Episode 343: Creating a More Meaningful ADHD Life Meghan French Dunbar

Living Well with ADHD
Written By Kate Moryoussef

ADHD Awareness Month 2026: What Actually Helps?

This October, I'm putting community, real experiences and practical support at the heart of ADHD Awareness Month. There are live conversations, Instagram Lives, podcast events and ways for you to share what actually helps in your own life. ⁠⁠Visit the Events page⁠⁠ to see what’s happening and get involved.

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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.

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:

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.

Kate Moryoussef https://www.adhdwomenswellbeing.co.uk
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Episode 342: Eating Well, Navigating Gut Health & ADHD with Dr Miguel Toribio-Mateas