I’m writing this on my return flight after attending the 2016 CHADD conference and visiting old friends in California. I had the pleasure of meeting ADHD experts from around the country, including authors, ADHD coaches, executive coaches, trainers of coaches, psychotherapists, parent coaches, and advocates. 

I attended sessions on women with ADHD, college students, ADHD and meditation research, and recent research on adults with ADHD who did not meet diagnostic criteria in their youth. One keynote speaker was Dr. Thomas Brown (Brown ADD Scales) who highlighted what research tells us about the ADHD brain and the effects of this neurological difference. Dr. Brown shared a metaphor about adult ADHD that came to him from a former client: “ADHD is like erectile dysfunction of the mind…if you can’t get it (your attention) up, you can’t get it to work.”

Another keynote speaker was Dr. Susan Smalley (suesmalley.com), founder of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, whose early work focused on genetics and ADHD. She presented research that makes a compelling case for practicing mindfulness. She said it clearly helps individuals manage their emotional lives effectively and direct their attention intentionally. Her research shows that the benefits are achieved relatively quickly.

A third keynote speaker was Dr. Luis Rhodes, who highlighted his research in New Zealand, and a colleague’s in Brazil, on adults with ADHD who appear not to have had ADHD in their youth. Dr. Rhodes made a case for eliminating the “age of onset” criterion in diagnosing ADHD.

I met with a number of experts, authors, and creative entrepreneurs: Casey Dixon (dixonlifecoaching.com), an ADHD coach and mindfulness practitioner who specializes in coaching attorneys and professionals with ADHD; Melissa Orlov (adhdmarriage.com), Nancie Kohlenberger (BA4Us.com), and Steve Kohlengerger, who specialize in ADHD in marriages; Elaine Taylor-Klaus (impactadhd.com), a parenting coach, author, and speaker; Elaine’s daughter Brex, who at age 22 is a successful actor in Los Angeles; Dr. Alan Graham (act10.com), an ADHD coach and psychologist; Jessica McCabe (YouTube: bit.ly/howtoadhd), a talented YouTube personality and advocate; and Dr. Harvey Parker (addwarehouse.com), founder of CHADD, ADD Warehouse, and Specialty Press. Dr. Parker is an author and psychologist who currently provides medical education to physicians (naceonline.com).

In Los Angeles, I had the pleasure of meeting Sylvia Castillo, community organizer, and social justice advocate for poor people, immigrants and people of color. Those natural roles were forged in response to the Ku Klux Klan’s campaign of hatred and violence in the early 1960’s. Sylvia’s family were targets simply for being a Latino family in a white community. She told me she wasn’t aware of her difference until her family moved from Pico Rivera, a Mexican American suburb, to Long Beach. She and her sisters lived with threats of violence in childhood for integrating into a majority white school system in California. Sylvia’s mother had to raise her children to reject the slurs white students were calling them and teach them courage and tolerance.  Her mom was an activist who once worked with Robert Kennedy. Sylvia shares my concern for minority youth—including those with ADHD—who are at risk for entering the juvenile corrections system more easily than the mental health system. 

Let’s continue to embrace our neurological difference, as well as the multinational diversity that defines American culture. We all belong.

If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be drowning every day. – Leonard Cohen

Why do some adults with ADHD insist that their ADHD is a “gift” that only serves them, while others would like to exchange their “gift” for one that works? I’ve grown a little weary of the two extremes: “I owe all my successes to this brain…I attriubte all my failures to this brain.”

If your inattention and/or your hyperactivity and impulsivity don’t cause any significant problem, then you don’t meet the criteria for a diagnosis of ADHD. And if you attribute all your failures to your ADHD brain, as if it is your only problem, then you can conveniently blame everyting on it (It causes you to run out of gas on the freeway, right?).

In our support group meeting last night, we had a rich discussion about perspective. How can we embrace our brains as they are and embrace change as well? You have a disability that doesn’t have to disable you in every way. It can serve your life’s vision whether you consider ADHD a gift or an obstacle. I believe that the problem isn’t whether we are judging ourselves positvely or negatively, exceptionally gifted or exceptionally disabled, but that we are judging ourselves…period. Judging performance is useful, but judging the self is a waste of time. 

Whatever you feel about your gift or curse, we all have to start where we are. Acceptance and willingness are more powerful than our judgmental language. 

My Aunt Emma once said that her son Kenny—I seldom use his adult name, Ken—and I were “peas of a pod.” She marveled at how the two of us, pre-teens at the time, were “scatterbrains” who were “never in a hurry.” Kenny’s dad was always amused by how much we could eat in one meal, while only one of us would become large (I only grew tall). Kenny was much like his father, and our grandfather, with their quick wit. They were all naturally funny. Like Yogi Berra, they couldn’t help it; their brains were just wired to make people laugh.

I once asked Kenny’s dad when he would be coming home from college. It was late spring and I thought the semester should be ending. “Oh hell,” my uncle said, “He’ll look around one day and see that no one is on campus, and then he will come home.” He told me once that Kenny went to college for just two terms, “Nixon’s and Carter’s.” Kenny, he said, was “studying to be an astronaut…down there in Oxford just taking up space.” That would describe my first couple of years in college. My aunt and uncle, both of whom died in their late 60’s, were proud of their son and would have been pleased to see Kenny’s work ethic and success in business.

An outstanding high school football player, Kenny earned an athletic scholarship to Ole Miss in the early seventies. He had met Archie Manning when the Ole Miss star quarterback was in Nashville to speak at the annual Banquet of Champions, an event honoring local high school championship teams. I had attended that banquet a few years earlier with my basketball team when Steve Spurrier, a recent Heisman Trophy winner from the University of Florida, was the guest speaker.

Kenny called me last Friday night on his way home from work, and we had a nice long chat. We hadn’t talked since the summer. We continued our conversation as he sat in his pickup outside his house, and I was sitting in my office. It was the end of a long workday for both of us. It was a rare event, and a delightful one for me, having an extended phone conversation that he initiated.

We reminisced about the days when his father, an Andy Griffith type sheriff, was an icon in a town that was much like Mayberry in the early sixties. Kenny’s family lived on the main level of the old jailhouse, downstairs from the prisoners. When the new prison was built next door, Kenny and I slept one night in the large open bay room upstairs where there were plenty of bunk beds to choose from. We raised a window in the morning and talked to the prisoners across the alley who were also on the second floor. They all had nicknames. I remember Grasshopper.

Kenny was too young, and our conversation was too fresh, for me to believe what my brother called to tell me early Sunday morning, about forty hours later. Kenny had slipped away from us early that morning, much like his dad had slipped away from my dad, just hours after they had played golf together. A heart attack, my brother said. We will bury Ken Huff tomorrow, but the gift of his humor, and the family stories he enjoyed sharing, will not be buried with him.

Clearly, Glenn Huff was not in the ADHD family. A ninth-grade dropout, my father had to leave school at fourteen to help his dad run a grocery store. His working memory worked, and he had to exercise it daily. My father could hold a lot of numbers in his head, organize and manipulate them, and solve complex mathematical problems. He also lived on a farm and witnessed his mother counting hens and eggs and estimating yields from their crops.

Today, I met with an accountant for help with some complicated financial issues. I prepared for hours, crunching numbers with a calculator, pen, and notepad. I erased and started over so many times that the numbers looked like the scratches a hen makes in the dirt. I calculated and recalculated so I could ask intelligent questions. The meeting lasted almost two hours, after which I told the accountant that I needed a nap. The effort to follow his dancing numbers, and then extrapolate what I needed, was exhausting.

Glenn Huff could have taken the same information and produced the answers in fifteen minutes. That is no exaggeration. That humble man didn’t think his spreadsheet brain was extraordinary. He just wondered what on God’s green earth was wrong his son who struggled to reconcile a simple bank statement with fifty dollars in the account. I would never measure up to what my dad modeled as normal.

My accountant—a fellow baby boomer—highlighted some differences between the generations, before and after ours. My dad’s generation, he said, had to rely on their brains to do what computers do now. My daughter’s generation, on the other hand, grew up with software that worked like my dad’s brain. Between those generations are the trainable old dogs that must learn new tricks. Successful boomers living well with ADHD will seek help when they need it, instead of being too embarrassed to ask.

Still, if I had the choice, I would take my dad’s spreadsheet brain over spreadsheet software! It never had to be downloaded or upgraded!

Did you ever know anyone who
     kept their tools sharpened and hardly used them?
     kept their house meticulously clean and never invited guests over?
     studied art, but never found the time to paint?
     studied meditation and never practiced it?
     took medicine for ADHD and remained unfulfilled in a miserable job?

Your brain is an important tool and, of course, you will benefit from sharpening it. But how sharp is sharp enough? How will you know when you have done enough sharpening of the tool and are ready to use it to build something of value to you? We therapists sometimes focus too much on the tools and too little on what our clients might want to construct. Our clients—not their therapists—are the experts on their values and their vision. Without a commitment to your vision, how much value would you place on learning to prioritize, activate, sustain attention, sustain effort, and manage time efficiently?

What if you found the perfect ADHD medicine and optimum lifestyle, and you were able to relieve all of your symptoms? What if your enhanced brain could now play blackjack, free cell, or video games more successfully? Would you want people to say this about you: “Hey, that guy has a great brain; he reached the top level of his video game the day he bought it?” You can squander the most perfectly nurtured brain, and you can achieve something worthwhile with one that has been nurtured well enough!

Dennis is the high-achieving CEO in my “Success Stories” chapter. He was always afraid that some executive, somewhere along his journey, would ask to see his college transcripts. He had been an average student, and yet he was a people person, someone his employees could identify with. They knew how much he valued them, and that might have been his biggest gift to the company. One employee on an assembly line had a suggestion for an engineering improvement, and Dennis arranged for him to meet with a group of the company’s engineers. After hearing the employee’s idea, the engineers wondered why they had never thought of it themselves. They made the changes, and the employee got a bonus. Dennis was resourceful enough to achieve his goals, and his company was a model for success.

Maybe your tool is sharp enough to construct what you wish to construct. I challenge my professional peers to consider this question: When is good enough good enough? Perhaps my challenge seems too shallow for well-educated and licensed therapists, since encouraging adults to have a vision does not require an advanced degree. But how many adults do you know who would be sufficiently motivated by a plan to overcome obstacles? How many do you know who would be more motivated by a plan to actualize their dream?

We can get so carried away focusing on brain-sharpeners that we lose sight of why we are sharpening. So, take your medicine, exercise, maintain a healthy diet, get seven or eight hours of sleep each night, and practice meditation routinely. Then build something you want to build with your tool.

Participants in ADDNashville often tell me that our support group has been more useful than anything they have done for their ADHD. A room filled with understanding and support is good medicine. Not having to waste time defending or explaining ourselves frees us to give our full attention to information, strategies, and tools that can help us.

During October, ADHD Awareness Month, I want to celebrate the diversity in our group and encourage celebrating diversity outside the group. Of all people, we have reason to embrace differences because we know how alienation feels. We wish to be accepted as we are.Others with discernible differences do to. Adults on the autism spectrum are often misunderstood and left out, physically disabled persons may be isolated in a small world due to limited mobility, adults with OCD live with an endless stream of unsettledness, combat veterans feel alienated with experiences that are beyond comprehension to others, and people who simply look and speak differently from the majority are often shunned by the majority.

If you have the courage to be yourself, show gratitude to those who let you. And if you think that others who are different from you should experience acceptance too, embrace them and their differences.

I remember when my friend Mike Himelstein was writing his hit song God’s Gift to the World more than two decades ago, before my ADHD diagnosis. He was kind enough to show me the completed lyric, and I felt compelled to tell him that one word seemed a little hard for a song lyric. I had never heard “extra” in a song. The song’s success humbled me! That word proved to be central, and one of the reasons the song was a hit.

Mike, my friend, this is my public apology! Today, I celebrate your song and those five words that hook everyone who hears them—the first line in verse one:

“There are no extra people.”

I was walking one morning at twilight, a time when lawns and houses are dark gray, stars are receding with the emergence of dawn, and mockingbirds are starting to sing. My plan was to walk mindfully rather than sit in meditation on my back porch. The morning air was cool and invigorating. Step, breathe, look, listen, smell, feel. That is how I began my walk…mindfully present…not becoming, not regretting, just being.

Then the open space in my mind became a welcoming host, inviting thoughts and images of tasks that I had been neglecting. Obligations wanted my focused attention, and they began to pop up like email notifications. All I had to do was not open them and remain in open awareness. It felt good not to open them, to experience non-attachment to thoughts about my obligations, or even thoughts about thinking. I’ve done it before, many times. “Trying to let go” is hard, but not attaching requires less effort, like simply noticing ocean waves that rise and subside.

I don’t know exactly when my mind detoured from this beautiful moment, but the noise of migrating geese jolted me back, mimicking the noise of obligations that had begun stirring in my brain. “Yack, yack, yack, yack, yack yack.” I intentionally followed the sound, remaining aware of the geese until I could no longer hear them, not attaching to thoughts about them, but simply experiencing the sound without judgment—of them or me. All I had to do then was not create more noise. Judgment about a lapse in mindfulness is just more noise. Acceptance circumvents it.

If you have ADHD, you know what it is like to start out determined to direct your attention and sustain your effort on a task, only to get derailed. The moment you realize that the wheels came off the tracks is your opportunity to practice returning to the task, just like returning to silence when meditating. You have three choices the moment you know your attention has gone off track: you can continue taking your thoughts for a ride, criticize yourself for succumbing to the thoughts and interruptions, or swiftly and silently put the wheels back on the tracks.

Living well with ADHD requires practice and repetition. You can develop a habit of gently allowing the noisy geese in your head to be your wake up call and return to the task at hand when working, or return to silence when meditating. To practice mindfulness in real time is to return as often as necessary to the present moment, at work or on the road at sunrise. I’m actually hearing a mocking bird at sunrise right now, notifying me that it is time to return from thoughts and words to open awareness so I can get to work on time.

Announcing the Mindfulness Meditation Workshop for ADHD and Anxiety

Saturday, November 5, from 9 a.m. – noon at Nashville Friends House, 530 26th Ave N.

I’m partnering with Lisa Ernst, meditation teacher and founder of One Dharma Nashville, to offer the workshop.

The $60 fee includes a copy of my book. Registration deadline is October 28. Workshop cost is $70 after this date.

Contact ernst.lisa@gmail.com or tmhuff@comcast.net to inquire.

As soon as I get my medication right, nothing will obstruct me from achieving my goals. Have you ever said that before giving more attention to fine-tuning your medication than using your brain to accomplish something?

As soon as I get into a daily routine of meditating and exercisng, I will be on the path to success. Have you said that and then wasted time criticizing yourself for “never having time” to meditate and exercise?

As soon as I get my system in place, I will be able to do my job well. Have you ever said that before giving more attention to your system than the actual tasks that your system was designed to support?

Pema Chodron, a wise Tibetan teacher, wrote this in her book, Start Where You Are: “As long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as you have an orientation toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are.”

I believe that many—perhaps most—adults with ADHD have brains that are good enough to actualize their vision. No doubt, you can enhance your brain’s functioning with medicine, meditation, exercise, healthy diet, and sufficient sleep. But isn’t that true for anyone’s brain? We should make every effort to sharpen the tool. It helps.

But what happens to you after you have spent a great deal of time and energy sharpening a tool that you don’t use? You criticize yourself. You create a layer of self-defeating mental activity. Then you believe that the image of an incompetent self that you just created is who you are, rather than what you are doing, creating an image.

What good is a sharpened tool if you aren’t building anything? What good is your system if it is not serving you? What good is your medicine if you use it to focus on low-priority activity that is unrelated to your vision. What good is intention to meditate?

Dreading the job of cleaning your kitchen after a social event can feel overwhelming. Feeling overwhelmed makes it difficult to start. Wash just one dish and see what happens next. It is more useful than fussing about a messy kitchen your ADHD brain.

Abandon your chronic wish for a better brain. Accept the one you have and keep moving forward. Hal David and Burt Bacharach wrote about abandoning hope of fruition in a popular song that Dusty Springfield recorded in 1964. Doing is more likely to get you where you want to go than “wishing and hoping and thinking and praying.”

Abandon hope of fruition and do something…one thing…right now. Doesn’t that make life feel more manageable? 

Share your successful strategies for substituting action for “hope of fruition.”

So you have this big goal to “get organized,” and you’ve read books, maybe even looked at some YouTube videos to get inspired. Still, when you approach that room, that desk, that garage…you’re stuck. Sometimes there’s so much going on in the space that it truly is difficult to know where to start. Paperwork? Books? Boxes of stuff left over from cleaning out the car? If you choose to open up shoeboxes of receipts, will you just screw things up? That first decision is often the toughest.

I recognize that there’s a certain amount of stress involved too. The other day I was checking out at a store and the topic of me being a professional organizer somehow came up. “Wow, that must be so stressful,” the clerk mused. Her comment startled me. I, of course, reassured her that there is tremendous fun and satisfaction in what I do, but walking back to my car I did some thinking. It’s good for me to be reminded that for many (most?), organization seems unattainable. Not only do people worry about where to start, but if they actually get started on a project, are they going to do it right? 

Let’s say I’m with a client who struggles with ADD/ADHD, and they nervously ask me where we’re going to begin. The question assumes I have a mystical way of determining the most advantageous location for starting. Sometimes I’ll suggest we go with immediately taking out anything that falls into a “trash” or “recycle” category (those decisions are usually easiest). Sometimes I’ll take one drawer and work them through a decision-making process for all of the items.  Another trick: I have clients take a paper towel tube, look through it, and scan around their space.

Copyright: vizualni / 123RF Stock Photo

This allows them to see smaller pockets of disorganization, and choose a spot that seems approachable. While instinct is involved in how much to tackle in one session, where we start really doesn’t matter. 

So breathe deeply, and take the pressure off of yourself. A little organization is better than none at all, and you aren’t going to goof anything up by trying. If you start from the entry to the room and work inward, you are making progress. If you work through sorting everything that covers the corner of a table, you are making progress. Even if you only open and categorize a few days’ worth of mail, you are making progress – and hopefully learning as you go. And that is really the crux of it – learning what patterns have occurred (there are always patterns), learning how to reconfigure habits, and learning how to move forward in a way that works. That’s the part of organizing that’s important. And just maybe, if you can get yourself started, you’ll be amazed at how far you can go.

Sara Skillen is the owner of SkillSet Organizing based in Franklin, TN. Her mission is to help busy people from all walks of life manage their stuff, their time, and their technology. An active blogger and speaker, her tips and ideas have been featured in Fast Company, Angie’s List Experts, and NOU Magazine, as well as her own blog “Sorting Through the Haystack.” Sara is an Evernote Certified Consultant and became a Certified Professional Organizer® in 2015.