You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (56 page)

4. Check In with Yourself

How is your mental state (what’s your “cognitive temperature”)? Are you calm, agitated, curious, bored? How about your body? Are you tense? You may need to stretch or move around a
bit before continuing.

Are you ready to do what you set out to do when you became overwhelmed? If not, go back to #3.

You may find that it takes several repetitions of checking back, doing the simplest tasks, and taking short breaks to get things moving. Before we introduce some more helpful tools for avoiding “stuckness,” we are going to urge you to include an ADD coach as a key member of your
professional helping team. He or she knows ADD from A to Z and is the expert at guiding ADDults through the pitfalls that generally litter our path from intention
to action. Go to ADDcoaching.com for more information about ADD coaching and to begin your search for a coach who is a good fit for you. While we are offering a number of tools from our coaching kit in this chapter, reading a self-help
book is not enough when you are trying to put more order and forward movement in your life.

First Aid for Decision Making

(What you can do when you are ready to start getting into action but don’t know
what
to start on.)

Everything seems equal in importance, and the ability to prioritize seems to have evaporated. In all likelihood, what is happening is that you are still boggled by all the to-do’s
floating around in your head—and the notion that you have to do them all
right now
. You are not so overwhelmed that you can’t function at all, but you are not in a great place to make decisions. You would be a better employee than a manager in this state of mind.

• Save the knotty problems for your coaching session.
  
• Make some kind of decision and stick to it. If you become aware that you have veered away from what you intended to do (become distracted), say “oops” and move back into your original task.
  
• In this state of mind, don’t waste time and energy trying to make the “best decision.” Write a few possibilities down, put them in a hat and pick one at random.
  
• If there are only two possibilities to choose from, flip a coin.
  
• The goal is to get moving, not to move in some perfect and efficient fashion.
  
• Keep the decision demon at bay by having no more than three things on the desktop. This means that you pluck three items from your “to do” list at any given time and write them down. Don’t go to your massive “to do” list for more items until you have dealt with the three on your desktop.
  
• Your coach can help you get started on more complicated decisions. He or she can provide the perspective needed to help you move away from “majoring in minors” while the must-dos go undone.
  

More on ADD Coaching

An ADD coach is the person who can help you learn how to:

get out of that state of overwhelm more quickly

decrease the amount of overwhelm in your life

take forward steps toward your goals

identify and remove obstacles to the actions you desire to
make

gather tools to
help you “work with your quirks”

Notice that we included a lot of self-care items.

Build a foundation that supports you—eating,
sleeping, meditation, exercise and play
(if you don’t, that inner five-year-old will get you)

Self-care is always the first step in any plan for change. You can’t think clearly when you are sleep-deprived or have low blood sugar. You would be surprised (don’t laugh)
at the number of our clients who attempt to manage their complicated lives while running on empty in terms of the basics. Often, the early months of coaching are spent laying the self-care foundation to support a life that really works.

In the first part of this chapter, we have been discussing what to do when you find yourself in a state of overwhelm. We have used different words for this state—
boggle, stuckness
and
shutdown
. Perhaps you have never thought in terms of “stuckness” being a problem with overstimulation, but it is. Generally, it happens because there is too much going on in our heads and we are having trouble identifying
the pieces and sorting them out. So we can’t choose or initiate an action step. In the next section, preventive medicine, we offer strategies for reducing the amount of time you spend in overwhelm, leaving more for taking those forward action steps.

Preventive Medicine (for Staying Out
of Overwhelm While Moving Forward)

The Rock-Bottom Plan

Once you have decided to make a major or minor life
change, the next step is to design a rock-bottom plan for living. This plan is a simple fallback lifestyle for the times there are lots of to-do’s in
your life. Actually, it’s an important tool in your box of life strategies even if you are just focused on surviving your everyday life.

Change, of course, always brings some upheaval with it. And life with ADD is rarely smooth sailing. Somehow we have been conned into believing that we “should” be always on top of things and always at our best. If you have been to those seminars and workshops on how to succeed, it can be very intimidating when you compare the how-to instructions to your actual life. They don’t say much about
dirty laundry and bad brain days, for example. It is then natural to conclude that everybody else bounds out of bed at the crack of dawn, eager to greet a day chock-full of successfully met challenges and productivity. This is simply not true. Even people without ADD have their ups and downs.

Imagine that you have just won an all-expenses-paid trip to the dream location of your choice. The only
hitch is that you have to leave tomorrow morning. What would you clear off your schedule today in order to board the plane to paradise on time? Of course, we can hear some of you saying “I would have to drop everything and spend the rest of the day and all night packing … and I’m still not sure I could make it.” That’s the subject of another conversation, but we are all too familiar with ADDult
packing challenges.

All right, we’ll try another scenario. Your mother is having surgery. You will need to be available to care for her for several days after the operation. What changes do you make to your routine in this case? Carryout food? Paper plates? Do you cancel your usual volunteer activities? What about going to the kids’ soccer games? Do you ignore the laundry and dishes piling up
as you deal with your mom’s needs? Do you let some things slide at work so you can leave a little early?

You can probably do this for your mom, but what about yourself? We know, this one is harder, especially if you aren’t having surgery or something that dramatic happening in your life. You
are just having a “bad brain day,” sort of like a bad hair day only worse. Even with the best of treatment
for your ADD, those functional dips do happen.

The key to riding out those less than stellar days is a preplanned strategy for a modified routine—the rock-bottom plan. Before your next bad brain day, sit down with pencil and paper and design a schedule that eliminates all nonessentials. Keep your list in a handy place so you can just read the directions when you need them—when you are on overload
is not the time to be thinking or planning.

We bet that you have had quite a number of these days and that you are not completely unfamiliar with the numbers of the local carryout joints. The difference between what you have done in the past and what we are suggesting you do now is that you may never have taken a guilt-free meltdown day. Instead, you ordered the pizza or slunk off to bed, all
the while calling yourself a lazy slacker.

Make no mistake about it, every time you talk to yourself in this way, you set yourself back. The antidote to taking a step back in this way is to reverse your usual standards for yourself. In the infamous words from Despair.com, you are “increasing success by lowering expectations.” Consider rock bottom to be your lowest functional point. Any behavior
over and above this baseline is cause for congratulations. Avoid defeating yourself by expecting a higher level of functioning at any given time.

Use your “rock-bottom plan” as the baseline that you return to whenever you need it. When you are making changes in your life, start at rock bottom and add things gradually. You’ll be amazed at how much simpler a major change can be when you aren’t
trying to rehab the kitchen, solve the problem of world hunger and write the great American novel all at the same time! Whenever you find that you had been sailing along, but then added so many activities that you got overwhelmed again, start back at rock bottom.

Put Your Own Oxygen Mask on First

Take this little mantra from the airlines and memorize it. Post it on your computer, your bathroom
mirror and on the toilet seat. Write it down a thousand times. Whatever it takes to permanently imprint these words on your brain. One of the biggest obstacles to making positive life changes is trying to take care of everybody else. It is just not possible to keep on giving from an empty pot.

Action Steps—Breaking It Down

One of the most common stoppers for our coaching clients is trying to
take action steps that are too big. For example, one of Kate’s clients (we’ll call her Pat) is interested in becoming a coach. Pat has a natural affinity and talent for coaching and has heard a great deal of supportive feedback in the training classes she is enrolled in. Recently, she took a marketing class and was encouraged to write articles, get speaking engagements and develop a Web site. Pat
was more than a little freaked out by this advice, as she is currently a homemaker and mom with almost no experience in the world of business. Those particular action steps seemed too big and scary to Pat.

The remedy was to help Pat come up with a smaller step, a baby step if you will. Rather than write an article for publication, she determined that putting some musings down on paper on a particular
topic was doable. The next step will be to show those musings to a safe person who will not judge them—her coach!

Sometimes the obstacle to taking certain steps is fear, and sometimes it is being overwhelmed and unsure of where to start. The solution to overwhelm is to break the action down into small steps, with a timeline for the whole project. The timeline, however, should never be set in
stone. Forgive the delay or detour and set a new date for the subsequent steps to completion. When a client is unsure of where to start, they usually lack some information about what is involved in a given action. Putting up a Web site is a big project, with multiple
steps. There is a learning curve involved and a lot of information to gather before action is taken. As ADDers, many of us carry
a lot of shame about our gaps in knowledge. This can make it hard for us to admit that we need help and information.

Crises are nature’s way of forcing change
.

—Susan Taylor

How Can I Be Sure I Have What It Takes?

You have done a whole lot of work with yourself, to accept your ADD and to clean out much of the mental gunk you accumulated before you understood how ADD affected your life. You
now have enough brain space available to actually think about the life changes you want to make. These changes can be little or big, from cleaning out that messy closet to going to school, changing careers, getting married or getting a divorce. Of course, you are the only one who can determine the magnitude of the change you are contemplating. For some of us, the messy closet may be a bigger deal
than completing years of school. The apparent size of any project has more to do with the emotional charge associated with it than the actual amount of work needed to complete it. That said, we know that the ADD brain tends to look at a task and do one of two things: (1) think it will be an absolute breeze, because the brain has not really processed all the steps and potential obstacles to be dealt
with, or (2) freeze up because the brain has seen all the work involved in the change and thinks it all has to happen
now.