146 - What Exactly Is The Strength Based Approach To ADHD

Mentioned in this episode was the Kolbe A Index, which you can find on their main website. Here's the link where you can learn more about it: https://www.kolbe.com/kolbe-a-index

The free webinar will be June 29,2024. Link below:

For those of you that are wondering why nothing is sticking, why you read things and don't do the work, why you have epiphanies about what could work but it goes nowhere...Join myself and others at ADHDBB.  There is a 'team' component to managing ADHD. Join our team. 

Transcript

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Do you ever hear about an ADHD support or coaching type stuff where they talk about strength-based approaches? Do you ever like wonder what that means? Like it makes sense, right? Like, what are you good at? What do you know how to do? What do you shine at? What you shine in moment. Like I can play Minecraft, but how does that help me to remember to do my laundry? I don't know. Let's talk about strengths. You are listening to ADHD Big Brother, the podcast for adults struggling with their ADHD and comorbid depression symptoms. I'm your host, Russ Jones, author of The Standing to the Top, believer that you can actually have a smile in your life despite this diagnosis. So let's make some sense out of this struggle. Let's learn some stuff. Let's laugh at some stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, here's some stuff. Welcome to the podcast, y'all. That's right. I'm from the deep south now. Y'all, how y'all doing today? Y'all doing pretty darn good? I'm doing pretty darn good. Tell me how you done. Let's do a mental health update real quick. Um, I'm doing this every week. It's something that I picked up from uh my time on the mental health and tech podcast. Uh, and it's to normalize talking about our mental health. Our school spaghetti, if you will. What's going on in your neck of the neurons? You doing all right? You doing shitty? Does it want to talk about it? Biblidi. I'll go first. Um and we'll just, you know, we're all gonna be comfortable talking about the uncomfortable. And I'm feeling today pretty darn good. Uh, I had a bit of a down day yesterday, and I'm attributing that to eating like shit the day before. Um, it happens, you know, pizza happens, and it happened. And, you know, why not just attribute it? You know? And honestly, even if my mood, I guess it's not directly resulting from how I ate, I I don't know. I've who cares? Why don't I just attribute it to it? It's gonna help me to eat better. So win when. But this week I've been feeling pretty darn good. Pretty darn good. And I'm noticing that I'm ruminating a lot less than before, which is so nice. Oh my gosh. And I don't know what to attribute that to. Maybe it's the medicine, but I know I've been making sure that I do a formal 20-minute on-the-cushion meditation every day, which is it translates to about 18 minutes of distractions and about two minutes of focusing on the breath. No big deal. That's those are just the reps that I do at my focus gym. Meditation for me, it's not about being amazing at focus, it's about self-awareness in the moment and then redirecting back to the item of the focus. Distraction just means, hey man, one more rep when I'm aware of it. This is a side note thingy, but I hear a lot of joking in the ADHD community about how impossible meditating is. And you know, I could never do that and sit down, focus, ADHD. And I'm ex- I'm like, I can't, I know, I can't either. I've had sometimes when I've been super focused, had these amazing meditation sessions. And then I've had meditations where I followed my breath maybe zero times. I think maybe if we don't call it meditation, maybe it gets more traction. Like maybe I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna do distracted thinking practice. Like I'm gonna do some DTP, you know, I'm gonna have a DTP session. I'm gonna spend five minutes doing some DTP. I'm gonna start out focusing on the feeling of my breath, and I'm gonna welcome any distraction. And when I catch myself, I'm gonna notice that, and then I'm gonna squeeze my mental glutes and I'm gonna put my attention right back on my breath, and I'm gonna welcome the next distraction. I'm just gonna keep going until the keep going with those reps until the timer goes off. So, yeah, that's the let's rephrase it. I'm gonna I highly recommend DTP sessions. Uh so yeah, I'm basically I'm doing good. I had a good week. Uh, I have another workshop coming up, and you guys are invited to that if you want it. It's free. It's how ADHDers can do shitty things. You know those things that you know how to do, that you have the it's like you have them as priorities, but you can't seem to get started on them. I'm gonna give you a nice little workshop about it. It's a fun workshop, it's about 30 minutes uh of info, PowerPoint, fun times, and then like 30 minutes or so of QA, which is my favorite part. So if you want to sign up for that, it's in the show notes. It's gonna be June 29th, that's next Saturday. And then I'm gonna share this with you guys. I want to share a text I got from my one-on-one client. Yeah, I don't have you're wondering about a hypoz. Are you allowed to do that? No, I don't care. I'm gonna share my private text message from my client. No, no, guys, it's a testimonial that I got. Um, and I've been helping him for about four months or so now. I'm gonna read it because it makes me so happy and it speaks so well to what I believe in. And so here you go. This is from Patricio. And I quote, and this is how he talks. Four years I've struggled. No, for years I struggled with accountability for my personal goals and projects. I always thought it was a willpower issue that would eventually improve, but it never did. While I had no trouble meeting goals at work, personal tasks were a constant challenge. I get that. That whole thing where like it's when you're at your uh when you're at work, it's like you can do this stuff, but then when you get home, all your structure and everything just right out the fucking window. I totally get that. Um, okay, continuing on. A prime example was my U.S. citizenship application. Despite its immense importance to me and my family, I had procrastinated for a year. After nearly 20 years of working towards this point, I couldn't get started due to a lack of pressure and my hectic work schedule. That totally reeks of ADHD. It's not like urgent, urgent, but it's in the back of your head all the time, and you're like, God, I gotta do that. Oh God. Working with Russ changed everything. He helped me start and complete the process, and now I'm proud to say I've achieved my citizenship. How freaking amazing is that? Okay. We broke the task down into small manageable goals that I could accomplish within a couple of hours, filling them into my busy work week. To ensure progress, I agreed to report back to Russ via text every few days. We also scheduled check-ins every couple of weeks to reflect on necessary adjustments. Perfect. Accountability is everything. Knowing that Russ was on the other end of those frequent texts significantly improved my self-accountability. During our check-ins, we generated numerous actionable ideas to keep pushing towards my goals. Russ brought a winning combination of creativity, understanding, and challenges to our sessions. Oh man, that's super sweet. I love that. Um, if you're struggling to make progress on your projects and could benefit from creative approaches and accountability, I wholeheartedly recommend working with Russ. His guidance has been invaluable in helping me achieve my personal goals. Man, I love that. And it that warms the cockles of my heart. Uh, it's such a thoughtful testimonial. And you know, the reward of like seeing someone excited about doing a thing that they haven't been able to do before. Oh, God, I love that. We all have that in us to do the thing, you know? We all have it. And sometimes it takes a thought partner. Like I hate the word coach, uh, but it's uh somebody like a thought partner to help us come up with our own ideas. It's just awesome. Anyway, super proud of that, and I'm reaffirmed uh that I'm in the right place for my soul. So here I am. I love this work. This is the good work. So let's talk about strength-based coaching. Oh, God, I can't get away from that word. Let's talk about improving our lives by utilizing our strengths. Utilizing, utilizing our strengths. Boom. Did it without using the word coach. Bam, done. Most likely it's it's we hear about ADHDs and the struggles, right? The problems, the issues, and those are all real. They create chaos, they're not fun. Uh, but we often think that we have to attack the failures or the struggles or the problems. And there's definitely ways to manage ADHD that are more like a cookie cutter process. And I subscribe to them big time. I'm uh I don't say cookie cutter to mean that they are um awful. Uh, but like timer specificity, uh, easy point of entry, accountability, community, planners, one notebook, externalizing. But it's the implementation of these things that is dependent specifically on you. Unique you. And it behooves us to take the time to think about um or assess our strengths. Like, what are we freaking good at? There's a strength-based test that I really dig because it it's not so much a well, it kind of is about the instincts, but it's the behaviors or the actions, let's say. The actions that are the result of our instincts. It's not an IQ test, it's not a um an emotional test, but what what compels us to action? And if ever there was a thing to know, it's like, what the fuck gets me going? Is it Minecraft? What is it? Or is it something about the game of Minecraft? What this is interesting. But it's called the Colby Index A. Colby is spelled K-O-L-B-E. Um, and I just I'm gonna put a link to it in the show notes. It's not your it's not a free online test. It cost like 55 bucks when I did it, but oh my gosh, it gave some really helpful insights into what gets me particularly moving. And I really appreciate it. There was like a an audio for each of the four components that explained what it was and why that aspect of me is unique and what it means. Super cool. But briefly, and I'm just gonna uh grab this off their site because they can explain it better than I can. But the assessment identifies people's instinctive strengths, explains them, analyzes how they align with tasks and other people, and then they offer practical solutions for putting them into practice. My takeaway from this uh is that it's helpful to know what drives us to action. And they call it our modus operandi. It's basically how do I operate? And how do I operate best? So, for my assessment, one of the things that was pointed out was that I'm an innovator. It pointed out a thing that I wouldn't have necessarily seen as a strength. I prefer to experiment to see what is gonna happen. Like I like to do a thing and stumble my way around. The suggestions for me on things were like racing the clock, taking on challenges, take it hello, ADHD Big Brother community. Does that sound like anybody you know? And I'm not just talking about me here. Promote alternatives. Like if I'm not known for promoting alternatives, I mean I basically hate every single word in the self-help productivity world. And I think we all need our own version of things, you know, school spaghetti. That's exactly the right view that I have of my brain. Experimenting, that's another big one. I do things at the last minute, that's perfect. That resonates so true. And with for a number of ADHD people, I would imagine. And here's my list of don'ts. Uh conforming. Ooh, that's gross. Uh hesitating, being afraid to fail, stick closely to a script, second guess yourself. And I can speak to this because actually I've actually done these things. I know they say that don't do them, but I've done them. And I know that we've all done them. I've hesitated on a lot of things. And that doesn't usually go well. It doesn't usually go smooth. When I can speak off the cuff, when I can just play and I can have fun, that's always better for me. So this is telling me my strengths in one area. And what I can do with that is I can look at when I'm trying to do things, maybe it's okay for me to wait to the last minute. Maybe it's okay to not try to do the thing the way that I think people want me to do them. I work great when someone wants to give me a challenge or when I challenge myself. That's a thing that compels me to action. What doesn't compel me to action is to do things the way that everybody tells me to do them. Conforming to some norm process is, uh, it's so restricting and it feels awful. It doesn't compel me to action to have to do a thing in a very dictated way to me. I need freedom to play and I need to be able to experiment with doing it wrong. So now we come to this thing like, okay, so how does that help me to do the do the dishes? Uh and these are the things where it often helps to be in a community or to have a thought partner because when we're struggling with seeing outside of our own box, it helps to get ideas, fresh perspectives. It like they can be a catalyst for us to get our own new, unique ideas, you know, going. And ideas in this case, I might uh might be I create a challenge with myself or someone else where like we have a list of chores that are worth a certain amount of points. And at the end of the week, we add up the points and compete to see who buys lunch. That's that's a fun competition. And I think there's it brings up a lot of, hmm. I'm just making this up. So it's that, but I think there would need to be some rules and regulations put in place. Uh, but it's a challenge. It's not about the dishes, it's about the challenge. It's I'm so much more juiced up to do a shitty task if I'm inside of a challenge. That's something to think about. Here's another one that I found interesting. There's a measurement called Fact Finder, which talks about how we gather information. And everybody does this uniquely. So some people gather intense amounts of knowledge prior to action. My particular rating is I simplify. And this is exactly who I am. I skim, I get the gist of it, I see the big picture, the why of it all, and then I create metaphors and I simplify. I don't do extensive deep dives into like the minutiae. I'm like, what do we need to know so that we can get moving, so that we can start experimenting. Experimenting on myself. And so, like, how can that be a strength? Well, if I look at this, uh like I look at my podcast, I don't do deep dives into the experiments or the science or the data. That's just not fun for me. I talk about my experiment of one, which is myself. Um, and I script a draft of the episode and I use it as a guide. But I'm not, I don't usually read it off the directly off the paper. But I I know that I have more fun doing it this way. I'm using my particular strengths to move forward on this podcast. Like I don't dread the podcast. I don't dread the chore of putting it all together. I'm creating the job environment that I want to work at. So doing things the way that work for my brain, and that to me is the ideal. And that's so that's utilizing the inherent strengths gifted to me by this goddamn ADHD brain that I love so much. So um I hope this has been somewhat helpful. I've been that's a great, that's a some really shitty phrasing. I hope it's been somewhat helpful. Not totally helpful, not all the way helpful, just somewhat, okay? Quit asking for the moon, okay? What do you think I have a lasso I can just pull it down for you? Well, I'm not a magician, all right? No, just what are your strengths? Or maybe not strengths. When you've done things that you didn't struggle to get started on, like when you are in your element and you're moving and shaking, when you think on that, when you reflect on that, what got you moving? What aspect of that got you moving? Like go as deep as you can on that, and then maybe you'll mine your diamond. You know, that juicy nugget of wisdom, of that insight about yourself, and that's a strength. You know, use that to do your laundry. All right. Alrighty, guys. Uh, that's gonna do it for me. Um, reminder, we have that workshop uh next week. If you're interested in attending, I'd love to see you there. You can sign up through the the Linkarooney in the show notes. And with that, I hope you have a fantastic week, and I will talk to you later.