I’m not going to go too much into depth on this one. I know I’ve written about this a lot in the past. But one thing that has come up in my coaching a bunch lately is the idea of how to prioritize self care. To define that, let’s consider sleep, exercise, mindfulness, down time, social interaction, or whatever else you need to keep your machine well oiled and ready to keep grinding.  For the sake of clarity and brevity, I’ll use exercise as the template for self care. Plus, it is probably the most important of those listed for me, personally. Yet, it is never the number one thing on my priority list… objectively. I can make it be number one. But it’s not there on its own. Yet, there is no way to make up a missed day of exercise. I didn’t get my blog post done yesterday and no small children died. I can always get that done another day or even, God forbid, skip a week. But I seem to effectively moved that task to today. But I did get my 42 minutes in on the spin bike yesterday.  And, I’m going to work out again today. Because that is a thing that I just can’t make up for.  I had a coach in high school who was also a math teacher. And he had a catch phrase, “Five times ten is greater than one times 50.” He was mostly referring to muscle memory and developing good habits. But I’ve found the lesson broadly applicable to my ADHD life, specifically in regards to self care. I get more out of meditating for five minutes five times a week than I would only doing it once for 25 minutes. I get more out of practicing the drums…

I’m really debating hard how much to share in this post. I don’t want to complain. I don’t want to over share. And those who read regularly know that I try to tow a line of speaking the truth about parenting kids with issues but not divulging too much about my kids, as what goes on the internet lives forever. So, I’m just going to start writing from my gut or my heart and see where it goes. Maybe it will be detailed and off putting. Maybe it will be vague and hard to follow. But I’m hoping for inspirational, in that whatever you are going through, you are most certainly not alone. LIkely it will be deeply personal. My wife is working like crazy and working for people who are crazy. I don’t want to diminish the herculean efforts of single parents by saying that I am a de facto single parent right now. But it isn’t too far from the truth. The timing of this happens to coincide with my oldest, 12 year old, having a major depressive episode, increased anxiety, the onset of social specific anxiety. And, if you read my blog, you know that my 7 year old is substantially mentally ill. And after a period of relative calm, he’s not doing particularly well either.  I have been hanging on by my fingernails for about two months now. I haven’t been in my garden. It’s at a critical point. If I don’t get out there in the next day or so, opportunities/ crops will be lost. I’m already writing off my fruit trees. I missed my chance to get them netted when I was sick for my whole off week last week. I’m not practicing the drums. I miss that. I am working out, still eating…

Quick one today. I”ve been sick all week so I haven’t even had the chance to back date my entry for last Friday. You see, Friday is blog day because I don’t have any clients on Friday. I’ve learned over the years that most people don’t want to talk about their issues on Friday afternoons. So, why bother working a half day. I can always use it to reschedule folks. But mostly I use it to do office work, schedule appointments for myself and my kids. They both do therapy mid afternoon on Fridays. It’s also morphed into laundry day for me, making beds, doing the shopping list for Saturday, and mowing the lawn. So, as you can see, it may not be the best day for me to plan of being introspective or even to just plain have the time to sit down and write something halfway decent.  If you’ve noticed over the past month or so since shortly after I got back on the blog horse, so to speak, that I’ve been less than consistent about my Friday posts. Oh, I’ll back date them so it looks like I posted on Friday. But you’ll get the email when I actually write it, which has likely been the following Tuesday or Wednesday.  Here’s where the wisdom come in. I’ve been doing this coaching thing long enough for other and for myself that I noticed this pattern and asked myself a question. I asked why I still have it on my calendar to post on Fridays if that doesn’t seem like a realistic goal right now? I challenged my assumptions. I challenged a structure that had worked for many years in the past. I didn’t allow that structure to become a sacred cow. It took me a few weeks to…

This is a quick follow up to the meal planning post from a few weeks ago. I think there are a few details that I didn’t mention. The most important, especially for the beginning planner, is to make the menu before you go shopping. I am realizing that I need to emphasize this now because my substantial garden is just coming in. I’ve been harvesting chard and kale for a few weeks. The first variety of broccoli in the mixed seed pack is ready and the broccolini is loving life in a different bed this year. So, I need to think a lot before I make my list about what, if any veggies I need. Also, my wife is working like a mad woman as she’s in catering sales and people are allowed to get married again. WooHoo! My suggestion is to look at your calendar for the upcoming week. Think about who is going to be around for dinner each night, who’s cooking, (assuming that’s you) how much time do you have to get dinner ready, what other evening activities are going on, and consider what you already have in the house (like salad greens that need to be eaten in the next two days,) and then plan your meals based on those factors. If you do all that before you make your shopping list, it will be a much less mystifying process. You should waste less food and money. You should be more prepared for dinner each night. Yes, it may be uncomfortable to force your brain to do the executive function heavy lifting at first. But it will become second nature eventually. And, my family love being able to check the “menu” on the fridge as much as I love not forgetting what my plan for the…

So, I don’t intend this to come off as complaining. But the reality is that much of life is harder for us as ADHDers. Owning that hardness is a key to succeeding, which can be counterintuitive. I guess it is sort of a Buddhist ideal of accepting reality and not fighting it. But I won’t get too Zen with the whole thing. I will say that it is often the things that society labels as “easy” that we find hard. So it can be much harder for us to let go of the feeling that those things shouldn’t be hard.  But once we let go, we can decide to create new strategies, new ideas, new ways to work around the shackles of the traditional world and make it bend to our needs. Wow. That sounds kind of grandiose now that I’ve written it. But I’m going to leave it in. Why? Because I just spent 1:07 on the phone with my mortgage company for our rental property because they didn’t pay the insurance out of the escrow and I got an email that the policy lapsed. Exactly what I wanted to deal with today. Actually it was my second call. So, “all day” I’ve been on the phone for about an hour and a half and I’m a bit punchy.  But that was part of my inspiration for this post. The other part of the inspiration came from a conversation I had with a client last week. That conversation crystalized in my mind how difficult it is for so many of my clients to make “simple” phone calls. There are so many reasons why. If I remember, I think I’ll do a whole post on that soon. But here I just wanted to give a quick tip about the dreaded…

By the way, I can’t honestly recall if I have blogged about this aspect of mindfulness before or not. I’m sorry if this is redundant, but happy if it is a needed refresher. I never thought that I could meditate. My dad, the completely neurotypical one in the house, was a TM guy. He still meditates for 20-30 minutes a day. He tried to get me to do it when I was a kid. A squirmy, hyper, easily bored kid. Even medicated, I couldn’t do it.  But the “can’t” really comes down to the definition of the “it.” I looked at my dad and thought, I have to do this like him. I need to do it for a long time. Five minutes felt long to me at that point in my life. There’s no way I could do it for longer.  I was also limited by my expectations. My dad does it for a minimum of 20 minutes. Even if I could do it for five minutes, what could I possibly get out of it? Perfectionism. Black and white thinking. Negative thought patterns. I pulled out all the ADHD stops. To be fair to myself, I don’t know if I could have meditated then, even medicated. But I know that I wasn’t able to with the limiting ideas I had in my head.  For many years exercise was my meditation. And, I very much do consider my exercise practice an integral part of my ADHD and depression and anxiety management. I really do consider it, at the lever I do it, mindfulness. But it isn’t really meditation. I only got into meditation in my late 30’s when my son did a study at MGH for ADHD kids under 6-12 using the kids’ calm meditation on the HeadSpace App. I…

What is mindfulness can be a difficult enough question for anyone to answer. For an ADHDer, it can be even harder. We tend to think of a super zen person, maybe even a Buddhist monk meditating for hours while completely clearing their mind of all distractions. But that is a very limited and typically ADHD/black and white way of looking at it. Honestly, that’s how I thought about it when I was younger until my eyes were opened. Now with a broader understanding of meditation and mindfulness as a whole, I realize how essential they are to managing our ADHD. First, meditation is great. I’ll come back to that. But meditation is not the only way to “do” mindfulness. For those of you who cringe at the mere mention of the term mindfulness, like the teenage client who inspired this post, I give you permission to insert the work intentional-ness every time I use the word mindfulness from now on. Because that is really all it is. In my experience mindfulness can be as simple as being intentional about something that you have never been intentional about before.  I’ll give you one example. Dr. David Nowell @davidnowell on Twitter gave me a deck of his mindfulness cards when we got together to network many years ago. I loved them and still have them. As with any group of things, I responded to some more than others. One of my favorites was, and I’m paraphrasing so I don’t have to look through the deck this is still on my desk these many years later, “listen to one of your favorite songs but concentrate only one one of the instruments.”  I was not a musician and other than jamming to a particular guitar hook, or that sweet drum fill from “in the air…

I was going to write about something else this week, until this article came across my desk. Thanks for sending it via snail mail dad. Food for thought when we know our ADHD kids are prone to addiction of all kind. Sex addiction, Internet addiction, porn addiction. My twelve year old boy still looks away and says, “eeeew” when there is a kiss in a movie. But he also has my wife’s old laptop in his room most of the time. I think it’s time for “The Talk.” And, porn clearly needs to be part of it. A reminder: Almost all addictive and risky behavior by ADHD kids starts earlier than we think it should. As parents, we should almost always err on the side of bringing those sensitive topics up on the early side, rather than the late side.

My mid-week post… post dated as my post for last week, which got away from me ended up being longer than expected. So I’m going to try to make this one more concise. We’ll see… I may expand on this more later.  The core idea is that in life we have certain moments that need to be triggers for action. Often as ADHDers, when something goes wrong we go into triage mode and deal with the immediate ramifications but don’t account for the lack of planning, organization, time, attention, or whatever we needed to spend to avoid having the same thing happen again. Thus, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.  I’m going to give you one example from my professional life to chew on. And I may expand in a future post on how this has helped me run a more efficient business. (And, this concept came up this week with a client who runs a business that is not too dissimilar to mine.) When I book a new client, like I did today, (Yay!) that automatically triggers…  ? I send a welcome packet to that client with 5 standard documents, one of which is personalized. Now there is a certain percentage of people who ghost me at this point for whatever reason. So I wait until I get billing info which triggers a new set of tasks automatically. ? Put client in my google address book under “clients,” (Check list while I’m in there.) ? Put client in my master schedule so I don’t promise a spot that’s not open ? Put client on my google calendar so I don’t double book  ? Make a folder for the new client with a name label These steps are annoying and tedious, ADHD kryptonite, if…

Here’s a quick one mid week (backdated to last week,) and I’ll give you a more substantial post on Friday… hopefully.  I have lots of clients who really stress out about meal planning and shopping. I know I’ve posted about that before. But I think sometimes I make it sound harder than it is. Really, you have some starch in your house. Roasting and baking potatoes, regular and pearled couscous, fries, wild, arborio, spanish and jasmine rice, nice bread to grill, hot dog/sausage and sandwich rolls, baked and black beans, tortillas and a both short and long pastas are what we usually have on hand. You keep those in stock as your “par.”  Then you think about how many days you want to cook, how many days you want to pull something out of the freezer, and how many days you want to do take out or eat leftovers. I generally figure look at the nights we will all be home and think about 7 dinners that need to happen. 1. Right now, I’m doing 5 Guys one night a week while my wife works late and the kids have practice. 2. We’ve got tons of Matzo Ball Soup in the Freezer. Add a roll and a salad/some veggies = a meal. Might be potato leek, chile, Fejoada, Kale soup, etc.  3 & 4. There’s always a pasta in here somewhere, maybe two. I’ve got several I rotate through. I’ve got pesto in the freeze, cacciatore, meatballs, amatriciana, and artichoke pasta when Michelle is out like this Friday.  5 & 6 are usually a piece of meat, a veggie, and one of those starches. I generally have chicken breast and thighs, sausages, pork tenderloins or chops, 80% lean burger, and eye round steak hanging out in the freezer. 7. I…

Here’s the schedule from Friday of vacation week. Having gotten my big work project done for the week, I could focus mostly on home/personal stuff. You will note that I already realized I misordered things while making the list and just gave them new numbers and accurate times. Errands in the afternoon. Probably my most accurate execution of the week. But no more or less productive. Just stuck to the plan ’cause there was no reason not too.

Thursday was much like Tuesday, without the gardening. I woke up with a fire under me to finish the copy for my new website. And I pretty much pushed everything else aside and banged that out… except I play a game with E and did his schedule with him. But again, the framework made for a productive day, despite it being changed quite a bit. I was in control. I decided what to work on. I was efficient and productive. WIN! Though you might not be able to tell that from first look at the schedule…