Translating ADHD

This week Shelly and Cam use a client story as a vehicle to explore emotion and emotional dysregulation. To have ADHD is to have challenges with managing appropriate and measured emotional responses. But that is not all. Emotion is key to the motivation system and developing new awareness and learning (All three barriers). Cam and Shelly look at emotional dysregulation beyond the term and, in Translating ADHD fashion, dig into a client situation revealing language and dynamics that go far beyond a “failure to regulate”. Shelly shares in detail how her client located advocacy and agency from an emotionally charged interaction and found hope and change. She also shares how one can have strength and sensitivity in any given modality like visual, verbal or emotional. Episode links + resources: Join the Community | Become a Patron Our Process: Understand, Own, Translate. About Cam and Shelly For more of the Translating ADHD podcast: Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode Follow us on Twitter: @TranslatingADHD Visit the Website: TranslatingADHD.com

Emotions are key to driving beliefs and behaviors. They also play a big part in effective ADHD management. Emotions also drive big signal responses like rejection, sensitivity or imposter syndrome. Those big signal responses can really impact our ability to identify and circumvent First Barrier dilemmas. The First Barrier of ADHD is the barrier to new awareness. Emotions like blame can cloud our judgment, disrupt our own agency and take us offline down some negative emotional rabbit holes (one of our Valley experiences). Shelly and Cam look closely at blame, one emotion they see often in their new clients, and the habit of ‘blame sponging’ or taking up all of the blame in some circumstance or situation. Emotion rarely operates alone. Black and white thinking and not seeing oneself in the picture contribute to a phenomenon of assuming all of the blame or rejecting it out of hand. Shelly and Cam share tools well known to long-time Translating ADHD listeners like curiosity and Pause Disrupt Pivot. Distinguishing our own stuff from others’ stuff and determining, through collaboration and communication, the ‘stuff in the middle’ gives us some traction with what once was a very slippery slope. Episode links + resources: Join the Community | Become a Patron Our Process: Understand, Own, Translate. About Cam and Shelly For more of the Translating ADHD podcast: Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode Follow us on Twitter: @TranslatingADHD Visit the Website: TranslatingADHD.com

Shelly and Cam revisit the First Barrier of ADHD - the barrier to new awareness - by illustrating a client’s own experience with struggling and eventually succeeding to generate new awareness. In Shelly’s words “to walk this world as an ADHD person is to walk this world misunderstood”. Because of the first barrier of ADHD, it can be extremely frustrating to know when we are struggling, and - when we do have this awareness, - it can be doubly hard to articulate our dilemmas to those around us. In the client example, the individual moves through this process with vulnerability and curiosity seeking support from the people around him. He also faces the uncomfortable truth that he is not holding up his own rules for engagement. Instead of moving into shame, he does his own understand own translate work to get to a place of curiosity and agency. Notice the use of language the client shares in this episode. An eye-opening example of navigating the first barrier to new awareness. Episode links + resources: Join the Community | Become a Patron Our Process: Understand, Own, Translate. About Cam and Shelly For more of the Translating ADHD podcast: Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode Follow us on Twitter: @TranslatingADHD Visit the Website: TranslatingADHD.com

This week we are delighted to present another special episode dedicated to exploring the lived experiences of people of color with ADHD by presenting an interview with coach and therapist Romanza McAllister LCSW. Romanza is a trauma-informed psychotherapist and ADHD coach in New York City.  She is a mental health advocate and very active in the leadership of ADDA. In this episode, Romanza speaks about growing up and the challenge of being misunderstood, even gaslit, by those around her as she tried to understand her own neurodiverse brain. She converted her own personal challenge into her current empowerment model of helping those with ADHD in communities of color find their unique authentic voice and recognize and celebrate one’s intersectional identities.  Join us in this fascinating, inspiring and far-ranging discussion with Romanza McAllister. Episode links + resources: Join the Community | Become a Patron Our Process: Understand, Own, Translate. About Cam and Shelly For more of the Translating ADHD podcast: Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode Follow us on Twitter: @TranslatingADHD Visit the Website: TranslatingADHD.com

Why is it that we stray off the path we know - of best practices, best strategies and best resources? Why is it we struggle to recognize we have left the path and additionally, struggle to relocate the path once we have realized this? This challenge with generating valuable awareness at the right time is a signature ADHD dilemma and creates the biggest obstacle to meaningful change and even addressing our ADHD, including pursuing a diagnosis. This is the first barrier of ADHD - The barrier to new awareness. Shelly and Cam discuss the first barrier and how it can manifest. Shelly recalls a story of Cam recently struggling with the first barrier and what he did to overcome it. This illustrates that the first barrier never goes away, but when we can anticipate the barrier with the 'pause, disrupt and pivot' process, we can navigate around it. Episode links + resources: Join the Community | Become a Patron Our Process: Understand, Own, Translate. About Cam and Shelly For more of the Translating ADHD podcast: Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode Follow us on Twitter: @TranslatingADHD Visit the Website: TranslatingADHD.com

Shelly and Cam continue with the ever-expansive topic of context with respect to ADHD with a deep dive into how our unique wiring is connected to our unique value at work and in the world. In this episode, they explore how contextual wiring presents in a few examples and how to leverage this ‘super strength’ throughout the week. They distinguish how big value is not the same as the big signal (episode 80). Our big value is often downplayed or dismissed because of societal norms and our own negative internal dialogue. Shelly shares how vulnerability and integrity informed a choice to no longer ‘play small’ and step closer to her own compelling Why (episode 101). Finally, the hosts discuss how getting stuck in ‘ivory tower’ thinking can inhibit exploration and experimentation. Episode links + resources: Join the Community | Become a Patron Our Process: Understand, Own, Translate. About Cam and Shelly For more of the Translating ADHD podcast: Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode Follow us on Twitter: @TranslatingADHD Visit the Website: TranslatingADHD.com

Shelly and Cam continue the theme of exploring context by introducing a process for shifting to a better mindset. Context informs our current narrative and our narrative informs our mindset or the way we perceive our world. They share a simple three-step process of Pause, Disrupt, Pivot to shift from a negative context to a positive one. Shelly shares an excellent story of how she uses the process to interrupt a potential spiraling event and move to a better frame of mind. As they often do, Cam and Shelly share typical ADHD challenges around shifting context and leave listeners with a simple practice. Episode links + resources: Join the Community | Become a Patron Our Process: Understand, Own, Translate. About Cam and Shelly For more of the Translating ADHD podcast: Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode Follow us on Twitter: @TranslatingADHD Visit the Website: TranslatingADHD.com

Shelly and Cam stay on the topic of context but shift to its positive elements. They distinguish the value of ‘Who’ and ‘Why’ questions and how they inform the frame or context those of us with ADHD put around our experience. Both Shelly and Cam share how the tone of their own ‘Why’ questions early in their careers led to very different outward manifestations but similar feelings of frustration and confusion. They then talk about how changing the tone of the ‘Why’ questions can open us up to curiosity, creativity and possibility. When we have a sense of who we are and how we show up in the world we can create agency and priority on the stuff that really matters. Episode links + resources: Join the Community | Become a Patron Our Process: Understand, Own, Translate. About Cam and Shelly For more of the Translating ADHD podcast: Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode Follow us on Twitter: @TranslatingADHD Visit the Website: TranslatingADHD.com

Shelly and Cam continue to explore contextual pitfalls and ADHD. Last week they introduced contextual mad-libs. This week they explore two more contextual challenges, ‘locking in’ to a limiting narrative and conversely ‘spinning through’ multiple narratives. Both are contextual in nature and a very ADHD Valley experience. We constantly tether to how we relate to our world, drawing frames of reference that meet a need that may be keeping us in a current state or mode and delay real and positive change. ADHD is partially an ‘access and regulation’ dilemma; accessing and regulating attention, emotion, memory, energy, motivation and action. Our experience is a ‘Goldilocks’ experience of too little or too much. For example, our emotional experience is often one of too much emotion or not enough emotion. The same goes for creating meaning in our current moment - tethering to our current context. Cam shares two successive periods in his life when he experienced both the lock-in experience and the spinning experience. For the lock-in, Cam shares how he fueled a ‘One Down’ perspective with a singular limiting story and the energy cost of keeping this ‘roadshow’ going. He then shares how he switched to the spinning version to rationalize a behavior and ‘play it safe’. This ‘channel switching’ is the situational rationalization we’ve discussed before. Cam and Shelly share practices for listeners to bring the Keen Observer to these unique presentations of contextual pitfalls. Episode links + resources: Join the Community | Become a Patron Our Process: Understand, Own, Translate. About Cam and Shelly For more of the Translating ADHD podcast: Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode Follow us on Twitter: @TranslatingADHD Visit the Website: TranslatingADHD.com

Shelly and Cam continue to discuss the concept of context as it relates to coaching and to the lived experience with ADHD. We are wired for context and the compelling narratives that can drive behaviors good and bad. Today we delve into how being wired for context is not so helpful as Shelly shares a concept that one of her clients termed ‘contextual mad-libbing’ - where one inserts their own narrative and meaning into an incomplete context like a short text message or a rushed meeting in the hall where key bits of data are missing. All brains add and subtract meaning to make what we are perceiving make sense. A brain cannot process every piece of information it senses, so it skips and subtracts and adds meaning. Those of us with ADHD can be susceptible to contextual mad-libs where we quickly add our own meaning when we don’t have the entire story. The practice of ongoing contextual mad-libbing can have the individual expend tremendous energy and precious bandwidth on something that may not even be relevant. Shelly shares how she worked with her client to break through the Third Barrier and maximize the learning from a past negative work experience to inform a new promising work experience. This coaching work helps to address ADHD issues like prospective memory, developing useful hindsight and forethought. Cam and Shelly leave listeners with a few exercises to bring the Keen Observer to this mad-lib phenomenon. Episode links + resources: Join the Community | Become a Patron Our Process: Understand, Own, Translate. About Cam and Shelly For more of the Translating ADHD podcast: Episode Transcripts: visit TranslatingADHD.com and click on the episode Follow us on Twitter: @TranslatingADHD Visit the Website: TranslatingADHD.com