The next section we work on after “ADD moments and victories” is described as “working on exercises”.  In this section, anyone in the group who has taken on a longer project shares on their progress.  The longer project could be setting life goals, or a budget, or following a process found on the Internet, or elsewhere, that seems useful to that individual.  This is followed by “report on success with goals set at the last meeting”.  Here we talk about progress or success, stumbling blocks or any readjustment in plans  to accommodate obstacles.  I should point out that there is no interchange in these sections.  Participants do not comment or ask questions until the next section which we call “requests for feedback”.  Then and only then do we ask questions or comment on something someone has said and only on the part on which they have specifically requested feedback.  Our exprience tells us that we are sometimes prone to make comments or criticize other participants efforts and lose sight of our own activities.  The final section is “plans for the period until the next meeting” and this section is divided into action items, with notations for what is to be done, how, and by when.

There have been people arriving on our doorstep who share just about experiences–mostly negative.  Nothing is said to them, but after awhile they either notice that no one else is sharing in the same manner or they run out of things to say and drift away.  We call our process peer coaching for a reason.  It is not a support group in the usual sense.

Peer coaching is not a replacement for the personal coach.  The two founders of the group both used a coach for a period of time and benefited from it.  Peer coaching is an alternative…perhaps even a supplement.  If you were to ask me, I would probably say that it is not as effective as personal coaching but it is a lot less expensive.  We are still fine tuning the process.  What we don’t have is a way of checking in as most personal coaches do but hopefully we will find a way to do this and experience the same benefits.  What I do like about peer coaching is the sense of independence and this may sound weird since we do it as a group.  The key feature is that there is no professional in charge.  We are in charge and this idea can be quite liberating.

He said, “I’m going to start you on some medication trials, personally I would advise you to take a martial art and I would look at getting a personal coach.”

When I inquired further about coaching he gave me a name and phone number and I called the person and set up a first meeting.  The cost at the time, I believe was around $500 a month, which took me aback a bit but within a month or two my earnings were up to the point where it wasn’t too much of a burden.  After about three months though, I started to have second thoughts and in spite of the coach’s suggestion that if I followed the process more closely more earnings would improve, I decided to take a break.  I never went back although I did try to find another coach a few years later.  At that time there were only a few in Toronto that specialized in helping clients who had ADHD.  One took weeks to return a phone call and then suggested, by email, that I call at a specific time and when I did there was no answer.  I decided that he probably also had ADHD and could benefit from his own coach.  I then discussed the matter with a friend and mutual sufferer and in the course of our conversation we came to the conclusion that we both had enough coaching experience to try coaching each other and set up a process to do that and invited others to join us in the experiment in weekly meetings.  We call it peer coaching.  That was some years ago and although we now meet bi-weekly we are still going strong and last meeting added two new people to the group.

So what do we do?  There is actually a fairly rigorous process that we set up.  The meeting begins with someone volunteering to chair the meeting and there is a printed agenda. The meeting begins with each attendant invited by the chair to share on a personal update since the last meeting, new information which any of us might have come across concerning ADHD or anything else in neuroscience that might seem helpful and then what has become one of the most important aspects of the meeting although it wasn’t planned to be that.  We share what we call ADHD moments and victories. This could be any of the things that make our lives miserable from losing the keys to our front door, or the car, to getting the time wrong for an appointment.  What tends to happen is that these little tragedies  have a brighter side in that we get to delight out companions with the stories at out next meeting.  Victories could mean something such as finding a device that attaches to your keychain that beeps when you clap your hands or getting the time wrong for an medical appointment and calling the office to apologize and asking if they might be able to accommodate you later in the day.

I will describe the other elements of peer coaching in my next post and in a subsequent post try to explain why the psychiatrist that diagnosed me suggested I take a martial art.

I found that, with a little practice, I could put such an occurrence aside and move on with life most of the time. It echoed Abraham Lincoln’s comment that most people are about as happy as they choose to be. The promise of neuroplasticity is that your can exercise some control over what your brain does. Now that’s not to say that it is easy. It isn’t but it is possible. The promise too is that not only can you change your brain you can change it by yourself.

Last winter, one 20 degrees-below-zero night, I was on my way to meet some people and, after driving a few blocks in my car, it started to run, roughly, on three cylinders with a lot of noise and smoke. I immediately drove home parked it and called the friend I was supposed to pick up at her home to say I couldn’t make it. She said she wanted to see the movie we and our friends had planned to see and was going to go anyway–on public transit. To my own amusement, I found myself feeling disappointed that she wasn’t going to just spend the evening at home as I thought I was about to do. As I was on the phone, talking to her, standing on the street, my local bus appeared in the distance, headed to a stop right where I was standing. I thought of Brendan, and how I had resolved not to have a day ruined by just the sort of occurrence I was experiencing. I told my friend I would meet her at the theatre and got on the bus and turned my attention to how I would complete the journey; meet up with her and our friends. It was magic. It worked and really wasn’t that difficult. After the movie our friends drove us home. We had seen the film we had intended to see, spent time with good company and the only bump in all of this was that my car still didn’t work.

Arriving home I typed the symptoms of what the car was doing into Google, fearing that it was something really expensive, my head now back into the problem and what I got back was that the symptoms matched that of a part that I had received a recall letter for but hadn’t got around to attending to.

The next day I called my auto service and had the car towed to the dealership and a few hours later they called to say the part was repaired under the recall as I had suspected. They even came, picked me up and drove me to the dealership to retrieve my car.

I try to remember this not just when my car won’t start or run right but whenever there is any kind of glitch in my plans and try to ask myself the question, “Do I want to deal with the problem the best I can and get on with my day?” Life’s too short, as they say. But more importantly, I know I have it within me to change the way I react to such event. A good friend once asked me the question: “How many of the things you have worried about have actually happened?”

The humorous answer is: “Hardly any of them and so I guess worrying about them has a positive effect.” But the true answer is just the first part of that statement…hardly any of them. How upset would I have been about my car breaking down had I known how easily it would be dealt with? Not much. I’m at a point in my life where I can see the end of it and how I spent that time is incredibly important. I want that time to be filled with moments with my friends enjoying mutual interests not stuck at home brooding about a broken car.

It seems that there is another community in New Jersey where, in the 1920’s, the community leaders decided to design the town to be car friendly.  There were no traffic engineers back then (there was hardly any traffic) and so the idea was turned over to, well ordinary engineers.  They went about building a system that mimicked the flow of water and in hydraulics, if you want the water to flow nicely, yoiu remove any obstacles that might slow it down.  You know–things such as cyclists, animals or people.  Hence the idea of sidewalks elevated just a bit above the roadway where the pedestrians could carry on whatever they wanted to: walking, sitting, eating along with their dogs and whatever other encumbrances they might want but where it would not hinder the progress of automobiles and trucks.  Of course, at certain points these pedestrians might want to get to the other side and since they were tax-payers you had to at least pretend to accommodate them, traffics signals were developed to allow them across the streets (quickly) and then the cars could go back to racing on to their various destinations unimpeded.

In Drachten, the only accommodation to making a change in direction whether you are a driver, a cyclist or a pedestrian, is a roundabout in the middle of town.  Cars must enter from the left but cyclists and pedestrians can enter wherever they want.  It would be chaos right?  Well that’s the point.  Since it is chaotic drivers tend to be more mindful and to drive more cautiously.  I have a number of friends who are fire-fighters.  They  hate speed bumps.  Some of them are paramedics and they tell of back injuries made worse by speed-bumps.  Studies now show that speed-bumps actually cause drivers to speed up, almost as if they were making up the time lost going over the bumps.  So why do homeowners still insist on having them installed on their streets?  Because intuitively they understand that the bumps will slow traffic even if they don’t.

Why is this discussion taking place in a blog that is primarily about neuroplasticity?  For one thing if you want to get your brain to change a habit, you must first get it to break the routine, to know what it is you want to accomplish.  Vision is absolutely essential to changing habit.  So is perseverance and so is thinking it through with all the facts you can find.  But there is another reason I have written about this.  I don’t like control freaks.  I particularly don’t like control freaks that haven’t thought it through where the issue is not getting you to do something differently but getting you to do it there way.  And then were are back to neuroplasticity again because almost everything we know about this topic has been discovered in the last ten years, where most of the knowledge in this fields is still undiscovered, we must question everything.  This consumes both time and energy and beyond that…it is just hard.  But if you want to change, successfully, you have to do it just as the people in Drachten had to do it.  But if you do do it, the results might just amaze you.

For people like myself, with ADD, anger can have a purpose.  It can wake up the brain.  So does worry and my brain can be like a guided missile, looking for something to either get mad about or to worry over.  I don’t like it but I know it works that way.  Sometimes when I stay up late to watch television, I can feel myself getting angry at some item in a documentary or a newscast and I realize that it is one o’clock in the morning.  I then have a choice.  I can continue with the anger and wake myself up in which case I’m done for going to sleep for at least two hours.  Or I can go to bed.  These days, usually, bed is my choice.

Today I went to buy a lock that immobilizes the scooter when it is parked.  The sales guy said to me, “Don’t lose the key.  We’ll have to take a cutting torch to it to get it off.”

I replied, “I’m going to lose the key I have ADHD.”

He said, without a pause, “That’s why some people buy a third key.”

Most of the time I think I’m the only one (plus a few of my friends) who loses things like keys and directions and receipts.  Hell I even lost the ownership certificate on the way back from registering the scooter this morning.  The truth is I lose a lot of things but wallets and keys I don’t (touch wood).  I use a trick I learned many years ago to always leave them in the same place.  My wallet is only ever in two places.  One is in my pocket and the other is on my bedroom dresser top.  Same with the keys. Oh I have occasionally left my wallet on a counter top while paying for somethings but I’ve been lucky.  Either the clerk found it and hurried after me or I’ve noticed before I got to far away.  Once or twice I’ve left my keys in the lock in the door after opening it and noticed they weren’t in my pocket (or on my dresser ) and gone to look at the door.

My worry now is that I have put the scooter key and the lock key on one ring that is different from the one I use for all the rest of the keys.  The reason is that I don’t want the whole bunch of them dangling together hanging from the scooter ignition.  I am worried but I plan to follow the same rules although it will mean having two sets of keys in my pocket or on the top of my dresser.  I do know that I won’t have to worry about leaving them in the door.

While doing it, you are traveling much slower than you would if you were running. The rhythmic nature of using the poles and swinging your arms is quite natural and requires little attention from the conscious mind so you are more aware of your surroundings and you walk more upright than you would if you were…well just going for a walk. All of this adds up to the perfect setting for the practice of mindfulness. I have been seeing the cemetery in whole new ways and I have lived beside it, or near it, almost all of my life.

Now I have come across a study that concludes that mindfulness, which the study defines as the ability to be aware and attentive of the present moment without emotional reactivity or volatility, improves working memory as well as mood.

In the next post I will talk more about this study.