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