A few days ago, my wife volunteered me to do some graphic design work for a group we belong to. She told them I was “an incredible designer.” Which was genuinely sweet. And also immediately created a problem.
It should have been a one-hour job. I spent six hours on it. I obsessed over font choices. I rebuilt the layout four times. I went down the exact trap I walk my clients through on a weekly basis — making a task exponentially more complicated than it needs to be because I felt I had to live up to a standard that, if I’m being honest, existed almost entirely in my own head.
The group didn’t need perfection. They needed a design. My ego was measuring me with a yardstick when the reality only called for a ruler.
And here’s the part I want to be clear about before we go any further: I’m the coach. I know better. I teach this. And I still fell straight into the trap — because without someone there to call out the story I was telling myself, the pattern ran unchecked.
That’s the thing about wrong standards. They don’t announce themselves. They just quietly become the air you breathe.
As Einstein (supposedly) said: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
If you are a COO or Operations Leader with ADHD, there is a reasonable chance you have spent the better part of your career trying to win a tree-climbing contest. Not because you’re broken. Not because you’re undisciplined. But the standard you’ve been measured by was never built for how your brain actually works.
You aren’t failing. You’re being measured by the wrong standard.
Where It Started: The 20,000 “No” Factor
If you have ADHD, you heard the word “no” far more often than your peers growing up.
Research suggests that by age 12, children with ADHD receive approximately 20,000 more negative comments than neurotypical children. Twenty thousand. “Sit still.” “Pay attention.” “That’s not how we solve this problem.” “You’re not trying hard enough.”
That volume of correction doesn’t just sting. It teaches something. Something dangerous: your natural way of functioning is a problem to be fixed.
So we learned to mask. We learned to mimic the behaviors that earned praise. We learned to look like we knew how to climb the tree, even as our nervous system was built for the water.
I struggled with math growing up — algebra especially. The standard approach made no sense to my brain. Memorize the formula, follow the steps, and show your work exactly this way. I felt genuinely stupid. Like everyone else, I had been handed an instruction manual, and I’d been given a book written in a language I’d never seen. My grades confirmed it. I internalized the verdict.
Then I had a geometry teacher, Mr. Bosler, who taught differently. He connected the concepts to things I could see and touch — shapes, patterns, and visual relationships in the real world rather than on an abstract chalkboard. And something shifted. The math started to click.
Then, the following year, my physics teacher, Mr. Dean, showed me how algebra applied to actual problems — friction, velocity, forces I could hold in my mind because they were grounded in something real.
I still don’t particularly enjoy math. But those two teachers changed something fundamental for me. They didn’t fix my brain. They changed the standard they were using to measure me. And the moment they did, I stopped being a failing student and started being an applied learner who’d simply been given the wrong tests.
The problem was never that I couldn’t learn. The problem was that I was being evaluated by a system designed for a different kind of mind.
And for years before those two teachers, I believed the problem was me.
Consider This Post: The masking that starts in childhood doesn’t stay there — it follows you into the C-suite and compounds under pressure. ADHD Executive Coaching: A Playbook for the Modern Operator explores what it actually looks like to lead from your strengths rather than compensate for your wiring.
Where It Shows Up Now: The Productivity Shame Spiral
You carried that measurement system into your career. And now, decades later, you’re still grading yourself by standards that were never designed for how you actually operate.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most productivity advice was built by and for neurotypical brains.
“Just use a planner.”
“Block your calendar in two-hour chunks.”
“Do the hardest thing first.”
“Build a morning routine and stick to it.”
For a neurotypical brain, these strategies work reliably. For an ADHD brain, they’re often a slow-motion setup for failure, and the shame spiral that follows.
You try the system. It doesn’t work. You assume you’re not disciplined enough. So you try harder, white-knuckling your way through the structure. When it still doesn’t work, you internalize the conclusion: I’m the problem.
But a fish isn’t undisciplined because it can’t breathe air. The fish is just in the wrong environment, being graded on the wrong skill.
Real Talk: Traditional productivity advice is frequently operational sabotage for an ADHD leader. It puts you in the Passenger seat of a system designed for someone else’s brain — and then tells you the problem is your driving.
The graphic design project I opened with is a small, contained version of this pattern. Six hours on a one-hour task, not because I lack skill, but because I was measuring myself against a standard of “incredible designer” that the situation never actually required. I had no one in the room to ask, “What does good enough actually look like here?” So my brain filled in the blank with the most demanding answer it could find.
That is the wrong standard operating in real time. And it cost me an afternoon.
Consider This Post: If this productivity shame spiral is showing up in how you manage your calendar and your energy, Energy Management for ADHD Leaders: Are You the Captain or the Passenger? reframes the entire conversation around working with your brain rather than against it.
The Leadership Trap: Grading Your Team by the Wrong Rubric
Here’s where it gets more expensive than a lost afternoon.
As an Operations Leader, the wrong standard doesn’t just cost you. It costs the people you lead.
You have a rubric in your head for what good performance looks like. And if you’ve never examined it, there’s a strong chance you’re applying it universally — to people with different wiring, different strengths, and different optimal conditions for doing their best work.
Gino Wickman’s Traction introduces the concept of “Right People, Right Seats.” The idea is straightforward: organizational health depends on having people who share your core values in roles that align with their natural strengths. When someone is in the wrong seat, no amount of additional accountability or training will make them successful. You’re asking the fish to climb, and wondering why it keeps slipping.
I’ve made this mistake. I’ve assigned tasks I thought were straightforward to people who had no framework for them — and rather than asking for help, they pushed through silently, producing work that cost us more time to fix than it would have taken to do correctly in the first place. The fault wasn’t theirs. I’d measured them against a standard that assumed a skill set they didn’t have, and I hadn’t created the safety for them to say so.
I’ve also made the subtler version of this mistake: assigning what I considered a “fun afternoon task” to someone who was already running on empty, assuming their energy followed my rhythm. It didn’t. What charged me up at 3 PM was genuinely crippling for them. The task suffered. They felt set up to fail. And I hadn’t asked a single question before making the assignment.
The fix isn’t more training. There isn’t any more oversight. It’s asking the question that Anchored Leaders ask before they assign, not after things go sideways: “Is this person in the right seat for this work, and is this the right moment to ask it of them?”
Consider This Post: If you’re finding that your team’s output doesn’t match their effort, The “Who Not How” Framework for ADHD Delegation gives you a practical lens for identifying the right person before you assign the work, not after the deadline has passed.
The Expectations Trap: Unclear Standards Are Not Kind
This pattern doesn’t stay at work. It follows you home.
In your marriage, your friendships, your parenting — anywhere expectations exist but have never been said out loud — the wrong standard operates quietly in the background, accumulating misses that feel like failures.
My wife thought she was giving me a compliment. I heard it as a performance requirement. Neither of us knew the gap existed until I’d spent six hours on a one-hour job. We were measuring success by completely different rulers, and neither of us had said it out loud.
That dynamic — unspoken expectations creating invisible standards — is one of the most common sources of chronic, low-grade friction I see in the leaders I work with. At work, it shows up as a COO who’s been quietly failing to meet a CEO’s expectations for months, with neither party having clearly defined what success actually looks like. In relationships, it shows up as a partner who feels perpetually let down by someone who’s genuinely trying and genuinely confused about why it’s never enough.
Unclear expectations aren’t kind. They’re a trap. You cannot succeed at meeting a standard you don’t know exists. And when you inevitably fall short, the other person feels let down while you feel like you failed — again — without understanding why.
The most anchored thing you can do in any relationship, professional or personal, is ask the question that cuts through all of it: “What does success actually look like here?”
Not what does it look like to you. What does it look like here, in this context, for this person, on this specific project or expectation?
That question alone would have saved me four hours and a rebuilt layout.
Consider This Post: If the gap between your CEO’s expectations and your operational reality is a recurring source of friction, The Visionary and Integrator: 3 Conversations to Define Your Partnership gives you the framework for making those expectations explicit before they become a source of ongoing misalignment.
The Audit: Where Are You Being Measured by the Wrong Standard?
If you’re recognizing yourself in any of this, here’s what I want you to do before you close this tab.
Pull out a notebook or open a blank document, and answer these four questions honestly. Not for me. For you.
Question 1: Where am I grading myself by a neurotypical standard?
What productivity system are you currently forcing yourself into that doesn’t fit how your brain works? What “should” you be carrying that was built for someone else’s operating system?
Question 2: Where am I in the wrong seat?
Is there a role, responsibility, or project you’re struggling with — not because you’re incapable, but because it’s fundamentally misaligned with how you operate? Are you a fish being evaluated on tree-climbing?
Question 3: What does success actually look like?
On your current most important project — who decided what “done” looks like? What does “good enough” look like? Did you agree to that standard explicitly, or are you operating on an assumption?
Question 4: Where am I applying the wrong standard to others?
If you manage people, are you grading everyone by the same rubric regardless of how they’re wired? Is someone “underperforming,” or are they simply in the wrong seat?
Consider This Assessment: If the audit surfaces more gaps than you can prioritize, the COO Stability Compass is a free 10-minute assessment that helps you identify where the misalignment is costing you the most right now, and where to start.
The Two-Notebook Method: When the Standard Has Become a Cage
Sometimes the audit reveals something harder than a productivity tweak.
Sometimes it reveals that the environment itself is the wrong standard — that no amount of reframing or energy mapping or expectation-setting will fix the fundamental mismatch between how you operate and what this role is asking of you.
When I was wrestling with whether to stay in a role that no longer fit, I used a practice that I now share with clients regularly.
I kept a notebook. From the front, written the standard way, I recorded what was working: what I was learning, what I wanted to keep doing, where I felt like myself.
Then I flipped the notebook over and started from the back. I recorded what was draining me: what I would do differently, what felt like swimming upstream every single day.
When the back pages started to outnumber the front pages, the signal was clear. The standard had become a cage. It was time to find a different ship.
A client I worked with recently faced a version of this decision. Rather than the notebook, I asked her two direct questions:
“What would it take for you to stay?”
“What would it take for you to leave?”
Her answers made the path clear. For her, in that moment, her CEO heard her and valued her enough to make meaningful changes — but it took her getting honest about what she actually needed before she could ask for it. The clarity came first. The conversation came second.
I want to be careful here: I’m not telling you to quit your job. I’m not telling you to walk away from anything. But I am telling you this — if you are constantly exhausted by a standard you can never quite meet, it is worth asking honestly whether the standard is the problem, not you.
Consider This Post: If you’re at the point of questioning whether your current role is the right ship entirely, The Paradox of the Anchored Operator explores how to hold steady in that uncertainty without either abandoning ship prematurely or staying so long the ship sinks.
The Part I Want to Be Honest About
I want to come back to how this article started.
When I finally delivered that graphic design project, I was mostly happy with what I submitted. I had already invested six hours — I wasn’t going to throw all of it away. But I did make cuts. I let some things go that my ego wanted to keep. I submitted something that was genuinely good, not the version of “perfect” I’d been chasing.
The group was happy, and I received several kind comments from the members. But what I walked away with wasn’t pride in the design. It was a reminder.
Even knowing everything I know about the Pink Trap, about wrong standards, about the story we tell ourselves under pressure — I fell into it anyway. Because I didn’t have anyone in the room to call it out. The standard crept in quietly, dressed up as professionalism, and I followed it for six hours before I caught it.
I say this because I think there’s a version of coaching that presents the coach as someone who has it all figured out. Someone who no longer stumbles. Someone who teaches these frameworks from a safe distance because they’ve transcended the problems their clients face.
That’s not me. And frankly, I’d be suspicious of anyone who claimed it was them.
The trap doesn’t stop being a trap just because you’ve named it. What changes is how quickly you catch it — and whether you have the right people around you to call it out when you don’t.
That’s what accountability is actually for. Not to judge your performance, but to hold the standard you actually want to be measured by, instead of the one your ego quietly substitutes when no one’s looking.
Conclusion: Stop Climbing. Start Swimming.
You are not broken. The standard is. Or the expectations are.
The fish isn’t stupid because it can’t climb the tree. It’s struggling because someone keeps putting it at the base of the trunk and calling it underperformance.
Your job, as an Anchored Leader, is to do three things consistently: know the standard you’re actually being measured by, make sure it’s the right one for how you operate, and ask the same question of the people you lead.
What does success actually look like here?
Not the inherited standard. Not the neurotypical default. Not the yardstick your ego reaches for when no one’s watching.
The right one. For you. For your team. For this specific moment.
That question, asked honestly and often, is one of the most powerful leadership moves you can make.
Consider This Download: If you’re ready to audit where the misalignment is happening and build a clearer picture of your actual strengths and pressure points, the Operational Leadership Mindset Audit is a two-minute diagnostic that tells you whether you’re operating as the architect of your business or the bottleneck inside it.
Frequently Asked Questions: ADHD Leadership and the Wrong Standard
You Don’t Have to Keep Climbing
If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself — in the graphic design trap, in the algebra classroom, in the performance review that never quite captured what you actually bring — you don’t have to untangle it alone.
In a complimentary 30-Minute Clarity Call, we’ll identify where the misalignment is costing you the most and build a clear picture of what success actually looks like when it’s measured by the right standard for your brain, your role, and the leader you’re actually trying to become.
No more climbing trees when you were built to swim.
