Gary Coulton – the winner of our Personal Inspirational Story Award 2025

He discovered he had ADHD when he was 65

Age

69

Where do you live?

Surrey, UK

What do you do?

I retired from the daily grind of employment in 2014, and from my business in 2023. I now describe myself as an author.

What it’s like being your age?

I’m the happier and more content that at any previous time in my life. My mind is now my friend and not my enemy, I am married to Mel, and we’ve been together 44 years, forty-two of them married.

What do you have now that I didn’t have when you were 25?

It is more about what have I shed and in that process gained. Age 27 was the watershed. I seriously contemplated taking my own life, not because of trauma but because of internal chaos. Ever since I can recall I have had a chorus of voices/characters in my mind. They are as real to me as the people I live with in the physical world.

For more than fifty years they were my mental ‘Demons’ spending their time belittling me and convincing me I was fake, and I would be found out. I captured all of this in my memoir, so I won’t re-write that here but it’s called ‘Demons to Champions – How I Fell in Love with my Maverick Mind.
Suffice to say, that I clearly did not carry out their wish. The question was then, how was I to live with them and lead a half normal life?
What I have now and lacked then was insight into accessing my innate wisdom. After identifying as neurodivergent age 65, I have my insight. I am a maverick thinker and that is wonderful not madness. I empathise with the younger me for he had no idea why he had a deluge of thoughts every moment and why he never quite fit in anywhere.

And relationships?

As is the case for all neurodivergent people we always think the best of people when we meet them. I treat them as if they are the most important person in the room at that moment. However, after many let downs, I now employ what I call ‘Smart Trust’, that is I will give you chance to prove yourself as a decent collaborative human being but there may come a time when I have to say, ‘I longer trust you’. I then end the relationship.
Again, as is the case for many if not most neurodivergent people I find it hard maintaining relationships if they are not refreshed regularly. So, I have no connections from school, university or my academic life. There simply wasn’t enough interaction to fuel the relationship. That said, since I became more internally aware I work hard at my relationships.
Now to the most important relationship in my life. Mel is my wife and quite simply the reason I am still alive, without her at my worst times I would have killed myself. We have a simple way, we talk everything out, and our love is unconditional.

How free do you feel?

This is an interesting question for a neurodivergent person. I realise now that for the first 65 years of my life I wore masks. Layers and layers of masks. All of them were derived from a desire to be normal and fit in. It is like living inside a self-imposed prison and you have no idea what you did to deserve the sentence. The glue holding them in place is strong and ‘cured’ by the raw heat of society’s expectations and demands.
To everyone except Mel, I looked like I was thriving. I had a very successful academic career and a reasonable, successful (but not financially) Executive Coaching business. Yet, this was at an immense emotional expense. It’s what it must be like to be a spy in a foreign land constantly scared of being discovered.

These days, for most of the time I feel free, perhaps in ways most people don’t consider. My first conscious breath each morning reminds me I am alive and demands I make the most of my day, even if that is to do nothing.
Mel and I are financially secure, not wealthy but we can pay our bills and then some. Our daughter who is autistic ADHD, is carving out a career backstage in the wardrobe departments of major British Theatre. That is a wonderful thing to witness from the ‘wings’, so to speak.
I do increasingly worry about the state of the world, but I have learned over the years that the voices in my mind that were once my ‘Demons’ have with my love become my staunchest ‘Champions’, together we recalibrate my emotions.

What are you proud of?

There are so many tangible things of importance and impact but in reality, I’m most proud of answering my dad’s question to me two weeks before he died of oesophageal cancer in 2000. He asked, ‘Gary, who do you want to come to your funeral and what was it you did for them that would make them want to come?’

I think about this every moment of every day. I can only do something in this moment, and it might as well be a constructive word or action helping someone else find the best of themselves.
Out of this sprang my concept of The Positive Echo. What echoes can we leave when we leave a conversation, change jobs, write a post, and yes, die.
I have no desire for fortunes or to have my name on buildings. What I desire is for someone to have a warm feeling when someone mentions my name. Even then, I don’t mind if they fail to remember me, if they make the most of their lives because they knew me, even for a moment.

What keeps you inspired?

Nature has provided me with a mind that never rests until I’m asleep. Alongside that she imbued an unbreakable curiosity about everyone and everything in the universe. I cannot avoid addressing a question and my world fires millions at me all the time. Once I feared my maverick mind but now, I adore it. I am never short of inspiration only the energy to carry out things holds me back.
I’m also inspired by people, people who through their endeavours and actions, show me more about the beauty of our natural and human world.

When are you happiest? –

This one is tricky because I feel that I have a hard time describing my emotions. I find my emotional vocabulary limited and never quite describes exactly what I’m experiencing, they call this alexithymia. It’s not that I don’t have emotions but ascribing a word to them is tough. For example, I am deeply empathic and can cry at the drop of a hat but ask me to describe what’s happening and I’ll be lost for an answer. But I digress, ‘When am I happiest?’
When I’m sat in the same room as Mel, and we don’t need to say a word, we simply know we love each other. Maybe a glance and a smile. After all these years together, this fills a library of words.
Oh, I nearly forgot marathon kayaking! Simply put it’s my mindfulness meditation on the water. Going fast and far in an unstable boat connecting my body to my soul, without my mind interfering. I’ll be paddling on my 69^th Birthday and aspire to do the same on my 80^th.

And where does your creativity go?

I was once called, ‘the weird kid who never knew when to shut up’. From the age of about four or so, I told stories. I’m told they were long and contorted, often about dinosaurs and pirates (not necessarily at the same time but who knows). The crazy thing was they were always spontaneous, and I built whole worlds and a host of characters. School I’m afraid programmed that out of me.
Curiosity is my creative friend. I never suffer from the blank page. As time went on my creativity expressed itself in a desire to understand the natural world and I swerved towards science. People think science is anything but creative but consider this, a scientist looks at the world and says, ‘I wonder how that works?’ Then we must construct a hypothesis that makes a testable claim. For example, I might ask, ‘Why is the sky blue?’ I can’t create an experiment to test a question but if I were to say, ‘The sky is blue because all other wavelengths of light are absorbed by the atmosphere’, I can test if this is correct. Creativity stems from the curiosity about the world and the ability to create the right experiment.

I then became interested in leadership and how people work better together in organisations, so my creativity was exercised in coming up with novel ways to achieve this. I finally, created the concept of Adaptive Intelligence (AQ) and eventually realised I had codified WISDOM!

These days I no longer work for other people, I ply my trade as a writer, initially my memoir, ‘Demons to Champions – How I fell in love with my neurodivergent maverick mind’. I’m now finishing a book called ‘Wisdomize’ about we each can access more of our innate wisdom to lead more complete lives. I am also deep in the research weeds for a book called ‘Eliza’, a novel based on my great-great-grandmother a working-class Victorian heroine. Who knows what after that?

What’s your philosophy of living?

To live every minute according to the Positive Echo Principle. I am not religious but adhere to the humanistic aspirations of all the religions I’m familiar with.

And dying?

It is the most lethal human condition and as such is unavoidable. I am completely sanguine about the thought of dying and becoming stardust again at some point. I’m more concerned with my mode of dying. My quiet genius Dad once said to me, ‘Remember this life is not a rehearsal, you will never have this one again.’

Are you still dreaming?

Of course, to a neurodivergent who often takes things literally, there are two answers to this question, the mundane and the prophetic. Boring first, for most of my life I have been unable to recall any of my dreams. All that changed when I began taking statins! I have the most boring dreams, always in colour, usually about moving around a cityscape trying to get somewhere but I don’t know where. At some point I realise I’ve left something behind at the beginning and need to retrace my steps. I’m never successful so I choose to wake up!
I’m guessing you actually want me to discuss my aspirations for the future. This is tricky when I’ve spent decades working to live in the moment and be more spontaneous. Like many autistic people I would plan everything down to the smallest detail, building elaborate schemes towards a huge goal. This burnt me out several times, so I chose to STOP IT.
My dreams are simpler these days, but no less important. They are to see my daughter secure and happy, to love my big brother and support his musical adventure at seventy-three, and to leave my Positive Echo wherever I go.
The rest will jump out in front of me, and I will pursue it, until it no longer holds my attention. That’s the sign of a free maverick non-linear thinker. I live by the credo that ‘None of us is smarter than all of us’.

What was a recent outrageous action of yours? –

To be frank I’ve never been the outrageous type, and I doubt that will change. These days outrageous is having a dessert after my main course!

Gary’s Substack is positiveecho@substack.com

His autobiography is Demons to Champions