Finishing what you Start

Wednesday, January 25, 2012 Leave a comment

Linears and  Holographics

ALL Kinds of Minds

  • Tortoises and Hares
  • Detailers and Concepters
  • Prioritize First vs. Do it NOW
  • DECIDE and Do vs. Go with the Flow

WHY won’t they LISTEN?

We humans are funny critters.  We want everybody to do everything OUR way.

Secretly, we sincerely believe that whatever we have figured out effectively for our own lives would transfer to anyone else’s – if they’d DO IT RIGHT!

THIER problems would magically disappear with OUR solution,
IF ONLY they’d:

  • try hard enough
  • give it enought time to become habitual
  • “want to” badly enough
  • stop resisting
  • or procrastinating

 – or really wanted a solution and not simply a chance to complain!

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Filed under A5. Tips, Tricks & Techniques, ADD | ADHD | Attention Deficit Disorder, G2. Rewrite Your Coaching Manual, H. Brain Based Coaching/Training Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Bunch of Words about FIT – Part 1

Monday, December 26, 2011 Leave a comment

I Don’t Tweet, Don’t Ask Me

You can’t Tweet a novel.

Neither can you expand on a concept effectively when you are limited to a handful of characters barely greater than the number of tiles you might draw in the average game of Scrabble!

Since “profound relating” is at the very top of my personal list of Core Values, I find “Twitter expectations” more than a little unsettling — especially when they are shoved down my throat as THE way to reach your clients (or anyone else!)

I have been accused of a lot of things in my life,
but “brief” was never one of them.

As a result, most of MY students and clients are more likely to appreciate something with a little meat on its bones than to extol the virtues of “The Cliff Notes approach to idea dissemination.”

Some of us LIKE words.  Most of us who like words really don’t care much for “brief.”  It’s a matter of perspective and personal preference, not an addendum to Robert’s Rules of Order.  So when I hear apologies for the length of a post on blog after blog, I want to weep.

For those of us in love with language, LESS is simply … well, less!

It’s a matter of FIT.  And whether you are coach, client, or both, the concept of FIT is probably THE single most important coaching concept underlying coaching success.

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Filed under B. Coaching Concerns, B2. Working with an ADD Coach, B2a. Mentor Coaching, ADD Style, D. Coaching with MGH, G2. Rewrite Your Coaching Manual, G3. ADD Coaching Secrets, G4. Mentoring the ADD Coach Tagged with , , , , , ,

ABOUT “From My Books”

Saturday, June 11, 2011 Leave a comment

Blogging by Book Excerpt

Drawing of rolling book cart like those found in smaller libraries - loaded with booksAbout those orphaned books I mentioned in Menage a Moi — I suddenly had an epiphany.

Why wait for publication to start getting the content in the hands of those who need it???

So, as time permits (or whenever I’m too covered up to write a new post for one of the other categories), I’ll pull content from one of my MANY books in process to share with you in this section.

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Filed under ADD | ADHD | Attention Deficit Disorder, G. From my Books, G1. The Boggle Book, G2. Rewrite Your Coaching Manual, G3. ADD Coaching Secrets, G4. Mentoring the ADD Coach Tagged with , , , , , ,

Until they believe they can, they can’t

Friday, May 20, 2011 Leave a comment

An ADD Coach’s single most important task is
the facilitation of THE most essential client shift:

 from “Expectations of Failure”
TO “Expectations of SUCCESS”

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Filed under A1a. Executive Functioning Disorders, A5b. Activation, B2. Working with an ADD Coach, G2. Rewrite Your Coaching Manual, G4. Mentoring the ADD Coach, H. Brain Based Coaching/Training Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Key Tasks for ADD Coaching

Friday, May 20, 2011 3 Comments

Old headshot of Madelyn (a.k.a. MGH) long familiar from the webADD-Specific Coaching Skills

Ten Key Areas That Need Time & Attention

A Therapist or Doctor may or may not have the time to work with any of these areas.

A “vanilla coach”** may not find these skills important, agree that they are useful — or even understand why they tmight be an appropriate part of a coaching relationship.

An ADD Coach, however, must be prepared to include a certain amount of work in each of the following arenas — understanding how to use EACH of the ten skills below.  It’s a coach’s job to work with clients to remove “what’s in the way” of shining success.

Backfilling basic skills — insufficient, underdeveloped, or missing as the result of kludgy Executive Functioning –is the most likely suspect in the ADD population, rather than lack of motivation, resolve, ambition or many of the other things-in-the-way that are more common among vanilla clients.
———————
**vanilla = unflavored by ADD – a “vanilla coach” means the coach doesn’t work with ADD/ADHD/EFD clients and/or has not been trained in an ADD/ADHD/EFD-specific, brain-based coach training, regardless of whether they fall on the Attentional Spectrum personally or not.

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ADD-flavored Coaching

Friday, May 20, 2011 4 Comments

Never forget that YOU are “the temp in charge” of your ADD client’s Executive Functioning Clubhouse!

Drawing of the human brain with the prefrontal cortex highlighted (the seat of the executive functions)Failure in this arena is the biggest mistake I see in otherwise excellent Coaches, and it turns pretty darn good Coaching into absolutely lousy ADD Coaching in a heartbeat.

An ADD coach must identify and presence the “Name of the Game” whenever they coach any ADD client. No matter how high functioning, ADD clients hire coaches for help in an area where they are struggling – and the source of the struggle is usually in the area of activation and follow-through to completion.

The main reason we ADDers struggle with activation and follow-through is because in our pre-frontal cortex, the Executive Functioning Clubhouse, the receptionist seems to take frequent breaks — and we get distracted and wander away before she returns with some necessary piece of our process!  If we could stay on track without your assistance, we wouldn’t have hired you in the first place.

Erratic Executive Functioning is the one thing that never changes with ADD, no matter how much an ADDer knows about ADD work-arounds or how well they understand themselves.

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Filed under A. Hopefully Helpful
, A1a. Executive Functioning Disorders, B. Coaching Concerns, B1. ADDCoach Terms & Tools, G2. Rewrite Your Coaching Manual, G3. ADD Coaching Secrets Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How I Mentor Coaches

Thursday, May 19, 2011 Leave a comment

Old headshot of Madelyn (a.k.a. MGH) long familiar from the web

Mentor Coaching with Me

I want all of my clients to enjoy their coaching time.

I firmly believe that it is impossible to enjoy ANYTHING much, unless it happens in an unconditionally constructive atmosphere. 

As important as that is with any client, it is essential with clients who support clients of their own.

In my experience, coaches need immense support to be able to develop to the point where all of the skills they need are as natural as walking and talking.

(Remembering to deliver charge-neutral communications and stay unconditionally constructive will take a lot more focus than it will once it becomes second nature to do so, for example.)

Coaches often feel a drain on their energies they can’t always identify and can rarely explain as a result.  A huge part of a Mentor coach’s job is to restore those energy balances!

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Filed under B. Coaching Concerns, B2a. Mentor Coaching, ADD Style, D. Coaching with MGH, D1b. Private Mentor Coaching, G2. Rewrite Your Coaching Manual, G4. Mentoring the ADD Coach Tagged with , , , , ,

Listening for Time Troubles

Sunday, May 15, 2011 Leave a comment

Illustration of the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland - RUSHINGTroubles with Time and Follow-Through

Most ADDers have trouble with T-I-M-E.  We run out of it, we are continually surprised by it, and we sometimes seem to be completely unaware of it.

All ADD Coaches worthy of the term must remain aware that Listening For your client’s awareness of time and their relationship to time (yes, they do have one!) almost always involves some serious sleuthing on the part of the coach!.

The Following Exercise is designed to help ADD Coaches sharpen their Listening FROM Skills

Not a coach?  That’s OK – answer the questions below for yourself.  The information will be useful to you in a Peer Coaching relationship [click HERE if you don't have one of those].  Your functioning insights will be valuable even without an outside observer, but it might be difficult to sherlock in real time or to actuate changes.  Do it anyway.

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Filed under A5. Tips, Tricks & Techniques, A5c. TimeSteps™, B. Coaching Concerns, B1. ADDCoach Terms & Tools, B2. Working with an ADD Coach, B2a. Mentor Coaching, ADD Style, G2. Rewrite Your Coaching Manual, G3. ADD Coaching Secrets, G5b. The Challenges Inventory™ Tagged with , , , , , ,

10 Essential ADD Coaching Concepts

Thursday, April 28, 2011 Leave a comment

Graphic of a man with a map, sandles & a sword about to enter a maze - in the center we see the top of a brown, furry head, with hornsMore than any other client type, the ADD client knows more about what’s going on with their functioning than their coach ever will. 

The trouble is:

1 – they don’t trust what they know,
2 – they don’t know how to explain their experience, and
3 – they can’t figure out in a vacuum what they need to DO to become intentional with attending.

As difficult as it may be to sort things out without an executive functioning crutch (that’s you!), the last thing they need is a coach who tries to coach them “by the book” – especially if that book was written by the ADD clue-free.

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Filed under A1a. Executive Functioning Disorders, A3. Linking & Learning, A5. Tips, Tricks & Techniques, ADD | ADHD | Attention Deficit Disorder, B. Coaching Concerns, B1. ADDCoach Terms & Tools, B2. Working with an ADD Coach, G2. Rewrite Your Coaching Manual, G3. ADD Coaching Secrets Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

HOW to Listen from Belief

Tuesday, April 19, 2011 Leave a comment

Drawing of two smiling figures standing behind a question mark; thought bubbles over their heads: a red X, and a green checkmark

Beneficial Assumptions

I’m not big on listening through assumptions of any kind,
generally, but I think you’ll find that filtering your listening
through the following Four Assumptions will help you
greatly, especially if you are viewing life through The ADD Lens™.
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Filed under A. Hopefully Helpful
, A5. Tips, Tricks & Techniques, ADD | ADHD | Attention Deficit Disorder, B. Coaching Concerns, B1. ADDCoach Terms & Tools, G2. Rewrite Your Coaching Manual Tagged with , , ,

The Art and Science of the ADD Question

Monday, April 18, 2011 Leave a comment

Don’t ask, DO tell

My heart breaks when an ADDer tells me about past coaching relationships that haven’t worked out.

While I have empathy for any coach who wonders why they couldn’t be effective with any particular client, my heart shatters when I hear from any ADDer whose coach doesn’t wonder about their own contribution to this client’s struggles.

ADD Coaching is not ADD icing on a “vanilla” cake!  

You simply must Rewrite your Coaching Manual™ through the understanding of how the brain “normally” works, and what’s going on when it works differently.

Line drawing of a person throwing a piece of paper and a huge question mark into a trash can.What you will discover when you do is that there are standard coaching basics that won’t work AT ALL with ADDers.

Never.  Nada!  No way, no how!

No matter what you’ve learned – or how well your vanilla skills work with how many bazillions of non-ADD clients . . .
you simply MUST throw them out when your client has ADD.

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Filed under A1a. Executive Functioning Disorders, A3. Linking & Learning, ADD | ADHD | Attention Deficit Disorder, B1. ADDCoach Terms & Tools, D1b. Private Mentor Coaching, G2. Rewrite Your Coaching Manual, G3. ADD Coaching Secrets, G4. Mentoring the ADD Coach, H. Brain Based Coaching/Training Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t blame the foot!

Sunday, April 17, 2011 Leave a comment

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Filed under A1a. Executive Functioning Disorders, ADD | ADHD | Attention Deficit Disorder, D1a. Private ADD Coaching, G2. Rewrite Your Coaching Manual, G3. ADD Coaching Secrets, H. Brain Based Coaching/Training Tagged with , , ,

Ten Basic Coaching Skills used most often with ADDers

Friday, April 15, 2011 Leave a comment

– Updated legacy post -orig. 11/15/95- from Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, CTP, CMC, A.C.T., MCC, SCAC –

Graphic of roadside-like sign: yellow triangle enclosing a ball peen hammer as metaphor for comment on "fixing"ADDers have had people trying to “fix” them all their lives: 
“If you’d just get organized . . .“  “If you’d only try . . .”

While those suggestions usually come from a loving intention, they are actually UNloving in execution, most frequently because they collapse won’t with can’t.

At the heart of that ever-so-well-meaning “should” is the assumption that all the ADDer has to do is make a commitment to willingness and their world will shift.

In other words, the underlying belief is that the ADDer could
 “if they really wanted to,” and that “all” that is missing is
a high enough degree of “wanting to.”

BALDERDASH!

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Filed under ADD | ADHD | Attention Deficit Disorder, B1. ADDCoach Terms & Tools, B2. Working with an ADD Coach, B2a. Mentor Coaching, ADD Style, D. Coaching with MGH, D1a. Private ADD Coaching, D1b. Private Mentor Coaching, F1. ADD Top Tens, G2. Rewrite Your Coaching Manual, G3. ADD Coaching Secrets Tagged with , , ,

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