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.

As a Facebook virgin just recently entering the 21st century, I am getting firsthand experience of media brain-lock. So much time is wasted in front of screens. Having to publicize my book made it necessary to learn about social media tools, but I must acknowledge my aversion to them. And I feel guilty for not accepting friend requests from people I don’t know, just as I regret accepting requests from people whose posts are offensive.

A neurologist once told me that conversations are as good as crossword puzzles for maintaining brain health, and even better when the conversations are with people who disagree with us because they are more difficult. I dislike seeing unsolicited expressions of intolerance and support of racism on my screen. I dislike polarizing messages with “likes” from the many friends who already agree with the messenger. Social media segregates us and allows us to avoid openminded interactions with people who might disagree with us.

My pen pal in Germany, a councilman in a major city, told me that one party cannot field a viable candidate there without forming an alliance with at least one other party. He said they have to negotiate through their differences or be irrelevant. Once in office, the groundwork has been laid for cooperation. Cooperation! Wouldn’t it be nice?

More to the point, those of us with ADHD cannot afford to have awareness of our priorities hijacked by our devices. Attention must be managed, or our focused state can become a brain prison. Getting locked up and isolated in hyper-focus is a prescription for lost time, missed deadlines, neglect of our partners, underachievement, and closed minds. Just like the television news junkie all hooked up to his “feeding tube,” Facebook junkies are going to the trough too often and staying too long.

Try leaving your phone off next time you eat dinner or leaving it at home when you go out. Phones once were devices that had to remain connected to the wall. Enjoy an occasional day of media abstinence. Try eating without noise like my father’s family had to before television began isolating us. You might notice the taste and texture of your food, the contours of your spouse’s face, and the humor of your children. Silence is fertile ground for creative thinking, and insights blossom when our minds are still. 

Dick Cavett is one of my heroes, a man of integrity, wit, and intelligence. He hosted talk shows in the sixties and seventies, often featuring extended time with a single guest. It is refreshing to learn from a recent interview that he could be inattentive like us, and on live TV! Monday’s New York Times featured an interview with Dick Cavett by Seth Myers of NBC’s Late Night. Read this brief exchange and recall the last time you had a similar experience…

Seth Meyers: How long did it take for you to walk out onstage and not feel like an actor without lines?

Dick Cavett: The first time you’re in charge of an hour and a half of television, you might as well be looking at Mount Everest. It took a few weeks to relax into it, and then it was fun, but those first shows I’d realize the guest’s lips had stopped moving and I had no idea what they’d been talking about. A tip for a young guy like you from an old hand: Have something ready that you can always say that can apply to everybody. Something like, “Do you pee in the shower?”

For the full New York Times interview, click the link below:

Perfect Strangers: When Dick Cavett Met Seth Meyers

I read in this morning’s Los Angeles Times about students at USC who are first in their families to attend college. “All told, about 20% of the university’s undergraduates, including the student body president, are first-generation,” says LA Times writer, Rosanna Xia. “Most are supported by some kind of financial aid.”

A university provost, Dr. Michael Quick, was a first generation college student, having grown up with a father who was a construction worker. His dad “chased jobs all over the country.” Dr. Quick attended sixteen different high schools. He told the Times that “the college application process was uncharted waters.” He now has a doctorate in neuroscience.

He wants first generation USC students to know how to manage life on campus with more privileged students and those already familiar with university environments. USC wishes to “help students navigate the culture shock of joining such an environment.” Dr. Quick told the Times that the university offers “crash courses on how to use the many resources at the library, and sessions on fellowship opportunities and tutoring centers. Seminars help students think about what steps they need to take toward graduate school and future careers…”

If you are a new college student taking ADHD to a campus, you may feel overwhelmed like first generation students. There are resources at universities that can increase your chances for success, and you should learn about them before you arrive on campus. There are educational consultants who can help you before you leave home.

Some universities offer classes for credit that introduce new students to college-level study skills. High school effort will not be sufficient, believe me! Still, college-level work is manageable and far more interesting than high school.

One nice advantage of the college environment is the likelihood of finding more likeminded peers. The overall population is larger, making for larger subgroups. You can find your tribe. But they are not going to be looking for you. You will have to take some initiative to learn about groups and organizations where you can meet your people.

Look for resources available to incoming students. Visit the university office of disability services and ask about requirements to qualify for services that you might need. If you wait until you are struggling and needing assistance, it will be too little too late.

I was a first generation college student (long before ADHD symptoms got a name), and I was lost for the first couple of years. By the time I caught on, I had to work doubly hard to make up for missed opportunities and to raise my GPA. I wanted to get into graduate school. Leaving home with ADHD was a daunting experience that I was unprepared for. If only someone had told me…

Perhaps I should be more contrite and say, if only I had listened or sought help!