Common Challenge # 5 - Project Completion

Common Challenge #5 – Project Completion

Let’s go on an interactive journey together. You will need to have a few pieces of paper, a couple of writing instruments preferably in different colors and time to think about projects. Let’s talk completing a project.

We have all completed projects. Projects come in all shapes and sizes; from cleaning your room to presenting your idea in a board meeting. Now bring to mind your most recent completed project, using a different color writing instrument answer each of these sections of questions regarding this project.

As you recreate your processes, notice what type of encouragement you received along the way. Did your friends and family keep you going through process? Was it co-workers or mentors that encouraged you? Did you encourage yourself?

Now let’s notice the work space where you completed your project. Was it clean and tidy? Was it small or large? Did you have all the tools to complete your project within a place that made sense to you?

Lastly let’s notice the time constraints it took to complete your project. Did you set aside 15 minute intervals? Did you spend one full weekend completing the task? Did you set up meetings with others to work on certain aspects of the project? Did you record the project in your day planner?

Once you have looked at your answers, you can start to determine your work habits. Every single person is different in how they will succeed in completing a project. Take a moment and re-read how you successfully have worked in the past. One of the keys to success is to create the atmosphere where you will succeed.

Let’s look at our Big Goal study from April 24th entry on Challenge #3. The goal was “I want to read for an hour a day for five (5) days per week starting tomorrow and continuing for three months.” We didn’t look at our previous habits. Now, we should define the work space and how to stay encouraged along the way. Where will the reading be done? Is it the library at a desk or in a comfy chair with hot tea? Can you read sitting upright or do you need to be more relaxed to absorb what you are reading? Let’s suppose from the exercise above you determined that you need a quiet place with no distractions so you set up a nice chair in a corner of your home to read for your one hour.

Also from the above exercise, you may have determined that you need to have a weekly check up on your progress but this person needs to be impartial to you. To complete your big goal, you decide you need to hire a coach for a weekly check up and assessment of the goal. Your coach will encourage you through the process and help you reassess your progress on the project. This will help to keep you accountable to completing the project on time. Now, you have the analysis to create an atmosphere that will encourage success on your projects in the future. You have evaluated what makes for a successful completion of a project and know how to attain the correct tricks and tools to aide you along the path.

Time Planning and Management

Time is elusive and if you have ADD tendencies, you may find many miscommunications relating back to time management. Everything from over committing to remembering is a challenge for those with ADD/ADHD. Sometimes deadlines are missed, co workers or friends are disappointed and we tend to get down on ourselves if we can’t find a fix for time management.

Through my coaching career, I have found that taking the time to find the correct time management plan is worth the effort. There is a myriad of planners to choose from and it all comes down to what will work for you. As you are shopping, look at color, style, pattern, size. You may ask; do I plan daily, weekly or monthly? You may ask, are the appointment spaces large enough to write in? Do I want to type and use a virtual calendar? Does anyone else need to have access to my calendar? Essentially what you are doing is trying to strike a balance between ease and effectiveness of your day planner.

Once you have determined what will work best for you. The work begins; the allotment of time or time management. Every day has a finite amount of time and every person has, what seems like, an infinite amount of tasks to complete. Do you ever feel like your “to do” list never ends?

Your day planner will help you organize your tasks so that all the balls you are throwing in the air are completed. Think of your day planner as your safety net for life, it will catch the balls you are throwing so that none land on the ground. As tasks begin to come in, you and your coach will analyze the deadline, the time needed to complete the task and the time you have available to do this. Sometimes you may find that you need to allot more time on either side of a project for unexpected interruptions in your day. You will record your time in your day planner. As you get more comfortable with your planner, you will be able to do this analysis yourself and continually, throughout the day, place tasks in specific appointment times. This technique will help you to meet your deadlines and keep yourself from over committing. It will force you to make choices about what is most important on a daily basis. Because of the finite number of hours available, one must choose what is most important for us to spend our time on. Finally the action of recording tasks on the calendar will help you to remember your projects.

At the end of each week, you and your coach will be able to track what is important to you and what is continually moving. You will have the tools necessary to figure out what needs delegation and what you have passion to complete.

Ultimately, you will be completing projects by their deadlines and have time to allocate to what truly inspires you. A key to time management is assigning a day and time to do everything instead of having the never ending to do list.

Values 3 The Big Goal

When talking about the Big Goal we must first define that goal. It is a dream or goal that feels big to the dreamer. Everything begins with a wish or dream and we turn it into a goal. There is an Art and Science to setting and achieving Big Goals.

First the Science, I like to use the S.M.A.R.T. Goal approach to turn your dreams into goals. S.M.A.R.T. is the foundation for goal setting in that it creates the steps you need to take to define and achieve your goals.

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  S is for SPECIFIC. We turn your dream into a specific statement.
  M is for MEASURABLE. The statement created must be measureable usually either in time or units
  A is for ACHIEVABLE. The question to ask is have others achieved your statement or are they in process of achieving your statement.
  R is for REALISTIC. With your life, do you have the time, energy and patience to complete the dream? Do you have the skills necessary or do we modify the statement to acquire the necessary skills?
  T is for TIME. Set a specific time frame for accomplishing your goal. When do you want to reevaluate your goal statement?

For example, let’s say that your big goal is to read more books. In this statement you have a dream. We want to turn this dream into a goal so we get more specific. I want to read for an hour a day for five (5) days per week. Now we need to exam this statement utilizing the S.M.A.R.T. goal setting technique. We made it specific. It’s measureable as one hour per day. We know others have done this so it is achievable. We know you can read so it is realistic. We need to set a time frame. Let’s say you want to do this for three months starting tomorrow. So we add that to the goal statement. I want to read for an hour a day for five (5) days per week starting tomorrow and continuing for three months. We have just defined our Big Goal.

Secondly, the Art portion is the achieving the Big Goal. The art is in the flexibility needed to achieve the goals when life happens. On a daily basis we must revise and evaluate how life’s interruptions are affecting our pursuit of the Big Goal. As part of the strategy to ensure success, we set the plan to achieve the goal and we set a backup plan. We also will set a strategy to keep the goal at the forefront of our thinking.

For example, using the statement above, we decided in week 1 of our test to read from 5 – 6 pm Monday – Friday as soon as we got home from work. If something comes up after work, then we will read from 10:30 – 11:30 before our normal bedtime of midnight. We put these time frames in our day planner so we are reminded of the goal. During the week we will notice how much we are reading, when and how focused we are during our sessions. We can record our thoughts in our daily planners. At the end of the week we will evaluate to see if adjustments need to be made to succeed in our goal.

We have a few steps to the Big Goal value; setting the goal, daily maintenance and noticing, evaluating the success and succeeding. The biggest secret in achieving a Big Goal is breaking it down into small parts, planning on, deciding and preparing for the work needed to succeed.

Value #2 Inner Motivation

To understand Inner Motivation one should start by understanding the different types of motivations. The top five (5) motivations are:

Utilitarian – meaning one prefers some practical or useful results to come from ones efforts, time, energy or money. People with this value are results oriented sometimes towards money, more productivity or better health. When people with high Utilitarian value volunteer, they want to see practical results to their efforts.

Altruism – someone who values service to others to benefit a certain person, group of people or cause. People with Altruism value want to see that their efforts are used for the good of others.

Aesthetics - can be a beautiful architectural design, art in general or noticing beauty in simplicity of elegance. People with Ascetics high on their values list; see the beauty and interconnectedness to life and its rhythm. Remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder so for a mathematician this could be a theorem or equation while for an artist it could be colors and textures.

Tradition – value of families and connecting through families. This could be around holidays, religious tradition (ceremonies, holidays, and rites). Usually it is not related to liberal or conservative but more about continuity.

Theoretical – value of understanding how things work, why they are the way they are. Usually people with high theoretical follow science, chemistry, biology or religious activities understanding how and why life all fits together.

The next step is to understand how one ranks these values and how specifically they show up for you. Most people need to take an assessment to rank their values. This will help one to understand more deeply and quickly how they show up in your life. This assessment will help you to understand how to spend your time, energy and money to align with your values.

Common ADD Struggle #1 – Values

Common ADD Struggle #1 – Values

There is a common misperception about values. ADD or not our world believes values are something that we chose or decide upon through life. There are theories that our deepest values are inherent, we are born with them and they are part of our soul. While it is hard for everyone to keep their values foremost in their minds, for someone with ADD it is 10 times harder to keep focused on ones values while making decisions. That is because those with ADD tend to notice many more possible values of which to consider.
It is a constant struggle for those with ADD to keep their values constantly present. I was recently asked what do you do to get these values first and foremost in a client’s mind. While there isn’t an answer that is constant for all, there are processes we can go through to help.
It begins with soul searching, noticing behaviors and getting feedback from friends and family. From there, it is advised to have guidance from a few sources to work through discovering your individual values. There are assessment tools used in the discovery phase followed by reflection of how your life’s energy is used in relation to the values discovered and finally integrating these values into your day to day life. Through constant thought processes, each individual along with their trusted advisors, can turn values thinking into a habit that will enhance your skills and awareness levels.
While this is a complex topic and each individual is unique, if you have a curious and provocative coach guiding you through discovery you will find a values based life awaits.

12 Common ADD Challenges

After over a decade of coaching ADD/ADHD clients, I have found 12 challenges to be the most common.

1. Values - Lack of clarity to what is important and how to connect those values to choices about work, friendships, relationships, education and other parts of life.
2. Inner Motivation - Lack of understanding of what really motivates oneself.
3. The Big Goal(s) - Keeping the focus of the big goals in place on a daily basis.
4. Time -Remembering appointments and deadlines.
5. Project Completion - Challenges ending or starting tasks.
6. Stuff - Clients are buried in piles of papers, books, files, tools or other items.
7. Information- Clients may be trying to track too much information.
8. Social Cues and Social Skills -talking too much, interrupting, saying inappropriate things, etc
9. Perfectionism - Working to get things to the impossible level of perfect, rather than getting things done or getting things done well enough.
10. Getting Started - Blocking points that can occur from sequencing to knowledge that hinder the start of a project.
11. Transitions -Include the stages between stopping one task and starting another.
12. Impulsiveness - Making effective choices despite impulsivity.

It is important for us to remember that just as we would not tell someone who requires glasses to see properly, to just put away the glasses and try harder. We should not to expect someone with an invisible disability to "try harder" on tasks. I have laid out these tasks because often it is what the world sees as the "simple" stuff that gets in the way of individuals with ADHD keeping them from having full, satisfying lives. Over the next few months we will take some time on each of these 12 challenges, diving a little deeper in each round of blog entries. I hope you can come along on this journey.

Coach Robb

Willingness to Think Differently

As much as parents want to do what is “right” for their children, there is one key ingredient to successful coaching for anyone. The client needs to have a willingness to try something different. This is a key element to create a satisfying and effective life. At times teens show up with this attitude or they can develop it after trust is established in the coaching relationship.

As an ADD coach, I have experienced many parents calling me to explain situations where their child can’t get their homework done, has trouble focusing and/or retaining information. Their studies are falling behind. Sometimes the parent may want to know if I can help; how long will it take. In coaching, the teen would be the one who determines the teen’s goals, and what the agenda of the coaching will be. That is one of the most powerful things about coaching, the client drives the agenda.

First and foremost a client needs to develop a true mindset of change so they can achieve their dreams. In the world of ADD, there must be a restored sense of self esteem and a grounded sense of confidence that is created over time. This confidence builds as the client takes on more, possibly larger, tasks and creates a history of successful learning. Every client is different so the plan developed is unique. It is this co-creation between client and coach that will lead to success.