I’m pretty sure this is a human thing. But it is also a decidedly ADHD thing. The thing being, not being so good at remembering when we did well, overcame obstacles, tackled our anxiety, and generally succeded in an unexpected (to ourselves) way. Again, having only been an ADHD person and having mostly coached and studied ADHD people for the last decade plus, I come from the ADHD perspective. If my thoughts are more broadly applicable, great. Over the years I’ve done a lot of thinking about why ADHDers are not so good at consolidating positive experiences and using them as templates for future challenges. I have some thoughts on that. I’m not sure that the post mortem on the “why” is the most important part of this. So, if you aren’t interested in the “inside baseball” analysis of this, feel free to skip ahead to possible strategies while I nerd out on the causes. There are well known studies that show ADHD kids get something like 20:1 negative:positive feedback. Yet we are often pretty darn smart. My client base certainly is. But we tend to learn at an early age that what we are bad at is valued by society AND generally considered easy by our neurotypical peers. All that EF stuff like planning, being on time, handing things in, paperwork, showing our work, etc. Simultaneously, the things that we are good at tend to come so easily that we almost take them for granted. And, sometimes they aren’t things that are valued, at least tangibly, by our society. For example, people skills are something that can be a great predictor of success in many career paths. But they are a thing that is almost never emphasized or rewarded at any level of schooling. So, what often happens is…

This is my second attempt to post a blog entry only using voice recognition on my phone. Hopefully it will also be successful. Last time seemed to go well. I will ask you to bear with me if there are any weird typos related to autofill. There are so many moments in our day when something small and useful, perhaps even vital, definitely efficient, seems like a big deal. Ultimately, we don’t have an accurate understanding of what attention is. The ability to do the unpreferred thing that feels tedious boring or overwhelming. That is attention. Just as much as sitting down and paying attention to a lecture in college is attention. But those little things happen all day everyday. When you get change at the convenience store do you take time to put it in your wallet or just jam it into your purse for the pocket of whatever jacket you’re wearing? When you bring the mail in, do weed out the junk mail and put it right in the recycling? Do you have a convenient place near the door to put the mail? Or do you just throw it on the dining room table with all the other mail until it becomes a pile that’s so overwhelming you don’t want to deal with it? After you make dinner, if you don’t feel like doing the dishes, do you leave the leftovers so that they’re gross and unusable the next morning when you get around to the dishes? Or do you take 2 minutes to put them in a tupperware so you can have them for lunch the next day? I’m not looking to shame anyone here if you’re doing the non-optimal behavior. And you’ll note that I’m not even framing it as a choice. We have years of…

First of all, I’m using voice recognition on my phone to write this sitting in a parking lot while my youngest is in OT. I hope it works. And I hope it comes out legible and linear. Hooray technology! Hooray multitasking! So I don’t believe in procrastination. I believe it is a label we put on a behavior that we don’t understand. Nobody gets up in the morning and says to themselves, I’ve got something really important to do and it’s going to negatively affect me if I don’t do it but, damn it, I’m just not going to do it anyway. It might look like that from the outside. But nobody makes that conscious choice to fail. Many wise people have said to me, people succeed when they can. I’ve been talking about this not believing in procrastination with my clients for years. I do that because almost everyone I work with lists procrastination is one of the top three things they want to fix in coaching. But that’s like saying I want to fix my grades. Are you going to break into this school computer and fix your grades? Because grades are not a thing that exists in and of themselves in a vacuum. They’re the result of weeks and months worth of accumulated behaviors. Coaching, at its core, is behavioral intervention. So it’s my job to figure out what’s the underlying situation when a client tells me they have a problem with procrastination. The reason I am writing this particular entry now after talking about procrastination for so many years with so many clients is that I think I finally have a good way to articulate what’s going on underneath the surface. Imagine an old school balance scale like the one that the statue of Justice holds.…

One of the biggest problems that my clients and ADHDers in general have is that when they run into a problem, they are so stressed, overwhelmed, pressed for time, or perceive themselves to be rushed that they slap a proverbial band-aid on the problem but don’t take the time to really fix the underlying problem. (Side note: did I just start a post with a three line long sentence? FYI: I’m not fixing it!) Suggestion: Take a deep breath. Realize that you have a moment to at least capture said problem and potential solution on something like a To Do List. Then it won’t leave your mind for good and you have some hope of coming back to it later and really fixing the underlying problem. ‘Cause when we aren’t in the heat of the moment, we’re actually pretty good at fixing stuff… most of the time, if we’re not super anxious. Real answer: systematize the s*** out of everything. Don’t go reinventing the wheel. We’ve got lots of wheels. Wheels are cool. No doubt. Invent something different. Example: When I book a new client I do five’ish things RELIGIOUSLY: I send the new client a welcome email with permanent scheduling options based on my “master schedule,” which is an excel spreadsheet. No double bookings or confusion. Contained in the welcome email is my welcome packet: Coaching agreement, Client contact info sheet, two forms of the coaching schedule for the rest of the year (different learning styles like the calendar and the text version, so I give both,) & My Rates Sheet. All of these live in a single folder on my desktop. Easy peasy… you know the rest. I add the client to my google address book under the client group with email and cell phone. Because there is…

I recognize that I and my practice is a small sample size. However, there is a body of research backing up what I’m about to write. So bear with me. I just don’t happen to have all the citations I should probably have. Picking your partner is probably the single most important decision that contributes to your happiness in life. Pick the right career(s) is a close second. Somewhere in there is making sure you are sleeping enough and well enough. Because between those three things, work, sleep, spouse, you’re looking at about 95% of your life. If any of them are out of whack… good luck. I really want to emphasize that there are really strong trends with us ADHDers but that we are still all our own unique snowflakes. Even “the vast majority” does not mean “all.” But here are some things to think about when considering a career and/or a career change. I’ll start by breaking down my current clients by profession. This is just a moment in time. A snapshot. And, it is inherently biased, influenced by me and my style. But… 3 Doctors, Pedi ER, Family Doc, Dev. Pedi 3 Computer Programmers / Tech People 2 Nurses 2 Therapist/Social Workers 2 Artist 1 Teacher, Elementary PE 1 Artist/Teacher/Entrepreneur 1 UPS driver 4 College Students (Med school, PreVet, Entertainment/Media, Anthro) 1 High School Student I would say that this is actually pretty representative of my practice over the ten years I’ve been coaching. Except I usually have more teachers. Here’s what you see. Start with the most obvious, the UPS driver, but go deeper. Of the 15 adult clients, there are 5 people who move for a living. There are 9 people who are in helping professions. 2 more who are training to be. 3 Artists.…

I will preface this by saying that I know that this is easier said than done. But I think the secret to life is not giving a shit what the world thinks about you. Of course, I believe myself to be a moral, ethical, good person. And, there are definitely people out there who need the restraints of what people think to keep them in line. But in our ADHD tribe, at least amongst the folks with whom I deal, there is a profound lack of confidence, a sense that everyone is judging us. And, I am not worried about us running amok when freed from this anxiety. We should not fear the proverbial scarlet letter. On the contrary. We should wear our “A” proudly. I think I’ll write a longer post about how to really build self esteem in the near future. That’s complicated. It could be a lengthy and meditative piece. But, I’ll be pithy and to the point today. Three things prompted me to write this post. I saw a woman in a black hoodie at Wegmans last week that had a very simple message on it in white letters: “I’m not for everyone.” I loved it. I was talking with a client yesterday who referred to herself back in med school as “the barefoot girl.” She was remembering a time when she didn’t care what anyone thought. I suggested that she get back in touch with the “barefoot girl” and stop caring again. My favorite palm tree on vacation. See picture. All the other palm trees are reaching for the sky. But one seems to be going for the ocean. And it seems to be doing fine! Personally, I’m much more skeptical of the millions of people doing the exact same thing than I am of…

Communication is maybe the most important aspect of any marriage or intimate relationship. Some might say honesty. Some might say love. Some might say having aligned values. Some might say sexual intimacy. Some might say compatibility. I probably wouldn’t argue with anyone who said any of those things. Making a marriage last is a complicated endeavor. But most of those things can be screwed up by a lack of communication. So, maybe I’m right after all. And, this is one of those topics that is both an ADHD topic and a general Life Coach topic. It’s come up in my life recently and it’s come up with several of my clients lately. As a side note, I wonder when similar themes come up with multiple clients at the same time if it is just coincidence or if I’m somehow influencing the system. That’s a philosophical meandering that I will probably delete before I post this. Anyway, back to communication. We all know that real estate is about location, location, location. And I always say that ADHD is about planning, planning, planning! But, that’s not the easiest thing in the world if you say, have attentional issues, executive dysfunction, and decision making struggles. Or if your spouse does. Or if you both do. Living life in modern America is reasonably complex, unless you go all Henry David Thoreau and live in a cabin on a lake by yourself. (Good luck with that.) Running a household in modern America where both parents work and two kids have their own stuff going on is a tremendously complex endeavor. How can you possibly make that work without communicating? As I said, this is a human problem. But it is made worse by ADHD. Interestingly I’ve seen ADHDers respond in very different ways. Some of…

Quick thought on accommodations today. I’ve recently gone through the IEP process with my oldest. And I’ve recently done the one year follow up with my youngest. 13 and almost 8 years old respectively. (Yes, I now have a teenager. Yikes!) As a consequence I have thought even more than usual about accommodations. I cannot tell you how many times I have dealt with a school system that has been more than willing to grant extended time to ADHD kids for in class assignments like tests and quizzes but looks at you like you have three heads when you ask for extended time for written assignments or homework in general. This has always pissed me off. But I have finally come to a place where I can succinctly articulate why it drives me so batty. If a kid has a slower processing speed when presented with an in class task during the day that is likely estimated at 30-50 minutes in length, how long do you think it will take them to complete a long term writing assignment that may be a four, six, or eight our project for their neurotypical counterparts? I always try to ask my kids how long they are spending on assignments compared to the average kid. I’m not trying to get them to compare themselves to others. That’s a big no-no. I’m just trying to get a metric for how much harder or longer they are working than their peers. If all their friends say they have 1 ½ hours of homework and they have four hours… that’s a problem. That’s a factor of 2.67 if my math is correct. That’s a big deal. They aren’t going to be able to withstand a really busy week or a day when they get homework in all…

Really quick one today. Y’all know that I don’t do ANYTHING without music, podcast, sports, etc. As such, I like to share new podcasts that I get into. I recommend Time Suck with the comedian Dan Cummins. It’s weird, a little dirty, funny, and very educational. He takes a deep dive researching some weird topic that used to be a “time suck” for him. Now he makes it a funny podcast and we all get to learn. Check it out… if you’re over… 14… maybe.