You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!: The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults With Attention Deficit Disorder (57 page)

Moving Forward at the Speed of Light

Of course, many ADDers are not at all reluctant to take action, and to take it swiftly. Many successful entrepreneurs are fast-moving, decisive guys and gals. Those with ADD who use this style effectively tend to have at least one farmer
(see Thom Hartmann’s
Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception
for a description of farmers) as a key team member to handle the details and ensure that appropriate information is available before
a decision is made. Without that balancing factor, ADDers can get in trouble, either on a work project or with relationships with others.

Don’t Be Fooled by Appearances—Even When You Seem to Be Terminally Stuck, There Is Forward Motion

As you know, computers work on many levels. We can be working on a spreadsheet, for example, while the download function is doing its thing in the background. Our brains can do something similar. When we dream, we are processing and reprocessing the events of our day in order to integrate our experience.
We also have unconscious thought processes that go on in the background of waking consciousness.

Even though we have seen sudden shifts in our clients many times, it is always a wonderful gift when a big change seems to come out of left field. They are stuck in the same patterns for quite a while, with seemingly endless repetitions of the old habits. Then one day there is a big aha! The learning
is integrated and new ways of behaving appear, as if by magic. The appearance of “stuckness” was just an illusion, as there was steady work going on in the background the entire time.

An experienced coach, however, is never totally shocked by the big shifts. Part of the job is to catch the smaller changes along the way and point them out to the client.

We know from our own lives that the ADD
experience is often “as if” one foot is nailed to the floor while we go around in circles with the other. Certainly, we do seem to meet those same life lessons over and over again. But have you ever considered that you may be learning something new each time around? What can seem like movement without progress may actually be just gradual progress.

One of the best ways to visualize this is as
a spiral. Sure, we’re coming around to a very familiar situation again, but haven’t we moved up a level, maybe ever so slightly? What looks like “returning full circle” if we only notice the length and width of our path, becomes a spiral that keeps moving upward with each cycle when we see its height. Like ascending a spiral staircase, we may find that we have been going upward at the same time we
were winding around the center.

It is by tiny steps that we ascend the stars
.

—Jack Leedstrom

Allow Yourself to Take Baby Steps

One of the biggest obstacles to moving forward is to sabotage yourself by giving up because you are not seeing results as rapidly as you expect. Here comes another coaching commercial: Get a coach who can help you to notice and acknowledge the
more subtle positive
steps you are taking. He or she has a long-range perspective gained from working with many people who have also traveled a bumpy road. These are folks just like you who have successfully overcome the challenges.

You won’t need to sign up for a lifetime of coaching. A good coach will teach you the skills needed to coach yourself.

Say Oops and Then Move On

In Kate’s all-time favorite movie,
The Producers
(1967), the opening scene features Zero Mostel as a cheesy, second-rate producer, reduced to wooing little old ladies to get financial backing. He is playing a racy little game with one of his elderly paramours when Gene Wilder walks in on them. Gene, playing an anxious accountant prone to panic attacks, freezes and starts hyperventilating. Zero, in a soothing voice (but with an underlying
subtext of menace), talks Gene out of the room. He says, “Oops, just say oops, back out and close the door …”

Learning to “just say oops” is not an easy task, but it is essential for successfully moving forward. Years of comments about our
not living up to our potential
leave their marks on our hearts. As adults, we take over where our parents and teachers left off, berating ourselves for every
misstep. The way out of the failure cycle is to reset our expectations and give ourselves the permission to be less than perfect. To forgive ourselves. To just say oops. This process often takes a long time. In the beginning, the coach does the forgiving, the client eventually learning the difficult lesson of self-forgiveness. Then, with more realistic expectations, the client is poised to get
into action and move forward.

Dark Humor and What We REALLY Think

When you get really fed up with those chipper folks who try to force-feed you that “just do it” nonsense, we suggest that you take a little trip to Despair.com. This Web site offers an abundance of demotivators—motivational products and posters for pessimists, underachievers and the chronically unsuccessful.
Darker humor is a soothing
salve for those moments when you wonder if you will ever stop going around in circles.

In the words of thinkrightnow.com, if your mind were a computer, your beliefs would be the operating system. The reason those inspirational posters are so annoying to many of us is that we basically think they are a “crock of s—t.” Our true beliefs are reflected in “despairational” slogans like these:

Success—a tiny oasis in a sea of chaos
Failure—is not what you do, it’s what you are
Mistakes—the one thing you can count on
Losing—take heart, you can only lose if you were in the game to begin with
Stupidity—thinking that there is any conceivable reason to get out of bed in the morning
Goals—those ridiculous statements you write on Post-its and paper your walls with
Procrastination—what you do to give people the impression that you actually intend to do anything at all
Laziness—if you wait long enough, the items on your “to do” list will become obsolete
Planning—a wildly optimistic vision of what you would like to happen
Success—if at first you don’t succeed, start another project

We laugh at this stuff, because, on one level, we think it is ridiculous. On another, however, we know that we
actually buy into the ideas behind the joke. How many of us have a core belief
that we really are failures, for example. Or that we are not in the game at all, not really a contender.

You Gotta Start Somewhere
(The Couch Potato Shuffle)

Somebody somewhere told us about a doctor who hands out unusual prescriptions to his patients in dire need of exercise. Naturally, these are folks who are also
fatally allergic to the very concept of getting up off the couch for any reason. Not because they are lazy, mind you, but because they are terrified of going through repeated episodes of extreme physical and mental misery, leading to yet another dismal failure to follow through.

This enlightened physician tells them that all they have to do is stand in front of the TV and walk in place for five
minutes. Anybody can do that, right? (As long as you are ambulatory, anyway.) Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? The patients are stunned, and then they laugh, and then they go home and do what he says. Wonder of wonders, they often find themselves going for an actual walk after doing that couch potato shuffle—even outdoors!

This is surprising only if you believe that lack of motivation is (a) some
incurable disease, or (b) an intractable character flaw. If you have read this book up to this point, we would be surprised if you still bought into “b.” As for “a,” “low-motivation-itis” is a stubborn virus, but it can be conquered, though not through a head-on confrontational approach. Break up the tasks leading to your goals into microscopic particles, too tiny to scare you. Have a ball making
up your versions of the couch potato shuffle.

Paperwork and Other Busywork
(Working with Resistance)

One of the most common problems ADDers struggle with is difficulty in completing paperwork. Many of us do very well with
the other aspects of our jobs, but are terrified our supervisor will find out about the mounds of backlogged paperwork we just can’t seem to complete. Or our supervisor is all
too aware of the problem and is losing patience as the stuff keeps piling up.

Well, of course the paperwork is the last to-do on the list. It is boring, tedious and often downright silly. An awful lot of the documentation we are required to do on the job is the result of overregulation and a “cover your butt” mentality. Our minds naturally are more attracted to more immediate and compelling concerns.
The mental hygiene problem in this case is that we make ourselves wrong for the way we are. We decide that there is something wrong with us because we don’t just loooove spending hours and hours filling out forms.

We don’t have to love it, we don’t even have to like it. If your job requires the paperwork and there is no getting around it, it is a matter of setting up a system to get the darn
stuff off your desk. Your coach can help with this. The best system in the world, however, will not work if you are struggling with your resistance to doing the job at all. Your resistance has a number of components (we are not going to go into Freud and that kind of resistance):

• Anger at having to do something you really hate to do
  
• Anger because nobody knows how hard this is for you
  
• Fear that once you start you will never get to the end of it … you will spend eternity in paperwork hell
  
• Anger because you think the paperwork is really stupid
  
• Basically, it’s “I don’t wanna and you can’t make me”
  

And on top of all that, our inner critic is making harsh judgments. Some self-talk snippets include:

• You are such a baby … whining about having to do something you don’t like
  
• Just suck it up and do it
  
• Boy, that “you can’t make me” attitude is really mature
  
• Your attitude is terrible
  
• It’s your own fault—you procrastinated and now you have to pay the consequences
  
• You deserve to do time in paperwork hell
  

Do you still wonder why that big pile of paperwork has now become much, much more than a pile of tasks you would rather not do? It has now become a huge psychological mountain you can’t
imagine scaling. Before you even begin the climb, there is a jungle of thorny vines at the base to hack your way through.

There is, however, a way to get through the thorny section and ascend the mountain.

The first step is to acknowledge that what you are facing is indeed a mountain. It does no good whatsoever to tell yourself that it “shouldn’t” be a mountain, because other people do it so
easily … blah blah.

Honor and respect the journey you are taking to conquer this mountain, because it is not trivial. It is a “hero’s journey” to fight your way through all the crap that is holding you back. Once you have learned to use your sword and shield to make your way through the jungle of poisonous thinking in one instance, you will be able to make it through the next obstacle course,
and the next … until you are home free.

So, how do you hack your way through the jungle and get to the top of that mountain?

Know That It
Is
a Mountain

Some of you are now saying, “It feels like a mountain, but that’s just plain silly.”

No, it’s not. It is a mountain because:

• You look at the piles and you are overwhelmed by their size.
  
• Your mind does not automatically chunk the job down to smaller work bites.
  
• You see it as a whole big hateful pile of work that you have to do all at once.
  
• Your inner adolescent rebels.
  
• When the few pieces of paper have grown into large piles, you have been looking at those same papers for some time.
  
• While you have been looking at the papers/piles you have been beating yourself up for procrastinating.
  
• You have tried and failed to tackle those piles many times.
  

Each time you made up your mind to do the paperwork and then could not make yourself follow through, it reinforced the idea that this job was just too much for you.

You have been calling yourself stupid, lazy and a lot of other unkind names for a long time in relation to that pile of paper.

When you look at the pile now, it represents a lot more than a bunch of work you would prefer
not to do.

It is now a big heap of shame, fear, anger and other emotions.

Of course you are stuck! Who wouldn’t be, under these circumstances?