Coach Nancy

Get Your House in Order

2011-10-04T10:53:00.000-07:00

STRATEGIES FOR THE HOME ENVIRONMENT

People with ADHD often live in chaotic environments. They misplace things, they jump from project to project randomly, and they leave things incomplete or undone. Lacking skills to prioritize, seeing everything as “equal,” and not keeping things in short-term memory all contribute to making the tedious tasks of daily living—staying on top of finances, grocery shopping, laundry, or clutter—stifling. With the proper approach, these tasks can be managed, and then mastered!

FINANCES

Understand the cost benefit of delegating.

If you’re like most people with ADHD, you avoid details such as keeping up on bank accounts and paying bills on a regular basis. The thought of sitting down, sifting through mail, and writing checks is enough to make you run from the task, not toward it. Nonetheless, bills need to be paid or you’ll continue to get late notices, accrue bad credit, or run the risk of getting your electricity turned off, not to mention upsetting others who depend on you! If this describes you, learn to delegate. Pay someone to keep track of your finances. Arrange for bills to be automatically paid via your bank. Do what you can to get the job done. In the end, it will cost you less than you’re spending in late fees!

Separate the task from the set-up.

To make paying bills easier and less painful, do the set-up first before paying the bills, which is the real task. Equip a “bill-paying station” with your checkbook, stamps, envelopes, and a basket in which to collect the bills when they arrive in the mail. On a designated day, open the bills and stamp the return envelopes. On the next day, put your return address on the envelopes. On the next day, write and sign the checks. Then all you have to do is stuff the envelopes and send them! By separating setting up and execution, and by approaching the task step by step, you won’t find it so overwhelming, and the job will get done.

Create accountability.

I have several clients who meet with their accountant every three months simply to make sure they keep up with their finances. If this is something your accountant is willing to do, go for it! Your accountant can help you create systems for budgeting and tracking your income. Chances are, if left up to your own devices, you’ll get in trouble. Ask for help from an expert! You don’t have to do it alone.

Ritualize attending to your finances.

If you don’t create space in your life for paying bills and reviewing finances, it will never come to fruition and will remain only a wish. Set a regular weekly time and place to pay bills and review your accounts. Mark it as an appointment with yourself and don’t skip it, no matter what. Do it at the same time on the same day each week so it becomes a habit. Remember to choose a day when you are least likely to be distracted by a more entertaining activity.

Stay in the know to say NO.

Stay on top of how much money you have in your accounts and how much you owe. For example, when you get your bank statement, highlight the amounts and post it on the back of your door so you see it every day. Lack of information about what funds are actually available to you at any given time is a recipe for spending beyond your means and ultimately for financial disaster.

Create visual reminders.

Keep track of when bills are due. Post dates on your calendar. Or here is a favorite of one of my clients: “I open all the mail when it comes in, and immediately sort out the bills, highlight the due dates, and tape them on the wall by the light switch. This way, I can quickly glance at the wall and know how many bills I have to pay, and when they are due. Because they're right next to the light switch, I'm forced to look at them at least once a day!”

Budgeting: Create a tracking system.

Keep track of receipts by labeling and carrying envelopes labeled Business, Groceries, and so forth. Put all receipts in the appropriate envelope when you pay for it, and if you forget to get the receipt, write the cost of the item on the outside of the envelope. At the end of each month, file them away for your records in a small, accordion-style 3x12 expanding file. This strategy is great for tracking receipts for expense reports, too.

LAUNDRY

Take action.

People with ADHD are highly affected by their immediate environment. It’s very important, therefore, to keep your living area organized and picked up. If you know you’re challenged in keeping up with laundry, take measures to get it done! Either delegate it by hiring someone to do it, or send it out to be done. Set a specific day of the week to do that, and write it on your calendar. Otherwise, the vicious cycle of having it pile up while you avoid it will continue. A messy environment also puts a strain on relationships and on those around you, so that’s another reason to take action!

Set personal standards and stick to them.

What is acceptable? What is not? Set standards and stick to them. Enlist a “no excuses” attitude in sticking to a schedule that you have clearly marked on your calendar. At the beginning of each month, for example, write LAUNDRY in each Wednesday box, and include the time you plan to do it, 7 PM. Don’t allow yourself to negotiate with your ADHD by saying, “Oh, I can skip this laundry week,” especially if you know that skipping a week will only lead down a path of shame and blame four weeks later as dirty clothes block your door!

Make it routine.

You must create the time and space for laundry. Otherwise, doing it will remain only a wish! Set a time and day to do it on a regular basis. Think this out and make it realistic. Don’t say you’ll do it Sunday mornings if you go to church. That’s setting yourself up for failure. If for some reason you can’t do laundry on your designated laundry day, have a back-up day and time. This way it doesn’t pile up and become unmanageable.

Use your environment.

Planning to do it and doing it are two separate things. Be sure you have systems in place to remember the day and time you have scheduled. Post a note to yourself as a reminder, or put a sign over your laundry basket “Do on Tuesday evening.” This strategy worked so well for one of my clients that when her fiancé saw the sign “Do laundry on Wednesday,” he thought it was directed to him and he did the laundry!

Combine it with another activity.

While you’re doing your laundry, also do another project or task you engage in on a regular basis. This will help you to remember to do it more readily, regularly, and painlessly. For example, designate Saturday mornings while reading the paper, or Sunday evenings while watching your favorite TV show as laundry time.

Follow it all the way through.

Doing laundry means folding it and putting it away, not just washing it! If you’re going to take the time to wash it, take the extra five minutes to fold it and put it away. A pile of clothes on your floor is still a pile of clothes, clean or dirty!

DECLUTTERING: STAYING ORGANIZED

No time for shame.

The only way to truly overcome the “messy closet” syndrome is to come out of the closet! That means accepting that your struggles are not a character flaw. It’s not you; it’s your ADHD. This doesn’t mean, however, that you don’t have to take responsibility for doing something about it. In order to take that first step, you must acknowledge it’s a problem and stop blaming yourself.

Know it could be emotional.

Going through old paperwork or clearing out clothes and clutter can be emotionally toxic, bringing up a host of feelings—shame, old memories, or horror that you’ve forgotten something important. Prepare yourself, and don’t allow negative tapes to sidetrack you.

Does it have a home?

Create “homes” for things like your keys, wallet, glasses, and cell phone—anything that you tend to lose track of easily. Some people use a small basket in the kitchen as a collection point for these items. One client keeps a pair of glasses next to her computer, another on the bathroom vanity, a third pair on the kitchen counter, and a fourth in her purse. It’s worth the expense, she says, to know she’ll be able to read anywhere!

Use the three-second rule.

When clearing out piles of papers or clothes, or doing any type of decluttering, don’t hold anything in your hand for more than three seconds. Make a quick decision: throw away, take action, or keep. Cleaning can be overwhelming, so take frequent breaks, but continue the process until it has been completed. Set a time and day for each “take action” item, and act on it! For example, if you have a pile of clothing to donate to your local church, designate Saturday, 9 AM, to deliver it.

Stand up and keep moving.

Stand up while decluttering, especially while going through paperwork. Don’t do it sitting down! Standing up helps your brain be more alert and prevents you from spacing out and/or hyperfocusing on one aspect of the job. Keep moving!

Don’t look back.

Once you’ve gone through clothes that you’re going to give to Goodwill or decided on things in the house you’re going to give away or throw out, DON’T LOOK BACK. Put everything in boxes or in non-see-through garbage bags. Get them out of the house or stick them in the trunk of your car as soon as you can. Otherwise, you might be tempted to go back through everything and keep things that you’ve already decided to eliminate.

Do a swap.

Have a friend help you clean, and agree that, in return, you’ll help him or her clear out clutter or go through paperwork. It’s a lot easier having someone with you who can keep you moving and who has no emotional attachments to your “things.”

Keep it alive through accountability.

The issue for people with ADHD isn’t the lack of desire to stay organized; it’s the ability to keep the importance of doing so in the forefront of their minds. Share your desired goals with someone, and keep him posted on your progress along the way. The power of verbalizing your intention, as well as having a watchdog of sorts, should help keep you on course and true to your plan.

It’s a process. Be vigilant!

Remember that you have ADHD. It takes longer for you to change your old ways and develop new habits. You have to be committed to staying in for the long haul to make things stick. Don’t give up! Discovering what systems and strategies work for you will take time. The worst thing you can do is give up. Know that you will slip and slide, but keep at it. It takes time to break old habits and develop new ones.

Create tangible accountability systems for yourself.

Create time sheets for doing dreaded tasks. For example, if you need to clean out the pantry, post a piece of paper on the pantry door. On the paper list the task: “Clean Pantry!” Under that, state the goal for the amount of time: “Spend One Hour Cleaning Top Shelf!” The time spent can be spread throughout the day. It does not have to be done all at once. Every time you go into the kitchen, time yourself and write the time spent (10 min, 15 min, 20 min, and so on) cleaning the pantry. When you reach one hour, stop. This serves two purposes: 1) to break the project into small, doable pieces; 2) to allow you to actually see that you spent one hour’s worth of time cleaning.

The key is to make your goal specific so that you can see and feel progress. For example, when you set out to clean one pantry shelf, you won’t be able to miss the difference in how that shelf looks compared to the other messy ones you haven’t yet touched. Or set out to do one load of laundry. You’ll be able to see that the original pile has become smaller.

Change settings to get mundane tasks done.

If you can’t do certain kinds of work in one room, try another. I personally find that I can’t pay my bills anywhere except at my kitchen table. I have clients who take mundane paperwork and drive to a parking lot and do it in their car. Do whatever it takes to find out exactly what helps you focus long enough to get the task done.

YOU CAN GET MORE TIPS AND STRATEGIES for getting your home environment in order in some of the articles in the Attention magazine archives on the CHADD website—if you're a CHADD member. Access to the archives is a very good reason to join CHADD!

And if you have other strategies that help you keep your house in order, please share them with the rest of us!

Until next month, warmly,
Nancy

Is Impulsivity Wrecking Your Social Life?

2011-09-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

One of the first things a client I’ll call James said to me was, “If I could only keep my big mouth shut.” He painted a picture of a life beset by inappropriate behavior and mired in paradox. Young and independent, he was also handsome, athletic, and outgoing, a Wall Street trader on the fast track. He already owned a condo, a vacation club share in the Rockies, and a new sports car that he’d purchased for cash.

What James couldn’t get was why he said things that people found uncouth and offensive; why a former fraternity president and popular super jock couldn’t keep a girlfriend for more than a few months while most of his old friends were settling down with spouses and children; why someone who’d already made “so much money it’s obscene” kept losing too much of it in casinos; why somebody who could make quick, lucrative trades on the floor of the stock market couldn’t manage his own credit cards or save more than a few thousand dollars.

“What’s up?” he wanted to know. “In the last two weeks, I lost my job, I got another notice from the condo association for parking in somebody else’s spot, I sprained my ankle skiing, and my girlfriend broke up with me. And oh yeah, I forgot my mom’s birthday on top of everything else, and now she’s all hurt and mad at me.”

IMPULSIVITY WREAKING HAVOC

By his own admission, James was displaying some of the classic characteristics of ADHD, specifically, an inability to control his impulsivity. “What’s with people?” he asked, speaking about his social life. “What do they want anyway? I see myself with a couple of kids someday, maybe a house at the beach, but hey, I’m not ready to settle down yet. Women—they want you to check in every day, they want to know what you’ll be doing six weeks from now, six years from now, and why don’t you come meet their mother in Minnesota after you’ve only just met them. All these women in the city are so boring, they’re all the same. Nobody just wants to do something without a million plans first, and it’s like they want you to try out for some Mr. Perfect prize. Nobody knows how to have fun anymore.”

Clearly, James was unable to understand that the frat boy behavior that had made him so popular in high school and college had worn thin. Old friends still included him when the Knicks or Jets or Mets were in town, but unable to predict what he might do or say next, especially after several drinks, few accompanied him on the ski vacations or fishing trips he often took, and no one invited him to gatherings including their wives and children. They weren’t willing to take a chance on James when their families were concerned.

Turned off by his excessive spending or rude remarks, newer acquaintances, especially women, were even less likely to last. At first he might seem charming and energetic and charismatic, but relationships usually ended abruptly when he was “loud, overbearing, and obnoxious, always the center of attention,” a description his girlfriend had recently invoked in ending their relationship. Other times, he simply got bored. The thrill of the hunt invigorated him, not the day-to-day commitment and empathy that invited intimacy.

Much of what James said in that initial interview troubled me, because I knew that if coaching were to make a difference for him, he would have to start assuming responsibility for his actions. At that point, everything was somebody else’s fault. Probably the most important issue for him was acknowledging the reality that his problems would not go away by themselves and that it was going to take hard work on his part to change things.

Impulsivity was wreaking havoc with his life, and he needed to face up to the fact that he’d been deceiving himself. His quick wit had helped him succeed thus far, but he’d been equally dependent on adrenaline, a formula that couldn’t last. He’d gotten as far as he could without a clearly identified long-term goal and a plan to achieve it. Now it was time to learn how ADHD was affecting his functioning, including his social life, and to take action to address it.

Unless he began to understand what was causing his behavior, and until he created strategies to compensate for his impulsivity, James would continue to jeopardize any chance of acquiring new, long-term relationships of any kind. While he could recognize, after the fact, that he’d said or done something untoward or indecent or downright rude, he never had a lesson learned from the past to apply to the future. And because he had never learned to inhibit his impulses, no matter how many promises he made to himself or to others, he always forgot. A prisoner of impulsivity, he was truly a prisoner of the present, and a lonely one at that. The number of acquaintances he had used to be enough, he admitted. The quality of relationships was finally beginning to matter, and he wanted to acquire a few strong ones.

You can read more about how coaching helped James and his difficult, but ultimately successful efforts to manage his impulsivity and improve his social life in my book, The Disorganized Mind. For now, in this blog, I’ll discuss the importance of adhering to basic social rules and some strategies that can help adults with ADHD improve their social lives.

ADHERING TO SOCIAL RULES

Many people consider etiquette a quaint art of the past, but while no one can dispute that we seem to be living in an “anything goes” society, there is a breaking point. “Enough!” we eventually hear when someone has brazenly, or even inadvertently, crossed a certain line. “I don’t have to listen to this, I don’t have to accept this anymore.”

Constructing a healthy social life requires people to adhere to social rules and to maintain personal boundaries—skills with which my client, and most people with ADHD, generally struggle. Talking too much and interrupting others, for example, or being too “honest,” without regard to anyone’s feelings are not acceptable. My client would have to face the fact that, even if talk show hosts and television personalities shout each other down with barbed insults and coarse language, ordinary people have a very limited threshold for absorbing such insults on a personal level.

Most won’t abide unreliability for too long, either. Repeatedly canceling appointments, showing up late, and forgetting important dates like anniversaries or birthdays test even a parent’s infinite patience, and it’s a rare individual—hardly a superficial acquaintance—who will put up with a pattern of it.

SOME STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPING A SOCIAL LIFE

In order to have a life outside of work, you have to have the ability to construct a social life. This means making and keeping a variety of friends, getting along with others in group situations as well as one-on-one, reading and adhering to social rules, and maintaining personal boundaries—skills with which people with ADHD generally struggle. Other issues can include talking too much and interrupting others, being too “honest,” and being repeatedly unreliable with friends: canceling appointments, showing up late, forgetting important dates like anniversaries or birthdays. These symptoms often make you come across as arrogant, selfish, aggressive, or not honoring personal boundaries.

Know the steps.

The first step in knowing how to make and keep friends is knowing yourself. What are your interests? What type of things do you like to do? Once you can identify what your interests are, you can then increase the opportunities of meeting like-minded people. That means locating clubs or activities that focus on those same interests. Next is carving out the time to be involved and showing up to meetings and activities so you can increase your possibilities of meeting people. Lastly, if you get nervous in new situations, you must have a dialogue rehearsed to break the ice and introduce yourself to others.

Make soft commitments.

Keep friends by keeping the lines of communication open. If you are the type of person who often backs out of plans due to over-commitments or who gets overwhelmed at the last minute, simply let people know that you’re making a “soft commitment” and not a “hard one.” Tell them, for example, that you’d like to go to the show and are tentatively saying yes, but that you might have a conflict and be unable to make it at the last minute. That way you will avoid disappointing people if you don’t show up. Do, however, have the courtesy to at least let the person know you’re backing out as much in advance as possible!

Plan! Plan! Plan!

If you don’t make the time and space for meeting up with friends and having a social life, it won’t happen. Learn to plan to see your friends and to have fun! Be sure to look at your calendar weekly and actually block out social time. Make a commitment and keep to it. Make it a regular and re-occurring activity so it becomes a ritual, like a movie on Sunday evening or a bike ride on Saturday afternoon.

Keep organized!

If you don’t have or can’t find your friends’ e-mail addresses or telephone numbers, how can you keep in touch with them! Create a system to track these details. Put numbers in your palm pilot, in Outlook, or type out a list and post them over your phone. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’ll find that post-it when the time comes and you really need it! Make creating and maintaining an organizational system for these details a priority!

The small things count.

People with ADHD often let small things slide, like remembering a birthday, returning a call, or responding to e-mail. These small details can go a long, long way in helping to build relationships. Set reminders; write birthdays in your calendar or PDF and make plans around the special events. If you don’t have time to chat on the phone, at least acknowledge that you received the call and are busy, but don’t just let things hang and expect people to understand. Making and keeping friends is a two-way street, and communication is a large part of it.

Get feedback.

Some people with ADHD are very adept at social skills, while others are not. If you have challenges starting small talk or reading nonverbal social cues, for example, or if you simply want to improve your general social skills, ask a trusted observer for candid feedback on how you present yourself. This feedback can be invaluable in helping to know how you come across. It can help you learn to better self-observe, to fine-tune things like eye contact and table manners, and to avoid talking too much or too loudly.

Don’t let yourself get trapped.

If you know you get bored quickly at parties, or get tired and want to leave but are dependent on others for a ride, plan an escape route! Drive separately, or take money for a cab. Tell your friends ahead of time that you might leave early so they’re not surprised. Don’t allow yourself to be in any open-ended situations if they cause you problems. It is essential that everything be as planned and structured as possible.

IF YOU'RE TRYING TO CONTROL YOUR IMPULSIVITY AND IMPROVE YOUR SOCIAL LIFE, the key to success is to select a strategy, work through it, and judge its effectiveness. If you’ve given a strategy sufficient time and it’s really not working, try something else. Use your creativity to design strategies of your own and share what works for you. And you can learn more about social skills on the Adults with ADHD and Relationships page of CHADD’s website.

Do You Leap Before You Look?

2011-07-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I was surprised when a client told me that during the twenty-odd years since he’d graduated from college, he had worked for eight different companies. “Yeah, I told my manager to shove it,” was how he described the latest time he’d been fired. “And he told me goodbye. Too bad I’m so used to it.”

Unfortunately, stories like his no longer surprise me. Many of my clients have gone from job to job, let go each time by employers no longer willing to overlook offensive actions and speech directed at clients, colleagues, and the bosses themselves. Sadly, these individuals have often been highly intelligent and skilled, in many ways so well suited for their jobs that success should have been automatic. What they’ve lacked has been a way to keep from saying and doing things so inappropriate that dismissal was their employers’ only option.

One of the classic characteristics of ADHD, impulsivity is a lack of the brain’s self-inhibiting function. In simpler terms, it’s an emotional response to the world characteristic of childhood, rather than a rational response—one that includes deliberation, judgment, and reflection—characteristic of adulthood. Instead of thinking about their intended actions or weighing the consequences sure to follow, people with impulsivity issues leap before they look, with neither foresight nor hindsight to guide them.

Those who manifest impulsivity lack impulse control—a way for their minds to “put the brakes on.” Without a cognitive response to a stimulus—without working memory or judgment or a way to evaluate consequences—they find it impossible not to speak their minds in the moment, and they often blurt things out, interrupt, or even finish other people’s thoughts for them, eliciting a lot of resentment along the way.

True, it might be refreshing to hear somebody speak without a script once in a while, but it’s also disconcerting to be on the receiving end of an unfiltered rant. Nobody likes it, and very few adults are willing to put up with it. Nor are they willing to endure indefinitely the company of someone who constantly draws attention to himself. To put it bluntly, that kind of behavior becomes embarrassing, if not exhausting, to be around.

Specifically, then, unless impulsive individuals begin to understand what was causing their behavior, and until they create strategies to compensate for impulsivity, they would continue to jeopardize any chance of acquiring new, long-term relationships of any kind. Whatever job they have would also be in constant jeopardy, and money problems would continue to haunt them because of excessive spending and frequent gambling. If the impulsivity remained unaddressed, their struggles would be seen as character flaws or a lack of desire to change and improve. They need to understand that their neurobiology is at the root of their struggles. Acknowledging that ADHD is causing—and, unchecked, would continue to cause—real problems is their first step in understanding what they need to do to help themselves.

One of the most difficult struggles for people with ADHD is being stuck in the perpetual “now.” They are unable to learn from past experiences in order to evaluate the potential consequences of present or future ones. Every situation is therefore something new, and their reactions are based solely on the moment in which they find themselves. It’s not unlike the person who continues to touch the lit burner on the stove, even though he’s been burned every other time he’s done the same thing. There’s nothing in his head saying, “Hey, wait. Don’t touch. You don’t want to get burned again.”

That’s what happens to individuals with ADHD. In any given moment, they can’t keep in mind the idea of the past or the idea of a future—that tomorrow or even an hour from now will actually exist. Mistakes don’t get “cemented” in memory in the ADHD brain, so there is no plan in place to prevent new mistakes—mistakes just like the old ones—from happening yet again.

STRATEGIES TO CURB YOUR IMPULSIVITY

The strategies that have worked for my clients might work for you, too, especially engaging an accountability partner with whom to role-play or rehearse before a social or business event. Many have found keeping a log of impulsive behaviors and asking for feedback to be helpful (as long as you’re willing to accept the feedback openly). You can try any of the following strategies, being sure to give yourself enough time to evaluate how they’re working. Change will not happen overnight, though, so don’t give up after one or two attempts.

Appoint a “watch dog.”

Enlist a trusted friend to watch over you and your actions. Give this person permission to be very honest and to confront you if you are about to do something you might regret, like calling an old flame, for example, or walking off your job or skipping a business meeting. Go over an agreed-upon dialogue for these circumstances—for example, “Jake, remember you told me to hold you back when you try to do these types of things because you forget the consequences.” For this to work, you must allow the appointed person to become firm with you if you continue to try to justify your actions.

Use a team of advisors.

One of my most impulsive clients surrounds herself with a strong team of advisors and uses them regularly. She says to build this philosophy into your life: “Don't make too many moves without consulting at least three trusted advisors. Choose people whose values are closest to yours and whose minds are more logical than yours.” Using this strategy, you’ll stay more on-course by thinking through consequences.

Plan ahead by rehearsing or role-playing.

Rehearsing and role-playing are ways of planning possible details for an upcoming conversation so you can collect your thoughts ahead of time. They also help you avoid emotionally charged, counterproductive responses to others, exactly the kind of behavior you’re trying to eliminate.

People who are at ease socially might wonder about such deliberate planning ahead of time, but for people with ADHD issues, especially impulsivity, it can mean the difference between keeping and losing friends. The strategy can work just as well professionally.

Write out your schedule nightly.

To successfully self-manage, it is imperative that you mark out a To-Do list and a schedule at the end of each day. Waking up without a designated structure for the day is as good as taking a day off! Look at the schedule first thing in the morning. Make this a ritual.

Create a “home” for thoughts.

If you’re someone who often complains that great ideas come to you in the middle of meetings or when you’re concentrating on something else, you can capture those ideas by giving them a home and writing them down. Keep track of your ideas in a notebook or computer file so that you can get to them at a better time. The purpose is to provide “containers” for thoughts so that you don’t impulsively act on them in the moment.

Think before jumping.

Before agreeing to work on yet one more project, join one more board, or meet someone for lunch, stop and ask yourself, before answering: Is this reasonable?

It is okay to say “no.” Do not overextend yourself! Often people say “yes” too quickly without first thinking of the consequences. Have a dialogue rehearsed in your mind to be ready for requests on your time. Say, for example, “I need some time to think about how this will fit it into my schedule. Let me get back to you.” If they demand an immediate answer, simply say no!

Rid yourself of toxic feelings.

If you do get sidetracked and consumed by toxic emotions, it’s important to get rid of them before going into a meeting or having an important conversation. Do what one of my clients did” Call a (close) friend and say, “I have to clear my head, can I just talk at you? After five minutes tell me to hang up! Okay?” Then let it rip! This helps to clear your head of your extraneous thoughts and enables you to more fully concentrate on what is in front of you without the fear of blurting something out that you'll regret later.

Learn to self-observe.

To help curb acting on impulsive thoughts, learn to “watch” yourself in action and monitor what you do, and don’t do! I personally pretend I have a mini-camera attached to a hat I’m wearing. I try to observe myself through the lens of this camera—my hands, my body – in all actions I take throughout the day. I continually ask myself, “Am I on-task? Off-task? Am I where I am supposed to be? Am I working on priority items?” This strategy worked so well for me that once I slapped one of my hands when I noticed it had “wandered off” and was brushing my dog’s teeth instead of at the computer keyboard writing my book, where it was supposed to be!

Do it actively.

Allow yourself to use flipcharts or to hash things out on pieces of paper as you talk. Often, standing up or pacing while talking can help thoughts come together in a more organized manner.

Practice bottom-lining.

If you’re like a lot of people with ADHD, you may have difficulty getting to the essence of a thought and will engage, instead, in long, descriptive stories. If this is you, practice the art of ‘bottom-lining,” which means getting to the point. Ask yourself, “What is the key thing I want the other person to understand?” By clarifying your point this way first, you’ll make it more easily when you actually speak to the other person.

IF YOU’RE TRYING TO CONTROL YOUR IMPULSIVITY, the key to success is to select a strategy, work through it, and judge its effectiveness. If you’ve given a strategy sufficient time and it’s really not working, try something else. Remember, impulsive people are usually creative people, so use that creativity to design strategies of your own. Share what works for you!

Warmly,
Nancy

Derailed by Distraction?

2011-06-14T11:16:00.000-07:00

“I pulled a Lucy again,” my friend Cathy joked the other day, a reference to the TV character of old whose antics constantly confounded her husband, Ricky, and who occasionally reminds us of ourselves. “I had another ADD moment! I went to go out and I got in the car, I started it, forgot my list inside and went back to the house to get it, the phone rang, I answered it, and well, you know the rest! An hour and a half later, I was looking for my purse and remembered it was in the car, and I went out and found the car still running in the driveway!”

And so it sometimes goes for those of us with ADHD, who find ourselves suddenly distracted from the task at hand and winding our way from one activity or idea to the next, “like somebody is clicking a remote control and switching the thought process in your mind,” as one of my clients put it.

Cathy and I are lucky, though. We joke about what we sometimes do because we can joke. When we give in to distractions, we know how to pull ourselves back. We acknowledge our ADHD tendencies, and we’re able to recognize when we wander off course. We’re beyond the dysfunction that led to our respective diagnoses long ago, and we accept moments like Cathy’s latest “adventure” as part of what living with ADHD means. We can laugh about things we do because (1) we already know we are not our ADHD – we’ve separated ourselves from this sporadic behavior, and (2) we have strategies and structures in place to keep us on track. Our occasional wanderings don’t define us in our own or in other people’s minds.

DISTRACTIBILITY

When they say they’re distracted, most people mean that they’re temporarily unable to focus or concentrate, a situational condition that will pass when the factors underlying it change. When ADHD individuals are distracted, however, their condition is ongoing, a brain anomaly that leaves them unable to screen out competing stimuli or hold their focus on something long enough to do anything with it. Distractibility is a condition with which they live, a particularly troublesome one given a culture that appears bent on aggravating it.

Sometimes it seems that one would have to live out a vow of silence in a monastic cell somewhere not to be on sensory overload, scattered and frenzied and off in a million directions. As a people, we’re wired and connected, clicking our way through the days, and for all the ways in which technology serves us, it also manages to keep us at its mercy. There’s a constant demand from this technology-driven environment to shift attention quickly and often, to shift and shift again, so we have little time or impetus to think, let alone think deeply, about anything. The minute we try to focus on one thing, a light flashes or a ring-tone sounds or a buzzer vibrates, and off we go to answer the call of what’s next.

How to keep up, we wonder? How to be everywhere, yet feel nowhere? So many devices, so little eye contact; so many rushed emails and voicemails, so little thought-provoking dialogue; so much noise, so little meditative silence. Who even knows what to do with quiet these days, except turn up the volume to drown out the discomfort of a solitary thought: What am I missing?

Most of us are stretched to the breaking point, with so many demands on our time and so many people wanting so many things from us, that without the wires of interconnectedness, we fear we’ll fall behind. And where will we be then, we wonder. Who’ll get the edge if we turn down the volume and disconnect?

To one degree or another, everybody is rushed, everybody is scattered, everybody has those miles to go before sitting back and taking stock. The wonder is that somehow, despite their hectic and crazy lifestyles, most people manage to get on with the business of doing what they have to do, and still remain in control of their lives.

Then again, most people aren’t living with ADHD.

There’s a difference in the degree and the frequency to which individuals with ADHD are susceptible to all the distractions out there, and there’s a major difference in the consequences of their behavior. They start off with a compromised ability to stay on task, and the demands of the click-click, push-button world make everything worse. “Oh, well, everybody feels this way,” doesn’t apply to them. ADHD individuals know full well that that everybody does not feel out of control the way they do. What they don’t know is what to do about it.

TRY THESE STRATEGIES

You can create strength-based strategies for dealing with distraction. I’ve had clients who write on their bathroom mirrors with dry erase markers to remind them of their priorities for that week, and others who pretend to be taking notes during meetings to stay alert. Try any of the following, adapting them to your own needs and style.

Filter out background noise to enhance focus.

Distractible individuals are overly responsive to both the external stimuli of their environment and the internal stimuli of their own thought process. They act on the stimuli, jumping from thing to thing or thought to thought, captive to every whim and fancy.

Be honest about the kind of environment that suits you. To avoid getting carried away and lost, you might have to put yourself in a setting that is completely free of distractions — nothing on the walls, no music or ringing phones, total quiet.

Find the right place that works for you.

If you know that working in a totally quiet space doesn’t help you concentrate, then give yourself permission to go to a café or a coffee shop, someplace that has a bit of a “buzz” in the background. Many of my clients leave the office for a while and go to such a place to work on a particular project. They say that the “buzz” helps to activate their brain to screen out the background noise so they can focus.
Use music to stay on track.

When I need to put in several hours of writing, I have one CD that I play over and over again. I only use this particular CD to write to. I’ve trained myself to sit down and start to work as soon as it begins playing. It took a while, but it works! Try it!

Be aware of the passing of time.

Wear a sports watch, and set it to beep every hour on the hour to help you “hear the passing of time.” When it beeps, stop and do a self-check. Ask yourself, “Am I doing what I am supposed to be doing?”
Create self-accountability every hour on the hour.

To make sure you stay on course and focus on what you need to be doing—and to learn to be accountable to yourself—take a post-it or a blank piece of paper and write down the three tasks you will complete over the next hour. At the end of the hour, throw away the piece of paper or post-it, and write down your next three to-do items on a new sheet. These need to be concrete and doable, things like “call Charlie” or “water plants” or “mail letter.” Knowing that you have to complete the tasks within the designated time will keep you moving so that you don’t hyper-focus on one activity to the exclusion of the others on your list.

Park it!

Whenever you get the urge to veer off course, park it. Designate a notebook or an electronic file for those extraneous thoughts that pop up. Get them out of your head and onto a piece of paper, delegate them to another time and day, and keep going! This way you feel as though you’ve acted on whatever it was, so it’s out of your head and therefore out of your mind!

If you’re someone who often complains that great ideas come to you in the middle of meetings or when you’re concentrating on something else, you can capture those ideas by writing them down as they occur to you. This helps you gain more control over your creative ideas and your impulsiveness, and it provides a way to follow up on your many great ideas.

Make it a personal policy not to make stops en route.

Many of my clients, already on the verge of being late for a meeting or appointment, will decide to make a quick stop at a store or run a quick errand on the way. History, of course, will tell you the consequences of these actions: getting stressed, being even later, missing your appointment altogether, disappointing others, and beating yourself up for repeating the same mistake over and over again.

Post a sign on your dashboard that says DON’T STOP! If you walk or use public transportation, stick a post-it on your wallet reminding you to GO DIRECTLY TO WORK or GO DIRECTLY HOME! And do what it says!

Avoid those traps!

Don’t fool yourself into thinking, “Oh, I can read one more e-mail before I leave for my appointment,” or, “I can do X, Y, Z really quickly before I go.” Don’t listen to that voice inside your head! It will only get you into trouble. “Just one more minute” doesn’t give you more time; it only makes you late. If you know, for example, that e-mail distracts you, use a timer to signal you to turn off your computer an hour before your appointment.

Beware of “see do.”

Most of my clients respond well to their immediate physical environment, meaning they get caught in what they call the “see-do” cycle and forget their designated priorities. They answer each e-mail that comes in, for instance, or notice dry plants and begin watering, or look for a snack and start cleaning out the refrigerator.

If this describes you, set up visual cues to keep you on track. Post signs to yourself like, “Complete project X by 5:00,” or create a screen saver to scroll across your computer screen saying, “Where Is Project X?” For longer-term goals and follow-through, you might want to post a calendar over your desk or in your kitchen with the due dates clearly marked in neon colors.

Distinguish the NOW from the NOT NOW.

Ask yourself, "Does this have to be done by today?" If it doesn’t, type or write it into your calendar with the date by which it needs to be done. Then you know that for now, it's dealt with. If you follow this process all the way through your list, you’ll be left with only the things that must be completed now!

One of my clients uses this strategy to help him prioritize his to-do lists so that he’s always working on the most important things on the list. He says it reduces his temptation to act on non-essential items, and best of all, it keeps him honest.

“If I have a long list to handle every day, I’m setting myself up for failure,” he said. “I’m lying to myself. I’ve promised myself a million times that I’ll finish the entire to-do list, but it's impossible. In the end, I look at all the undone items and feel demoralized…again. So I got rid of the lists, and it works for me, especially because nothing gets forgotten!”

Maybe his strategy will work for you!

Prepare ahead of time.

If you know you’re frequently late to appointments because you get distracted, prepare as much as you can the day before the appointment. Put the files you need in your briefcase, the PowerPoint files on your computer desktop, your coat by the door, and so on. Do anything you can to make it as easy as possible for you to simply grab what you need and run.

Use distractions as rewards.

Come up with a list of things you know will distract you, and use them as rewards. Plug these items in upon completion of a task or at the end of a designated time segment.

One client, for example, knew that computer games were definitely a distraction, so he scheduled playing a few into his work plan to keep him motivated. By saying, "If I work 1 hour on my report, I can spend 10 minutes on computer games," he was able to complete his reports.
Do whatever fits! For this strategy, you have to ask yourself, “Is the reward motivating enough to keep me working at my assigned task no matter how hard it is for me to stick with it?” You also have to be very careful that you keep the reward time limited. If not, it will become a distraction again, rather than a reward.

I’ve coached many clients with distraction issues, and while it hasn’t been easy, it really has been fun. The strategies that we’ve created might seem outrageous to other people, but I can say unequivocally that they’ve worked. Try your own, and be as creative as you want!

Warmly,
Nancy

Stop “Circling the Airport”: Procrastination, Part Two

2011-05-17T11:18:00.000-07:00

“Productive procrastination” is a popular survival tactic among my clients. They enjoy feeling busy, and they fool themselves into thinking that of course they are busy, they’re not procrastinating, they’re getting so much accomplished, so how could anyone say they’re not working? They delude themselves into thinking, “Let me just do these other little things first. That way I’ll be able to focus completely on the important thing because I won’t have all this other stuff hanging over my head, so I’ll really do a better job.”

Procrastinators often wait to begin a task until they’ve run out of time, until they have painted themselves into that proverbial corner, literally creating the “high stakes” situation that their brains need. Part of the problem for those of us with ADHD is that the attention system of our brain is often “sleepy” or lethargic when not fully aroused, so we go from stimulus to stimulus, from issue to issue, seeking ever-immediate gratification and completely forgetting whatever it was that we were initially considering. We can’t sustain the interest and effort and ability to focus on a single issue that, as adults, we’re expected to have, so we’re on to the next idea before completing the original one.

We’re so easily lured into unrelated activities, in fact, that people suspect our motives, calling us irresponsible and lazy, undependable and even self-centered. Well, some us probably are, just like some people without ADHD are. We’re human, after all, so we’re subject to the same human flaws as everybody else. For years we’ve also been told we’re all those things, so some of us probably believe it, perpetuating the self-destructive myth even further. But for most of us, it’s not irresponsibility or laziness or selfishness that lies at the root of our behavior. It’s biology. And it’s usually compounded by a lack of understanding about how to compensate for it.

We’re called stress junkies with our need for high stimulation, but it’s that very stress that actually focuses us. With it, we somehow prioritize better. We can suddenly sequence the steps we need to follow, and we can sustain the effort we need to complete the task at hand. We can stop “circling the airport,” as one client put it, where “I see the target, I know that I’m circling, but I can’t seem to land.” With the right stress, we know that we can land, so we seek the stimulation that allows us to do what we must. Like anybody else, we like to feel good, and we choose reward over punishment every time. The problem comes when we feel good about the wrong things. Then the pleasure turns to pain when we realize we've disappointed those we love and failed to live up to our best intentions.

Although it sounds paradoxical, good stress and an aroused attention system help us make the decisions that usually frustrate us into avoidance. When we can’t imagine where to begin, we don’t begin at all, doing everything else that we can think of to avoid the pain of being overwhelmed. Last-second stress turns us on, though, and in the frenzy of the rush, we can suddenly make the choices that paralyzed us earlier. How many term papers were written that way, how many exams passed, how many guestrooms and bathrooms and patios renovated for guests about to arrive? Being out of time has always forced people into action, but those of us with ADHD have a whole personal history to remind us how we get by.

MORE STRATEGIES TO DEFEAT PROCRASTINATION

Here are some more strategies to try—but be sure to add your own personal touches to suit your own personal circumstances.

Co-coach your way forward.

Find someone who has similar goals, and work out a co-coaching relationship. Both of you, however, must be willing to do the following:
• Set up mutual goals and guidelines for the relationship.
• Be sure the co-coaching includes only what is appropriate. If it’s about work, stick to work issues.
• Be consistent in your contact with your coaching partner.
• Be honest and open to suggestions, and trust your coaching partner to have your best interests in mind.

Use a witness.

Clients often benefit from the mere presence of someone to help them start or complete a task. This seems to work well with tasks that have been put off for a long while or that are emotionally charged, such as doing the income taxes or clearing the house of clutter. Many of my clients don’t need the person to help them with the actual task. Just making the appointment and having them show up to sit in the same room with them is enough!

Use a model.

If you are asked to write a report or do a project and are stuck, get a sample or a model to work from. This will help you see the end product so you’ll know what is expected of you. It is a tangible way of having your goal in sight.

Match peak performance with priority projects.

Do you know your “peak performance” time of day? When do you get the most work done? When are you the most focused?

Know whether you’re a “morning,” an “afternoon,” or an “evening” person, and be sure to have your most important project in front of you at your best time. If you don’t, you’re apt to do a task of lesser importance, and exhaust your energy that way. I’ve had clients who were “morning” people but who ended up re-grouting their showers or balancing their checkbook during peak performance time. One devised a computer program that he wanted to market to banks, all the while putting his actual job in jeopardy.

You become the first thing you do in the morning.

A well-known author and friend of mine once said to me, “You become the very first thing you do in the morning,” meaning that if you do the thing that is most important to your career each morning, first thing, and if you make doing this a habit, you’ll be successful.

Take this advice to heart, as I did. It definitely worked for me when writing my book, and it has worked for many of my clients. It will work for you!

Make actions concrete.

Goals and plans are only wishes unless you establish a “when” for each individual step and action. Be specific on the breakdown of the steps you plan to take and the times you plan to do each one. Set a clear time and day for the completion of each.

Always have a back-up plan.

It’s typical for my clients to sabotage their first set of plans and then to give up completely. Don’t let that happen! When you mark out a schedule with start times and days to begin working on the project, set up several back-up times so you can’t escape starting work. For example, set a start time/day of Tuesday 11AM with a back up of Tuesday 2PM, and then the DO-OR-DIE start time/day of Tuesday 4PM.

Share your goals!

Tell someone about your goals for the day. Sharing what you want to do helps in making it happen! Accountability can create the necessary motivation, and help you to be more consistent.

Understand why you "circle the airport."

Some of my clients describe their tendency to avoid long-term projects as “circling the airport.” They know what they need to do, and they understand the importance of starting, but they just can’t seem to “land.” What ensues is a cycle of self-loathing that perpetuates the “circling.”

Understand what this is about. For some, it’s an issue of not knowing where to start. For others, it’s an issue of dreading what it will take to get the task completed—hours, if not days, of making up for having put it off. Simply knowing this can help you cut yourself off at the pass before you start to panic and circle again and again.

NEVER GIVE UP!
I end on the same note as last month. The only “best” strategies to defeat procrastination are the ones that work for you as an individual. The most effective strategies will probably be the ones you create on your own. Only a process of trial and error will reveal what works for you. Modify and customize these strategies until they are exactly right in your own life.

Warmly,
Nancy

Procrastination and Adult ADHD

2011-04-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

Who among us doesn’t love the luxury of an occasional lazy afternoon, putting off till tomorrow what we might have done today?

We all do, of course, but when people with ADHD procrastinate, they aren’t feeling momentarily lazy or giving in to a harmless, well-earned need to unwind. Procrastinating might qualify as a justifiable indulgence or a rare, sweet choice for the majority of people without ADHD, but for those living with it, there is nothing sweet about it. It comes layered with guilt and humiliation and an intuitive sense that you are letting others down.
For adults with ADHD, procrastination is a significant problem with a biological base, not an occasional reward for serious and consistent work or the result of a mood swing. And while you can learn to compensate for it, you can never change the biology in which your procrastination is rooted.

If you struggle with procrastination, you may find that working with an ADHD coach will help you to overcome this self-defeating behavior. Self-coaching with strategies that have helped others may also help you take control of your time, tasks, and talents. Try any of the following strategies as a start. Through trial and error, my clients and I have created all kinds of strategies, some of which might also give you ideas. Add your own personal touches to suit your own personal circumstances. Once the strategies begin to work, you can practice, practice, practice until they become new habits, a part of your brain's "machinery."

Keep the goal in mind.

One of the hardest struggles for my clients is keeping their goals in mind. If you can’t see your goals, you’ll be more likely to get off track. Devise methods to keep the goal in mind, and to see, and track, progress. Mark your goals with colored markers on a monthly calendar and post it where you will see it throughout the day, in the kitchen, perhaps, or over your workstation or desk.

Separate the set-up from the task.

Eliminate the confused feeling of “Where do I start?” by separating the set-up from the actual task. For example, place a blank word document with the title “Year End Report” on your computer desktop, but don’t start the report until later. You can do the same for paying bills by stamping and addressing envelopes at one time, but writing the checks and mailing them later. Doing the set-up as a separate task can make the task less daunting.

Establish and meet the minimal goal.

Start by defining the smallest possible goal that will accomplish something meaningful on the project or task. Call this the “minimal” goal and schedule a time to complete it. At the scheduled time, do only what you stated as minimal, even if it’s simply opening up a file and looking at the project for 10 minutes! That’s what I mean by minimal! This allows you to approach a tiny aspect of the project without becoming overwhelmed.

Limit time spent on making plans.

Do you tend to spend hours making detailed plans with the best of intentions, but never seem to get around to implementing them? Set a timer for 10 minutes, and allow yourself to write down only the basic things you need to do, not every single detail. Work on daily goals rather than scheduling every single minute. Then get moving!

Use rewards as good stress.

Most of my clients work well under pressure, so try to use this insight in a positive way. Set a lunch or dinner date with a friend, or plan to go to a movie. Tell your friend you can’t go until you’ve finished three hours of work on your project, or until you’ve cleaned your house, for example, and say that if you don’t finish, you must cancel. This is not meant to be a punitive exercise, but one to fire you up to get the work done.

Create false deadlines.

If you’re avoiding starting a long-term project, find someone you respect (and fear a little!) and set several mini-deadlines for handing in parts of the work. It can be your supervisor, boss, or a trusted advisor. For example, tell them, “I’ll turn in a draft of the first part of the report by next week.”

Many times this false deadline can stimulate you enough to get the work done. This strategy needs to be used carefully because it’s meant to create positive energy, not make you more stressed, so be realistic and don’t over-promise!

Beware of "productive procrastination."

A majority of my clients fool themselves into thinking they’re being productive by getting other projects of lesser importance off their plates first. Generally speaking, they can be incredibly productive doing everything BUT what they are supposed to be doing!

Beware! You are fooling yourself! Understand that much of this has to do with a sense of immediate gratification! See it for what it is. Use those small projects as rewards for actually working on your most immediate priority.

Remember the pain of the past.

A typical pattern my clients fall into is saying to themselves, “Let me clear my desk of other work first, then carve out time over the weekend for project X,” when history dictates that every time they do this, they put X off until the night before it’s due. This tactic might have worked in high school, but you know it’s not serving you anymore. Know that your brain will fool you in the moment and convince you that this time you’ll actually accomplish it. Ask others around you to remind you of the pain of the past. It’s one way you can stop this self-destructive cycle.

Create “safe” high stakes for yourself.

People with ADHD often wait until they’ve boxed themselves into the corner before they finally start a project. I know this about myself, so I’ve used the knowledge to my advantage. I take my laptop computer and drive to a parking lot or to a park bench. I turn on my computer and basically play a game of chicken with myself. I sit there staring at the battery drain, and without fail, when it hits 73%, my brain kicks in and I start to write like a maniac until the battery drains. Then I head home. Doing this always guarantees me roughly two hours of writing.

Keep daily lists.

Keep it simple in the beginning. Start the day by writing down your primary goal. At the end of the day, list as many things as you remember doing that day, and put a check next to each one that was connected to your goal. It will give you a clear picture of the relationship of your goals to your actions. It will also show you the kinds of things that pull you off course, so you can learn to identify barriers.

It bears repeating that the only “best” strategies are the ones that work for you individually, so the strategies that are most effective will probably be the ones you create on your own. If something seems “almost there,” modify it until it’s exactly right in your own life. And don’t forget that trial and error will reveal what’s best—which means don’t give up!

Warmly,

Nancy

Tips for Daily Self-Management

2011-03-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

For me, trying to self-manage and get through a day with ADHD is equivalent to corralling a herd of wild stallions. I have to remain vigilant at ALL times. I have to remind myself that I have ADHD, self-observe, and use what I call my “survival” strategies. If I don’t, I’ll be left to my own devices—racing across the savannah headed who knows where!

Over the years I’ve learned that these strategies form the foundation that keeps me tethered and allows me to accomplish my goals for each day.

Stay focused—PARK IT!

To combat the racing thoughts that come with ADHD, create a method to “park” them. This could be texting or emailing reminders to yourself, using recording devices, or jotting them down on paper. My preferred method is paper. I keep paper everywhere—in my car, purse, kitchen, bedroom, office, bathroom, on the stairs, by the front door, the garage door. Even when I exercise, I carry paper and pen. By parking it, I won’t forget the thought, obsess about forgetting, or act on it—I’ve parked it and can act on it later!

Keep the day manageable

My motto is, “If your daily list/goals gets bigger than a post-it, you have too much on your plate.” And my post-its are the three-inch by three-inch ones (not the three feet by five feet flipchart-sized post-its).

Visualize yourself in time and space

At the beginning of each year, I print out the next twelve months—one month per sheet. I post them across the wall and fill in ONLY “big ticket” items such as conferences, vacations, or anything out of my regular routine, doctor appointments, visitors, and so forth. As each month goes by, I draw a huge ‘X” through it. This way I can conceptualize time passing, the future and events to come.

Smooth out transitions

Transitions are the bane of my existence. If I do not know what is coming up next I become anxious, panic and at times end up becoming paralyzed. To prevent this, I do the following:

• As far in advance as possible I collect, organize and set out everything I need ahead of time for projects, trips, or getting in the car to do errands.
• I then post notes, such as: “Nancy, remember, conference in 2 weeks!” or “Go to bank at 3 pm!”

Keep perspective

Anyone who has ADHD knows that life can be like a rollercoaster ride—there are ups and there are downs. The problem is we can become very myopic and convince ourselves during the down times that things will never get better. I’ve learned to appoint two to three trusted, longtime friends who know me well to give me a reality check. They remind me I have ADHD, that I tend to think catastrophically, that I tend to forget the positive things, and that within a few hours or by the next day I will have forgotten about it and be “back to normal.”

Manage meals

Set the table the night before. Pre-prepare any ingredients ahead of time—chop any vegetables ahead of time and put them in plastic baggies so all you have to do is throw them in the mix.

Remember to take things to the car when running errands—including your to-do list!

Tape or clip your car keys to whatever it is! Packages, letters, to-do lists, dry cleaning, and so forth.

Manage finances

Use one, and only one, credit card to charge everything, and ONLY do online paperless bills and banking.

Keep track of important things

I always tell someone else where I've hidden a spare key or put an important document. History demonstrates that I'll always forget, no matter how important it is. I also photocopy of all contents of my wallet, in case I ever lose it.

Organize papers

Don't sweat the small stuff! I clump things in categories. Any similar projects get clumped together. Conferences, bills, client work, health, office equipment, etc., get filed into a file cabinet and ONLY "active" projects stay on my desktop, either in wire baskets or expandable flex file folders so I can carry them around with me and work on them in different places.

I hope you’ll find these tips helpful. Until next month,

Warmly,

Nancy

Change Takes Time

2011-01-25T14:20:00.000-08:00

I think New Year’s resolutions are a bad idea, a total set-up for failure for people with ADHD. There never is such a thing as turning a new leaf just like that.

“It’s funny how clear things are becoming since we started this coaching,” a client once told me. “I can see now that I’ve always had a remarkable unconscious repertoire of behaviors to accommodate for the problems in my personal and professional life. None of them have been particularly healthy, and most of them are downright self-defeating. Mainly, I had to make sure people held me in impossibly high regard, but would fondly excuse me from any concrete expectations.”

And then he added an observation so rich in insight that it can affect your self-coaching journey, as well: “Only because I’ve slowed down enough to think about what I’d been doing—to reflect—can I see this. And I think taking the necessary time has been the real difference in making the changes I listed as my goals way back when we started. I know everything in life seems ridiculously fast-paced, but I still wonder why so few people understand the concept of time when it comes to change.”

What he was referring to is the incontrovertible truth about changing your life. As you self-coach, you cannot judge a strategy’s success or failure after one or two attempts at implementing it. You have to take time to let it work, and you have to take time to evaluate whether it’s working. The symptoms of your ADHD and the goals you hope to accomplish might be vastly different from my client’s, but the responsibility of evaluating your progress belongs to both of you.

Coaching, remember, is a process, and the changes you seek don’t happen instantly, but incrementally over time, sometimes a very long time. Because success requires commitment, and because the strategies you design are as individual as your individual needs, trial and error is an inherent, and time-dependent, part of the process. As you self-initiate change, you have to evaluate constantly whether the strategies and structures you’ve created serve your goals. If you’re heading steadily toward where you eventually want to be, then your strategy is apparently a good one and you can continue to leave it in place. But if you’re falling behind or slipping off course, you’ll have to make a correction.

Evaluate your plan

That’s what evaluating means: Judging or appraising the success of your plan and strategy, and acting, or reacting, accordingly.

Sometimes modifying a plan is easier said than done for individuals with ADHD, not because they can’t think of another strategy, but because they haven’t taken the time to analyze what is wrong, and right, with the original one. One of my clients, for example, knew how quickly she would become impatient when she didn’t get immediate results. “I could feel myself getting in a panic or a frenzy,” she told me, “and I’d wind up just ditching the entire plan. I never knew how to look at individual parts of it, so I never really knew which parts might be working and which parts weren’t. I’d get so frustrated that I’d just give up on everything.”

Through coaching, she understood the importance of acknowledging her history of impatience in order to counteract it. In her notebook, she began to track her progress with the plan on which she was currently working, addressing specific structures within it. By slowing down to analyze discrete elements of her plan, she could evaluate each separately and then make the necessary changes, rather than give up entirely on what might, with a few adjustments, have been workable and successful.

The following questions can help you assess your progress:

• What is working in my plan? Try to identify specific progress using this strategy, such as specific actions you’re now taking.
• Why is it working? If you can identify why it works, you can use the information in creating other strategies.
• What measures or system can I use to track my progress?
• If something is not working, what about it isn’t? Can you isolate one thing that isn’t?
• What can I do about it? Have you perhaps selected the wrong day to pay your bills? A simple change could make all the difference for you!
• When will I do it? A goal must have a specific start date, or it is merely a wish. Set a date to begin!
• What is my commitment level? On a scale of 1, lowest, to 5, highest, rank your commitment. Remember that it has to be high if you’re going to succeed!
• How can I remember my commitment to my goal? How can you engineer your environment to help you? What visual or auditory cues can you use?

Keeping track of your progress and adjusting your strategy along the way are essential to success, so go back to these questions regularly. But precisely how often you must re-evaluate your plan is impossible to answer, for just as there is no one-size-fits-all strategy, neither is there a one-size-fits-all timeline.

If you have ADHD, your biology complicates your life. Remembering your goal for the future—whether it’s the next ten minutes, hours, days, or months—can be affected. So can remembering the pain of past behaviors and patterns. Short-term goals are always best, and you have to make sure the goals or resolutions you choose are ones you truly want and ones that are meaningful to you.

We need to always have a plan, a goal, a vision, a path, a place toward which we are moving. We need to see the steps and see where we are in space and time. That means posting a calendar with important deadlines and dates so we can see them in the context of the day, week, month and year. And we need to post the calendar somewhere where we will see it all the time. Some people even cross out each day as it passes to see time "encroaching" on their goals and deadlines.

But remember, at times, we can plan, plan, plan—and get completely caught up in planning. Or become rigid, committed to the plan and not the process. Life is a process, and it unfolds in mysterious ways. As a very close friend once told me, there is no script for life—always make room for and expect the unexpected.

Warmly,

Nancy

And To All—A Good Night’s Sleep!

2010-12-15T10:30:00.000-08:00

Personal health is often a low priority for people with ADHD. Lack of organizational skills and an inability to prioritize make it difficult to establish and maintain the structures and routines needed to sustain good health habits. Because staying healthy has a positive effect on everyone—especially people with ADHD—it needs to be a goal, and strategies for achieving and sustaining a healthy lifestyle need to be incorporated into your life.

But even if you’re determined to live a healthy lifestyle, along come the holidays to interfere with established routines. For many people, it becomes even more difficult to keep up with things like getting enough sleep, exercising and eating regularly, eating healthy foods, taking medications regularly, and keeping up on personal hygiene.

Sleep can become especially challenging during this busy and sometimes overly exciting time of year. But it’s estimated that up to 80 percent of people with ADHD experience sleep problems anyway, even when it’s not the holiday season. You can find a lot more information on this subject in the article by Gina Pera, “ADHD Never Sleeps, But Children and Adults with ADHD Can,” in the December 2010 issue of CHADD’s Attention magazine.

Here are a few strategies I recommend to my clients that can help at any time of year. You may find them particularly helpful now when there’s even more temptation to burn that midnight oil.

Create (and stick to) wind-up and wind-down routines.

Waking up on time hinges on going to bed on time and getting a good night’s rest. Set routines to help you “wind up” in the morning and “wind down” at night. They can consist of anything from showering and watching the nightly news each night, or having coffee and reading the paper each morning. The idea is to ritualize the routines you have created around getting up and going to bed.

Wake up and go to bed at set times.

Establishing consistent times for sleeping and waking really works! Don’t keep irregular hours, even on the weekends—especially during the holidays. Wake up and go to bed at the same time each day. This will increase the quality of your sleep by letting your body enter into a rhythm, and help to de-stress you by knowing when your day starts and ends. Not everyone requires the same amount of sleep, but consistency is the key, so establish a routine and stick to it.

Know what your traps are.

Problems with transitions can contribute to the struggle of going to bed and waking up. Because people with ADHD struggle with ending one activity and starting another, it’s important for you to know your traps and be vigilant in avoiding them. If you know that talking on the phone, watching TV, or checking e-mail keeps you up past your bedtime, post signs reminding you to stick to your schedule. For example, don’t allow yourself to go on the computer or answer the phone past nine o'clock at night. Ask for help from those around you so they know not to distract you from your goal. I had one client who knew he would sit and read for hours in his home office, losing track of time, so he bought light timers and set them to turn off all the lights in his office, jolting him into closing his book and going to bed.

Set a bedtime alarm.

Use a wristwatch with an alarm or set an alarm clock in your home to go off one hour before bedtime so you have time to get ready.

Have a system for waking up and staying up.

Always have a back-up system—use three alarms if necessary! Set one in the bedroom, one in the bathroom, and one in the kitchen. If you turn off the one by your bed, you’ll still have the other two ringing, forcing you to get up and turn them off. Or switch off with a friend, calling each another in the morning, and commit to it. The buddy system works.

Other strategies some of my clients use involve their senses: pre-setting their coffeemaker to go off so the aroma can reach them, or purchasing alarm clocks with dawn lights that gradually fill the room with bright light. Some even sleep with their shades open so the morning light will wake them up.

Whether you're trying to stay on a healthy track this season, or just beginning to recognize how good health habits improve your ability to manage ADHD, I hope you'll find these strategies helpful. Here's to healthy and happy holidays!

Warmly,
Nancy

Part Two: More Strategies for Maintaining Spiritual and Mental Wellness

2010-10-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

Ever notice what happens when you don’t adhere to personal boundaries, curb impulsivity, or keep emotions and negative tapes in check? If you, like many people affected by ADHD, face challenges in these areas, you may find it difficult to maintain spiritual and mental wellness. When you give support to your internal life, you improve your “external” life as well. This month I will share seven more strategies that can help you maintain your “inner” health.

1. Hold yourself back. Learn to say NO!

The word “yes” flies out of our mouths way too often, and we end up over-committing and stretching ourselves way too thin. Each day, say “no” to something, no matter how big or small, so you get comfortable saying it. Create a variety of dialogues that will help you hold yourself back from various situations. For instance, if your friend or colleague asks you to make plans for the upcoming weekend, say, “I’d like to give this some more thought before I commit. Can you check back with me tomorrow?”

2. Keep perspective. Be comfortable in the grey zone.

In times of crisis or stress, your sense of clarity can be skewed and the desire to make things “black or white” can be very compelling. Be sure to be flexible with yourself and others. Allow yourself time to be in the “grey zone,” especially if there is a crisis that is out of your control, like a death or divorce. Recovery can’t be forced, so let your emotion run its course. In time, the fog will lift, and your energy and clarity will return.

3. Journal your emotions.

If you frequently deal with “runaway emotions” or “negative tapes,” you probably get locked onto thoughts or issues, unable to let go. By keeping a problem-solving log, you can defuse emotions by distinguishing what they are and what they are associated with. Write in the log whenever your emotions are preventing you from moving forward. The log can lead you through a series of questions that you ask yourself, such as, “What specific situation triggered my sadness?” “What specific action did I take in the situation?” “What could I have done differently?” “What specific action can I take now?” Answering questions like these can help you step back, see the issue in perspective, and recognize that you have the power to deal with it. This helps you let go of the feelings you are overwhelmed by, gain a new perspective, and move on.

4. Plan in advance for potential emotional upheavals.

To help prevent or minimize emotional upheavals, make detailed plans for any times you find potentially volatile, such as holidays or unstructured time. Write out or go over dialogues in your head of what you will say in particular situations and how you will say it. Have an “escape” plan. For example, I have a client who gets in her car and goes to sit in a parking lot for a little while to take a break from the traditional Christmas Day celebration with her extended family each year. She returns renewed and more able to participate in the holiday festivities.

5. Create a history and future for yourself.

Keep a journal of past accomplishments, future goals, and plans. Review it regularly. Typically, individuals with ADHD live in the moment, which lends itself to a host of problems: not thinking of consequences before acting on thoughts; forgetting past accomplishments as well as past failures; not thinking of the impact of current choices on a future goal, even a short-term one. The feeling of being perpetually trapped in the present can often lead to feelings of emptiness and lack of direction. Having a list of past accomplishments can help to shift your focus to the success you’ve already achieved. It can also encourage you to believe that you can succeed again and achieve what you set out to do!

6. Beware of let-downs after completing big projects or accomplishments.

Many of my clients immediately go into a depression after they complete a large project. All of a sudden the pressure is off and nothing seems exciting or relevant. Know this can happen, and put a plan in place to compensate for the downtime. For example, immediately after I completed the Boston Marathon, I couldn’t escape the sense of “I haven’t done anything with my life; I’m a total loser.” To counter this, I put together a photo album of the marathon and started sharing my recent “win” with everyone so it would stay alive in my mind and help me remember that I wasn’t a “loser.”

7. Take a daily inventory.

Take time each day to reflect on your life and how you are living it. What do you want to change? What will it take? What are you willing to give up to get there? How were you of service today? How can you live a more purposeful life? Asking yourself these questions at the end of each day will help you focus on the things you can and cannot change in your life. That way you can begin to focus more on the positive instead of the negative.

These strategies and the ones I wrote about last month have made a difference for many of my clients who cope with ADHD. If one doesn’t work for you, try another. The key is to find something that helps you keep yourself in balance, use it for as long as it works, and try something new when you need to.

Warmly,

Nancy

Maintaining Spiritual and Mental Wellness - Seven Strategies

2010-09-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Maintaining a healthy mental or spiritual life is contingent upon balancing work with play, taking time for yourself, and giving back to the community. Failure to adhere to personal boundaries, to keep emotions and negative tapes in check, and to curb impulsivity can contribute to diminished spiritual and mental wellness. When you give support to your internal life, your external life will also be better. Here are seven strategies:

1. End the shame and blame.

The only way to stop blaming yourself for your ADHD is to learn as much as you can about it. If you can understand the neurobiological roots of ADHD, you will be better able to separate yourself from the disability and do something about it. The way to end the shame and to start to build self-esteem and move forward is to make friends with your brain and develop strategies to bridge gaps in performance.

2. Make a date with yourself.

Block out “sacred time” weekly to rejuvenate. Don’t allow anything to creep into this space. For example, if you’ve decided to use this time to read and relax, don’t allow yourself to clean your house instead because you have a day off. To help put boundaries around this sacred space, make a list of what is permitted in that space and time, and what is not. Post it! Review it and practice sticking to it!

3. When you say yes, you also mean no.

Often, we don’t think of the consequences of saying “yes.” Stop and think before committing. When you say “yes” to something, what are you saying “no” to? For example, if you say “yes” to doing an extra project at work or helping a friend move on a Saturday, are you saying “no” to spending more time with your family or to taking time to exercise? What are you saying “yes” to in your life? What are you saying “no” to? What is it costing you? Try to ensure that “yes” adds something to your life.

4. Identify your energy rhythms.

People with ADHD are often unaware of when their bodies are worn down. It’s important to learn not only what types of projects create energy for you, but also which ones drain energy. That way you can plan the most demanding activities during your peak energy times, as well as gauge when to stop working on a project and rest.

Keep a calendar or a log of your energy rhythms for a period of several weeks. This works best if the system is simple. For example, use a scale of plus or minus signs to depict high or low energy times, and write them beside different activities logged in a daily calendar.

5. Pre-plan for bad brain days.

Can’t concentrate? Distracted? My clients call this a “bad brain day.” For these days it’s important not to push yourself too hard and to have a failsafe plan in mind by knowing what works for you. Take a break and walk around the block, have a cup of tea, or call a friend. Then get back to work. One of my clients says he gives himself a “time out” by going to a café near work to just “sit and chill” for an hour. The key is to know when these days hit and take action by doing what works for you.

6. Practice relaxation exercises.

People with ADHD often live in a state of constant stress. It’s important to learn how to slow down and de-stress, both mentally and physically, at any given moment. Learn relaxation techniques and methods to center yourself at any given moment. Practice slow breathing techniques, or join a yoga or meditation class. If you are spiritual, make daily prayers a priority.

7. Give thanks.

One of my clients has made a habit of ending each day by writing down one thing for which she’s grateful. She does this right before bed each night as a way of reflecting on the day she’s just lived through, and a way of de-stressing before sleep. I’ve tried it, and I agree with her. It’s amazing how you can learn to accentuate the positive!

What do you do to keep yourself in balance? More strategies to come next month!

Warmly,

Nancy

Eight Strategies to Help You Get Moving

2010-08-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

For many of us with ADHD, personal health is often a low priority. Lack of organizational skills and an inability to prioritize make it difficult to establish, implement, and maintain the necessary structures and routines to sustain good health habits over time. Things that seem simple for others—like getting enough physical exercise—become monumental tasks.

But exercise has such a positive effect on people with ADHD! Here are eight strategies that have helped me and many of the people I coach.

1. Do it for your brain’s sake! Knowing that exercise is good for your body is only half the story. Growing evidence shows the benefits of exercise to your brain. It’s simply foolhardy NOT to exercise these days with the amount of stress we endure, with or without ADHD. Forget about looking good. Make your goal feeling good!

2. Make it doable. All too often we set ourselves up for failure with goals that are way out of reach. If your goal is to exercise for one hour a day, seven days a week, don’t expect to fulfill that goal immediately. This “all or nothing” approach is a recipe for discouragement and failure. Be realistic and start slowly. The key is making the goal attainable, and to be able to do it on a regular basic.

3. Set a minimum and a maximum goal. Identify the absolute minimum you would require of yourself—say jogging one time per week. Next, identify the most realistic number of times per week you could jog, a number that you could reach without too much stress—say three times per week. Your exercise goal would then be jogging once a week, minimum, and three times a week, maximum. You’ll most likely meet your minimal weekly goal or even exceed the maximum goal. What a great feeling it is to exceed your personal goal!

4. Create accountability through partnerships. If you know that working in partnership works for you, and that doing things on your own doesn't, invest in a personal trainer. If you’re unable to do that, find other ways of accountability, like joining a running group or asking a friend who is a dedicated exerciser to join a class or gym with you. It’s sometimes harder to disappoint others than it is to disappoint ourselves.

5. Be prepared at all times. If you tend to skip exercising because of forgetting your gym bag, keep an extra one packed with exercise gear in the car and at your office, one that is always ready to go when you are. A personal favorite of mine is to sleep in my (clean) exercise clothes. When I wake up, I can’t escape remembering what I was going to do that morning—EXERCISE! I have my clothes on and I’m ready to go!

6. Keep a scorecard. Because the ADHD brain lives in the present, it’s easy to forget past accomplishments, even if they’re only a few days old. To combat this, make progress measurable by creating ways to track your progress. On the five days each week that he runs, for example, one of my clients writes on his calendar in black magic marker the number of miles he completes. Or you can use your calendar as a “scorecard.” Mark an "E-Y" (“Exercise-Yes”) on the days you exercise and an "E-N" (“Exercise-No”) on the days you don’t. The point is to see your progress and monitor whether or not you’re reaching your weekly and monthly goals. Essentially, you’re charting your own personal history of successes. The key is to make your tracking system visible and simple.

7. Adopt a “no excuses” attitude. Consider the time you have to exercise as an appointment with yourself and do not break it. When you travel, call ahead and find out the hours of the hotel gym. If you catch yourself negotiating with yourself about whether or not to exercise, stop and simply walk out the door to the gym. Even if you go for ten minutes, that’s a win.

8. Create flexible structures. I use a system of “structured flexibility” when it comes to exercise. It’s simple. I make sure I never miss more than two days in a row without exercising. I MUST go on that third day, no matter what. This guarantees me flexibility as well as exercising a minimum of two to three times per week without fail.

I hope these strategies will help you, too. If you have learned other strategies that work for you, please share them with the rest of us!

Warmly,
Nancy

Working Together When a Spouse or Partner Has ADHD

2010-07-13T08:26:00.000-07:00

Does ADHD—your own or your partner's—impact your loving relationship with that person?

Tomorrow I will participate in an online Ask the Expert chat on the difficulties couples face when one or both of them have ADHD. I'll also offer strategies that can help improve the difficulties couples face when one or both of them have ADHD. The chat begins at 3 PM Eastern Standard Time and it's sponsored by CHADD and the National Resource Center on ADHD. To join, click here at about 2:45 and follow the instructions.

This short selection from my book, The Disorganized Mind, describes some of the things I've heard from clients.

Brad ran through a litany of his wife’s ADHD behavior when I asked him what living with her was like. “I have to prepare myself every time I walk in the house,” he said immediately. “It’s a perpetual soap opera. Will she be in tears because she hates herself today? Will she be laughing with a new best friend she just met at the market and dragged home? Will she even be home? Will there be smoke billowing from the kitchen from the latest dinner she’s burned? Will there even be dinner?” He often felt worn down by the patience her unpredictability required. “It’s hard not to lose it with her sometimes,” he said, “if you know what I mean.”

I do know. I’ve heard variations of his comments so often that I can almost write the script for them. “I communicate with him mostly by e-mail,” was how the wife of one client put it. “I’ve given up on expecting him to sit and have a conversation with me. He just gets up and walks out of the room. I swear I see his back more than his face!”

Even children weigh in on their parents’ ADHD. “I can understand how my parents got divorced,” one teenager told me, “but not how they got married in the first place. My dad is so normal but my mom is really crazy.” He was talking about his mother’s impulsive, distracted behavior, the way “she forgets things all the time, like me, even,” and the toll it had taken on the entire family.

Things don’t have to become intolerable. Families can learn to function, and function happily. Family members, like the individuals with ADHD themselves, can educate themselves and create strategies for coping. In many ways, it comes down to understanding and to expectations.

Even though they can appear self-absorbed and can definitely be exasperating to others, I have yet to meet anyone with ADHD who wants it that way. My clients haven’t wanted to use their ADHD as an excuse for inexcusable behavior, either. What they want is a way to work through the problems that their ADHD causes. They want family members to be there with them, everyone helping in whatever way possible to make the family unit strong. But just as families of those with physical diseases or addictions need advice and support from others in similar circumstances, people living with partners with ADHD also need to know how others cope.

Does any of this sound familiar? Has coaching helped? What strategies did you find helpful? Please share your stories!

Warmly,

Nancy

Getting There from Here: Easing Transitions with ADHD

2010-06-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

A large part of my coaching is to help people identify their ADHD challenges and devise strategies to meet them. In order to do this, I explore the reasons why each person gets stuck. I have found that what appears to be procrastination or distraction may actually be a problem with making smooth transitions. The cues that it might be transition trouble is when my client says, “I get stressed and overwhelmed when I have to stop one task and move to the next” or “I can never seem to make it anywhere on time without having a meltdown in the process.”

Transitions require the brain to shift its focus and attention. The ADHD brain often overreacts to this discontinuity by going into a “startle” state, making the person anxious and stressed. Since I was young, I too have struggled with transitions, especially those that require me to travel. So I identified with Judy’s story when she came to me for help.

Judy loved her job, except when she had to travel. The thought of having to pack brought on panic attacks. She found it hard deciding what to take with her on a trip. She stayed up all night packing and repacking, a routine that repeated itself before each trip. Judy was so frazzled and exhausted with each transition that her performance at work suffered.

Through coaching, we developed some strategies to help make travel easier for her. First, we posted a calendar and wrote out her travel schedule so she could prepare her mind for the trip. By seeing when her next trip was, she was able to visualize the process and plan ahead. She developed a routine of putting the suitcase in the middle of her bedroom three days before each trip, which forced her to start packing. She also purchased a second set of toiletries and identified a standard set of “travel clothes,” so she didn’t have to make last-minute decisions about her wardrobe.

Timeliness was also a hurdle for Judy. She found it hard to go from one environment to another. She continually arrived late to work and became disorganized and anxious when leaving her office to attend meetings. Judy also found it hard to pull herself away from a task at the end of the day, fearful that if she stopped working on it, she would never “get her head back into the project.”

Her trouble with transitions was pervasive, and it was also affecting her home life. Her husband was tired of her not being home for dinner and not participating in making plans for the weekends.

The antidote for transition troubles is to first identify the struggle, understand the underlying ADHD causes, and develop strategies to minimize the brain’s startle response. Strategies for making smoother transitions focus on making the transition more gradual and lessening the panic. Many of my clients have adapted the following strategies to their particular needs:

Recognize the problem

Know that you struggle with transitions, and take time to determine the causes of it. Whether it’s difficulty going from work to home, or adjusting to guests in the house, there are always ways to make life more manageable. Develop strategies to make your life, and the lives of those around you, less stressful.

Use the Power of Visualization

When making transitions, no matter how big or small, do “dry runs” in your head. Visualize every detail you can in making the transition. Sketch out times for ending each activity and starting the next. You need not follow the times exactly, but have an idea of when you will need to be switching gears. Visualize each action in as much detail as possible. See yourself moving from one activity to the next.

Learn to Let Go

To transition successfully from one project to another, you need to learn to “let go” of the first and move on to the next. Many of my clients are perfectionists when it’s time to move on to another project, and they find it hard to wrap up what they’ve been doing. If you do this, set a specific stop time, then allow yourself 15 more minutes. No more! You can go back to the first project later, but the idea is to keep moving forward.

Plan Ahead

Always plan out the next day before going to bed. This way you’ll have in your mind what you are going to do, when, and how. You will wake up more directed and centered.

In order to have smoother transitions, you must be able to see beyond the moment. I even suggest to clients to sketch out detailed plans for three days at a time. This can help you (1) see more clearly what is coming up and (2) identify priority items. Remove items from your schedule that can wait, and adjust accordingly when “unexpected” things crop up.

Create a “Wind-Down” Routine for Transitions

This strategy is particularly useful for those who have assistants. Ask your assistant to call you two hours before your scheduled meeting. Have him or her call again an hour and a half before, and then an hour before, telling you exactly how long you have until the meeting.

If you don’t have an assistant, use a stopwatch and set “wind down” goals for each time juncture. For example, two hours before your meeting, start wrapping up whatever you’re working on; an hour and a half before, prepare your files for the meeting; an hour before, finish everything you need for the meeting. If necessary, write out this plan on paper with designated times, and check off each step as it comes up.

Separate the set-up from the task

If you are having difficulty approaching a project, your coach can help you learn to set up for the task before actually beginning it. Set-up is usually brief--10 minutes or less—and is done as a separate activity in advance--the night before or before a break which precedes beginning the actual task. This helps eliminate the confused feeling of “Where do I start?” For example, the set-up for cleaning your desk might be setting out file folders and putting them next to the desk; the set-up for ironing is getting out the ironing board and laying out the clothes to be ironed. Doing the set-up as a separate task can break through the grip of procrastination, giving you the mind-set of being ready to begin. This strategy can be very effective if you are facing a particularly anxiety-provoking task.

Make it a routine

Turn tedious chores into a routine. Lay out your clothes for the next day the night before. Make sure your presentation for tomorrow’s meeting is saved on your laptop. The little things you do today, pay off tomorrow.

Stay a step ahead of yourself

Know your tendencies. Do you find yourself checking your e-mail five minutes before you have to leave the office—and winding up returning 20 e-mails you should have left for the next morning? Shutting down your computer a half hour before you plan to leave might solve the problem. Recognize what gets you in trouble, and find preventative strategies to bail you out.

By understanding that her challenges with transitions was due to her ADHD, Judy was able to identify the situations that triggered problems and devise practical solutions to help her move more smoothly through her day.

Nancy A. Ratey, Ed.M., MCC is a strategic life coach specializing in coaching professionals with ADHD. Nancy lives in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

2010-05-10T16:01:00.000-07:00

Stress Less! Coaching Tips to Turn AD/HD Chaos to Calm

In our fast-paced world, we all experience stress and find our own ways to minimize it. For a person with ADHD, normal daily stress becomes debilitating. This is mostly due to the way the ADHD brain is wired. Because our brains have a faulty attention system, they are unable to slow down, block out, or prioritize stimuli. What’s more, adults with ADHD, especially when it has gone undiagnosed, often have poor self-esteem. They dwell on past failures or feel as if they haven’t lived up to their potential and expectations, or those of others. This causes them to approach situations pessimistically or to avoid tasks altogether, increasing their stress levels.

So why are many people with ADHD known as “stress junkies?” In my coaching practice, I see many clients who wait until the last minute to finish a project or to leave the house for an appointment. They can’t say no, and take on too much responsibility at work or in their social life. Creating these pressure-filled situations has served them well by helping stimulate their under-aroused ADHD brain. But the repercussions can take a toll on their health, adversely impact their family life, and put their job at risk. Talk about stress!

When Janice first came to see me, she was about to lose her job: She was often late for meetings, and she wasn’t prepared once she arrived. Her stress was so high she would break out into hives and couldn’t sleep at night. She was frustrated by the fact that she couldn’t get things done unless she had a gun to her head. She admitted to me that she would have been fired a long time ago if she hadn’t been quick on her feet.

As we talked, Janice learned why she waited until the last minute—the eleventh-hour pressure stimulated her ADHD brain, enabling her to finish the job. She also recognized that she continually fooled herself into believing that “I could pull it off this time,” only to fall short again. Her brain would get stuck in the moment, causing her to forget the past consequences of her actions and her present goal of not repeating those self-defeating behaviors.

We developed a middle-ground strategy. Because Janice needs a certain amount of pressure to jump-start her brain, she set up false deadlines with her boss to help her divide projects into smaller pieces. By doing this, it was easier to chunk down the project instead of waiting until the last minute to finish the whole thing.

I have other clients whose brains don’t have “brakes.” This causes them to over-respond to everyday situations. Simple things—transitioning from one task to the next, going from work to home, packing for a vacation— result in “mini-panics.”

One of my clients, George, struggles with transitions, especially leaving the office to go home. He lives close to his job, so his commute time is short. Within minutes of arriving home, his wife, Helen, asks George to help her with the kids or to assist in another task. George, still unwinding from the pressures of the job, is overwhelmed and storms out of the house. All these arguments have put their marriage on the rocks. Helen sees George’s behavior as resistance to helping around the house. George feels guilty and demeaned.

George and I worked on solutions. He now walks home from his office, so he can decompress from his day’s work. Helen smoothes the transition by calling his cell phone or e-mailing him with things that need to get done when he arrives home. George can visualize what will be expected of him before he walks in the door. The end result? Less stress for all.

People with ADHD already spend a lot of time and energy compensating for their neurobiology, so they have less of both to combat stressors in healthy ways. This ongoing pressure from all sides can result in chronic stress, which can harm the body and brain, create hopelessness, and lead to substance abuse. A person with ADHD needs to develop appropriate strategies to manage stress. Here are some that work for my clients. Maybe they’ll work for you!

Acknowledge Your ADHD

Understand and accept that your neurobiology is different. If you don’t know how your ADHD affects you, you can’t work on ways to help yourself fend off stress.

Keep Your Brain in Shape!

Exercise! Exercise! Exercise! It’s key to peak mental performance, and to gaining focus and control! Don’t skip it, ever. Physical activity delivers lots of benefits: It can make you feel good, look good, and promote longevity. It is also good for your brain, increasing beneficial neurotransmitters and other chemicals that help the brain work at its best. If your brain is frequently overwhelmed, keeping it in shape will enable you to better handle what life throws at you.

Make Structure Your Friend

Plan out the next day before going to bed. You will wake up more directed, centered, and be better prepared for any transitions or curve balls thrown your way.

Observe Yourself

People with ADHD are not good self-observers. This often results in not knowing you are stressed and burned out until after you get sick. Be aware of your body and how you feel. Pulling all-nighters won’t help you; it will only compromise your performance.

Remain Vigilant

One of the hallmarks of ADHD is forgetting that you have the condition and thinking you don’t need strategies and structures to improve your wellbeing and combat stress. Wrong. Send reminders to yourself, post notes, and ask friends and family to reinforce the importance of using strategies. And don’t let down your guard!

Take Time to Play—Recess for the Mind!

Slot down time, play time, “you” time into your planner, just as you would a deadline for a report that is due at work. Read, eat cookies, journal, do art, sit on the floor of a bookstore and talk, change your location, cook—whatever. Do what you love without guilt. The cost benefit of not taking breaks from today’s ultra-busy lifestyle sets you up for burnout and loss of control.

Create Book Ends

Get up and go to bed at the same time each day. Establishing regular body rhythms, as well as predictability and consistency in your schedule, will help increase efficiency and reduce overwhelm and stress.

Think in Terms of Three’s

Ask yourself which three pressing items you can complete that will give you a sense of accomplishment. They do not have to be big items. Returning a phone call, filing several papers, and filling up your car with gas will do. Write them down and keep the list in front of you. Cross off each task as you complete it. Then move on to the next three items.

Stop Avoiding

A well-known author once told me, “You become the first thing you do in the morning. If you want to be a writer, write.” People in general know what they leave to last or what they are avoiding and it’s generally the most important task! Post a note by your computer asking, “What am I avoiding right now?” Then do it first. That is the first step is gaining control!

Park It

Distracted by random thoughts? Write them down on a piece of notepaper, so you can stay focused on the task at hand. You will reduce the noise in your head, and can go back to these items later. I have found that these distractions are often not priority items.

Create Boundaries

Give yourself permission to ignore “shoulds”—those imposed by other people and those imposed by you. Learn to say no. Ask yourself, “If I say yes to this, what am I saying no to?”

Try these tips and I’m sure your life will become calmer and more fulfilling.

Until next time!

Warmly, Nancy

Strategies for Those Living Without the “H” in ADHD

2010-04-13T05:38:00.000-07:00

I was excited when Nancy asked me to be the guest blogger this month to blog about inattentive ADHD. So often it is not recognized, and yet it impacts lives as much as ADHD does in general. I am pleased to be giving this topic a small amount of the attention it deserves!

I first want to make a distinction: this is not about inattention as a symptom but about predominantly inattentive ADHD. Understanding and thriving with inattentive ADHD requires its own set of strategies that overlap with strategies for the general ADHD population but depart from them as well. I write and think a lot about the inattentive experience, and while it is unique for each person, I can offer some general strategies that can help to build a center and understand this experience and create a path to thrive with it. These strategies are meant to offer a starting point to living with, and beginning to thrive with inattentive ADHD.

1. Understand that you and your experience are different from that of people “with the H” in ADHD. Many of my coaching clients have said to me that

They don’t recognize themselves in the books they have read about ADHD.

They don’t easily relate to very hyperactive people with ADHD

Hyperactive people may overwhelm them

The strategy here is to acknowledge and validate for yourself that neither are you that person people immediately spot with ADHD nor is your set of challenges the same.

Read about ADHD and compare yourself; acknowledge where you are the same or you are very different from what is described. The end result will be a much better awareness of your ADHD and how you work. Look at examples of our cultural understanding of ADHD and see how you fit and how you don’t.

Some ADHD experts and researchers have even proposed that “predominantly inattentive” ADHD be redefined as separate disorder. I am not here to argue the case one way or the other, and I certainly see overlap in the hyperactive and non-hyperactive (which I will get to some more later) but to point out that this suggests that your experience will indeed be very different from your hyperactive peers.

2. Understand that the inattentive experience is largely invisible to others.

As new as our limited understanding of (especially adult) ADHD is, our understanding of the inattentive side of things is that much newer and more limited. Just as people may not have picked you out as having ADHD because you are not hyper, and were not disruptive as a child in school, etc, etc, your experience and challenges are invisible and unfamiliar to other people. But this is not just because it is newer to our understanding; it is also because people can’t see what is going on inside your head. And often times, for the inattentive ADHDer, that is the only place ADHD is visible. Because of that, it is important that you get a good picture of what’s going on for you. That if other people don’t see it, or even don’t understand when you explain it, that you know what your ADHD looks like; know how it affects you; know when it feels like it is who you are and when it feels like it is getting in the way of who you are.

3. Know when your mind is “hyperactive” or “hypoactive.”

Since our experiences of ADHD are different and are tied into so many aspects of our lives, it is hard to pinpoint strategies (and struggles) in a nutshell. But one I often like to start with in people with inattentive ADHD is what I call the hyperactive mind (or on the flipside, the hypoactive mind).

Do your thoughts proliferate and travel along paths unfocused by you? To me this seems the parallel to physical hyperactivity. Know if this is something that happens to you. Know when and how it happens. Practice stepping back. Or does your mind go too slow, like you can’t get it going? The same self-knowledge is key. Some people report a hyperactive mental experience; some a hypoactive one; and some report both. The core here is lack of control of focus or attention (as in all ADHD) and this includes your internal experience.

As you build awareness you can build strategies to work with, prevent, and respond to what happens in your internal experience. It is only the beginning of thriving with inattentive ADHD, but it is a needed start.

Becca Colao, MA, ACT, SCAC, lives and coaches in Waltham, MA. She specializes in inattentive ADHD and regularly writes about it at http://www.thinkythink.com/. She can be contacted at becca@coachbecca.com.

Feels Like Spring! Is it time to get organized?

2010-03-09T08:43:00.000-08:00

Feels Like Spring!
Is it time to get organized?

Guest blog entry by Kathy Peterson

When I started coaching people with ADHD 15 years ago, I noticed that many of my clients struggled to get organized. I wanted to help them. Even though I have ADHD, too, getting organized is easy for me. It has been an important compensatory strategy for me in dealing with my attentional issues.

I realized that when my clients try to organize their physical environment, it is very helpful if I participate with them at their home or office. When we do this work together, my client learns organizing skills, which are best acquired by doing. After all, people with ADHD often learn best experientially.

Many people with ADHD find it hard to get and remain organized. Here’s why:

They find it hard to manage time and tasks. They often leave items out on the counter, desk or floor to remind themselves of tasks that need to be done. Over time, this can lead to a very cluttered environment.
They often multitask, which can lead to disorganization, especially in one’s office.
They often move impulsively from task to task, never finishing any of them. Chaos can follow in their wake.
Some grow up in a chaotic household, with one or both parents having ADHD and possibly substance abuse problems. They don’t know what it’s like to live in an organized environment.
They often struggle to make decisions and follow through with plans. Indecision leads to disorganization and problems with clutter.

Another barrier to getting organized is “black and white” thinking: in other words, in order to be organized, all systems have to be perfect. A person with this mindset may alphabetize cooking spices and CDs, line up shoes neatly in the closet, and divide files into precise categories. The problem is rigid systems can be hard to follow. Organizational systems need to be simple and flexible in order to work over the long haul. It is important to find a middle ground, and not to strive for perfect order.

The point of organizing your space is to have it work for you. There isn’t one right way. The space should be easy to move around in, visually pleasing (based on your tastes), and tailored to the activities that take place there. You should be able to put things away easily and to find them at a moment’s notice.

One thing you should understand: Being disorganized is not a moral failing. Organizing is a skill that is easier for some to acquire than others. The good news is you can get help to learn these skills, and employ them to meet your needs, as well as those of coworkers and family.

Many people are ashamed about being unable to deal with clutter on their own. They often feel judged by others and judge themselves harshly for their deficiencies. I feel their pain. If you want to learn the skills that will help you get organized, you may need to work with a professional organizer. A good organizer will not only help you reduce the clutter but also help you overcome your feelings of being judged.

You and the organizer are a team. As you sort through the clutter, the organizer helps you figure out which things you value and want to keep in your life. This can take many hours over several weeks. During this process, you and the professional organizer will establish new organizing systems. You will practice new ways of doing things between organizing sessions, and the organizer will check in with you on how systems are working. The organizer will also modify the systems, if they are not working.

Here’s how the organizer-client relationship works:

Step 1: As you work with an organizer, she will want to understand the following:

What is the goal? What has precipitated your desire to get organized? How do you want to use this space? Create a vision for the desired result, in terms of function and appearance.
What systems are working—and not working? Often one can’t tell by just looking at the space how functional it is. Some spaces look great when you walk in, but then you discover that things have been jammed into drawers and closet shelves to get them out of the way. The reverse can be true, too.
What factors contributed to the disorganization?
What have you done to get organized, and with what results?
What are your preferences for visual stimulation? Many people feel that if things are put away in drawers and behind closet doors that they have gone missing. For them, if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. However, leaving everything in view is often too stimulating and makes it difficult for the client to focus. Others find that a simple, calm visual environment works best for them.

Step 2: Now you and the organizer are ready to dive in and work through the clutter—papers, clothing, and objects of all kinds. You start in one room, or a small corner of one room, and sort the mess into a few broad categories: Keep, Donate, Throw Away. The organizer doesn’t push you to get rid of things at this point. You may eventually discover that you have many of the same items—10 pairs of black slacks or a dozen snow shovels—and the organizer may suggest you keep only your favorites.

It takes time to go through accumulated stuff, but client and organizer learn a lot as they do it. The team works on chunks of the project at a time, so that they can put things away in between sessions. Also, if you are ready and willing, the organizer will identify tasks you can do on your own to speed the process along and save money.

Step 3: Once you know what stuff you want to keep, you and the organizer think about function. The goal is to store things close to where they are used, making it easy to access and put them away. In some cases, you may need to purchase furniture or containers for storing items. It is best to know what you want to store, and where, before doing so.

Step 4: You and the organizer may label and/or create routines to support you in maintaining your newly organized space. Maintaining your space with the systems that have been put in place is important. During the weeks of working together with an organizer, the client practices putting things away and using systems and routines for the flow of items and information. If needed, the organizer will improve the systems and routines to help them work even better for you. An ADHD coach may help you with accountability, and you may schedule maintenance sessions with your organizer.

To get organized, your first step is to acknowledge that disorganization is causing problems, and that you are willing to work on finding solutions. There is hope. With effort on your part and by partnering with a professional organizer—possibly in combination with a coach—you can learn the skills to de-clutter your life.

ABOUT KATHY PETERSON

Kathy Peterson has been coaching adults and college students with ADHD since 1994. She also works as a professional organizer with a small number of clients. Kathy has a BS degree from Columbia University. Kathy had a successful career in corporate sales and marketing before becoming a coach. Kathy received life coach training from the Coaches Training Institute (CTI), and ADHD coach training from the National Coaching Network with Nancy Ratey and Sue Sussman, co-founders of the ADHD coaching field. She lives and works in the Boston area.
For more information visit www.petersoncoaching.com .

RESOURCES

To find a professional organizer near you, contact:

National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization (NSGCD; www.nsgcd.org)

National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO; www.napo.net )

Books to Read

ADD Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life, by Judith Kolberg and Kathleen Nadeau, Ph.D.

Conquering Chronic Disorganization, by Judith Kolberg

Jumping Jack: How Coaching Can Help Curb Impulsivity

2010-02-08T14:47:00.000-08:00

Jumping Jack: How Coaching Can Help Curb Impulsivity

Jack told his friends he left his corporate job as a salesman to start his own business, but the truth was that he was fired for swearing at his boss. This was not the first time he had done something like this. In fact, he lost several jobs for cursing or telling someone off. Although he was always seen as a valued employee for his out-of-the-box thinking, his impulsive behaviors undercut the company’s high opinion of his abilities.

Impulsivity and erratic behavior also took a toll on his personal relationships. His friends no longer invited him over for get-togethers, fearing that he would insult their spouses or say something outrageous in front of their kids. Jack’s wife was at her wit’s end. She was tired of all his excuses for losing jobs and friendships. But mostly, she was fed up with his unpredictable behavior. Jack’s litany of “I’m sorry’s” didn’t cut it for her any more.

Jack’s impulsivity affected every facet of his life—he jumped from project to project, task to task, and acted on thoughts that just popped in his head. If he drove past Home Depot, for example, he would stop and shop, thinking, “I wonder if there is a sale on lumber? I’ve wanted to build a deck for years!”

To a person without ADHD, Jack’s story might seem made up or exaggerated. Believe me, it isn’t. Such impulsivity is a challenge for many of my ADHD coaching clients. Jack might exhibit impulsivity differently than some other clients, but the consequences and outcomes are the same—the pain of feeling out of control.

Jack sought my coaching services shortly after his son was diagnosed with ADHD. Jack noticed that he struggled with some of the same behaviors as his son. He also saw that medication helped his son manage his symptoms. Jack’s wife, Linda, suggested Jack talk to a specialist about his challenges. After an evaluation, Jack was diagnosed with ADHD. His doctor advised that he work with a coach, along with taking ADHD medication, to learn strategies to improve his focus and to stay in control.

In the initial coaching intake, Jack told me that he knew ADHD was causing his struggles, yet he didn’t know how to stop himself before he, as he describes it, “jumped” into the fire. Although impulsivity can be one of the most difficult ADHD symptoms to manage, medication and coaching can be effective in helping a client take control of them. Acknowledging that there is a problem—and having a strong desire to change—is a key component to making progress.

Jack found it difficult to admit that his impulsivity was a problem. It was part of what had made him such a successful salesman: He was a risk taker and a dynamo, pushing forward to close the deal when others would hesitate. He also saw himself as a “truth teller.” He told me, “Hey, I told my boss he was an idiot because he was making a bad business decision!” As we talked, Jack realized that insulting his boss, no matter how true his words, was never a good move. He desperately wanted to learn ways to be more aware of, and to better manage, the negative aspects of his impulsivity.

Medication gave Jack the ability to slow down and to take stock of what he was doing before acting rashly. But he needed strategies to stop himself long enough to consider alternative actions—to consistently control his impulses.

Many coaching strategies can help clients accomplish this, but as with all successful client-coach relationships, those strategies need to come from the client. Jack and I discussed in detail the situations in which he acted impulsively, and we developed strategies to do slow down and to evaluate the potential consequences of his actions.

It’s important to remember that coaching is not one size fits all, so what worked for Jack might not work for you.

1) One of the keys to reining in impulsivity is being able to self-observe. Jack came up with the idea of going through the day as if a camera were monitoring him. He called it his “third eye.” This helped him to be more conscious of his actions.

2) Jack also discovered that using a mantra helped him slow down. During the day he would say to himself, “Do not engage.” Or he’d ask himself, “What will the consequences of my actions be?” or “Is this what I really want to be doing right now?” This allowed him to stop for a second and evaluate the potential consequences of his actions—getting fired, getting divorced, offending a friend.

3) To curb his urge to “do it now,” he learned to park his thought. He would write down the thought he was about to act on in a notebook, or he would text it to himself on his cell phone or call in to his voice mail. This simple act of writing or calling helped him from acting rashly.

4) Jack frequently flew off the handle when talking with friends or colleagues. To prevent flare-ups, I suggested he form a “committee of trusted advisors” to whom he could vent—in person or on the phone. This allowed him to get over his impulsive anger without feeling the need to follow through on actions.

5) Through discussion, Jack and I were able to identify some of the triggers of his impulsivity—instances in which someone didn’t see things his way would upset him—and put plans in place for alternative actions. He realized that taking a short break—a brief walk or a trip to the men’s room—gave him the time to reconsider what to do—or not do.

Over time, and through continued accountability to me, Jack learned to stop, create space between his thoughts and his actions, and consider the consequences. He also learned to remember the pain that his impulsive actions had caused him in the past and to keep his goal in mind: to be more in control of his impulsive behaviors and eventually to learn to manage them himself.

Until next time!

Warmly, Nancy

Mining for Motivation

2010-01-12T05:40:00.000-08:00

Guest blog entry by Ose Schwab

Do you have a hard time getting yourself to do something you know you should or want to do? Do you forget your goal or let overwhelm dim your desire? You are in good company.

Many of my clients, intelligent adults with ADHD, struggle to access the drive that will get them started and keep them going. Even with a compelling goal, they forget, feel overwhelmed, get discouraged, or shift their attention to more immediate rewards.

One such client – we’ll call him Steve – came to me for help to be more productive at work and to publish a book. Steve wanted to write about his experience with depression. He felt distant from this goal and did not schedule time to write. Steve also confessed that he wasted time at work. Projects languished in lieu of urgent requests from colleagues. He checked the Internet too often. Overall, Steve felt frustrated with his performance and lack of motivation.

Another client, a college student I’ll call Joe, also struggled with motivation. He came to me out of desperation. He had almost failed the previous semester and his parents were looking to me to “fix him.” The winter semester was at hand, and he was scared he would procrastinate away his last chance of parent-paid tuition.

Joe and Steve needed some help to hone their drive and remove obstacles from forward momentum. To this end I began to mine for motivation by asking them questions.

Questions stimulate thought, feeling, and action. Questions activate neural pathways in the brain. They clarify your desire and understanding of self. Questions can remind you of past successes. They inform your plans with understanding. Questions help you design sustainable drive that will help you fulfill your goals.

What do you want?

Motivation that sustains you is internal – that is – born of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. It starts with desire. Successful adults with ADHD and/or learning disabilities have desire. They want to achieve something meaningful. They want to be successful in their own way. To access desire, ask yourself the question, “What do I want?”

Joe and Steve had to reframe outside expectations and goals into language that they could respond to. Joe, my college student, knew he did not want to relive the agony of isolation and shame he had experienced during the semester prior. However, he had not given thought to what he wanted out of college. He said he wanted to do well if he was going to be there. He also said he wanted to figure out how he might be able to use his particular inclinations – though still relatively undefined. Talking about this helped him to clarify a short-term goal. Joe decided he was going to strive for all A's by handing in assignments on time, attending every class, and reaching out for relationships.

Steve was sure he wanted to write a book about his experience with depression. Further discussion about this project allowed him to connect with its importance. He felt more strongly about it than work, but considered that there might be ways of weaving this project into work.

He told his boss about the book. This bridged work to book. He also began to consider ways that work could equip him to complete the book. In addition, he considered other people at work he could talk to about the project. This gave life to the day-to-day-grind he often felt.

Steve reframed work projects using words that resonated with his values. For Steve, an idealist, it was important to consider how these projects could help people in meaningful ways. Reframing the work helped motivation to increase. Steve’s attitude and focus subsequently improved.

What excites you?

Individuals with ADHD need the right balance of stimulation to experience optimum motivation. Too much can lead to overload or shutdown. Too little starves it. Boredom will tempt quick fix stimulation to distract you away from the goal.

Asking what excites you can help inform what plans you need to make to keep the motivation flowing. Steve loves the thought of hope. His book is about hope. Talking and thinking about it is a thrill. Overcomers’ stories; words of inspiration; reminders of how people struggle – these fuel his desire to work on it.

Joe remembered his participation in a project to help a rural family build a house. Last to leave, first to arrive on the site, Joe exhibited motivation. Why? He likes to help people. Doing a job well is cool. He likes to see progress. Joe also loves to work with his hands.

What do you know?

Knowing what makes you tick informs the best plan. Your plans benefit from the understanding of ADHD brain wiring as well. Such information can help you consider your challenges objectively, without judgment. Then you can apply creative strategies that combine self-awareness with ADHD understanding.

Steve shared that he had been successful at maintaining motivation to train for and run a marathon. He had never run one before. With careful preparation and planning, he designed a practice schedule that he kept to. Steve now uses this achievement as a model to learn from and apply to the current book project.

He also understands the power of distraction and the challenge to get started. Even if connected with the goal, Steve automatically categorizes next steps as “required tasks.” They take on the stigma of being uninteresting.

Difficulty carrying out “uninteresting” tasks is typical for individuals with ADHD. A recent study offers a neurological explanation as to why some individuals do not feel satisfied to complete non-interesting activities – less dopamine along the reward pathways. Steve knows he needs to compensate with strategic cues, accountability, or other external reinforcement.

What do you need?

Discovering what you need starts with observation. The best observations are judgment free. Think of your observing eye as if it belongs to an alien who has never been to earth. Don’t assume, just notice.

In addition to observation, knowledge that can feed your understanding of ADHD also informs need. Discover how the brain works. Glean tips from professionals and others with ADHD.

Pulling it all together requires reflection. And with reflection, Steve realized he needs doses of inspiration administered throughout his week. He realizes the need for specificity in his plan – to have very concrete steps laid out and ready for action at the allotted time.

Joe also identified his need for a specific plan to follow each week. He needs to know where and when he will study. He needs understanding and validation for his integrity. It helps to be accountable. And he knows he needs to get out of the apartment and study at the library sometimes.

What can you do now?

Research suggests that the brain registers thought about action the same way it registers the action itself. This means that you can pave the neural way (so to speak) for your intentions. You can think concretely about a task to get your mental juices flowing. And doing this will increase motivation to complete the action.

Inspired by the book “Art of Possibility,” Steve wrote a letter dated end of 2010. He wrote to me about the successful completion of his book. The letter contains details of celebration dinners, contact with a publishing house, and the steps undertaken throughout the year. The process of writing the letter helped Steve connect with what completing the book will be like. It also helped him identify milestones to the completion.

Right now, Steve is more excited about the book project than ever. He receives sporadic emails of entries from various blogs. He has a detailed plan for January, which includes mapping out milestones for the year much like his marathon plan. Steve knows what to do now. And he is doing it.

Joe just finished the fourth semester of mostly A’s. He feels more confident and excited about his direction. He clarified his desire to pursue petroleum engineering and continues to look forward to overseas work experiences as he winds up his last year of college. His parents are proud and marvel at the motivation he exhibits at school and in the home.

Do you know what you want? If not, ask yourself some questions. And if you know what you want, connect with what excites and stimulates you to action. That stimulation will keep you going. And as long as you plan in accordance with what you know about yourself and the challenges you face, you will be able to strategically inject excitement and impetus to carry forward actions that support what you want. Your days, weeks, months, and years of your life will be driven by the kind of energy that connects with the heart of who you are and what you want.

For more information:

“Art of Possibility” by Benjamin and Rosamund Zander. A short book about possibility. It claims you can paint your own reality. Possibility exists to the extent you can imagine it.

“Drive” by Daniel Pink. This book explores the source of motivation from the perspective of economic, social science, and biological research. Pink makes a plea to the business world to act on the knowledge of motivation that exists.

"Exceeding Expectations," by Henry B. Reiff, Paul J. Gerber, Rick Ginsberg. Book reporting research of successful adults with ADHD and/or learning disabilities.

“Finding your Focus Zone” by Lucy Jo Palladino, PhD. This book explores ways to maximize attention and motivation with ADHD.

“Evaluating Dopamine Reward Pathway in ADHD” by Nora D. Volkow, MD; Gene-Jack Wang, MD; Scott H. Kollins, PhD; Tim L. Wigal, PhD; Jeffrey H. Newcorn, MD; Frank Telang, MD; Joanna S. Fowler, PhD; Wei Zhu, PhD; Jean Logan, PhD; Yeming Ma, PhD; Kith Pradhan, MS; Christopher Wong, MS; James M. Swanson, PhD . http://www2.mc.duke.edu/depts/psychiatry/adhd/myweb/documents/Volkowetal_2009_JAMABrainconnection.pdf Abstract of research that concluded, “A reduction in dopamine synaptic markers associated with symptoms of inattention was shown in the dopamine reward pathway of participants with ADHD.”

ADHD Brain discussion offered by John Ratey. Podcast from Brain Science Podcast Forum. http://www.docartemis.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?fid=03&topic_id=1220915839

Ose Schwab of Potentia Vita has been coaching adults and college students for over three years. She lives and works in the Boston area. She believes that individuals with ADHD are an untapped treasure that when mined will help our world solve problems and thrive. To follow her blog "Shift Forward", visit http://potentiavita.com/shiftforward.

STAY CONNECTED WITH YOUR ADHD PARTNER!

2009-12-15T08:23:00.000-08:00

Maintaining and sustaining an intimate relationship is difficult for anyone. It can be more challenging if one or both partners have ADHD. When a spouse is constantly distracted or can’t slow down enough to pay attention to his or her partner’s needs, it often leads to relationship meltdowns.

The majority of my clients have marital problems. Clients wind up at my coaching door because their significant other has given them an ultimatum: “Get help for your ADHD or else!” At this stage, uncontrolled ADHD symptoms are not only jeopardizing their relationship but also their job and sometimes their health.

As I’ve said many times before, a client must want to be coached in order to be helped by the process. He or she can’t be forced to change. Frankly, though, I’ve never had a client with relationship problems who doesn’t want to make changes to improve his or her marriage.

When one spouse has ADHD and the other doesn’t, I often invite the non-ADHD partner, with the permission of my client, to give me feedback about how ADHD plays out in their life. When both have ADHD, problems can be compounded. Impulsivity and distractibility can cause fights and tear couples apart. Each person feels angry, humiliated, frustrated, and misunderstood. Partners can end up not trusting one another and, as a result, they feel disconnected and resentful.

No matter who has the ADHD, here are a few simple principles that couples can use to promote understanding and healthy relationships.

Nurturing the Marriage

Each person must take responsibility for his or her own actions—or lack thereof. In other words, the person with ADHD can’t use the condition as an excuse, and the non-ADHD partner must learn as much as he or she can about ADHD to understand how it affects his or her spouse. A relationship can’t survive—never mind thrive—if one partner blames another for things that are out of his control. The better option is to look for ways to nurture the relationship. Like choosing your fights. Each partner should ask, Does X, Y, or Z contribute to the growth of our relationship, or does it tear it down? If it doesn’t nurture it, agree to let it go.

Cathy felt like she was married to a ghost. When she tried to talk with her husband, Roger, about her needs, he would walk away, interrupt, or check his iPhone. Cathy, feeling alone and isolated, would stomp out of the room in frustration. When she confronted her husband about tuning her out when she wanted to talk, he would yell back, “Why does it always have to be about you?”

Through coaching, they came to understand that it wasn’t about Cathy or Roger, but about their relationship. By viewing their marriage as a third entity—as something that needs love and care to grow—they were able to slow down and listen to one another. They also realized that blaming one another and fighting over small stuff was only tearing down themselves and their 15-year marriage.

Reinforce with Praise

I remember getting a call from Sally, the wife of one of my clients, Bob. She was at her wit’s end and told me she was going to leave Bob. The trigger for such an extreme move? The Sunday newspaper. After reading it, her husband continually left the sections scattered all over the living room floor.

Bob and I developed strategies to help him to remember to pick up the paper and throw it away, instead of leaving it strewn in the living room and kitchen. Wanting to please Sally, he also decided, for the first time in their 20-year marriage, to pick up his clothes off the bedroom floor. He did this for a month without a syllable of praise from her. Yet the minute he blew it and left the newspaper on the floor again, she started yelling at him. He felt defeated, as if all his efforts were for nothing.

I found it hard to bite my tongue when Sally didn’t acknowledge Bob’s efforts. Looking at the relationship from her perspective, she was waiting for “the other shoe to drop.” She was so used to Bob reverting to old behaviors that she could focus only on his mistakes. Meanwhile, Bob became more discouraged.

ADHD is not an excuse, but if your partner is trying to change his behaviors, acknowledge it and encourage him or her. Praise is a tonic for persons with ADHD, who often have had a lifetime of shame and blame. Look for instances when your spouse is doing something right versus something wrong. Non-ADHD spouses should try to remember that change and progress might take a lot longer due to the wiring of the ADHD brain.

Plan Time Together

Schedule date nights and don’t skip them—no matter what. Make that commitment and stick to it. Time away will help you not only distance yourself from the day-to-day madness, but will also allow you to remember what you loved about each other when you first met. Always keep the door open for intimacy.

Eliminate Toxic Interactions

When one partner has ADHD, taking care of the details of daily living can often be the source of tension between a couple. It typically goes like this: The non-ADHD spouse asks the ADHD person to do something—pick up a few things at the grocery or change a light bulb. But because of ADHD symptoms, the request is never fulfilled. This type of dynamic almost led Craig and Beth to get divorced. Craig would tell Beth that he was going to fix something around the house, but he didn’t do it. After weeks of frustration, Beth’s anger would start to build and inevitably she would blow up.

I worked with them to create new strategies of communication, because it was clear to me that they couldn’t talk without hidden resentments emerging. I suggested that they use a notebook to list and check off tasks that needed to be done. Other suggestions included hanging up a white board or using Google Calendar, which allowed them to communicate without bitterness or anger.

Have a Sense of Humor!

I’ve had many clients say to me, “I feel that my partner just tolerates me these days. I wish he would embrace me for who I am—all of me—like he used to. He used to think my quirks were cute! Now I feel ashamed and demeaned.”

While it’s important not to use ADHD as an excuse, it’s equally important to see the humor in some of the behaviors it causes. For instance, I would avoid doing work by moving furniture. Thank goodness my husband never cared. He said it felt like he was coming home to a new house each day! It might have driven someone else nuts, but we still laugh about it.

Happy holidays and have a wonderful New Year!

Talk to you all soon!

Warmly,

Nancy

P.S. I’ve invited my dear friend and colleague, Ose Schwab, to be a guest blogger next month. She will blog about how to start out the New Year right. I know for one, I will be excited to read her post!

A Coaching Story: Meet Connie

2009-11-10T05:51:00.000-08:00

No matter how long you’ve been coaching, how expert you are, or how much training you’ve had, you sometimes talk with a prospective client and a little voice in your head says, “Who are you kidding? You can’t help this person!” For me, that client was Connie, who called to see if I could help her turn around her life.

Connie was animated on the phone. We chatted for a while and laughed about some of the struggles we share, thanks to our AD/HD: For instance, thinking we could drop off dry cleaning and mail packages as we rushed out the door in the morning, when we were already late. We connected immediately.

Connie was an executive in an advertising firm before getting married. Now she was a stay-at-home mom with five children ranging in age from 5 to 16. I couldn’t imagine how hard her life must be. My own struggles—trying to stay organized every day while caring for two dogs—seemed smaller in comparison.

Connie was upbeat initially, but as the conversation wore on, she confessed that she felt beaten down by life. She was depressed and anxious. Fighting back tears, she said she had recently read entries in her journal about things she wanted to change—to be on time and more organized, to exercise regularly, and to spend more time with friends and family. She wrote the entries several years ago. Nothing had changed.

“How could I have been so successful in my corporate job and fall apart at home?” she asked me. Even though she had been happily married for 20 years, her relationship, lately, had become rocky because of her AD/HD. Connie’s husband didn’t understand why she was unable to finish a task when she had all day to do it. He couldn’t understand why she was disorganized—being late when picking up the kids and misplacing her keys several times a week.

I started to feel Connie’s pain. I kept thinking to myself, “How can I help her if I haven’t walked in her large shoes? I have two dogs; she has five children.” One thing I could relate to was Connie’s feeling of being overwhelmed. I understood how AD/HD impacted her life, and I believed I could help her. We decided we were a good match, set up an appointment, and started the coaching process.

In the initial intake meeting, we had a one-hour in-depth conversation where we started to identify Connie’s struggles and challenges: the inability to prioritize her activities, keep track of time, and structure her day. Connie learned that these challenges were caused by her AD/HD, not by her lack of discipline or effort. At one point, she blurted out, “You mean some of this is my AD/HD? I thought I was just lazy!”

Understanding that her AD/HD was the source of her problems stopped her from judging and blaming herself. It was as if a light switch had been turned on. Only then were we able to develop strategies that would allow her to, finally, make changes in her life. For the first time, I could hear a glimmer of hope in her voice. “There is a good reason why I keep repeating mistakes. Coaching can really help me make the changes I’ve tried so hard to make on my own.”

We compared her success in the workplace with her challenges at home. Why did she excel at the office and fall apart at home? After some probing, we discovered that Connie thrived at her job because her responsibilities were clear-cut and her day was structured. She didn’t have structure at home. Her children attended school, and her husband worked. She was often alone all day.

We decided to add the missing ingredient—structure—to her day. We started with something pressing in her life. Guests were visiting next weekend, and she had to get the house in order. We agreed that her goal for the upcoming week would be to neaten up the house in preparation for those guests. How would she accomplish it?

“In my eyes, everything seems important,” said Connie. “There’s paperwork I’ve been wanting to get to for three years that all of a sudden seems urgent to complete! But yet guests are coming. I’m so confused! Where do I start?”

I had her make two lists: a priority list for all the things she needed to do to prep the house for the guests and another labeled “Do Next Week,” for tasks she could tackle after they left. She put the latter list in a file folder on her desk. By listing tasks on her priority list—and breaking those tasks down into achievable actions—she built confidence that she could keep moving forward.

To help her accomplish the tasks on her priority list, we devised ways for her to organize her day and to better track time. We went over her weekly schedule and identified “open zones”—periods where she had time to accomplish tasks. Her goal was to slot a task from her priority list into an open zone. For example, make up the bed in the guest room, vacuum upstairs, clean the kitchen sink. She set her cell phone to beep every hour, so she could “hear” the passage of time and check in with herself to see if she was on track. Connie also e-mailed me during the day to let me know what she had accomplished. This motivated her to do more.

There were slip-ups. When Connie checked in with me by phone every week, she admitted her miscues. “This sure isn’t easy! I found myself off track many times. I began to see how I would negotiate with myself. I’d say, ‘It’s OK, Connie, if you play solitaire on the computer for a few minutes.’ I wound up playing for hours. My cell phone would beep every hour, and it helped get me back on track. But, I admit, there were a few times when I ignored it! I’m learning, though.”

We found that the weekly check-ins by phone worked well for Connie. We would identify daily priorities, and divide them into doable pieces. We also came up with ways for her to be accountable. Connie slowly began to make progress. She became more confident and self-reliant, and her family was able to depend on her.

As the weeks went by, we addressed Connie’s other goals—exercising, socializing more with friends, and spending time with her family. “For the first time in my life, I actually do what I say I am going to do,” Connie told me. “I see where my AD/HD gets in my way, and I have strategies to work around it. I have hope I can live a happy, more satisfying life. I see light at the end of the tunnel!”

Connie’s success underscores the foundation of coaching: It is a dynamic, evolving process that takes time to work. The client must be prepared to work hard and to establish a productive partnership with the coach. I’m still working with Connie; she—as we all are—is a work in progress. She is making positive strides, and she is improving with each session. I am so glad I didn’t give into that little voice of mine.

Until next time,
Warmly,
Nancy

Daily Living Challenges for Adults: How a Coach Can Help

2009-10-13T06:14:00.000-07:00

“Never confuse motion for action.”
—Thomas Jefferson

For people with AD/HD, the concept of time is fluid, even immeasurable. If you want to accomplish the tasks necessary to live a normal fulfilling life, you have to develop the ability to manage activities within time constraints. This has obvious repercussions in arenas like school and work, but what about in daily life? What deadlines await you there? Well, you have to pay the bills on time, keep your living space clean and neat, wash dishes, do laundry and buy groceries. These are the activities of daily life that often trip up people with AD/HD. A coach can help you manage these tasks through something called "structured flexibility."

Developing and keeping to daily structures is often one of the hardest things for people with AD/HD to do. Every day you must be ready to start the routine all over again. People with AD/HD know they need organization in their lives, yet tend to avoid it. However, it is possible to introduce too many structures into your life. Often the hunt for the right system can be a distraction itself. Some people fear they will get bored doing the same thing each day and therefore avoid any kind of regular arrangement of tasks.

A coach can help you chunk down your daily business into do-able, manageable pieces, encouraging you along the way, so that you maintain attention and follow through no matter how boring it might seem. A coach helps you establish routines to ritualize such tasks and reduce the burden. Some of the core daily living patterns stressed in coaching include:
Better sleeping patterns
Exercise programs
Healthy eating
Personal appearance
Planning time to de-stress and relax
General establishment of daily routines and rituals to accomplish daily tasks.

Let’s look at an example from the story of one of my clients.

Sonya zooms from one household chore to another but doesn't finish any of them. While cleaning her kitchen she sees the piled-up laundry. So she puts a load into the washer and then starts folding the clean load that's been sitting in the dryer, but she never gets back to the kitchen. Sonya is always tired and run down because she is a slave to her environment. She's not in control of her tasks. They control her.

Sonya's coach sees that she needs to systematize and prioritize her jobs so that she isn't trying to do everything all at once. The coach helps her do this by setting up certain days when she does laundry, pays bills, cleans the kitchen, etc. She posts notes around the house as a strategy to remind herself when to do what job. This works because Sonya responds so readily to her environment.

However, when her fiancé visits for the weekend, Sonya panics when she sees that her pile of dirty clothes (which she had been used to laundering regularly) is missing on Sunday morning. As she frantically begins to search for them, her fiancé walks in with the laundry basket. Baffled, Sonya asks, "What are you doing?" He responds, "What do you mean? I was simply following your instructions! You wrote notes, 'DO DISHES ON SATURDAY!' 'DO LAUNDRY ON SUNDAY!'" In this circumstance one might say that Sonya's strategy well exceeded her expectations!

Daily success for the adult with AD/HD means not confusing motion with action. It means ordering your life so that each part of it is clearly delineated and broken down into steps. The effect of AD/HD on the multitude of personal tasks that each of us must complete every day can be insidious. When we can’t get up and get to work on time, when we’re feeling stressed and rushed due to poor time management, when we forget to take care of our bodies and souls because we over-focus on work or school, our quality of life erodes. The inability to establish patterns of daily living can eat away at our confidence, self-esteem and performance.

Some of the most common issues addressed in coaching adults concerns establishing habits and daily rituals to make each day more livable. You may be able to develop systems to organize yourself at the office, but if you neglect to pay your bills on time, or forget to go to the grocery store, or if you’re always losing your keys, then all of your hard work in other areas may not be enough to help you establish and maintain balance. A coach experienced with training the AD/HD brain can help you meet daily challenges head-on. By checking in with her on a daily or weekly basis you will learn to perform to the best of your ability without moving aimlessly, wasting precious energy.

The very nature of AD/HD predicts that the brain's executive function is not working well enough; therefore, planning ahead, prioritizing and following through is hard. Things that other people take for granted are often a real struggle for people with ADD/LD. Paying bills, getting enough sleep, taking your medication consistently, and keeping your home clean are simply matters of course for most, but for people with ADD/LD, they can present as much of a difficulty as a long-term project at work.

If you have AD/HD, daily time management and organization are obstacles to living effectively. To move beyond these obstacles you must establish routines for recurring activities like getting up, going to bed, grocery shopping, doing the laundry, etc. The mundane tasks in life seem so simple on the surface, but have you ever stopped to think how many steps are involved with something as seemingly straightforward as doing them? For example, stop and think how many steps are involved in paying your bills.

These issues are often skeletons in the closets of people with LD and ADD. The career woman who appears to be at the top of her game at work may feel she’s leading a double life. She may shine in the boardroom, but have piles of papers to the ceiling of her dining room. The feelings of shame and the amount of energy that is drained trying to fix or feeling guilty about not being able to fix daily life details is immense. A coach can help you gradually establish patterns and routines that can give you a sense of control and well being in your daily life. You will develop your brain's executive function and become the boss of your own life. By learning to organize, plan, and prioritize, using strategies that you and your coach create, you can clear the hurdles of daily living with success and confidence.

Change is hard. Altering or eliminating old habits and patterns is never fun or easy. Worse, the job of trying to replace old destructive behaviors or habits with new healthy ones takes a lot of time, effort and persistence. If you have AD/HD no one has to tell you that making things stick is hard. Chances are you have struggled many times to develop new habits but simply gave up after repeated attempts. Negative tapes and the constant voices of criticism prevail over your efforts.

Why can’t you just keep a to-do list? Why are you so disorganized? Just hang your keys on a hook and you won’t lose them anymore! Can’t you just pick up your room and clean your desk for once? For the person with AD/HD it is more a matter of losing hope than lack of effort to change. Because of how the AD/HD brain functions, there is often an inability to maintain a steady, consistent course of action long enough to establish it as habit. All too often, what started out as a new commitment, a new challenge, slips off into the distant crevices of your brain, gets clouded over and disappears.

A coach understands this on again, off again tendency and will talk with you to discover where and how you slip off the road. In conjunction with a coach you can isolate the warning signs to alert you that you are straying from the road, and you can discover strategies to sustain attention long enough to follow through on a course of action. Keeping the entire goal in mind and sustaining motivation to completion are the keys to success. Regular contact with your coach will help you accomplish what you set out to do. You can slowly build a history of successfully meeting your goals, thereby learning self-reliance.

Due to the neurobiology peculiar to AD/HD individuals, change can be harder than normal. Sticking to one course of action can be a particular challenge as well. If a coach does not know better, they may see the symptoms of AD/HD masquerading as resistance, denial, passive aggressive behavior and so on. A coach needs to understand AD/HD to effectively coach client make necessary changes. This means not judging their slips and slides, but rather, helping them to better understand how their neurobiology gets in the way and what they can do about it.

The level of self-observation necessary to work with a coach in the process of filling the potholes in personal behavior helps the client to be engaged in creating strategies, thereby forcing them to use their brain to develop critical thinking skills. This is the power of coaching! The strategies stick because you came up with them! You understand where they emanate from, so you know how to bridge them. You can stop the self-blame and demystify how you get off track. Knowledge is power! You are the driver who knows where the potholes are and which way to swerve to avoid them.

Nancy

The AD/HD Coaching Model: An Interactive Approach for Positive Change

2009-09-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

In previous blogs I’ve mentioned that the primary goal of AD/HD coaching is to help individuals with AD/HD self-initiate change in their daily lives. To that end, I’ve developed a model for AD/HD coaching. It’s built on three core principles – Partnership, Structure, and Process. In combination these three elements enable the coaching process to take form and shape. No one element stands alone—it is the synergy of the three working together that create the coaching dynamic.

Let’s take a closer look at each component:

Partnership: By co-engineering a partnership with the coach, the client takes charge of the process, customizes the service to meet their needs, and develops a user-friendly partnership to motivate and move them forward. The client thus plays a central role in molding and shaping the dynamics of the coaching process.

Structure: Coaching establishes both internal and external strength-based structures to improve a client’s ability to focus and channel their abilities toward achieving set goals. Structuring takes the client repeatedly through steps such as attending to details, planning, organizing, and prioritizing, allowing the client to essentially “fake it 'til they make it.”

Process: Through a process of inquiry, the coach guides the client through self-exploration and learning. The coach poses non-judgmental questions to assist the client in analyzing the situation at hand and work toward an achievable resolution. The focus is on problem solving and being in action. The client thus becomes empowered and more willing to take ownership of his or her actions or lack of actions, as a result of discovering their own solutions.

HOW COACHING HELPED JUNE

June represents a typical client who comes to me for coaching services. She is married with two kids. She has recently been diagnosed with AD/HD and learned about coaching through a local AD/HD support group. In our initial intake she said she has been disorganized and distracted as long as she can remember. She said she is always late to pick up her kids from school and to other appointments, forgets to pay the bills, looses her keys regularity, and finds herself rearranging the dishes in cupboards or doing “anything else but” her priority tasks. Her husband has threatened to leave her if she doesn’t become more responsible, and her kids have learned to not depend on her when she makes promises to them. She is desperate and feels that she has tried everything. She told me she has read countless self-help books on time management and organization, but is not able to consistently apply the concepts.

Since her diagnosis she has been taking medication for her AD/HD. She said it helps “if only I can remember to take it!” She also has been seeing a therapist regularly to deal with her feelings of being a failure as a wife and a mother. She said it’s helped her with her emotions, but she still struggles with trying to change her daily habits and behavior.

It was clear that June was experiencing difficulties in a variety of different areas due to her AD/HD. Together, through the coaching process, we identified a couple areas she wanted to work on immediately: Her ability to measure time and prioritizing tasks – namely her ability to assign and direct her attention to the most important tasks for that day and to complete them in a timely manner and, her ability to self-monitor.

Below are a few examples of how we worked together. Remember, coaching is very individualized and tailored to each client’s needs, so what worked for June might or might not work for everyone!

Measuring time and prioritizing tasks: By talking out actions and plans with me on a bi-weekly basis over the phone June was able to identify what her top priorities were for each day. We designated start and stop times for working on her priorities and created accountability around completion of them through e-mail check-ins. Independent of me, June also used a timer and created a "time card" for her-self on her computer so she would "clock-in" to work, so to speak, and "clock-out" for each task.

Self-monitoring: June would log in a journal what she did each day. In our phone check-ins she would report to me events that had happened during the week. We would review instances where she felt she had made bad choices, for example, attempting to run several errands on the way to pick up her kids when she was already over 45 minutes late!

By analyzing these occurrences, June was able to self-reflect and talk-through possible alternative courses of actions. She then "programmed" me to keep reminding her of her tendency to get distracted by non-important tasks. I would do reality checks with her by saying: "Remember, June, you tend to fool yourself into thinking that in the moment it’s important to rearrange the cupboards or stop run five errands on your way to pick up your kids– how can you keep yourself focused?"

Also, by tracking her medication intake more closely she was able to become more aware of how she behaved on and off medication and to be more aware of the warning signs of when it was wearing off. We designated specific times to take her medication as directed by her doctor and set her wristwatch as well as her cell phone to beep when she needed to take her next dose.

June’s direct involvement in the creation of strategies, including designing the coaching partnership itself, maintained her interest and motivated her to change her behavior. By providing structure and support and prompting her with questions, the coach was able to help June learn the skills to stay on track.

Until next time! And remember, if you have any questions please submit them!

Warmly, Nancy

The Coaching Process: How It Works

2009-08-10T12:43:00.000-07:00

In an earlier entry I touched briefly upon what coaching is and how it helps individuals with AD/HD.

This week I want to talk about how coaching is done. Of course every coach has his or her own unique style of coaching and/or model; so, once again, I’ll be speaking in general terms.

Most coaches start out by having a brief initial conversation with the potential client. In this initial exchange it’s to remember coaching is a partnership—it’s a two-way street—meaning each party is “interviewing” the other for what I call “a good match.” The coach accesses if the client is ready to be coached and is a good match, and the client accesses if the coach is the right one for him or her.

The criteria a coach uses in deciding who is a good client for coaching are several. The main one is, is the client ready, willing and able to be coached?

People of all ages and from all walks of life can benefit from coaching. The individuals who benefit most have a strong desire for personal growth and improvement. They are ready and committed to take action and participate fully in the coaching process. They also must have the willingness and desire to be accountable to their coach.

Coaching is based on a wellness model; if overriding problems with depression or other medical issues are inhibiting daily functioning of the client and are left untreated, then the coaching will not be successful. Very often the coach will work in tandem with the individual’s various healthcare providers to overcome these obstacles.

The client in turn must know what he or she wants from the coaching process before contacting a potential coach. This is easier than it might seem. Simply make a list of the issues you are struggling with and ask the coach how he or she would coach you on that particular issue! This way you’ll immediately get a sense of the style of coaching as well as competence level. What you’ll want to ask is: Does this person have an understanding of AD/HD? Do I get a sense she/he “gets” my challenges? Do I like his or her style?”

Of course, other basic considerations should be taken into account, such as: Has this person been trained as an AD/HD coach? How long has the coach been coaching? Does he or she have coaching credentials, or is she/he working toward any? How many clients has the coach worked with? What are some examples of successes the coach has had with clients?

Once you both decide it’s a good match, you then move forward to what is called the “initial interview or intake.”

THE NUTS AND BOLTS

The coaching process begins with an initial interview in which the client shares goals, history, and current challenges with the coach. The coach and client together develop a strategy and a roadmap specifically designed to meet the client’s individual needs. The coach guides the process, provides the structure, asks questions, and offers feedback, but the client drives the process forward. Regular meetings and check-ins are an essential part of the coaching process. These contacts can be in person or by telephone, texting or email. Periodic reviews can also be established to monitor overall progress. The lengths of these sessions differ between individual coaches. Some offer 30-minute sessions three times a month, while others offer one-hour sessions four times a month.

In this initial session other issues are covered such as a coaching agreement that reviews the parameters of coaching—what it covers and does not cover—and other general procedures such as payment and cancelation policies.

THE TIME FRAME OF ADHD COACHING

Since the coaching process is unique for every individual, the time frame for individual coaching relationships varies. Some clients need to hire a coach for a short-term project, while others hire a coach for long-term goal achievement.

The goal of coaching is to provide the external support and guidance necessary to jump-start the process until the client learns the skills necessary to keep him or her on track over time.

Ultimately, ADHD coaching helps the client learn about his or her own brain and its deficits in order to demystify them. When individuals have an understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses, they are then able to develop concrete, sustainable strategies to maximize their unique abilities. Coaching helps transform an “I can’t” attitude into an “I CAN” attitude. The brain can learn! This is the energy that helps clients make positive, lasting changes in their lives.

I hope this helps everyone to gain greater insight into how coaching is done!

Until next time, warmly,

Nancy

Deciding What to Keep and What to Throw Away

2009-07-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

Many people with AD/HD have problems with clutter. There may be many reasons for this, among some is the false hope that one day you’ll actually bake that exotic cake you saw the recipe for in a pile of cooking magazines you’ve had for 10 years.

Another reason is the inability to prioritize and to decide what to keep and what to toss, causing the person to get overwhelmed, keep everything, and simply give up on ever sifting through the piles.

It doesn’t matter the cause--the end result is usually always the same- a sense of guilt, shame and frustration is felt by the person.

The general rule I use is this: be brutally honest with yourself and ask, “Am I really going to need this? Will I ever REALLY get around to making that cake? Will I actually ever make that scrapbook of mementoes for my kids? If your answer is NO! Throw the stuff out! 99.9% chance is, that if you’ve not read or acted on whatever it is by now, you never will!

Next, ask yourself, “Will this (magazine, paper, etc.) Impede my progress forward or will it propel it? If it will impede it, throw it out!

I have dozens of other strategies on how to get through the clutter and paperwork and can make that an entire section of the blog! But some quickie ones are:

-Always go through clutter while standing up- never sitting down

-Divide things into 3 piles “keep” “throw away” and “I don’t know yet”

-Use the 3-second rule—don’t keep anything in your hand for than 3 seconds- hurry put it in one of the 3 piles- quick! ;-)

-Designate a time to start and stop

Response From Coach Nancy

2009-06-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

Thank you all for your posts! Here are some general thoughts of mine regarding some of the questions asked so far:

MEDS OR COFFEE?

Coaches are not qualified to advise clients on medication. They can help the client to set up schedules to remember to take their medication and to take them on time.

If other medication issues come up, or if a client is self-medicating by drinking excessive amounts of cola or coffee, I might, as a coach, suggest they see a Dr. who specializes in treating people with AD/HD.

Regardless, whether my client is on or off meds I suggest that they enlist good health practices and EXERCISE! EXERCISE! EXERCISE!

SIMPLIFYING A COMPLICATED LIFE

Many of my clients lead very busy lives and/or have a hard time saying no and end up with a lot on their plate.

As a coach, I help clients to simplify their lives by practicing saying no. I have them rehearse dialogues ahead of time, for example “I would love to help you out, but my schedule these days is really packed. Let me get back to you when things ease up.”

I also work with my clients to set out a schedule with clear boundaries as to how they will spend their time so all their activities are "contained" and don't "bleed" into one another.

TECHNIQUES FOR HANDING FINANCES

On the CHADD site www.chadd.org under the National Resource Center for AD/HD there are some great articles that have wonderful tips for adults with AD/HD and finances. The URL is:

http://www.help4adhd.org/gsearch.cfm?lr=lang_en&varLang=en&search=finances&srch.x=0&srch.y=0

FINDING A COACH IN YOUR AREA

The benefit of coaching is that it is done mostly by phone and can be done from anywhere in the world, so the coach doesn’t have to be from the client’s immediate geographic area. However, coaching is very individualized, and some clients do want an “in person” coach. So, it’s up to each person to seek out a coach that can meet their own needs.

There are many directories for coaches listed on my site under “finding a coach.” The most important thing is to interview a few of them and get a sense of their style. Learn as much as you can about coaching and what it can offer you. Prepare questions ahead of time. Then see who is a good match for you. To me, that is very important!

Finding My Life's Work

2009-06-09T07:33:00.000-07:00

Hi!

I am pleased and honored to be the contributing writer for the new CHADD AD/HD Coaching Blog. I will post a new blog entry every second Tuesday of the month. My hope is to cover a variety of topics that I think will be of interest and helpful to practicing coaches, to people looking for a coach, and to the public.

As many of you know, I’ve been coaching for over 15 years. What some of you might not know is how I came to be a coach. I got into coaching due to my own struggles with AD/HD. I was fortunate to have grown up in a very structured home and learned early on the importance it made in my life. However, all the structure at home didn’t prevent me from having all the same struggles and challenges that everyone with AD/HD faces when they become independent and go on to face the “real world.”

College was a huge hurdle for me, and graduate school was impossible. I had to drop out of Harvard after my first semester. It wasn’t a matter my knowing WHAT to do, it was knowing HOW to apply the skills I learned growing up. Once I was diagnosed with AD/HD and went on a trial of medication, everything fell into place. I finally was able to APPLY the skills I had learned from my father.

As the saying goes “people attract people like themselves.” Before I knew it I was helping others by passing on the lessons I learned growing up. I saw how these strategies and methods my father used to keep me on track made a difference in other people’s lives. Essentially I was doing a form of coaching to help my fellow classmates with AD/HD as well as setting the groundwork for what would become my life’s work—coaching!

So, what is AD/HD coaching and how can a coach help a person with AD/HD?

AD/HD coaching is a dynamic methodology that aims to nurture the client’s ability to self-initiate change in his or her daily life. It is a supportive, practical, concrete process in which the client and coach work together to identify and pursue goals. Coaching helps individuals with AD/HD develop the structures necessary to function effectively and to learn practical approaches to the challenges of daily life.

This goal is ultimately accomplished by using strength-based strategies and the client’s own innate creativity to solve problems. The coach provides structure, feedback, and encouragement to keep the learning process a dynamic one. This is done until the client increases self-awareness, builds an arsenal of strategies to draw upon, and develops the confidence in his or her own ability to self-manage.

AD/HD coaching focuses on the specific needs of the individual being coached. Like all coaching, it is a supportive, goal-oriented process in which the coach and the client work to develop the tools, strategies and confidence necessary to help the client reach his or her potential. The AD/HD coach is trained and experienced in working with people with AD/HD and is capable of helping them develop strategies that maximize the talents of the AD/HD brain and compensate for the individual difficulties the client experiences.

Typically, AD/HD coaching helps individuals with AD/HD develop the structures, processes, and practical approaches necessary to meet the challenges of everyday life and excel in their special areas of talent.

I am excited to share my thoughts and experiences with all of you. If you have any questions you would like me to address please feel free to submit them.

Thank you very much for participating in this exciting venture!

Warmly,

Nancy

First Posting

2009-06-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

Coach Nancy will be posting on Tuesday of next week.