Honestly! Some of the advice we get for dealing with ADHD comes from Professors of The Bleedin’ Obvious at Bloodyuseless College, Oxford!
‘Top’ ADHD coach that shall remain nameless (unless enough of you ask!) has just issued a list of top tips for overcoming ADHD. The first one made me want to gnaw my own leg off:
Keep the goal in mind.
One of the hardest struggles for my clients is keeping their goals in mind. If you can’t see your goals, you’ll be more likely to get off track. Devise methods to keep the goal in mind, and to see, and track, progress. Mark your goals with colored markers on a monthly calendar and post it where you will see it throughout the day, in the kitchen, perhaps, or over your workstation or desk.
Keep the goal in mind. Thanks! I hadn’t thought of that! Well done! If you give advice for overcoming depression do you say ‘cheer up, misery guts!’? Do you deal with schizophrenics by saying ‘Don’t be such a loony!’? Of course it is one of the hardest struggles for your clients, because that’s the essence of the problem in the first place.
“Devise methods to keep the goal in mind”. Brilliant advice! That what they’re paying you for! How successful would a tennis coach be if she gave the advice “Devise methods for scoring more points than your opponent.”? Answer: not very.
And then the ultimate: a monthly calendar. Well that’s new, I must say. No one with ADHD ever, ever thought of using a calendar. No, it is our appalling lack of knowledge of commonly used pieces of stationary that has been holding us all back all these years. Thank you so very much. Now I realise what all those funny bits of paper with the name of a month at the top and lines dividing the paper into boxes, with numbers are. Blimey, I’ve just got it. The numbers are consecutive, aren’t they? They’re days of the month! Hurrah! I’m cured!
Look, we may be disorganised but we’re not morons! We’ve not only heard of calendars but we’ve got them, usually several. I’ve got a stack of them, some of them are even this year’s! Actually, when I say stack, what I mean is that I have so many they would make a stack, if only I could find all of them at the same time.
I’ve got calendars, diaries and scrappy bits of paper. I have two online diaries, a mobile phone and tablet computer. I can’t consolidate them because I can’t find them all at the same time. I may have one somewhere obvious but I habituate to its presence and it disappears into the background, not that it makes a lot of difference because I often forget to put stuff in it in the first place. And if I move it so as to overcome the habituation I just forget where I put it. And who can keep a colour coded system running? You can remember where all your coloured pencils are? And which diary am I supposed to put what in? And, and, and… oh, please, someone try to see it from our side…
AADD-UK
adhdbrighton
aethelreadtheunready
veillantif
I am reminded of Chris Wossname on Who Wants to be Filthy Friggin Rich asking the contestant if they had any strategy they were going to use. Strategy? You ask the question. I try to answer it. Pfft!
Posted by Me | August 16, 2011, 10:35 pmThanks AADD UK for pointing out that Aethelread’s opinions (above) are personal and not representative of AADD UK. Now I can give him full credit for a cracking post that highlights a common and most frustrating problem I also have encountered (assumption of ignorance due to ignorant assuptions) without even the hint of a suspicion that he might have cribbed his pertinent observations and his direct and appropriately acerbic syle of presentation from some Extrraneous Official Source.
Good on you, Aeth. I found the recognition of a kindred spirit in your post most gratifying.
Posted by Luce Cannon | August 12, 2011, 9:39 pmGreat comic relief lol, thanks !
Posted by Sam | August 5, 2011, 12:59 pmMeanwhile, back at the ranch…
I have made an informal study of the coaching industry in all its many ramifications. This was prompted about ten years ago when I attended a training course at work, delivered by a highly-reputable external supplier who, likewise, shall remain nameless since the consultant they’d hired to do that particular course was almost perfectly useless. I don’t mean chocolate teapot useless – chocolate teapots are big pieces of chocolate, after all (consider – what’s the use of a chocolate rectangle?). I mean appendix transplant useless. And I wondered: how did this woman get paid several hundred pounds to do this when she has added no value at all and we’d have got more out of the two days if the group had been self-led without her interference?
I have come to the conclusion that successful coaches/consultants are not, **in the first instance**, good at helping people change and grow. I stress: they MAY be good at that. But what makes them successful is that they are good at is self-marketing and spotting/taking opportunities to function as coaches or experts. Once you’ve got your feet under the table – having established yourself as an expert in some sense – then the work just keeps coming and your position is self-stabilising. It never ceases to astonish me how readily a person’s professional reputation enables them to get paid for promoting motherhood and apple pie. But they must be good, because people keep coming to them for advice, don’t they?
This is a problem, because there ARE good coaches out there, of all kinds. And they deserve to be recognised, and they should be influential too because their influence is constructive. The trouble is, as C. Northcote Parkinson observed: if you can tell the difference between good advice and bad advice, you don’t need advice. The rule of thumb I go by nowadays is that a coach’s real competence is likely to be inversely proportional to the hyperbole with which their material is marketed. So a coach who is described as “top”, “international”, “best-selling” etc is likely to be a chancer (the clue is in the phrase “best-selling” – i.e., best at selling). Remember, I said “rule of thumb”, not “law of physics” – good coaches can be successful, and successful ones can be good. But it doesn’t surprise me that Aethelread’s above-mentioned “top ADHD coach” appears not to suffer from ADHD, nor to have any idea of how to manage the condition. (S)He is simply focused on selling.
I’ve yet to find anything that beats good old word of mouth. Truly independent but truly knowledgeable!
Posted by Nick Bulbeck | June 8, 2011, 10:54 amOh thank you. Betray me. Sell me up the river. Stab me in the back. Judas! Snake in the grass! Asp in my bosom! Paul Revere! It isn’t as if my post is the only one that anyone liked on the whole damn site, is it?
Posted by aethelreadtheunready | May 6, 2011, 10:51 pmAADD UK would like to point out that the opinions of this author are personal and not representative of AADD. The coach mentioned in the article is not in the UK.
Posted by AADD-UK | May 6, 2011, 9:55 pm