The ADHD Creative Club

This week's guest is David Middleton, game designer and founder of Bewilder box Escape Rooms. David has created over 40 immersive experiences and worked with some massive names including Horrible Histories, Peaky Blinders, Paddington, and Black Sabbath. He's also got ADHD, and it turns out building escape rooms might just be the perfect job for a brain that runs on dopamine. The Dream Job...

From makeup artist to award-winning cake designer to intuitive abstract artist and burnout coach, Hali Jafari has pivoted more times than most people have had hot dinners. But here's the thing: every single pivot was a feature, not a bug. In this episode, Hali talks about why ADHD's so-called "shiny object syndrome" can actually be your greatest creative superpower, why the antidote to burnout isn...

Ever felt like a Scalextric car being held down on the track—wheels spinning, motor screaming, and smelling like burning rubber, but you’re not actually moving?  Katherine, founder of Lightbulb ADHD Coaching, lived that cycle through a dozen "failed" careers before realising she wasn't broken; she was just using a neurotypical operating manual. Katherine now holds exceptional credent...

For Maddy Alexander-Grout, the realisation that she wasn't a "broken horse" but a "beautiful rainbow-colored zebra" didn't come until her ADHD diagnosis at 37. Before that, life was a chaotic cycle of self-medicating with alcohol and chasing dopamine hits through a shopping addiction that racked up £45,000 in debt. Now, she’s flipping the script to show neurodivergent e...

For many ADHD creatives, the "business" side of things feels like a separate, hostile language. Celie Nigoumi describes the brutal shift from being a "talented amateur" to a "struggling pro" who was once so overwhelmed by corporate meetings she’d completely zone out, feeling like an "idiot". She eventually realised that building a successful business isn&#39...

Running a business as an ADHDer is like putting your face right next to a fire—there is nowhere to hide from the heat of feedback. Maddy Shine, SEO and website strategy expert, knows this "burn" all too well; from the sting of a short email to the internal spiral when a client cancels a membership. In this episode, we dive into how Maddy stopped letting Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (R...

We’ve all been there: the "bull in a china shop" energy that feels like it’s either going to build a kingdom or burn the room down. In this episode, Dave sits down with filmmaker Ben Ogunbiyi, who went from "flushing" his potential through self-medication to directing socially vital films like Neon . Ben opens up about the raw shift from masking his neurodivergence to using it...

Visit https://theadhdcreative.club/ for tips, resources, and to join the community. From Alien to Artist: how late ADHD diagnosis changed everything  In this deeply moving episode of the ADHD Creative Club, Dave welcomes tattoo artist and fine artist Katriona Macintosh, who shares her extraordinary journey from being the "gifted child" who painted herself as an alien at age 9, to receivi...

This week on the ADHD Creative Club, I sat down with Wesley Verhoeve: a photographer, director, and curator whose work you've probably seen in places like the New York Times, Airbnb, and Discovery Channel. Wesley just got diagnosed with ADHD later in life. He talks about that weird, emotional moment when he realised, "Oh... so this is what it's like to not feel anxious all the time.&q...

In this episode of the ADHD Creative Club, Dave sits down with sports presenter and award-winning podcaster Dom Newton, who received his ADHD diagnosis in November 2023. Dom shares his raw and honest journey from being a "working-class lad from Bradford" to building a successful career in sports broadcasting, all powered by what he calls the "ADHD superpower." In this episode,...