Diagnosed at 50 ADHD IS MY SUPER POWER!

Barely scraping by at school, Annie’s using her self-taught skills in business

- Cloe Willetts

When executive business coach Annie Romanos was diagnosed with ADHD, she didn’t rush to hide her new label. Instead, feeling freer than she had in 49 years, she wanted to let the world know!

“For girls and women particularly, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is majorly undiagnosed or misdiagnosed as anxiety and depression. I found out in June and all the pennies started dropping,” says the Raumati South mother-of-three, who now specialises in working with other professionals and entrepreneurs with ADHD.

“It’s often associated with the young, disruptive boy in class,” she explains. “But the less obvious inattentive form of ADHD, which many girls and women have, gets missed.”

As a child, Annie was enthusiastic and energetic, often described by her teachers as distractible, not reaching her potential, struggling to focus and unable to apply herself.

“But I was a happy, cheery kid who was probably a bit of a force of nature in the classroom,” recalls the mother of Alex, 15, Thea, 14, and Gabe, eight. “The truth is, I found it hard to follow instructions and do things I wasn’t interested in at school, which was most things apart from English.”

She left high school at the end of sixth form believing she was unintelligent, undisciplined, inconsistent and lazy.

“I also always felt like an outsider,” tells Annie, 50. “I’d pretend to get on with and understand people, but I actually got really good at being a social chameleon, while never feeling like myself.”