Creating a More Meaningful ADHD Life
Megan French Dunbar, author of 'This Isn't Working,' discusses how to build a meaningful career and life by prioritizing purpose, joy, and quality of life over hustle culture. She shares her personal journey through burnout, ADHD diagnosis, and recovery, along with practices she learned from interviewing successful leaders who have built sustainable, fulfilling careers.
Summary
Kate Moore-Yousef interviews Megan French Dunbar, a business anthropologist and author who has worked with major companies on leadership and culture strategy. Megan shares her background of growing up watching her parents run businesses—her father stressed and overwhelmed, her mother fulfilled by meaningful work helping children with disabilities. This contrast shaped her pursuit of work that combined curiosity with positive impact.
Megan describes her journey building Conscious Company Media, a nationally distributed print magazine focused on impact-driven business. However, without knowing she had ADHD, she operated under constant overwhelm and overwork, with no systems to manage the chaos. When she had her first child in 2019 and returned to work, she lasted only four months before resigning on February 1, 2020—just days before COVID lockdown. This began a two-year period of severe depression, loss of identity, and therapeutic work as she struggled with postpartum depression and the loss of her achievement-based sense of self-worth.
By 2022, Megan began researching what successful, fulfilled leaders did differently. She interviewed over a thousand business leaders and identified outliers who seemed both successful and happy. Her research became the book 'This Isn't Working,' which identifies two key frameworks: 'Soul Success' and 'Sustained Leadership.' Soul Success consists of purpose (meaningful work), passion (following what lights you up), and intentional cultivation of quality of life (time off, health, meaningful relationships). Sustained Leadership focuses on optimizing the quality of being rather than quantity of doing—creating conditions to show up as one's best self through exercise, nourishment, sleep, mindfulness, joy, social connections, and professional mental health support.
Megan emphasizes that every leader she interviewed worked with a mental health professional, indicating that successful people prioritize reflection and growth. She discusses the research behind joy (the broaden-and-build theory, which shows that positive emotions expand our aperture and improve decision-making, resilience, and relationships) and describes her practice of annual solo 'joy trips' where she travels alone to refill her cup.
Megan addresses the guilt women feel about prioritizing themselves and joy, noting that modeling healthy behavior inspires others—when one woman CEO took a three-month sabbatical, another later did the same after seeing it was possible. She emphasizes this is a 'mini micro revolution' for women to claim their own joy without judgment.
Currently, Megan works according to an 'ideal life statement': doing impactful work with people she loves while intentionally nurturing her quality of life. She sets boundaries (working until 2:30 p.m., then being present with her kids, no nights/weekends), carefully selects clients, and privileges autonomy over additional income. She hosts a podcast called 'Unbehaved' exploring new ideas and pushing envelopes.
Kate and Megan discuss how ADHD individuals struggle with external validation and the need for meaning and fulfillment to stay motivated. Kate shares her own desire to take a solo vacation and the guilt she feels, while Megan encourages her to book it, framing it not just as self-care but as necessary nervous system regulation.
About this episode
What Actually Helps You? This ADHD Awareness Month, I’m putting real experiences, community and practical support at the heart of the conversation. Join live conversations, podcast events and opportunities to share what actually helps you. Add your name to my event waitlist as well! Visit the Events page to see what’s happening and get involved. _________________________________________ What if the burnout, the guilt and the relentless doing weren't signs that you were failing, but signs that the playbook you'd been given was never designed for you in the first place? On this week's episode of The ADHD Women's Wellbeing Podcast, I'm joined by Meghan French Dunbar, bestselling author, business anthropologist and founder of Conscious Company Magazine, the first nationally distributed print magazine in the US focusing on impact-driven business. Meghan's book, This Isn't Working: How Working Women Can Overcome Stress, Guilt, and Overload to Find True Success, is a USA Today bestseller and Next Big Idea Club selection. She works with companies including Coach, John Deere, Torani and Kate Spade on leadership and culture strategy, writes for Forbes, Fast Company and Inc, and hosts the podcast Unbehaved. She was diagnosed with ADHD four years ago, and this conversation made a lot of sense of a lot of things. We talk about purpose burnout, motherhood, identity, joy and what it actually looks like to build a life and career around meaning rather than productivity. Meghan is warm, honest and brilliantly funny, and this is one of those conversations that leaves you feeling both validated and quietly ready to do something differently. Advertisement⏐Try AG1 now at http://drinkag1.com/adhdwomen and get £20 off your first order + 5 AG1 Travel Packs for on the go, a bottle of Vitamin D3+K2, and the Welcome Kit for FREE. No risk with the 30-day money-back guarantee. Find all details about the health benefits in the link. Study results are on file with AG1, 2023. In this episode, we cover: How Meghan's ADHD diagnosis four years ago reframed her entire career and the relentless curiosity that drove it Why she burnt out running her own organisation, resigned from it, and spent two years rebuilding from the ground up The difference between social success and soul success, and the three elements the most fulfilled leaders Meghan interviewed all had in common Why sustained leadership is about the quality of your being, not the quantity of your doing The six key predictors of burnout, and why ADHD makes several of them almost inevitable without the right support What the broaden and build theory tells us about joy, and why nurturing it is not indulgent but a genuine performance strategy The joy trip: what it is, why Meghan introduced it into her family and what it has given her every year since Why ADHD women are often the outliers who model a different way of working, and why that matters for everyone around them What enough looks like, and why deciding that with your partner is one of the most radical acts available to us Why autonomy is the non-negotiable for so many neurodivergent entrepreneurs Timestamps: 00:00 - Welcome and introducing Meghan French Dunbar 02:00 - What drives Meghan's passion for business, impact and entrepreneurship 05:00 - How her ADHD diagnosis reframed decades of relentless curiosity 08:00 - Burning out as founder, resigning in 2020 and two years of rebuilding 12:00 - What the outliers taught her: soul success, purpose and quality of life 16:00 - Sustained leadership: why quality of being beats quantity of doing 19:00 - The practical foundations: sleep, movement, joy and professional support 22:00 - Why younger generations are already rewriting the playbook 25:00 - The joy trip: how it started, what it involves and why it changed everything 31:00 - The broaden and build theory: the science behind why joy makes you better at everything 35:00 - Modeling a different way for other women 38:00 - What Meghan's working life looks like now, and what enough means to her 42:00 - Autonomy, ADHD and why working for yourself so often becomes the answe Links and Resources: Find my popular ADHD Women's Wellbeing workshops and resources on my website here. Follow the podcast on Instagram: @adhd_womenswellbeing_pod Get my book, The ADHD Women's Wellbeing Toolkit (also available in ebook and audiobook) here Join the More Yourself membership community here Visit Meghan's website: meghanfrenchdunbar.com Connect with Meghan on Instagram Connect with Meghan on LinkedIn Subscribe to Meghan's Substack: Unbehaved Listen to Meghan's podcast: Unbehaved Watch Meghan's TEDx talk Get Meghan's book: This Isn't Working: How Working Women Can Overcome Stress, Guilt, and Overload to Find True Success Kate Moryoussef is a women's ADHD lifestyle and wellbeing coach and EFT practitioner who helps overwhelmed and unfulfilled newly diagnosed women with ADHD find more calm, balance, hope, health, compassion, creativity, and clarity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Key Insights
- Megan argues that without ADHD diagnosis and proper management systems, she remained constantly overwhelmed despite building a visionary organization, ultimately leading to burnout severe enough to cause resignation after maternity leave.
- Megan's research found that every successful, fulfilled leader she interviewed worked with a mental health professional, suggesting that willingness to reflect, process, and seek help is foundational to sustainable success.
- Megan identifies that achieving and accomplishing had become the basis of her self-worth, so when she couldn't achieve during her early motherhood period, she experienced clinical depression and complete loss of identity.
- The broaden-and-build theory demonstrates that accessing positive emotions like joy actually expands cognitive capacity, improves decision-making, strengthens relationships, and builds long-term resilience—making joy cultivation a functional business asset, not a luxury.
- Megan contends that many high-achieving women conflate busyness with value and don't know what brings them joy anymore because they've spent years prioritizing external validation over internal fulfillment.
- Megan argues that when one woman visibly models healthy boundary-setting (like taking a sabbatical or prioritizing joy activities), it gives permission and inspiration to other women to do the same, creating systemic cultural change.
- Megan claims that organizations with long-term perspectives (like Tarani Syrups with 34 years of 20% growth) succeed by building virtuous cycles of employee opportunity, profit-sharing, and community benefit, whereas short-term profit-maximization cultures eventually collapse.
- Megan describes that her ADHD diagnosis explained her relentless curiosity and willingness to follow passion rather than practical paths, which enabled her achievements but also required deliberate systems and boundaries to prevent overwhelm.
Topics
Transcript
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