My Board of Directors? Yup, everyone has one.
It’s the great command center of your
brain. It guides and directs some of the critical actions that can make all the
difference in our everyday lives such as being on time or late, organized or
messy, able to handle stress or too reacting with too much emotion, and in
general feeling in or out of control.
Your board members have assigned roles and tasks that can
include functions such as:
- Emotional Control: responding to a situation with the appropriate level of emotion; controlling your anger, frustration, and tears so you don’t appear to be out of control or childlike;
- Planning: looking ahead and anticipating what’s to come and when to do it;
- Organization: also thinking about the future, where should I put the things I’ll need later
- Working Memory: recognizing the cause and effect of actions for the future, filing away ideas, comments, conversations to be retrieved later;
- Shifting: ability to unhook from current thought, activity, plan to move forward on a likely basis;
- Initiating Effort: getting started with a task that you need to get done (no matter if you want to or not);
- Task Monitoring: you have got the task in motion, take care to finish it properly and on time;
- Self Monitoring: recognizing and self-correcting when you are off-task, interrupting, arguing, operating outside social norms.
When any one or all of your Board of Directors is influenced
by ADD/ADHD, their functionality can be challenged to such a degree that it can be
almost impossible to get through the day and successfully meet your goals.
That’s when your executive board members are working at cross purposes, and have
failed you. When everything goes well, we can assume that the board had the
right stimuli to work together to support you.
“Executive functioning” has become the common place term
used to describe the cognitive skills and resulting behaviors assigned to your Board of Directors. It
represents a significant advancement in better understanding an ADHD diagnosis.
No longer are we limited to the three
(3) characteristics of hyperactivity, impulsivity and lack of focus
(inattention) in describing the wide reaching impact ADHD can have on managing
life tasks.
Different experts, clinicians and researchers have their own
definition, or list of executive functions that they subscribe to. Assume
that’s just pride of authorship and take comfort in knowing that in fact the
lists are more or less the same. Working
with your Coach to help you take control over your Board of Directors will
bring about a level of satisfaction and stress-reduction like you have never
experienced before. Next Blog in this Series: Managing Your Emotional Control.
