You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (27 page)

How about using your “closed door time” to spin happily on your desk chair? What about carefully spaced trips to the water fountain, file cabinet or duplicating machine? Volunteer to run needed errands. Find acceptable excuses to get up from your desk periodically.

Watch Your Foot-in-Mouth Disease:
Have you ever filed a medical insurance claim for Foot-in-Mouth Disease? It may not be on the
list of covered medical conditions, but if you have ADD, you probably have it! This condition causes an ADDer to spend most of her life with at least one foot in her mouth because she doesn’t monitor what she says before she says it! It’s no wonder she stumbles along in work relationships. Hopping
on one foot while extricating the other from the mouth makes it difficult to manage the details of
a job!

Of course we’re talking about that troubling impulsivity of our ADD that keeps getting us in hot water. It got us poor grades in conduct on our school report cards and gets Diane an unsatisfactory grade as a manager. A thoughtless remark or a poorly worded memo can make enemies and even contribute to the loss of a job.

Our advice to you on this one is to be an
S.T.A.R.
Before you speak,
act or approach someone, remind yourself to stop and think, look and listen. When you take action, reflect on the results of your actions. If necessary, glue a large
S.T.A.R.
on your desktop as a memory teaser for
S
topping,
T
hinking,
A
cting and
R
eflecting. It will take some effort to pull this off. You may need to reward yourself by finding a like-minded individual you can trust. Together, you
can let off steam at lunch or during breaks.

Review Chapter 6 Again:
All the issues we discussed in group and one-to-one relating apply to the work setting. Refer to the strategies in the previous chapter for continued work on interpersonal relationships and communication.

The remainder of this chapter is a departure from the format we’ve
been following. We’ll use this discussion to explore the question we posed earlier: Are you failing in your job, or is your job failing you?

What Do You Want to Do When You Grow Up?

Have you ever pored over the want ads in the newspaper looking for a job that matches your qualifications? How many times have you closed the newspaper without responding to even one inquiry because you couldn’t find
a match? Let your ADD imagination roam for a moment and pretend you’ve just seen the following ad:

W
ANTED

Fast-growing company looking for one special employee!
The perfect candidate will be someone who has:

difficulty with rules and authority,
ineffective communication skills,
trouble switching between tasks,
an intolerance to noise,
an inability to handle interruptions,
an irritable, moody, unpredictable and impatient personality,
an intrusive, impulsive and hyperactive behavior style.

Now, there’s a job designed for ADDers! But let’s get back to reality. The chances are slim to none that you’ll ever come across an ad like that. Don’t just toss it aside, though, until you take a closer look. To do this, you’ll need to refer to your inventory again in Chapter 5. Use your creative
thinking and growing awareness of your ADD advantages to hypothesize about ways to use both sides of the equation.

Whether you’re twenty, forty or
sixty years old, it’s not too late to reassess some of your life choices. Your asset and liability sheet may help you evaluate the question about job failure. Perhaps the job you’re in is dead wrong for you.

Vocational Planning:
For our young ADD adult readers who are considering their future professions, pay careful attention to our want ad and list of positive and negative qualities. You may
decide, based on your interest and math aptitude, that accounting is an obvious choice for you. Before you spend substantial time and money on a college education, give plenty of thought to your balance sheet. You may love math, but do you love details and paperwork? If not, the painstaking detail of accounting work may bore you to tears. If your real love is the creative, problem-solving aspect
of mathematics, you might be happier in certain kinds of engineering or computer work.

If you can get by without the earnings of a summer job, consider using your free time to do volunteer work in your field of interest. You’ll learn a great deal more about a profession by experiencing it firsthand than reading about it in a book.

Talk to people in the profession you’re considering. Ask them
detailed questions about what they do every day. Find out what they like and dislike about their work and think about how this fits with your new self-knowledge. Are you cut out for spending much of your working day writing lectures, grading papers and going to endless committee meetings? If not, you may need to rethink your decision about using your love of literature to become
a college professor.
Perhaps becoming a freelance writer would be a more rewarding choice.

If you want to attend college but have only a vague idea of your future career interests, try to attend a university that offers a variety of degree programs. Talk with a college counselor about the course work in various programs. Credits often apply across degree programs. You can use credits you’ve already earned in a new
program if you decide to switch your major. If you plan carefully, you can save wasted time, effort and money.

You’re Grown Up and Still Asking:
“What Do I Want to Do When I Grow Up?”

Even if you’ve invested tons of money and time in your career and current job, you don’t necessarily have to throw it all away. Before you decide to jump ship, thoroughly examine your current situation. In many
careers there is latitude for change within the profession. Psychiatric and community health nursing, for example, require creative problem solving and a gestalt approach. Unlike hospital nursing, they don’t include extensive detail work. In teaching, possibilities exist for a change of grade level or subject matter. There are also options for supervisory or counseling positions.

Find Your Niche:
Perhaps the job you need is the one you already have, with a twist. You might be able to find or negotiate a job description that fits your abilities and offers unique benefits to your company. You may be thinking about beginning a degree program in counseling because you feel that you’re wasting your people skills. Before you act on your decision, consider possibilities within your current organization.

Many businesses offer training and consultation services to their employees. Can you become the in-house trainer or consultant? With your individual talents and some seminar training, you can offer your services at a fraction of the cost your company typically incurs in hiring outside consultants. Your company may even be willing to pay for the additional training you’ll need.

Match Yourself with Your Job—Start Your Own Business:
Maybe you’re not a perfect candidate for someone’s want ad and will need to design a job to fit your qualifications. Is the oversupply of rules and regulations, coupled with the snail’s pace of change in a large organization, unbearable? Perhaps you could explore ways of working by and for yourself. The difficulties you experience in someone else’s business
may disappear when the business is your own.

You may be able to use the niche you developed within your organization as a jumping-off place for other business opportunities. As you continue to collect a paycheck and gain invaluable experience, you can begin networking outside your company. You may at some point decide to go off on your own and contract with your previous employer and other related
businesses to offer your services.

As a consultant, you have the advantage of being your own boss. It can be easier to ignore arbitrary rules and rigid people if you aren’t a permanent employee. You don’t have to get caught up in the office politics and can move on when policies and people start getting on your nerves. And it’s usually easier to be on your best behavior when you’re in a new situation
for only a short time. You may also be able to retain some of the benefits of working for someone else—use of office equipment, secretarial support and the established network of business contacts.

If you choose to join the ranks of many ADD adults who start their own businesses, do it carefully. Take a hard look at your balance sheet and your list of perceived financial needs. Can you afford
financially and emotionally to live with less while you work at developing your own business?

If you decide to take the calculated risk of working for yourself, use your list of assets or positive qualities to explore possibilities that offer the best match. Keep in mind that working on your own offers flexibility but requires long hours in the initial stages of establishing your business. It
also requires the ability to design and follow a plan to stay on track.

With no boss or time clock, it is important to establish your own schedule and set of rules to keep from sliding into the ADD Standard Time Zone, where all bets are off in terms of the actual date that
any
project will reach completion. An ADD coach who also has expertise in small businesses can help you maximize your chances
of success.

Temporary Work:
Rather than establishing your own business, you might try temporary work as a satisfactory compromise between self-employment and working for someone else. In temporary work, you “rent” your skills by the hour, day or longer, but usually work for an agency that employs a number of temporary workers.

Temporary work offers several advantages. The ADDer can satisfy a
restless nature by changing job settings frequently. Another advantage is the ability to control the hours of work. Many of us find a standard forty-hour, five-day workweek incompatible with our unique capacities. Some of us find full-time work too taxing. Others prefer working for long stretches and then taking large blocks of time off. Many ADDers are also night people, unable to function well
until the afternoon. In temporary work, unusual working patterns can often be accommodated.

If you’re fairly adaptable and can get along with people for short periods of time, temping may work well for you. Of course it doesn’t offer carte blanche to do anything you please. If you don’t follow through with completing tasks or develop a reputation for being difficult, you’ll stop getting assignments.

If you have had a history of employment failure, use your new self-knowledge to reassess the reasons for it. Your awareness of your strengths and challenges can help you realistically analyze your situation, sorting out the problems that result from your behavior and those that are related to the behaviors of others. You may be in a better
position to figure out whether you have
failed on your jobs or your jobs have failed you. Your new insights may even help you become more accepting of the quirks of your colleagues.