Ben Pollard | ADHD Coach and Flourishing founder
Helping people with ADHD & Autism feel seen, heard, and capable of flourishing - because I know what it's like when your brain has other plans.
I started school in Liverpool, in the 1980’s. I was good at lego, and bad at fighting, but I did a lot of both. My brain, like many others, is a double helix of badly spelled distractions that draw me down cul-de-sacs like a hungry Hansel following breadcrumbs of dopamine. Just as teachers were starting to tell me I was stupid and lazy, my parents told me I was smart, but had a slightly different brain. I’ll always be grateful, but I wish the same had been true for my ADHD. Many years later, I’ve learned to work *with* my brain rather than constantly fighting against it. It’s taking time, but it’s gradually transforming how I live, love, lead and generally how I show up in the world.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in late 2015, during what I can only describe as a difficult chapter of life. I was burned out after five intense years of political community organising, work I loved, but work that filled every waking moment, and leaving no space to process the traumas and challenges of broken relationships, and complex family histories.
My mum had been diagnosed with ADHD a few years earlier, in her late 50s — she was diagnosed late, but was in many ways ahead of the curve. At the time, I was sceptical, now I’m deeply grateful. Over a number of years I gradually started to learn more, slowly accepting that maybe ADHD was real, and maybe even described many of the challenges that shaped my experience of the world.
By the time I reluctantly sort a diagnosis, I was tired, lonely, and bruised. Meds helped me turn down the noise, and start regulating my emotions, and question what I believed about myself and the world around me. Connecting with people who got it, without judgement, helped me feel seen, heard and respected, perhaps for the first time. These experiences, created above all by coaching, made space for me to start listening to myself, be kind to myself, accept realities, and start changing stories. It's an experience of hope and change that I now try to offer others, through my own coaching, and the supportive community I hope we can create together at Flourishing.
My ADHD Story
Shortly after my diagnosis, I threw myself into learning everything I could about ADHD. I discovered that coaching could be genuinely transformative—not just for managing ADHD symptoms, but also for building a life that actually works with how your brain operates. So I trained as a coach, both to develop these skills for myself and to share them with others.
That decision connected to something I'd learned in over a decade of community organising: the people closest to a problem often have the best answers. I worked at Citizens UK, where I saw how ordinary people could build power and create change when they were truly listened to.
When I left in 2015, I co-founded a charity called Local Welcome that grew to several thousand members across more than eight UK cities, bringing local communities together by cooking and eating shared meals in community spaces. When COVID made that impossible, we launched ADHD Together—an online peer support service in partnership with South London and Maudsley NHS Trust and King's College London. Lived experience, I've come to believe, is a design advantage.
I hold an advanced qualification from ADDCA (the ADHD Coaching Certification Academy), and I was among the first UK-based coaches to complete this advanced training. I'm also a member of the International Coaching Federation, with more than 500 hours of coaching experience.
About My Coaching
The real power of coaching, for me, is fundamentally about deep listening with powerful questions.
When we don't learn how to listen well—to others and to ourselves—it strains our relationships and increases disconnection. We go through life filling in gaps and making assumptions about what people think, feel, want, and need from us.
What I offer is the experience of being truly seen, heard, and respected. And through that process, I help clients develop those same listening skills, both listening to others, and also learning to listen to and accept their own emotions and needs. Many of us with ADHD have spent so long reacting to our need for dopamine - and the maladaptive habits we've built without realising it - that we've lost touch with what we actually want, or what we need to help us flourish.
Coaching creates space to pause, to recognise our emotions, and to make choices aligned with our values. It's not talking therapy - it's future-focused and action-oriented, built around developing practical skills and systems that work with our brains. Many clients also seek therapy alongside, before, or after coaching, particularly when trauma is involved, or relationships have broken down.
How I Work
I believe a world in which all brains can flourish would be better for everyone. This belief shapes everything I do. Compassion, connection and justice aren't soft words to me, they're the foundations for a life worth living, and they take courage, effort and time to develop. I also think these values are shared by many of us whose brains don't fit the square pegs of would as it is.
For me, flourishing means radical acceptance—of the challenges and limits of the world as it is today, of the person I’m becoming, the stories that have shaped me, and the strengths I bring to the world. It means having the courage to pause, to give myself rest, space and time to write and then live my own story rather than constantly feeling like I'm reading the wrong script.
If anything gives me permission to flourish, it's all the ways that I haven't. The burnout. The perfectionism. The years of trying to do too many things at once. I'm still learning, and yet I still believe that flourishing means hoping, even accepting, that change is possible, and justice is vital.
What I Believe
I love cycling, everywhere, in all weather. Long ago, I cycled from Russia to London, on a whim. Alongside coaching, and other work, I’ve spent a lot of the last five years building a houseboat on a hundred-year-old Thames barge—teaching myself construction from scratch because apparently my ADHD brain thought that sounded reasonable. Would I do it again? Not in a thousand years. Have I learned to let go of perfectionism? Nearly, but it’s a lifelong journey.
I listen to audiobooks at triple speed. It sounds somewhere between Stephen Hawking’s computer voice, and a 90s modem, so it's slightly embarrassing when people overhear it. However, to me it's like a Swedish massage in my prefrontal cortex. Blissful. Silent. A sanctuary of staccato syllables downloading delicious data straight into my mind. It’s not ‘normal’, but nether am I, and the chances are, neither are you. Welcome home.
Beyond Coaching
If you're tired of fighting your brain and ready to start working with it, I'd love to hear from you. Book a free consultation and let's explore whether coaching could help you build systems that actually for the brain you have, and the life you want to build.
Work With Me