You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (58 page)

Probably you have already experienced some relief as you recognized the painful emotions associated with your paper pile job. Perhaps you shed a tear or two, or spent some time pounding an inanimate object. Congratulations, you have taken a step toward
healing the emotional baggage that surrounds your ADD. First you acknowledge that you have the feelings and then you allow them to come out somehow. The hard part is letting yourself have your feelings … knowing that you are not just being silly or immature. That you are an earnest soul who has been doing the best you know how.

Treat It Like a Mountain

Realize that you are going to be going
uphill.

This is bad news and good news. The bad news is that the grade may be steep and involve some huffing and puffing. On the other hand, aerobic exercise can feel pretty good once you get in the groove. The sitting around doing nothing but worrying how high the mountain is can be a lot more work, stress and strain. So maybe the bad news is really good news. The good news is that you are going
up.

Experienced mountaineers may just charge up that mountain if the challenge is not too great and they are in terrific shape.

If, however, you are not in top shape you will need to take it in stages.

• Be sure to take enough snacks and nourishment for the journey
  
• Sit down and rest when you need it
  
• Give yourself a big pat on the back at the end of each leg of the journey
  
• If you get out of breath after going a hundred feet, take a rest and tell yourself you did a good job going that far
  

In the case of paper piles, you may want actual food-type snacks or it might be some other type of reward. Music is very nourishing to the soul, but sometimes we forget to turn it on. Usually, it is because we don’t feel that we have earned the right to be happy. If you still believe that you have to earn
happy-making treats (and most of us do), think of it as an incentive plan in reverse order. You give yourself the treat during the job in order to lift your spirits enough to do it at all. Often, you need to give yourself the reward before even starting the job.

KK:
“I often give new clients a prescription to do away with their ‘to do’ list for a few days (or as long as it takes to relax). Their
only focus during that time is self-care. They can meditate, listen to music, take a bath—anything that feeds them. Usually they start getting naturally activated even while the prescription is in effect. Taking the ‘shoulds’ away has an amazing effect.”

When you are ready to ascend that mountain, make sure you have the proper gear. Is your chair comfortable? Do you have enough light? Is the
music on (or off—your preference)? Have you written reminders to yourself? Such as:

Take a break when you need it.

You are already doing a good job—you are facing your fear and beginning to take the action steps needed to get through your paper pile.

You are allowed to have feelings about doing this job—take a tantrum break if you need it.

And do anything you want for yourself in the way of
encouragement.

It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away.

—Kenichi Ohmae

We’d suggest that you pause a moment before continuing to read. Mr. Ohmae’s metaphor contains a compelling message, reminding us of a power we often forget—the power to change our feelings by changing our thinking. On those days when you are frustrated, feeling that you will never adequately maintain the forward momentum, take the metaphoric lenses out of your eyeglasses and replace them with
a new set, as Mr. Ohmae suggests. Seeing the situation differently expands your thinking so
you can consider your situation from a different perspective. And with changed thinking, you will experience changed feelings, fear being a big one that often ties us up in knots.

Fear of Taking Action

Peeling back the layers of the fear that can confront us as we begin moving forward on a significant
change in life, we run into some common themes:

If I take this step it will eventually lead to doing or being something I don’t feel ready for.

If I take this step I will fail … again.

If I take this step (even if I am successful) I will drop the ball later on and fail to follow through.

If I take this step I will have to make all these other scary changes (doing something my husband/wife
doesn’t approve of means I will have to get a divorce).

The key to addressing these fears is to remind yourself that you can take a break in the forward action any time you need to. Give yourself time to adjust to each step on the road to your goal and you will be more likely to stay the course.

Beware of Playing the Catch-Up Game

One of the big obstacles to forward motion is the strange notion
that we are behind and somehow have to catch up with everyone else. The comparison game, of course, is always a losing proposition. Without exception, if you look around you will find people who seem to be doing better than you are. Why do we want to engage in a surefire losing proposition anyway?

The backlog of all those half-done, not-good-enough efforts from the past can drag your current
projects down so heavily that they come to a standstill, relegated to the slush pile once more. This
happens because the new project has too many expectations attached to it. We are trying too hard to prove that we are really okay. No matter how spectacular our work in progress is, it can’t make up for all the things we didn’t do, or did poorly in the past. Take another look at the section called
“Toxic Mental Debris: The Vicious Cycle of Shame, Perfectionism and Procrastination” at the end of the mental hygiene chapter for more on this one.

Follow-Through and Accountability

We bet that the mere mention of those words sends shivers up your spine. You envision a sadistic slave master who is giving you the lash as, once more, you confess that the dog ate your homework. When you have been
“guilted” for most of your life, eventually guilt loses its power as a motivator. It wasn’t a great strategy to begin with, but once upon a time it may have set you in motion, after a rather miserable fashion. Now, you still get to feel rotten, but your butt refuses to unstick itself from the chair when you are made to feel guilty. Sometimes it is you who is doing the guilt tripping and sometimes
it is somebody “out there.” Either way, guilt is worse than useless—it is a demotivator that contributes to backward motion.

Still, we can’t avoid those follow-through actions if we want to make progress toward goals. The key to success in developing follow-through skills is to keep practicing them, without making yourself wrong when the actions don’t quite match your intentions in the beginning.
We don’t recommend that you try to go it alone. It is all too easy to slide into old patterns of beating yourself up in the privacy of your thoughts. A good ADD coach can help you by continually reminding you of your goals and intentions, while at the same time asking the right questions to discover the things that are stopping you from taking action. Your “failures” to follow through are then
simply viewed as clues that will lead the way to solutions.

Using Play to Boost Productivity

The reason we have such an aversion to work is that there is not enough play in it. Really. The people who told you that you are
an adult now and it’s time to put the toys away and get to work were just plain wrong. Think about some of the most dysfunctional working environments in existence. Not only
are they unbearably grim, but they tend to put the brakes on actual output. Why do you suppose there are so many reports in the news about going postal? And then we have the IRS, which hounds the poor wage-slave but can’t keep its own house in order.

We have worked for “the man” in employee situations and we also have logged many years in self-employment. Our most productive work environments
included a liberal dose of fun. Without it, those creative juices just evaporate. You don’t have to be a painter, dancer or writer to be creative, by the way. Anything we do can be improved when we flex those muscles that produce novel solutions. You may need to use stealth if your workplace is very repressive. If anything except following orders is forbidden, find ways to doodle in the margins of
your binder, so to speak. Or better still, look for a more congenial way to earn your paycheck.

A User-Friendly Life?

It is time to wrap this chapter up. Perhaps you wondered exactly where it was we were going with all this talk about the things that get in the way of forward motion. There is a point to all this—honest! When we wrote the first edition of the “lazy crazy” book, the final chapter
was called “From Obstacle to Opportunity,” and it was filled with stories about ADDults who were living joyful lives that were a good fit for their unique selves. It was written fourteen years ago, when we were blissfully unaware of just how much housecleaning it would take before our own dreams would be realized. We have both been through a divorce since then, and a number of other difficult transitions
that sometimes made it seem as if there would never be any real forward progress in our lives. We are intimately acquainted with the thoughts and beliefs that can get in the way. We also know, without a doubt, that it is possible to make your way to success from some very stuck and seemingly hopeless
places. We know this because we are advanced students in the School of Hard Knocks. It doesn’t
do any good to present a Pollyannaish view of all the wonderful ADD characteristics.

We can’t tell you exactly where you are going. That depends on your dreams and your personal value system. As coaches, we would ask you the questions to help you uncover the “what” and the “why” of your personal vision. With that picture firmly in mind, we would help you to navigate your chosen path, teaching
you the tools that you can use to move yourself in the direction you desire. This chapter, of course, is just a snapshot of the stoppers and work-arounds that would be discussed in a coaching relationship. That’s why we strongly urge you to work with a coach. We can deal with generalities in a book but not the specifics of your situation.

Success is achieved when you figure out what you were born to do and fashion a lifestyle that enables you to do it.

If we were to make a statement that applies to all of us it would be this: We want to design and live a user-friendly life. One that uses the gifts (strengths) we have and doesn’t require us to spend a whole lot of time doing things that are a struggle. Your job, your relationships, leisure-time lifestyle … all of it needs to come
up for review and revision.

If you take the “dis” out of disabilities, you will find abilities
.

Lest you think that the whole purpose of ADD recovery and self-help is to banish all those embarrassing differences, consider this phrase from the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous:
God doesn’t make junk
.

We firmly believe that there are positive uses for every seemingly strange talent, trait and
“symptom.” It is often a matter of first accepting ourselves and then rearranging how our differences are used to come up with a formula that works. Read our
second book,
The ADDed Dimension
, for more perspective on the positive side of the ADD experience.

We challenge you to work hard at your recovery. We challenge you to set aside your defenses and squarely face the reality of your ADD. We
challenge you to use your self-knowledge to work on the weaknesses that have a negative impact on your recovery. Most of all, we challenge you to celebrate your unique gifts and talents.

Never lose sight of the many gifts you possess! We truly believe that ADD is more than just a disability …

It is also an ADDed Dimension!

Epilogue

I
magine a world without ADD.

We invite you to glimpse such a futuristic world created by the imaginative mind of our colleague, Darlene Contadino of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Thank you for your insights, Darlene, and for your permission to include your essay in our work.

We think it is a compelling conclusion for this book …

Scientists Debating Wisdom of TNT
Gene Removal

Dr. Smarty is credited with the original discovery in 2275 of the elusive TNT gene that caused impulsivity, distractibility and poor reinforceability. The discovery of this gene and the subsequent development of a surgical procedure to remove it from patients constituted a major scientific breakthrough.