Date night, no kids, and an open road to the local cinema to see the next blockbuster! We got our tickets. Ready, get set, and..."Honey could you wait just a moment while I freshen up in the bathroom? Oh you gotta be kidding me sweatheart the movie's gonna start! I know honey, just give me a minute and I'll be right out."

Anyone familiar with me knows patience is not my virtue. In fact, waiting for anything can be excruciating. During such times I have to find creative ways to focus my attention on something interesting, so my moods don't overtake me. 

I was standing near the hallway when someone spotted my lanyard and keys. They must have  thought I was a cinema employee because a patron came to me handing me her ticket and asking me to direct her to the movie she came to see. My first thought was, "I don't work here." But then I realized how much fun I was suddenly having. I obliged her. "Right this way mam." About 15 people later my wife comes out of the bathroom to find me working my second job. She says, "Are you having fun yet?" It made for a good laugh that otherwise could have turned into a meaningless argument. Sometimes the creative ADD mind can be the best show in town.

There are countless assessments, personality tests, and screening tools all over the Internet that give you a lot of information about your general interests, strengths, weaknesses, tendancies and on and on and on... But does it really get to the heart of who you truly are? Does it bring you to a genuine understanding of how you instinctively work?

Those assessments, personality tests, and screening tools and strategies "experts" offer have been developed and recommended based on how you and everyone else similar to you are the same. The assessment, test, tool or strategy works if you fit who the expert, generally speaking, has in mind. 

Do you find yourself sincerely trying strategy after strategy and falling short of the result you wanted? If you're not hitting the mark you had in mind,  please my friend, don't beat yourself up for that. When strategies are developed and marketed to the public it's designed to work for approximately 20% of the population it's meant to serve, leaving 80% behind to wonder what's wrong with themselves. I can't begin to tell you how many different oranizational systems and strategies I bought and tried only to conclude I was a loser because it should have worked. I mean, it was designed for me. Right? Not necessarily! 

Understanding your preferred learning style and the secondary styles of learning that influence that preferred style implies that you are different and unique. How you use that style to your advantage is the key. For instance, an individual who prefers to talk out loud to organize his thoughts (i.e. Verbal Processor) may have a secondary aural learning style. This individual may incorporate music as a way to verbally process information. The next verbal processor may find one or many different people to verbally process information with because they have a secondary social learning style. Do you know what your personal learning style combination is?

After you hone in on your specific style, now is the time to think about what tool you will use. Writing, recorders, files, journals, singing, drawing, etc. are all tools that can be effective, but only if they are a good match for your specific learning style combination. The right tool in the right context for your learning style will help your get the result you're looking for when you work. It's interesting how experts first direct you to the tool without asking you to consider how you're different. Remember, it's your life, your work, your way. It doesn't rest in the hands of a self proclaimed, expert tool man or marketer. If you want someone who is genuinely interested in you and how you insticntivley work, then download the "ADD Processing Style" (Upper right hand corner of this page) and call me for a FREE SESSION. Together, we'll discuss what's been revealed to you and how to use that to your advantage.

Best Wishes Friends,

Steve Gundy, MSW, ACG 
Attention Coach

 ADD and life can sometmes be a paradox. You're flying a plane one minute executing barrel roles and loop to loops. Then, suddenly, you find yourself scattered & out of control trying to read your flight instruments while steering franticly to stay on course. Coaching enables you to touch that co-pilot inside that guides you to a safe landing. Think about that for a second. Coaching touches the best part of who you are and doing amazing things when the real you shows up, regardless of what the ADD may look like. Safe landings to you my friends!

Nothing is perfect and there is no perfect plan. We all know that. But how often do we find ourselves falling into the belief that just short of perfection is failure? Is that true for you? What's underneath that kind of black & white thinking? I can personally relate it to prejudging a result that, in reality, isn't even there. Yet, in my mind, it has already happned. That's fear and it's like a train ride to nowhere, hoping for a stop that never happens. That kind of fear is the greatest source of procrastination I'm learning, even today, to overcome.

When you realize you are riding the train of perfection then derail the train. This means disrupt the thinking pattern that says, "I can't...until it is perfect." and judges what you will accomplish. A thinking pattern disrupt can look a lot of different ways. Here's a few to get your creativity flowing for something that is unique and works for you:

1. Write the judgement down on paper, then wad it up and throw it away. Do it until your trash can if full.

2. Call yourself and dump it into your voicemail. Leave it there, listen to it later, then erase it after you have rephrased it with an alternate perspective or something more positive.

3. Ask yourself three questions and give yourself an honest answer: What's the best thing that could happen? What's the worst thing that could happen? What's the realistic thing that will happen? The answer to the 3rd question will help you gain a more realistic perspective on you and your situation.

4. Come up with as many alternate results as you can to the negative result you are attached to. Ask trusted friends for an alternate perspective on this. Record them saying this on a digital recorder and play them back over and over and wait and listen for the result that speaks truth to your situation.

The fear of failure is really about making a perfect plan only to realize you fall short when you don't get perfect results. The truth is when the result you have in mind doesn't turn out exactly the way you wanted, the result is not a failure. It's a result that was meant to be revised. If we start looking at what we want for results in terms of being an evolutionary process that involves revisions, then we set ourselves up for taking action and moving towards the vision we hold near and dear to our hearts rather than riding the train of perfection to nowhere. On the other side of those revisions is a beautiful diamond, but remember that even once a lump of coal has formed into a diamond, the diamond still has flaws. The point is the lump of coal stuck to it's job, allowing the process to continue.