Better goals for ADHDers?

Goals can go jump in the lake! ADHDers can do what they choose to do by setting things up to support their executive functions instead.

[Transcript of video]

ADHD and goals

Goals. How confusing are they? We are told that there are so many ways that you can set goals, and there’s  this system and that system. and that it's all very straightforward, and that they need to be SMART, and that they need to be made exciting…

But none of them worked for me. This is really difficult and made me feel like something is wrong with me. But over time I've worked out that actually there's nothing wrong with me. I just need to do it in a way that works for me and my beautiful brain, because setting goals with ADHD works better with ADHD strategies. And what I've learned, I'm hoping that you'll find useful too.

The key idea is that it's not mostly about goal setting in the traditional sense. It's about setting things up so that you can do the things that move you forward towards what you want. This includes accepting the fact that for people with ADHD, our executive functions are often not working so well, so we need to give ourselves some extra support if we want to do something big, complex and long-term.

The problem with goal-setting

Why are goals a problem for us? Well, first of all, they take place over time, and time is confusing…and the more time there is, the more confused I get.

Also, things require organization. They have to be ordered. They have to be made sense of, they have to be held until the right time. That's quite a lot of stuff and it makes me feel a bit sick sometimes.

On top of this, you have to remember that you had a goal, which I frequently will forget. Then you also need to be motivated to actually do the actions that you've told yourself that you need to do.

Those things are difficult for me. However, there is a state that I get into with all those things become easy. So for me, that's what I might call my creative state, my obsessive state, or hyper focus.

In this state, it's like if somebody says, “Do you know what - you have to move out of your house in a month!”  I've seen a lot of people suddenly get very very good at focusing. For me, I might be like, “I'm gonna create this mural that's the size of this huge building!” 

I get very excited and my brain will suddenly start giving me instructions. It will help me manage my emotions and manage my stress. It will help me plan and prioritize and be motivated and stay focused.

All the executive functions start to work better for me when I go on to that state. And then when I'm not in that state, a lot of the time it's very hard to access them (if I'm not in a special interest area).

The helpful question

The thing that I found really helpful is to ask myself:, “How can I set things up so that those executive functions are replicated outside of me?” -  instead of asking my brain to do those things. Some of the things that can really help are: structure, motivation and positive emotion. 

With structure, this is about putting in place the prompts and the reminders, having a plan, having a way of keeping everything together. All those things mean that when I arrive to do the thing, there are a bunch of instructions waiting for me, so that I'm not having to try and remember what I did last time I was working on this.

In terms of motivation, we have things that make it more sparkly for us. That might be first of all making our bodies feel more awake by listening to music so we’re all amped up, or making sure we're doing it at a realistic time, not at a time when there's all sorts of other people doing interesting things around us that we might get distracted by. 

Also, it means making the task itself motivating by making it more fun, making it more interesting, involving other people, or setting out mini-deadlines.

In terms of adding in positive emotion, this is really important, because positive emotion is something that will help me to pay attention and wake my brain up and make me feel good and excited about doing a task.

For me, I find it really important to have an abundance mentality rather than a deficit mentality. So every time I do something on that project I am like: “Hey, guess what? You did something. That's amazing! You could have done nothing.”  This is as opposed to beating myself up, which is what I would have done 10 or 20 years ago.

Having positive emotion also means that we have ways of dealing with procrastination, because procrastination can be a real builder of negative emotion. The more you procrastinate on the task, the more negative you feel. 

A simple thing we can do to help with that is just to engage with that task for 10 or 15 minutes.This brings that task down to size, as opposed to what you were thinking it was. It also brings our emotion down, and then afterwards we can have a good break and cool off.

One of the things that can really help with all this is you don't even need to call it a ‘goal’. You can call it an aim, a target, a mission or a project - something with a positive emotional association.

And you don't need to worry about how you phrase your goal, as opposed to what a lot of people will tell you in the books that you might have read. What matters is that you set things up for your future self so that your future self can take the actions that will move you forward towards what you want.

If you don't know what you want, that's actually really common and it's okay. Sometimes we mask by using our empathy to want what other people want. If that's you, you can start small and just pick something. Ttry to use emotion like excitement to tap into something that you’re interested in. Pick a little thing and give it a go.

Setting things up for the ADHD brain

So goal setting is actually not the thing we want to be focusing on. We want to be focusing on setting things up for ourselves so that we can move forward towards what we want.

We can use our gifts to do this. We can use analysis and creativity and we can use our systems brains. We can use honesty to support us in this process.

The key thing is to be interested. The more interested you are in learning how to make a goal work for you, the more you're going to be able to pay attention, and the more awake your brain is going to be.

And that's really what we want. Get curious. Start to try things out. You can ask yourself: “How does my ADHD play into this? What can I do to support myself?”  Those questions will take you a long way.

If you do choose something that you want to do and then set things up and then learn stuff, I would love to hear about it. I'm fascinated by this process. 

Good luck, and I really hope that you get to do the things that you want to do even when you're not super-hyperfocused on them…because, why not?

Let’s do it!