ADHD Center for Success

Life can be a challenge if you’re a non-ADD adult living in relationship with an ADD adult partner.

I recently coached a non-ADD adult regarding some of her specific issues living with her ADD adult partner. My client voiced concern that is easily the most common complaint I hear from non-ADD relationship partners. “I feel like he needs me to tell him what to do all the time. I have to guide him and direct him. I resent that I married my husband to have an equal partner but now I feel like I’ve got another child to take care of.”

Adults with ADD tend to lack the inherent nature of structure and routine. Consequently, adults with ADD often function best when there is some source of ‘external structure’ in their life, ie work and school. However, non-ADD relationship partners also provide a great deal of structure and anchoring for the adult with ADD. Without this anchor, the ADD partner may have a greater tendency to meander during projects, chores, and possibly with life in general. Thus, it may appear that the ADD partner is depending on you or that he/she won’t do certain things without your comments or reminders.

Coaching Tips for Non-ADD Relationship Partners:

• Communicate, communicate, communicate.
• Be honest, firm and gentle with your communication.
• Clearly communicate your preferences and expectations of your ADD partner.
• Clearly communicate your disappointment when there are breakdowns in agreements.
• Take time to acknowledge the strengths, assets and gifts of your ADD partner. Acknowledge these gifts to your ADD partner.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Consider marriage/couple therapy with a therapist who is dual trained in couple therapy AND who has a thorough understanding and skills working with adults with ADD.
• Do not take your ADD partner’s challenges and breakdowns personally.
• Do have ‘realistic’ expectations of your ADD partner.
• Do not expect perfection from your ADD partner.

Schedule your complimentary consultation with CoachRudy

~CoachRudy

*Resource: Russell Barkley, PhD

Russell Barkley, PhD, one of the foremost researchers of ADHD suggests that ADHD is not an attention disorder. He suggests that “ADHD is a blindness to the future… so that the child and adult with ADHD are going to wait until the future is eminent (in your face)… and then they will try to deal with it.”

Barkley suggests that “ADHD  creates a nearsightedness to time so that the person with the disorder cannot organize to the delayed future but only to the imminent future. Thus, everything in life becomes a crisis. But the crisis was avoidable and no one has patience with this because they see this as a moral failing. ‘You could have chosen to get ready, but didn’t’.”

 Dr. Barkley also suggests that “ADHD is a performance disorder. You can’t perform the things you know how to do. People with ADHD know what to do, but they can’t do what they know”.

“I have heard Dr. Barkley speak several times but I had not heard him speak of this before. Most of the ADHD children and adults that I work with struggle with procrastination, delaying the activation to get things done.”  ~CoachRudy

If you’d like to hear Dr. Barkley yourself, click on the link below.

Most children and adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD) know the feeling of overwhelm. It’s that place we go to when we’ve overextended ourselves, when we’re multi-tasking to our max yet having trouble keeping up. This is when stress gets the better of us, and more. Maybe you recall that old expression, “Stop the world, I want to get off”.

It goes without saying that we love stimulation but there are those times when we receive too much stimulation and become overwhelmed by it. In general, we tend not to be the most organized person so there are those times when we get stuck; can’t move forward, can’t move back. Do you know the experience of approaching today’s designated TO DO task but all you can see is clutter, disorganization, piles of prior incomplete tasks and suddenly you experience that sensation slowly creeping up and you can’t figure out where to start. Yes, that is overwhelm.

By the way, are you on target to complete and mail off your taxes before April 15? If you managed to keep organized financial records then preparing your taxes may have been a simple task. If on the other hand, you are challenged by organization and paperwork then you may have experienced overwhelm even at the thought of your taxes. Then you may have also felt your blood pressure or anxiety on the rise.

Symptoms of Overwhelm –
• Brain freeze – can’t discuss, can’t problem solve, etc
• Tired, sleepy, poor focus, increased irritability
• Running in circles, busy but poor productivity
• Depressive and stress related symptoms
 

How to manage overwhelm?

I offer several coaching solutions to manage overwhelm but here’s one of my favorites. Develop a “Recipe for Success”. Do you have a favorite kitchen recipe? When you follow your recipe and utilize the proper ingredients in the proper amounts you are nearly guaranteed to create your favorite dish with a reliable outcome. That’s all you do with your “Recipe for Success”.

Your Recipe for Success!
• Know your desired outcome
• Determine the ingredients necessary to create your desired outcome
• When creating your recipe, consider what’s worked in the past
• Your recipe MUST be written and kept where that you can easily find it
• Post recipe in calendar or organizer; review on 1st day of every month

~CoachRudy Rodriguez, LCSW

Get help with ADD overwhelm TODAY! 

Eliminate Time-Draining E-mail Habits 

If you are feeling overburdened and stressed at work, your online habits may be partly to blame. Poor e-mail management often is a sign—or the cause—of other time management woes. A top culprit: mismanaging incoming messages.

Marsha Egan, president of The Egan Group, a success-coaching firm, offers a self-management program that teaches you how to eliminate time draining e-mail habits and boost your productivity. First, Egan says, you need to alter your perception of e-mail: Stop viewing the act of checking e-mail as a task in itself; come to see e-mail as merely a task delivery system. Then adopt these habits:

• Empty your inbox every time you check it.
• Live by the two-minute rule. If you can handle any incoming message in two minutes or less, do so immediately. That could mean replying to, forwarding or simply deleting a message.
• Use a filing system. Create action folders and use them temporarily to file e-mail messages that will take longer than two minutes to respond to. Treat those messages as items on your daily to-do list.
• Control incoming messages—instead of letting them control you. Change your “send and receive” e-mail function from “Automatic” to “Every two hours.”

Source: Success Magazine July/August 2007

 There are many possible reasons for putting off until tomorrow what you intended to do today. It is only once you know why you are doing it that you can figure out what to do about it.

Source: “The Organized Life: Secrets of an Expert Organizer” by Stephanie Denton

If you’re an adult with ADHD, you’re in good company.

Below is a list of famous people speculated of having ADD/ADHD.

Architect:

• Frank Lloyd Wright

Artists:

• Pablo Picasso
• Vincent Van Gogh
• Salvador Dali

Athletes:

• Michael Phelps
• Terry Bradshaw
• Pete Rose
• Nolan Ryan
• Michael Jordan

Authors:

• Samuel Clemens
• Emily Dickenson
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Ralph Waldo Emerson

Composer:

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders:

• Andrew Carnegie
• Malcolm forbes
• Henry Ford
• Bill Gates
• Paul Orfalea
• Ted Turner

Entertainers:

• Jim Carrey
• Steve McQueen
• Jack Nicholson
• Elvis Presley
• Robin Williams

Inventors:

• Alexander Graham Bell
• Thomas Edison
• Benjamin Franklin

Physicist:

• Albert Einstein

Political Figures:

• James Carville
• John F. Kennedy
• Abraham Lincoln

By ANITA BRUZZESE

Gannett

Updated Jun 28, 2010 03:42PM

Daryl Wizelman was diagnosed at age 6 with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, also known as ADHD, when he couldn’t concentrate in class and teachers considered him hyperactive.

His pediatrician put him on medication, which he said was a “real life-changer.”

Fast forward a couple of decades. Wizelman starts his own company, but employees say he doesn’t seem to listen to them, rushing through meetings and showing little interest in their ideas. Again, his ADHD has come into play, and he struggles to find ways to take a childhood disorder and make it fit into a working world that expects top performers to be focused and organized.

More years pass. Wizelman now says he has learned to be more aware of the appropriate way to behave and even sees the positive aspects of his disorder.

“It gives me a lot of empathy toward other people with whatever struggles they may be facing. It teaches you to treat others how you want to be treated,” said Wizelman, a speaker and author from Calabasas, Calif.

Mental-health professionals estimate that 9 million adults in the United States have ADHD. Symptoms of ADHD and attention deficit disorder, also known as inattentive ADHD, include difficulty paying attention, easy distraction, trouble finishing paperwork, fidgeting, talking too much and procrastination.

All these issues can cause workers with the disorder a lot of problems at work, and possibly even get them fired.

To read more…  Manage ADHD Symptoms on the job

(HealthDay News) — Adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) miss, on average, more than three weeks a year in workplace productivity, according to a new global reckoning of the problem.

Altogether, between 3 percent and 4 percent of adults worldwide have ADHD, according to survey data from the World Health Organization (WHO). Researchers say the condition can cause a serious loss of concentration at work due to chronic hyperactivity, forgetfulness and impulsiveness.

But many adult workers with ADHD may not know they have a problem, the team noted.

“While surveying mental disorders around the world, we’ve interviewed close to 200,000 people in almost 30 countries, and we’re discovering that an enormous number of adult workers — more than 3 percent on average — have untreated adult ADHD,” said study co-author Ron Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Kessler is also the director of the WHO’s World Mental Health Survey Consortium, which is based at Harvard.

Dr. David W. Goodman, director of the Adult Attention Deficit Disorder Center in Luthersville, Md., agreed that ADHD is an “under-diagnosed and under-recognized psychiatric condition that causes a tremendous amount of disability in the work environment.”

Read entire article>

Article By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter

Last Updated: May 28, 2008

Next week I will send two Special Announcements. The first is that my NEW website will go LIVE. I have needed a website for some time so I recently spent a weekend building the new site. My blogsite will continue to post articles, research and such while the NEW website will host information regarding my coaching packages, teleclasses & seminars and eventual products in the works.

The second announcement is that I have totally revised of my coaching packages. In the announcement I will unveil new group coaching options, revised individual coaching options and a new membership program filled with several benefits you’ll enjoy.

Stay tuned for that announcement next week.

I recently learned of a book: “A Whole New Mind – Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the World.” In a chapter called “Symphony,” the author estimates that, “self-made millionaires are four times more likely than the rest of the population to be dyslexic. Why Dyslexics struggle with L-Directed (left brained) Thinking and the linear, sequential, alphabetic reasoning at its core. But as with a blind person who develops a more acute sense of hearing, a dyslexic’s difficulties in one area lead him to acquire outsized ability in others. As Sally Shaywitz, a Yale neuroscientist and specialist in Dyslexia, writes, “Dyslexics think differently. They are intuitive and excel at problem-solving, seeing the big picture, and simplifying . . . . They are poor rote reciters, but inspired visionaries.”

In my personal reading and research of successful adults with ADHD I find that several of the most successful adults with ADHD are also Dyslexic. Now that is certainly not to say that Dyslexia is a prerequisite for success but it appears the combination can be a profitable combination that some adults take to the bank.