I’m Emma, the founder of Thorp Coaching and an executive coach, facilitator and speaker. Before becoming a coach, I spent more than 20 years in executive search, consultancy and commercial leadership. My career included building and exiting my own business, followed by working as a Chief Commercial Officer and board member within a global recruitment business.
Those experiences taught me a great deal about leadership, business pressure and organisational life. They also taught me how easy it is for someone to look capable and successful while quietly running on fumes.
I didn’t know I had ADHD. I thought I simply needed to work harder, move faster and hold everything together more tightly. I’m also dyslexic and spent years believing I wasn’t as clever as other people, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. My answer was always to compensate: prepare more, push harder and keep going long after my body was asking me to stop.
For a while, it worked. I kept performing and achieving, and became very good at functioning inside a life that was costing me too much. Burnout became normal, anxiety became my baseline and eventually my physical health began to unravel.
When I was diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood, relief wasn’t my first response. I felt grief and anger for the years I had spent believing I was failing, and because nobody had recognised how hard I was working simply to keep up. Diagnosis didn’t explain or excuse everything, but it helped me understand both the strengths that had supported my success and some of the patterns I was less proud of.
My story isn’t a neat tale of diagnosis followed by perfect self-acceptance. I still have a brain that wants to fight me but what hat has changed is that I’m learning to work with the reality of how I function, rather than constantly trying to performance-manage myself into being somebody else.
Today, I’m an ICF (ACC) and EMCC (Senior Practitioner) accredited executive coach. Through Thorp Coaching, I work with leaders, individuals and organisations across a range of sectors. Some of my clients are neurodivergent and some are not. I help people think more clearly, understand the patterns shaping their leadership and perform at a high level without paying an unsustainable personal cost.
I’m particularly interested in what can sit behind high performance: overworking, shame, emotional intensity, difficulty asking for help and the enormous amount of energy some people use simply to appear fine. My work brings together lived experience, professional training and the reality of having led people and businesses myself.
As an ADHD UK Ambassador, I share my story in the hope that others might recognise themselves and make sense of their experiences sooner than I did. Through speaking, coaching, fundraising and advocacy, I challenge simplistic stereotypes about ADHD, Autism and dyslexia. I also offer organisations practical support and constructive challenge to help them turn awareness into meaningful change and create workplaces where people don’t have to reach burnout before their struggles are taken seriously.
My talk, Behind the High Performer, explores undiagnosed ADHD and leadership with warmth, honesty and humour. I offer the virtual version in return for donations to ADHD UK, with in-person sessions available for a small fee. I believe awareness matters, but it is only the doorway. Real inclusion is about what happens next: how meetings are run, how feedback is given, how workloads are managed and whether people feel safe enough to ask for what they need.
Nature was an important part of my recovery and remains central to my life and work. I’m a volunteer warden on the Ashdown Forest, where I am also licenced to coach in person and run immersive one-to-one retreats. I’ve gradually redesigned my work around regulation, connection and better thinking rather than relentless productivity usually with my Staffy, Boggins, somewhere nearby.
I don’t claim to have everything neatly sorted. I do believe that understanding ourselves gives us more choice and that coping is not the same as thriving.
Website: thorpcoaching.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmathorp/
Instagram: @thorpcoaching