, I probably maybe I could do some version. But when we started, like I can't build technology. So having a co-founder was a non-negotiable for me. I knew that like I really care about accessibility and wider impact. So I knew that tech needed to be a part of whatever solution that we created. So I did have a co-founder already. He is technical and we are very vision and values aligned, but we're very skills complementary. And it's a bit hindsight 2020 because I didn't think about all of this when we started working together. I just knew I needed someone technical and we had really similar values and we wanted to build something similar. But in hindsight, now I've kind of determined that those things are important to me around the skills, the vision, what was my third one, and values.

SPEAKER_02

So did you, you know, how did was it somebody you already knew? Did you ask people, ask around? Like how did you find this co-founder?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so it was a different time then. It was right when the pandemic was kind of teetering off, but people were still all online. So there was a lot more happening in terms of online networking, I would say. So I actually met my first co-founder in a it was literally just an open mental health slack startup group. So it was for anyone who's interested in mental health startups. So there are founders, there are operators, they're just people who are interested, kind of interested like the business side of mental health and around scalability relating to mental health. And that's how I met my first co-founder. And then that co-founder went to school with my current co-founder. And so the three of us were working together for a bit, and then now it's just the two of us. So it was a little bit of like, it's always like this is a bit of timing, a bit of luck, a bit of putting yourself out there. But I would say that I would say, I guess, two things. Like one, it's about like increasing your surface area, not just about finding a co-founder, but I think everything in life now. If you tell more people that you're doing it, like if you post in LinkedIn, hey, I'm really interested in these topics, I'm really interested in solving these problems, people start talking to you. That's how we found our clinical lead and our science lead as well. It's just from me posting and asking for conversations. And eventually you talk to enough people and someone is interested and then it aligns. But if you're on more of a time crunch, I know YC also does founder matching. Sharon probably cut knows more about that, but there's a lot of different places where the intention is to find a co-founder. So that's also a process that you can go through if you want to. But it also depends on what sort of business that you want to create. I think a lot of businesses don't require two co-founders. So I would say I would consider the business, the type of business you're creating and what it requires, and then also like the type of person that you are. Like I'm a very collaborative partnerships person. I also really need accountability, external accountability to get things done. So for me, a co-founder makes sense, even if I didn't have a type of business that necessarily required it. But I do know a lot of people who are like for them, an equal co founder doesn't make sense because they're very, I don't know, either like strong vision, likes to do it their way, which is nothing right or wrong about that, or they have a type of business that doesn't really require a co founder. And in the beginning, maybe it financially doesn't make sense to be paying two people. So there's a lot of considerations on both the business and like the you side of things to consider.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. And I appreciate you sharing that because I think so often these things feel like magic. Everyone's like, oh, and I have a co-founder. And I and everyone's like, How? How did you do this?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I do think that just expanding surface era is good for anything in business. Ever since we I started making content, which was end of 2024, just the opportunities are just so much more. Like people just kind of know what you're up to. And then when they think of something, they will automatically think of you. So it's like it's not like instantly you get some sort of opportunity, but it's just that now people kind of have you in their mind so that when something comes up that's a good fit.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, no, it's it's so cool. And and you're right. And I always find it really surprising because obviously I'm looking for people who are CEOs to come on my podcast. And I'm always really surprised by how many people I'll be able to find their business, but I will not be able to find them. Like they are not on Instagram, they're not on socials, I don't even know, like it's hard to find the name of the founder. They might have a LinkedIn, but they're never gonna like connect with you. So it's really interesting to me how many CEOs aren't doing that surface area conversation.

SPEAKER_00

It's really tough because I also didn't do it for a really long time. Like I was only posting on Shimmer.care on Instagram for years. And I only started posting on ADHD Crystal because someone told me that would grow faster. I didn't post it because I was trying to do anything for myself, but I should have, I should have thought of that. But I think that I think founder brand is it's not a new thing, but I think it's a more acceptable thing. I think that there's this notion of like you should put your head down and you should build, and anything else that doesn't immediately bring you a result is not a good use of your time. And I think a lot of startup founders still feel that way. And especially if your Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever you do for your founder brand isn't taking off, it does feel like it's directly drawing from resources and time that you have to deal with things that maybe feel immediately important.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of people do feel like that. And and I also wanted to talk to you about this in general, but it's relevant here is that idea of rejection because you're doing funding, you're doing outreach, you're doing a lot of things that come with, you know, potential for rejection. And then there's the ADHD side of that with that rejection sensitivity. How have you navigated that space?

SPEAKER_00

I think a lot of it honestly is just repetition. It's like not a very satisfying answer. But the more you do it, and when you hear the 100th person saying something mean to you, it just doesn't hit the same as the first person because they kind of all the people start to blend together and you're like, okay, it's another one about this. And now it's like it only really hits me if it's a new type. Like I haven't heard this comment before. But once you have volume, it's like you've probably heard all the comments before, and you kind of realize that a lot of the comments have more to do with them than it has to do with you. And those are the type of people who are going and DMing everyone and telling them mean things, and they spend their whole day doing that, and that helps give you a little bit of sympathy or empathy and also removing yourself from the equation of like if it wasn't me, it's someone else. And so now I often I used to like respond to all of them. I don't know why, but I did. And now I just delete them and then I'll just block them, and then that's that's it, they're gone. I don't know why, I just felt the need to justify myself before. And so I think repetition is big. And then I think the other thing is it's really difficult, but to separate yourself from your company as well. I think with investors, you definitely need to do that. You need to understand that they are not investing in your business. One, it's your business, and two, like not you. And two, it's there's so many factors. Like most VC-backed VCs, they invest in like two or three companies per year. Like so many things need to align. Their thesis needs to align, the timing needs to align. Maybe they just invested in something kind of similar, maybe they were burned by something kind of similar. There's just infinite possibilities, and they never tell you the real answer. So you don't really know. So it's not helpful for you to think that it's something that is about you that you can't change, because then the next conversation you walk into, you're gonna walk into it with less confidence. So I think also frame maybe the third thing is also framing it as like what is helpful, like what is helpful to my business? How can I show up in my next meeting in the most helpful way? And what does that mean? What does that imply to how I need to deal with that last situation? Because at the end of the day, like once for all of us entrepreneurs, it's like our company is our baby and we'll do anything to kind of put the baby forward. So I think a little bit mix of all of it, but I if I were to honestly answer it, I do think repetition is like the biggest thing. Like if you're considering making content, just put it out there. The first one's gonna suck, you're gonna hate it, but that's okay. The 100th one, you either won't hate it or you just won't care that you hate it anymore.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I agree. I've been going for five years now, and occasionally you accidentally scroll too far down Instagram and you're just like, ooh, okay. But it is, it's this idea. I love the repetition. It feels to me like going to the gym for rejection. You're just you're just oh you're like, this is heavy, but it's gonna feel lighter, and then I'm gonna lift even heavier weights. So let's go. Can you tell me a little bit then about how your personal experience as gym is that you said self-described number one user has changed the way that you approach you know, leadership, team communication? How has it affected you, not just as a person with ADHD, but as a business owner with ADHD?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, uh infinite. I think that one thing, so I think okay, let me cover like strategic and tactical. So on the strategic side of things, so we've spent a lot of time designing out our entire methodology, like what scientific foundation it's based on, like what various modalities we're pulling from in both Indy and Shimmer. And so, for example, like on a very high level, in all of these, there's some version of a North Star, and there's some version of like the building blocks it takes to get there, and then there's some version of like figuring out what your strengths and unique assets and values are to shape how you get there. And that's essentially like the process that in various modes of coaching that you go through, and you kind of evolve as a human, you evolve in your goals, and you evolve in how you do things as you move along that journey. And so I apply that basically directly to Shimmer as a company as well. Like when we have conversations, it's like, okay, like what's our North Star here? Okay, how do we build, how do we break down these building blocks? Like, what are our competencies? What do we stand for? And like all of this is basically the exact same thing that we do as a process in coaching for an individual. So for me, it's very, very similar. It's just like a larger version with more people. So you need to build slightly larger processes around like, okay, it's not one person's strengths, but like what do we collectively believe our strengths, what do we collectively believe are our values? So we'll do a lot of exercises and workshops, like when we do retreats, we'll do exercises around this to kind of find what our collective beliefs are. And so some of it comes like top down from like our mission, and then most of it comes more bottoms up from who all of us are. And as team members change, as like our understanding of the world changes, those things evolve a little bit as well. So I would say on a really high level, it's basically like taking that the same coaching frameworks that we have and then like applying it to the company as if it's being coached by an entity. And then on the tactical side, I think as I went through coaching, like being user number one, I've also evolved what I even define coaching as. Because when I first started, I was just a user of coaching, and then I got credentialed as a coach under ICF, and then now I'm almost on my courses for the MBC HWC. So it's it's always it's different experiencing it and then then knowing like what the background of it is and and why coaches are asking certain things or why they're reflecting things in a certain way. And so now having like the full understanding, I think that tactically we also will do that for everyone involved. So like our coaches, our members, so like making things really easy and for our partners and our creators and reducing the executive functioning required, helping them link things if they're if our member is setting something up, we'll say, okay, well, like what can you link this to that you already do on a Monday? And so bringing in all these very tactical things to every single interaction we have. And then the one that I think the last one that I really want to emphasize that I I love talking about is just like strength-based development. So our model for coaching is based on strength-based, and even before coming into being an entrepreneur, I always believe in strength-based development because of the last job I had. And so we've kept building on that kind of ethos. And so, within our team, as I run the company and as we develop people in our team, it's also we take a very strength-based approach. So if someone is like really struggling with specific logistical things, instead of like working with them on getting better at that, we'll try to ask, okay, like, is there an automation that we can build? Is there somewhere we can offload this to? And then let's spend most of our time talking about, I don't know, how you're great at podcasts. And if you're great at podcasts, how can we get you on more podcasts? And because at the end of the day, especially now with AI just automating a lot of the bottom level stuff, like we're all gonna be known for the things that we're good at. And so the more that we can place our team members and members and coaches in situations where they can leverage their strengths, we'll all do better as a company, but also they will have more confidence, they'll be able to be in like their zone of genius at all times or as many, as much of the time as possible. And so we try to translate like all of these principles into all the different various people and communities that we work with because our company, like we do coaching, but we also within our coaching, you have access to expert webinars and creator webinars. And so we work with ADHD creators and experts a lot. And in doing that with such a small team, like we need to be very efficient and very effective about the way that we do that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, no, I love that. I love that. So fascinating. Well, Chris, I just have three questions I like to ask everyone. So we'll go through them with you as well, which is what is a professional achievement that you're the most proud of?

SPEAKER_00

This one is recent, and I don't think it's recency bias, but I I do have bad memory. But a couple of weeks ago, I went back to keynote at my undergrad, which to me was so crazy. Like I've spoken at, I don't know, like more famous schools in the US because I'm I'm Canadian, but somehow like going back to my undergrad, and at the time when I was in undergrad, obviously I was undiagnosed. I was a little bit of a delinquent and I was like constantly getting in trouble. So being able to go back and be unmasked and talk about my journey and also see like all the little versions of what I was 10 years ago, that was really, really cool because one, I got to reflect on my entire journey. So preparing the keynote, I was like, I don't know what to talk about. And so I was like looking back at old photos and old journal entries, and that was really cool. But then also being able to just stand in a situation where I was in such a different space and to be able to reflect back to them, like all the progress that is possible, and being able to tell that through not only my own story, but I was kind of like weaving in like stories of our members, stories of our coaches, stories of our team members, just felt really cool that they also created that space, the keynote to like to the ADHD community, which was really cool as well.

SPEAKER_02

That's amazing, that's awesome. And on the other side of it, do you have a professional embarrassment or failure that you've had and how did you handle it?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, this one was also a hard one to think about. I literally was asking my co-founder and my girlfriend. I was like, I can't, I can't think of it. I feel like every day I just have a lot of failures, and you just choose one. So I think similar to the our earlier conversation about repetition, I do feel like failure as a concept. I've probably like a mix of reframe and numb, like both things. I definitely view like we we always use the word experiment and hypothesis, like within our company. It's like you have an experiment or you have a hypothesis, so that when something goes wrong, it's like my hypothesis was wrong. It wasn't like I am a failure, you know, it's like my hypothesis was wrong. I did the work and I proved it wrong. So it still kind of feels like a win in terms of insight and process. So we have done a lot of work to reframe it because I think that if you're scared of failure, then you won't take the right moves to be able to succeed. So that like not to not answer your question, but that is probably that is probably how I view failure. But when there are, there are a lot of like little tiny things that always happen. Like, I don't know, I get up on a presentation and like I I don't know, I didn't know what slide was coming next, or like we make a lot of mistakes in our emails, which is can be very annoying to other people who have ADHD, like time zone conversions and things like that.

SPEAKER_02

And I think the way Yeah, I don't touch them anymore.

SPEAKER_00

I'm like Yeah, yeah, we we were just dealing with one this morning too. We sent it out to like hundreds of thousands of people and they're like sending us screenshots. This one says 4 p.m. This one says 3 p.m. mountain time, Pacific time. We're like, oh, I'm so sorry. So I think the way that we've dealt with a lot of this is like just making jokes out of it. We generally, when we make a mistake, we'll lead with like, oh, we've sent the wrong thing, and people will actually deal really well with it. And they'll be like, Don't worry, it happens, you're good. And people are really kind about it.

SPEAKER_02

And then, you know, if you had a quote for your life, for your business, something you'd like to share with other people or say to yourself, what would that quote be?

SPEAKER_00

So you ask the right person because I am a huge nerd about quotes. I when I was younger in high school, uh, no, it wasn't even high school, it was elementary school. I used to go to quotes.com and I would scroll on quotes.com. And this is before there was even infinite scroll. So I would click like page two, page three, page four until like four in the morning, and I would just read quotes and cry. My quotes that have stayed through time are really, really cliche, but I love them. I think the first one is there's two of them. The first one is you don't stop playing because you got old, you got old because you stopped playing. And I truly, truly believe that. I think play is so important, having fun is so important, which is kind of a perfect dovetail into my second one, which is the most cliche one is in the world, but I still love it, is that life is a journey, not a destination. And we even have that in our shimmer values. One of them is called Joy in the Journey. And I just believe so strongly in that we like we can't confirm what is going to happen. We might fail, we might succeed, we don't even know if we'll have tomorrow. Right now, we're probably in a time of history where we like really don't know what's gonna happen. So the only thing you could really know for sure is that you're showing up the way that you want to show up today, and that you're in alignment with your values, you're working towards things that are important to you, whether or not you get there, and that you're just doing good by yourself and like the people around you, and everything else is kind of moot because we don't really know that we're gonna get there, anyways.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, no, I love this. And obviously, I am also a huge quotes nerd. That is why I'm from everybody that comes on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, sorry to give you two that you definitely already know.

SPEAKER_02

I love it. My one is uh we rise by lifting others, and I feel like it's a very similar energy.

SPEAKER_00

I love that.

SPEAKER_02

That's so good. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Chris, for coming on the podcast. Tell everybody, if they don't already know, how they can find you and how they can find Shimmer.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. Instagram is at adh.crystal and at shimmer.care. And coincidentally, our our website's also shimmer.care, which people get confused by because nobody knows that you can do a dot care, but apparently you can.

SPEAKER_01

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.