it’s an ADHD professional organization. Google it. just got back from 5-day conference. My brain is full of add information. I’m going to spend some time in the next few posts doing some takeaways from the conference. They will probably be in bullet points. And I will likely do some posts on specifics in more depth after having a chance to watch some of the recordings. I think I’m going to start with some personal takeaways. — sitting still and paying attention is hard. I believe that my medication works about as well as one can expect. And if obviously made a career out of managing my adhd. So, I didn’t expect it to be quite so draining. But unlike other conferences I’ve gone to, the slides were not available online. So I couldn’t follow along. Many of the lectures were overcrowded. So I was jammed on a tiny seat between other people. I did my share of standing up on the side. But there were definitely times I wish I could have sat on the floor against the wall and still seeing the screen. Reflecting, it was actually the sitting still in a small place that was harder than the paying attention. But the combination was a doozy. I actually broke the fidget toy that I brought. Apparently I squeezed it one too many times and it actually exploded. I’ll post a picture of that later. — my tried and true strategy of planning a workout in the middle of every day of lectures worked beautifully. There were actually two days I think that I worked out twice. A really hard hour on the spin bike or lifting weights between 3 and 1/2 hours of sessions in the morning and 4 hours of sessions in the afternoon was not…

I’ve written some pretty long posts in the last few weeks. So I’m gonna hit you here with a really quick tip. Have a clock in every room of your house. I know there are some people are gonna say, “Duh.” But I am consistently surprised by how many of my clients lose track of time in rooms that don’t have clocks. Of course, we need to actually look at the clock, which requires a little mindfulness and presence in the moment. But that’s another conversation. Start with the clock in every room, including the bathroom, and let me know how it goes. Standard disclaimer. As a person with ADHD, I made the decision when I started my blog, that I didn’t want it to be that thing that I avoided out of perfectionism. I made the decision to get my ideas out there with very little filtering and rarely any editing. Adhering to this philosophy means that I may never have put out a perfect blog post. But it also means that I put a really good blog post out most weeks for the last decade. So please continue to bear with me by overlooking awkward phrasing, typos, grammatical quirks, etc. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the heck out of the contact. P.S. I’m not even gonna read this before I start slapping it on the end of my blog posts. Ha!

In case you noticed that I updated my standard disclaimer and got back in the habit of adding it to every post. Or even if he didn’t… I thought i’ll explain a little bit more about what it means to me and how effective it has been. Marketing oneself as an ADHD coach is not easy. I actually do almost no marketing. I rely on some networking. I benefit from occasional referrals from colleagues in other niches in the ADHD world. I am particularly grateful for those referrals. I very rarely get direct client referrals, especially with adults. It happens a little bit more often with late teens and young adults because their parents talk. And lately I’ve been starting to get referrals from psychologists and psychiatrists who work with current or past clients and I’ve seen the benefits of the work that I do. That has taken many years to build. But I’m very proud of it. It’s nice to be respected by your peers. And as a coach, it’s nice to even be considered a peer with medical doctors and PhD’s. So what’s my point? The main thing that I do to be visible is keep my website up-to-date with new contact. I don’t actually change the main part of the site regularly. I generally overhaul it from soup to nuts about every four or five years. But I’m constantly producing new content by posting new blog entries. I am hardly a tech genius. But I am told that by having my website constantly refreshed with new content instead of being static, that has helped me climb higher with search engines. It seems to be true. Because the vast majority of my clients have found me online. I also like the side benefits of knowing that my blog…

I’m going to give you one specific example, call it a case study of what I talked about last week in terms of easy often being really hard for us. It involves an anonymized former client. He was, in fact, one of my earliest clients when I was first doing professional organizing, before I even started coaching.  Awesome guy. Very nice. And very smart. Had a big job in the banking industry. Travel the country. Did lobbying work. Was paid handsomely. Excelled in his job in every way. Though I will note, I virtually guarantee you that was supported by a personal secretary who did all of the tedious day-to-day stuff. I’m so confident in that guarantee because of what he hired me for. It may best be described as a modern day archaeological dig. He hired me to go through his mail. As brilliant and talented as this man was, the tedium of opening his mail and dealing with its contents was completely overwhelming to him. That simple task, which most people look at as so easy they don’t even really have to think about it, was Kryptonite to him. The reason it felt archaeological, or maybe I should say anthropological, was that it was like going back through time because I needed to go through the seven years of unopened mail dating back to his divorce. This is the man who would be having dinner with us senator in Washington on Thursday only to come home to his beautiful house on Friday and find out that his cable had been turned off because he hadn’t paid the bill in two months. Not surprisingly if you did not know about ADHD and how it worked, you would have a hard time making sense of that guy. Of course, if…

I think I touched on this a little bit a few weeks ago. But I partially can’t remember and I’m sure it can use repetition and more flushing out anyway. And it’s a direct continuation from last week. We have established that boredom is our kryptonite. Let’s expand that definition to include boredom, tedium, repetition, lack of variety, or really anything that falls under the heading of what we call a non-preferred task. This often manifests in even the brightest and most capable ADHD people as a the mind-bending paradox of “easy” being really “hard.” But let’s back up for a second. What do I mean by hard? I know, not a word you really need to think of a definition for. What if we changed it so difficult? How about challenging? How about attentionally challenging? Are you following me? Language is important. I have always said there’s a word missing in English between want and be able to. When we don’t do something that we know is important, most people framed that as, “I didn’t want to.” Of course they wanted to do it. Why the hell else would we be talking about it and Coaching?  OK. I recognize that’s a slight oversimplification. And I think I’ll do a post about the difference between wanting the result of something and wanting to engage in the process of doing it sometime soon, if I haven’t recently already. But my point is we always default to the word want, which really is like saying we have a character flaw and is undermining in the long term, because we don’t know how to conceptualize not being able to do a thing that we are aware we are capable of doing. Don’t think about that sentence for too long. It’ll make your head…