ADD Holiday Survival Guide

With the holidays fast approaching, I want to share some useful information to help you through the holiday season.

To budget for all the wonderful gifts you plan to buy this holiday, here is a well known website where you can order your credit report. Log on to annualcreditreport.com. You’re entitled, by law, to a free credit report once a year from each of the major credit-reporting bureaus: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion.

Another useful bit of information is a wonderful survival guide offered by ADDITUDE magazine. Here are the first three tips. I will send out subsequent tips in the next few days.

1 REPLAY YOUR GREATEST HITS

Make a list of all the activities your family did last year—everything from attending a religious service to seeing local light displays. Have each family member rate them on a scale from 1 (very important) to 3 (unimportant). Do your best to fit in the 1s and some 2s, and forget about the 3s.

2 SAVE THE EARTH—AND YOUR WALLET

Set a date on your calendar to send out cards, and make the job fun and easy by using your computer to send cute, interactive e-mail cards.

3 STREAMLINE GIFT-GIVING

Keep shopping simple by buying everyone varieties of the same thing, such as books, gift certificates, or clothing from the same catalog or website. Stock up on decorative candles or bottles of wine to give out as hostess gifts, too.

These simple tips might save you some time and stress. Happy Holidays!

Power of Positive Thinking

Therapists and ADHD coaches tell ADDers to practice “self-talk.” There is great value in talking to ourselves, assuming that we speak as we would want others to speak to us. Unfortunately, that’s not what typically happens. In revisiting the various events of our lives, it is the 20 percent we did wrong -- not the 80 percent we did right -- that we remember and castigate ourselves about.

No Use Being Negative

The negative words we reserve only for ourselves are counterproductive. Did you know that the unconscious mind does not compute negation in language? That’s right -- the deepest recesses of the mind don’t process the word “no.” Therefore, when we say, “I will not fritter my time away on the computer today,” the words are read as, “I will fritter my time away on the computer.”

And we wonder how we manage to find ourselves, once more, firmly stuck in those black holes. We talk ourselves into them! No amount of “but I said...” changes the fact that we have commanded ourselves to do the very things we want to avoid. And we beat ourselves up over our transgression. What is this telling us about the path we must choose for our positive growth? we must head towards the positive.

The bottom line to all of this is that we are our thoughts. If we think negatively, we will be in a negative state. If we think positive and speak positive, we will be and do the positive. Our intentions are within our powers. Speak the positive and see what happens.

As an ADHD coach, I steer my clients to the positive. If you are interested in ADHD coaching, please contact me at www.ahelpinghandforyou.com.

(Portions of this wonderful article are excerpts from ADDITUDE magazine, Peggy Ramundo, Kate Kelly, Winter 2009.)