The case of the missing assistant

Typically, As a person with ADHD you need understanding, reassurance, and techniques to cope with or succeed in these areas:

• The self-knowledge that comes from understanding what is your condition versus what is your true self
• The plusses and minuses of the condition, depending on context and your specific case.
• Understanding things that you have always wanted answers to, like events or memories in your life
• Whether you might have a particular niche or strength in terms of how your ADHD can be overcome, or even potentially useful in different parts of your life.
• How to be more socially capable, given how ADHD might interfere with your social interactions
• How to get stuff done without leaving things to the last minute
• How to be more balanced or give priority to things in a more judicious way.
• How to better manage temptations that you find hard to avoid due to issues with impulsivity or insecurities
• How to control what you say better, and speak/ communicate more effectively
• Creating and sticking to timelines
• Keeping track of time
• Staying focused on the things you need to
• Building self-acceptance
• Building self-esteem
• Mastering interpersonal skills and techniques
• Self-monitoring- understanding your particularly changeable emotions and how to manage them.
  
  

So this course will look at all that and many other things besides

Now to the case of the missing assistant!...

Supposing you are a boss, or someone similarly lofty. An 'executive'. The kind of person who has an 'assistant' at work, sitting in a smaller office ahead of yours. A nice touch. A sign of importance and status, and a very useful person to have too.

What does a typical assistant do?

• Keeps your office in order.
• Decides what the day looks like- your appointments, meetings and so on.
• Prioritises different things according to what matters most
• Remembers names of people visiting
• Keeps you to time

Now suppose your assistant is not very good. He or she is either absent, or asleep, or easily overwhelmed. Sometimes they do a great job, other times they do nothing at all.

As a boss without an assistant to try organising you, what would life in your office be like ? Any number of different things, mostly bad ones, and maybe some good ones?

Question A: YOUR STRANGE OFFICE

Look at the following list and tick the top 3 that stick out most for you:

• Don't know whether you're coming or going. You become very easy going, oir very anxious.
• Do too many things at once. Sometimes you really succeed; mostly you fail though.
• Overdoing the things which feel easy or pleasant to do.
• Can't remember places or names very well: you become good at making new friends and bad at keeping up with old ones.
• Lose track of your da, overworking or not going in at all sometimes.
• Don't really know what kind of work you're really doing: you drift in and out of different businesses.
• Become very good at managing emergencies- your office is a constant emergency anyway
• You become very controlling and ordered, doing the
• You get distracted and lose time
• Feeling restless and uneasy; maybe this stresses you, maybe this makes you feel tired and lazy.

To execute something means to act on an intention. To get something done. That's why executives in companies are called such. They look at information, they decide what's important, and they move to get things done, moved forward.

ADHD is called an executive disorder, because if your brain was a workplace, the missing assistant makes it difficult for you- the boss- to get things done in a way that you want.

Now let's go back to this office, an imagine it some 10 years later. Imagine things went from bad to worse over time. What do you think are the consequences for the poor old boss in this place?

QUESTION B: THE CURIOUSLY BAD

Tick the top 2 that resonate with you the most:

• The boss gets sad and feels stupid, failing to believe in themself any more. (depression)
• The boss becomes very irritable and pedantic, trying to get one thing- just anything- done (anxiety)
• The boss gets worn out and exhausted, and loses emotional control (temper, impulsivity).
• The boss has poor knowledge of himself (poor working memory)
• Unable to get the right information together, the boss makes crazy decisions on the spur of the moment.
• Unable to know when to stop, the boss becomes overwhelmed by the smallest decisions, so ends up not making them at all
• Not knowing what to do rto prepare for anything, the boss procrastinates to an Olympic extent.

But wait. Imagine in some offices, again with a missing assistant, things went particularly well? They worked around the missing assistant, and ended up changing to take advantage of the fact. What could that look like?

QUESTION C: THE CURIOUSLY GOOD

Tick the top two items that resonate the most for you:

• It's a crisis specialist. No barriers to see the boss. Go to these guys if you want a crisis to be brought under control quicktime.
• It's a sports office. The boss plays basketball all day, becoming extremely good at it. Everything else is the distraction. Basketball is all you need baby!
• It's a charity office. The boss knows how hard it can be without anyone to help, so they start helping out other people. They have a strong sense of justice.
• It's a very playful and creative place. Because just about anyone or anything can enter and see the boss, the office becomes a playful and whimsical place which takes advantage of this. Art, music, ideas- this place churns them out like water from a dam./

QUESTION D: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE STRANGE

Given this strange situation, what can any boss do to get along in the world of business? I mean, there are strange things, and good things, and bad things all present.

The lists in questions A to C are not complete, in that any number of different things could happen in any given office where the boss doesn't have an assistant.

If you have ADHD, or some significant streak of it, diagnosed or not, you will by now totally understand and relate to this picture. The question for you is very similoar to what the boss faces in this office.

Give that you have ADHD (or a large streak of it, diagnosed or not) what can you do with yourself that makes the most of your skills and talents while also overcoming or circumventing your weaknesses?

That's what this program helps with. By the end of it, you should be:

• aware of how you are as an individual, distinct from your ADHD.
• aware of how your ADHD interacts with your individual qualities- your personality, your beliefs, your skills and so on.
• able to use techniques to calm the ADHD from its excesses, buying you time and relief from impulsive decisions, emotional overload, anxiety and a raft of other issues.
• able to use techniques to help you make better decisions in line with your abilities and strengths
• able to build on areas which may be particularly fruitful for you- expanding your strengths if and when ADHD makes them bigger and potentially valuable to you or others.
• more content and insightful into your life as a whole
• able to advocate for yourself in life, whether at work (formally) or in relationships (informally) to help people to get the most from you- so you can show them your best side, and you can also appreciate them for what they are rather than being preoccupied with your own issues.

There are many other things that the program looks at, but this is enough to get you a flavour of what's going on. With any luck you should be feeling more recognised and understood at this point. Well done for getting this far!