Focus for the Career Planning Process

When in career planning focusing on learning about yourself, what you enjoy to do and what you do well will help to find a career path/profession that will remain desirably challenging and complex enough to keep you interested. This is one of the best kept secrets to career planning with ADHD. The foundation of career planning is know your values, motivators, skills, talents and put them to work for you in an environment that keeps you challenged. Everyone is different so your foundation must be thoroughly explored.

You can use strategic thinking to assist your career planning coach and help put the pieces together as you complete assessments, surveys and hash out your history (work, school, hobbies). This process will help you determine what sort of skills, talents, people, causes and/or businesses will hold your interest for the long haul of a career.

In your career planning you must remember the basics of the ADHD mind and think about how the career you choose will keep your ADHD focus stimulated and interested. As with everything ADHD, how it impacts you is different so your search will be different from everyone else. The question you need to answer is “How will you make your career planning experience meet the criteria that will enable you to have a successful career?”

You can engage your focus by being creative and break up career planning into parts so it’s a series of quick sprints in each section of the process. Or you can turn into hyper focus gear (ADHD term that means block out everything else for long periods of time except what we are working on) and make it a fun exciting marathon.
You could also engage your focus by breaking up the process with two or more professionals instead of the traditional way of just one professional. For instance, you may use your coach, your psychologist and maybe someone on your informal support team that is knowledgeable about the profession of interest instead of just your career planning coach. This will help you with different perspectives about your skills and talents.

Remember, there is no perfect career path but there are many, many great ones that you will find satisfying and bring joy to your life. We want to help you create the invaluable experience of waking up in the morning, looking forward to going to work.