What Coaches Need to Know about Adult ADHD

When I first suspected I had ADHD about 8 years ago, after getting my hands on the “Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale” screener for ADHD, I kept telling myself that “it’s too damn hard to get good help as an adult with ADHD!”

Since that day I’ve wanted to make it easier for other adults with ADHD get the help they need, whatever that may be. This became the driving purpose behind my starting my ADHD coaching practice and in getting involved in the ADHD Coaches organization, where I have served on the board of directors for the last four years and where I am currently president-elect.

One thing we coaches know is that distressed populations tend to present more in coaching than those who aren’t distressed, and I believe this also applies to adults ADHD. One reason why I was prompted to start Leading with ADHD was because of the number of clients I met in corporate coaching contexts who painted the picture of their ADHD for me, without yet knowing what it was they were grappling with. After I surfaced the possibility that they might also have ADHD, the vast majority of those clients went on to be diagnosed.

So I decided I need to do something to help other (non-ADHD informed) coaches identify the possibility of ADHD in their clients and to help those clients get the help they need. To that end, I created the presentation “What Coaches Need to Know about Adult ADHD”, and I’ve presented this to several groups of executive and leadership development coaches.

Please feel free to use this information in ways that are helpful to you or others you know, and if you have a group of coaches you’d like me to present this to, please do get in touch.

Helping You Overcome Your ADHD Challenges in the Middle of a Pandemic

I imagine that you, like me, have received too many emails over the last few weeks that offer support but are full of hollow platitudes - and perhaps commercial offers that you aren’t interested in. I see this as ever-so-thinly veiled commercialism, and the last thing I want to do is to show up like that.

I’m writing this today because I’m acutely aware of how many of us with ADHD are facing challenges related to the pandemic, like isolation (it’s like kryptonite for me!), lack of structure and boundaries, time awareness, and distractions caused by sharing our workspace with our families, loved ones, or pets.  And many of us are losing our jobs, compounding the challenges we are facing.

Leading with ADHD Support & Accountability Group

To help you better overcome these challenges, I’m offering a new Leading with ADHD Support & Accountability Group starting next Thursday April 23rd at noon PDT.  I invite you to join 7 other adults with ADHD on Zoom for one hour each week to overcome the key challenges you are facing right now, such as:

• How to overcome “procrastivity”

• Get started on tasks and projects more easily

• Become more aware of time

• Maintain your focus

• Or whatever challenge you want a solution for! 

You’ll have my full support and the support of other adults who really get what you are going through, and you can learn from their ADHD life experience. 

This 6-session group is designed to be supportively positive, budget-friendly, and outcomes and accountability focused, while providing a safe space to learn and stretch yourself. 

Learn more about this group, and sign up here.

I’m Here for You

I continue to be here to support you individually as well, and I’m committed to working with you to develop a coaching program that works for both you and your budget. 

Here’s a reminder of the coaching I offer:

• Superpower Coaching:  This positive, strengths-based approach will help you to quickly identify your unique talents and abilities – your superpowers – and then dig into your key challenges and develop strategies to effectively manage them.  

• Leadership Development and Executive Coaching:  I’ll help you grow, develop, and be more successful as a leader, while applying ADHD strategies to help you overcome the challenges you are experiencing in your role.

• Career Coaching:  If your job has been impacted, or if you think it might be, I can help you refresh your resume, identify what job you want, and plot your path forward.  

If we’ve worked together before we’ll pick up where we left off and focus on what challenges you want to solutions for right now. 

Let’s Talk

If you are interested in joining my Leading with ADHD Support & Accountability Group, you can find out more and sign up here.  If you’d like to explore individual coaching and work together on developing approach that works for you and your budget, let’s talk.  Book a 30-minute no-obligation conversation so we can figure out how we might be able to work together.

I look forward to speaking with you soon.  In the meantime, please stay healthy and safe!

Coaching for Motivation in Adults with ADHD - Presentation at the 2019 International Conference on ADHD

Yesterday I had the great privilege of presenting a workshop at the ADHD Professional Institute as part of the 2019 International Conference on ADHD in Philadelphia. This presentation was a major shift for me, as I was my first time presenting to - and teaching! - other professionals (coaches, therapists, psychologists, etc.) My topic was about how I use 2 theoretical models of motivation - Self Determination Theory and the ADHD Interest-based Nervous System - to help clients develop intrinsic, autonomous, and authentic motivation that helps our clients engage in tasks and projects more effectively.

If you are interested, you can download the slides from my presentation here or on Slideshare .

Let me know if you have any questions or would like to discuss this approach!

Lead with Your ADHD Superpowers

In my prior post I shared how the ADHD nervous system is different.  In this post I want to talk about the importance of identifying and leading with your unique strengths – your superpowers – and how you can do that.

Everyone is good at some things and not so good at others. This is not limited to people with ADHD. People with ADHD tend to be hard on ourselves, focusing on our challenges and abusing ourselves with negative self-talk, which diminishes our self-esteem and motivation. But given that ADHD also brings gifts, taking the time to analyze what you are uniquely great at and then learning how to lead with those superpowers will make you more successful, and you’ll feel better about yourself, too.

There are 3 key ways to identify your strengths and superpowers:

1. Self-assessment

2. Feedback from others

3. Strengths assessments

Self-Assessment:  Take some time to reflect on your strengths, and keep in mind that we often don’t recognize our own strengths because they involve things that come easy to us. On a sheet of paper, write down all the things you are good at. What are your strengths? What do you do better than anyone else at work? What leadership skills do you possess? What have others told you in the past? Write down whatever comes to mind – you’re just brainstorming for now.

Feedback from Others:  Ask co-workers, your boss, family members, and friends about your strengths. They may have complimented you in the past and you just brushed them off, because of negative self-esteem or an assumption that everyone has those same strengths. Take the time to send an email to a dozen or so people in your life. Give them a short list of numbered questions. Ask them things like: What adjectives would use to describe me? What are my unique strengths? What is different about me? What qualities do I have that you especially value? When you have all of this feedback, consolidate it into a single document and sort it based on the number of times a strength was mentioned.

Strengths Assessments:  There are a number of strengths assessments available online, and using one (or two) can be a great way to tease out your strengths more objectively. I particularly like the VIA Character Strengths assessment (a basic report is free) for strengths based in personal values, and the StrengthsProfile ($14-$40 US) for a broader range of strengths that are more likely to show up in your professional life.    

Finally, once you have all of the information you’ve collected above, pull it all together.  Identify and rank those top ten strengths you believe you are uniquely best at – your superpowers.

Think about how you can better lead with those superpowers, leveraging them to perform better and feel better.  Work to reframe how you look at yourself – pushing past negative self-talk and give yourself credit for what you are doing well. Learning how to access your superpowers when you need them will help you live your best life.

In upcoming posts, I’ll share more about the importance of how you can manage your challenges and practice self-compassion.

If you’d like to learn more about my individual coaching or my soon-to-be announced coaching groups, please get in touch.

Adult ADHD Isn’t What You Think It Is

When most people think of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, they think of a 10 year old boy who can’t sit still and who gets distracted by any new shiny object.  And in fact, the DSM V diagnostic criteria for ADHD is still based on research of the externally observable behavior of boys under the age of 12.   But ADHD in adults is so much more about our internal experience, and it isn’t actually about a deficit of attention or about observable hyperactivity. In fact, adults with ADHD tend to pay attention to everything, which can cause an internal hyperactivity. We can also devote intense focus and energy on a task or topic when activated to do so. Sound familiar?

And the “disorder” label implies that that ADHD results in “clinically significant distress or disability.”  Yes, adults with ADHD are presented with challenges because of their ADHD, but they are also granted a number of gifts or unique strengths that I think of as “superpowers.”  These can include such talents as high levels of imagination and creativity, a strong sense of intuition or the ability to “connect the dots” before anyone else can, and the ability to shift gears rapidly as external priorities change, to name few.

So how can we call ADHD a “disorder” when it bestows so many gifts?  I prefer to think of it simply as a “brain difference”, or as an “Interest-based nervous system” as Dr. William Dodson describes it after decades of working with adults with ADHD.  He describes two fundamentally different nervous systems in adults:

Neurotypical or “Importance-Based Nervous System”
This is what people without ADHD — or neurotypical people — often have. They find motivation for and engage on tasks based on importance. The task or topic may be important to themselves or to others, such as a boss, co-workers, spouse, family member, or friend. And the degree of importance may be related to a reward for doing the work or punishment for not doing it. Knowing the importance of doing the work and the related potential for reward or punishment is enough to provide these individuals with the motivation they need to “engage on demand” on tasks or projects.

ADHD or “Interest-Based Nervous System”
Adults with ADHD, however, are typically not motivated by importance, reward, or punishment.  Instead, we need to have an authentic or intrinsic interest in the task or topic in order to muster the motivation we need to engage with it.  And this interest takes one of the following forms: 

• Interesting: A topic, task, or project is intellectually stimulating or intriguing enough to trigger genuine curiosity or a desire to learn more or solve a problem.

• Challenging: I like to think of this as “challenging in a good way” because we all think of challenges differently. Some of us become highly motivated to take on a big challenge, especially when others think it’s impossible or dare us to try it. “You can’t do that!” is often the motivator some need to dive into a task and prove the other person wrong.

• Novel or Creative: This is when a task or project provides an opportunity to develop something new or approach a problem in a creative or completely different way.

• Passion: Current research appears to indicate that for some their values or attachments to causes – or perhaps to those they love – can provide interest-based motivation.

• Urgency: Many adults with ADHD have become “urgency junkies,” waiting until the last minute to engage on a project, because the urgency of a looming deadline provides the motivation they need to engage and focus.  But waiting until the last minute often doesn’t produce the best results, and our work may suffer. 

Understanding the differences between neurotypical people and those of us with ADHD is key to laying the foundation for living our best lives (see my Model for Success with ADHD ).  Other keys are medical (medication) support, physical self-care, and support from others. 

In upcoming posts, I’ll share more about the importance of leading with your superpowers, managing your challenges, and practicing self-compassion. 

If you’d like to learn more about my individual coaching or my soon-to-be announced coaching groups, please get in touch.