ADHD Organization

  Too Many Ideas? Too many ideas are counterproductive when you cannot decide which ones to execute, and you become overwhelmed and come to a dead stop. Too many ideas are counterproductive when you follow all of them, and do not execute any of them to your satisfaction. Too many ideas are counterproductive when you act on them, and forsake what you say is important to you. Too many ideas are counterproductive when the ball of thread called your life is unraveling, and you can’t remember why you started these endeavors. Sometimes it feels like a fire hose let loose! The ideas keep spraying, pushing you back into a corner, until you want to yell, “help!”  The conundrum comes in deciding which to implement.

Does it ever seem like when you are trying to make progress it is two steps forward and one step back? When you have  ADD there is a tendency to think in black and white… it is working or it is not working. Can you think about progress in another way? Experiment Progress is not linear! You have to experiment to see what works and what does not work. It could be that you have not found the strategy that works for you, yet. I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.  – Thomas A. Edison Remember Alternatively, you found the right strategy, but “forgot” to do what you know works for you.  Does this sound familiar? If this is the…

Have you ever forgotten to ask yourself, “Why?” That is, “what is the purpose of doing what I am doing?” For many of us with ADD, this is often times the case. Sometimes we exert significant effort toward a goal, before asking, “Why am I doing this?” What if you earned a degree in economics, attended law schools twice, went back to school to earn a Post-Baccalaureate Teaching Certificate, taught middle and high school, and never asked, “Why”? You might have spent a lot of time working hard to achieve goals that may or may not have been the “right ones.” As you may have surmised already, I did all of the above. While it was certainly a circuitous path to get to where I…

If you are playing a big game, and by necessity experimenting with different strategies and tools to meet your goals, rather than playing it safe, you know that you cannot get it right 100% of the time. When you push your limits you will inevitably hit some speed bumps along the way. When you have a setback, you can choose to see it as a cautionary sign to slow down or as an excuse to come to a complete stop. If you are prone to adopt the common ADD tendency to think in terms of black and white, you may think that there are only two options when you hit a barrier; you can go full speed ahead and just try harder or give up….

    Those of you who struggle with clutter, whether space or paper, know very well the impact it has on your life. For the purposes of this post, the question is: What affect, whether direct or indirect, is it having on your ability to reach your goals? In some cases the impact is obvious. Perhaps less obvious is that that physical clutter can lead to If you are ready to address your clutter there are three steps. The first step is cleaning out the clutter. ADD-Friendly Ways To Organize Your Life by Judith Kolberg and Kathleen Nadeau has helpful strategies for this. If you feel that you need help, you may enlist your family or friends. Hiring an organizer may be the answer for…

The objective in this exercise is to pinpoint the values that made each experience a “peak experience.” After looking at the example below, come up with at least three of your own peak experiences. You may notice in my example that some of the values that are important to me are independence, achievement, acknowledgement and connection. I would be curious to hear what values your discovered while doing this exercise. Feel free to leave a comment below. Peak Experience: Working full time in my own business. Description of Peak Experience: I had been working for a few years while trying to start my own coaching and training business. Then one day I walked away from my full time job. I felt a sense of pride…

Whenever I work with people in reaching their goals, our first step is making sure that they are clear on their values. This is key because their values should serve as the foundation for all of their goals. When people ask for my help, it is because they want to become more effective and efficient in reaching their goals. They are ready to work hard on building their strengths and countering the challenges of their ADHD symptoms in order to do this. Together we make sure that they are heading in the right direction by looking at their values, first. To give you a taste of what I am working on, I thought that I would offer the exercise below to help you look at…