Tag: Challenges

Improve your life with these 3 ways to use your character strengths

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Improve your life with these 3 ways to use your character strengths

If you’re anything like the majority of my coaching clients, you’re always looking for ways to make positive changes in your life.

Character strengths are the positive parts of your personality, so it makes sense to use them as much as possible.

Here are three ways to employ strengths to change your life for the better:

  1. Shore up weaknesses

You may be acutely aware of areas of weakness where you’re not so good at a skill or find something challenging. Identify one or more of your stronger strengths to bolster your performance in these areas.

For example – perhaps you’re not great at remembering upcoming events, but one of your signature strengths is Creativity, and another is Zest. (Your signature strengths are the top 5-7 strengths in your VIA ranking). You could use Creativity to brainstorm new ways of reminding yourself, and you could use Zest to inject some energy and enthusiasm into finding workable solutions for yourself.

2. Develop relationships

There are many ways to develop and improve relationships with others by using character strengths.

One way is to observe someone using one of their strengths and comment favourably upon it; this is known as strengths spotting.

For instance, if you notice someone coordinating with a group of people to get a job done, you could comment on how they employed their strength of Teamwork and say something about how valuable that quality is.

Sadly it is more common for humans to notice and pick up on errors and mistakes than to catch the positives. Making a point of remarking on someone’s strengths is an excellent way to help them feel seen and appreciated. You’ll generally find people respond well to their strengths being noticed, and will begin to notice yours in response. Everyone wins!

3. Overcome stressful situations

When irritated or stressed, you can learn to draw upon your strengths and turn around the feeling of helplessness or being stuck, which is often the default response to challenges if you have ADHD.

One way to do this is to bring to mind a past occasion when you faced and successfully overcame a problem or stressful situation.

Have a list of your 24 character strengths and their definitions in front of you, and pick out what it was inside of you that helped you deal with it. Was it your Bravery or Kindness? Was it Perseverance or Humour, maybe? Or perhaps it was a combination of Love, Fairness, and Perspective?

Write down or think about which strengths you used and how you used them to help you in that situation.

In the future, when facing an irritation or something stressful, you’ll be much better placed to draw on similar strengths to overcome difficult situations.

There are many ways you can bring strengths use into your daily life to build a more fulfilling and productive future. If you’re interested in finding out more about how to increase your awareness of and focus on your strengths, look out for my half-day strengths workshops, or consider one-to one coaching with me.

I’m coach Anna Schlapp, B.A., ACC, coaching people with ADHD and other co-occurring conditions for 8 years in the UK and worldwide. You can get in touch with me here

 

Looking for Something to Help You Through Tough Times? Your Strengths Are Always With You.

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Looking for Something to Help You Through Tough Times? Your Strengths Are Always With You.

What do you always have with you to help you through the tough times no matter what? – Your character strengths.

What are character strengths?

There are many models or ways of looking at your strengths. In this piece I’ll be referring specifically to the field of character strengths that emerged from positive psychology research in the early 2000’s. Character strengths are the positive parts of your personality. In the VIA Character Strengths framework, there are 24 of them altogether. 

As I often remind my coaching clients, your strengths are always available to you. However they are often beneath conscious awareness. In other words you are already drawing on your strengths daily, probably without fully realising where or how you are doing so.

Character Strengths are about how you do something i.e. you approach an uncomfortable situation with your boss with courage (BRAVERY), you interact with your impulsive child with light heartedness. (HUMOUR)

 

Why are they important now?

We are all having to deal with a level of change, stress, and uncertainty enough to test anyone. Restrictions to the way we live our lives, not being able to meet in groups socially, having to stay in your home most of the time, home-schooling, the threat or reality of losing your job. Add the heartbreak and devastation when we lose loved ones, and the list of challenges goes on and on. Let’s face it, we need all the help and support we can get.

 

How can knowing your character strengths help you?

Becoming more versed in character strengths increases feelings of resourcefulness and capability.

Paying attention to your strengths reminds you of the goodness in you and all of us.

A strengths focus can help you relate more deeply to others and to yourself.

You can draw on your strengths when you face stressful or demanding situations.

 

How can they help right now in the tough time of the pandemic?

Learning more about strengths and their definitions makes it easier to recognise which constructive parts of yourself you use, and when. You’ll appreciate how strengths have helped you in many of your past experiences, positive and not so positive. With increased awareness, you’ll be able to intentionally bring forward strengths to bolster you when you are challenged or at a loss.

 

Here’s an exercise you can try for yourself:

If you’re unaware of your own character strengths then go to www.viacharacter.org and take their free assessment. Print off the list of your strengths and have it in front of you.

Now dig back into your past, and bring to mind an experience that really challenged you at the time. Look at the list of strengths to help you identify which ones you drew on.
How did you deal with it?                                                                          
What did you do that worked?                                                                       
Which of your strengths were involved when you overcame this situation?                            
Looking back, you likely utilized a combination of strengths. Notice where you were ingenious in this context. How does that change how you feel about your present circumstance?

Now make use of this information to devise solutions, move forward, and resolve your current challenges.

 

How that might work in practice;

During the first lockdown I was required to be available to supervise my daughter’s home-schooling. I had to completely change the way I worked and re-organise my hours to fit around her virtual lessons; and support her to access and stay focused on Zoom. I felt a sinking feeling of overwhelm and dread when the news first came, and wondered how on earth I would keep working and support my daughter. Then I remembered my character strengths.

I thought back to a previous occasion where I had felt challenged; each summer holiday when my daughter was much younger. Back then I had applied understanding and patience (PERSPECTIVE) (PERSEVERANCE) to both myself and my daughter.
I used my top strengths of ZEST & LOVE OF LEARNING, to devise new and exciting things we could both enjoy learning about and doing together.   I also planned so that each day we had at least one set activity to do. (PRUDENCE) 

To manage the current challenges of the lockdown, here’s how I used the strengths I had identified:

  • I planned each day in a very detailed way to coordinate our differing needs and Zoom times. (PRUDENCE)
  • I used BRAVERY to face the uncertainty of our situation. I applied PERSPECTIVE AND PERSEVERANCE to take the longer term view, and stick with important changes to our routines like hand washing.
  • When severely tested I reminded myself to appreciate how I love and am loved (LOVE), and how grateful I am for our health and our lives.(GRATITUDE)

 

How you can use your own strengths right now; 

When you next feel the weight of uncertainty or are confronted by some new obstacle, bring your character strengths to mind to remind you how capable you really are.

  • Character strengths are the positive parts of your personality.
  • You always have your character strengths within you to support and nourish you, on your journey through life.
  • Bringing character strengths into conscious awareness reminds us of the innate good in ourselves and others.
  • Character strengths provide personally relevant ways to boost your resources in life now and in the future.
  • They remind us that we can prevail when times are tough, and that we have much to be grateful for.

By familiarising yourself with character strengths you will have invaluable resources available to sustain you in particularly demanding times.

 

 

                                 

 

 

Lost something again? A fresh approach to keeping track of your stuff.

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Lost something again? A fresh approach to keeping track of your stuff.

Are you a person who’s always losing things? There’s your keys, your phone, your purse, your glasses. They are never in the place where you think you last saw them, are they? Or where they ought to be, in that special basket by the door, or on that hook next to the stairs.

Why not? Well maybe you, like many others, are not fully paying attention when you put your keys down. Because you’re busy thinking about other things.

When you’re busy in your head thinking, it’s pretty much impossible for you to notice what you are doing with your hands or anything you’re carrying. For much of our days we are going through life on autopilot. We can eat, walk, and even drive whilst thinking about other things entirely. Some studies show that maybe as much as half of our lives are spent on autopilot, and that goes for everyone, not just people with ADHD. No wonder we lose our stuff!

So what’s the solution? Well, one sure way is to pull yourself out of autopilot at the right moments, so you can pay attention to where you are putting your keys.  Catching our own autopilot behaviour as it is happening is the secret.

You can do this by building up your ability to catch yourself acting on autopilot. Think of it like a skill that can be improved on with practice. You get better at it the more you do of it, right? Or a muscle that gets stronger the more you exercise it. If you are training to lift weights you don’t immediately start with the heaviest weight, do you? You’d end up in hospital with a strained tendon or worse. So you start small with a weight that’s well within your capabilities and work your way up.

Use plenty of help and support to make it easy on yourself at the beginning. A good starting point is to use some kind of external prompt at intervals throughout the day. This could be any signal that comes from outside yourself which can call your attention to what you’re doing in the moment.

For example, choose an activity you already do several times a day – such as making yourself a hot drink or having a glass of water – and link that to consciously noticing what you’re doing right then. This will begin to build up your “noticing” muscles. Maybe you’re the sort of person who wants something that will be sure to rouse you out of your autopilot trance. You could use bells, alarms or any kind of noise that will grab your attention. If you are a visually oriented person, other options might be to have post-its, sticky notes or coloured dots strategically placed in odd corners of your home. Put them somewhere you’re sure to see them.

You can set up timed or random occasions for catching autopilot throughout the day. Why not get creative with this; finding new ways to gently prod yourself to consciousness with an alerting stimulus? Try several until you find something that works. You may need to swap them around from time to time once your techniques lose their novelty and become an invisible part of the furniture, when you don’t respond to them anymore.

Once you’ve noticed you are in autopilot, then what? Simply being aware of what’s happening in the here and now, aware of both your internal thoughts and feelings, and of your surroundings, can give you some space. A welcome break from the chatter in your mind.

You can regularly interrupt the current of mindless inattention, by bringing your attention back to the present. I tell my coaching clients they can do this by practicing catching themselves in autopilot and bringing their attention to what’s happening in and around them. Then I encourage them to stop whatever they are doing for a few moments and bring their attention to their breath. This is a form of Mindfulness practice; a way of “taking control of our attention (self – regulation) with an attitude of openness, curiosity and acceptance.” (Bishop et.al. 2004 – in Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition.) 

This way you give yourself a chance to notice, then choose what you want to focus on. By checking in with yourself at regular intervals throughout the day, you’ll give yourself opportunities to ask yourself “What do I want to do right now? What could be next?”

Once you learn to catch your own autopilot behaviour, you’ll begin to notice things you didn’t notice before.

You can learn how to pull yourself out of autopilot and back into the present with:

  • Gradual practice building up bit by bit.
  • External prompts like a certain time of day.
  • Linking to things you do regularly like drinking a hot drink or glass of water.
  • Setting up timed or random occasions to draw attention to what you are doing.
  • Auditory prompts like bells or alarms, or custom noises.
  • Visual prompts like post- its, sticky notes or coloured dots.
  • Stopping what you’re doing and bringing your attention to your breath.

Before long you’ll also become more aware of the times when you’re putting your keys down. And begin to remember where to find them later.

Anna Schlapp, AACC, ACC, is a certified ADHD coach who specialises in creative solutions to triumph over the hurdles of ADHD. Anna helps those with challenges in organisation to co-create personalised blueprints for leading more amazing lives. Read more of Anna’s strategies for empowered productivity on her blog. To find out how Anna’s unique system can help you maximise your potential, ask about a complimentary coaching session.

 

Challenges of ADHD: producing creative work consistently.

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Challenges of ADHD: producing creative work consistently.

What can make it hard for creatives with ADHD to produce work consistently over time? And what can help? Part one of a two-part blog.

For me the definition of creating on a consistent basis means to create something regularly. Many of us in creative fields need to be able to produce work on a regular basis in order to keep income flowing in. There are projects to complete, work to hand on to others where work involves more than one person, due dates for submission, deliveries to consider, publishing deadlines to meet.

You could say that producing work consistently is going to involve several different stages

  • Having initial ideas
  • Preparation and planning
  • Getting started
  • Carrying out the work, and continuing to work on it over time making adjustments as needed.
  • Getting it finished and out of the door.

I hear a lot from people with ADHD who tell me they are able to do something quite well for a while, then it lapses for one reason or another. It can be days, weeks, or months before they realise they have stopped, and even longer before they find a way to return to it.

Could it be due to novelty wearing off?

Could it be that the buzz that comes from achieving something at first, is no longer providing the juice of motivation needed to continue, as soon as it begins to become routine?

Could it be to do with getting easily thrown off course by external events like interruptions or distractions?

Could it be because self-directed transitions are hard for those of us with ADHD, so returning to something again once you have stopped presents problems?

There are many possible answers to this conundrum, as everyone has their own particular “brand” of ADHD. Yes, we are all different.

Years ago I used to believe that I could only paint when I felt like it. Then, on occasions when I did feel like it, I would not be organised enough in my materials to make a start. By not organised enough I mean, for example, that my paper would be stored in one place, my paints and brushes in another, and I didn’t have a dedicated clear workspace to work in, etc. This caused me no end of frustration, as I often could not find what I was looking for, and on many occasions I spent so long looking with no success, that I finally gave up in disgust. Painting accomplished – nil.

I also think on reflection that I may have been slightly affected by inflexible thinking, as I would get hyper-focused on finding the exact brush or paper that I had thought of using, whereas, looking back now I wonder, why didn’t I just use my creativity to improvise and do something else?

Hyperfocus is an interesting one for ADHD creatives, as it can either take the form of “helpful hyperfocus” which enables us to be immensely productive, or “hindering hyperfocus”, as in the example above. Sometimes we can experience a combination of both! I’ll have more to say about hyperfocus and creativity in a future blog.

In the end, once I realised that ADHD was an issue for me, I found a great piece of advice by Dr. Ned Hallowell. His recommendation is to only get as organised as you need to, to achieve what you want, without taking organisation too far and getting embroiled in perfectionism. Doing this has certainly helped take my own productivity in painting to a whole new level.

For now, here are three tips you can try, if producing work consistently is eluding you.

TIP one: To help take that first step towards creating, have everything you need set up in advance for yourself and to hand, so that it becomes really easy to begin. Preparation is one key to avoiding frustration and inertia.

TIP two: If getting prepared seems like a bit of a chore, try separating it out into a standalone activity, and then take a break and go away. Making yourself a drink or going for a walk can provide enough of a break for it to seem like a completely separate activity. Then when you return to begin your creative project, voila! There is your workspace and everything you need to get started immediately. Getting going feels much smoother and more effortless.

TIP three: Beware of thoughts telling you it has to be done in a certain way. You’re a creative after all; some of the best inventions and creations in the world have come from happy accidents or from people making it up as they go along. Keep that inner flexibility and creative muscle well-exercised.

Another thing to understand is that if we wait until our brains and bodies are in the state we believe is ideal for creating before we begin, like I used to, then we risk either at worst not achieving anything at all, or at best only a fraction of what we could be capable of.

So instead of the “Do I feel inspired to create today?” criteria, we need some other way of getting ourselves to create regularly – which is what I understand by consistency. Someone once said that our lives are defined by the questions we ask ourselves.

What might we be capable of if we changed the question above to, “What do I feel inspired to create today?” Feel the difference in those two questions. The first asks for a simple yes or no answer, while the second question opens up a whole world of possibilities.

What kind of questions are you asking yourself when you set out to create something? The first kind, or the second? And which will you be using next time?

In part two of this blog we will be examining ways to get unstuck if your creative projects grind to a halt.

Anna Schlapp B.A., AACC, ACC, is a certified coach with the ADD Coach Academy and the International Coach Federation. Specialising in ADHD and Creativity, Anna helps talented people like you find ways of being more creatively productive and productively creative.

Get in touch to schedule your complimentary coaching session with Coach Anna.