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    The Disorganized Mind: Coaching Your ADHD Brain to Take Control of Your Time, Tasks, and Talents
    The Disorganized Mind: Coaching Your ADHD Brain to Take Control of Your Time, Tasks, and Talents
    The Disorganized Mind: Coaching Your ADHD Brain to Take Control of Your Time, Tasks, and Talents
    Ebook332 pages5 hours

    The Disorganized Mind: Coaching Your ADHD Brain to Take Control of Your Time, Tasks, and Talents

    By Nancy A. Ratey

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    For the millions of adults diagnosed with ADHD The Disorganized Mind will provide expert guidance on what they can do to make the most of their lives. The inattention, time-mismanagement, procrastination, impulsivity, distractibility, and difficulty with transitions that often go hand-in-hand with ADHD can be overcome with the unique approach that Nancy Ratey brings to turning these behaviors around.

    The Disorganized Mind addresses the common issues confronted by the ADHD adult:
    "Where did the time go?"
    "I'll do it later, I always work better under pressure anyway."
    "I'll just check my e-mail one more time before the meeting…"
    "I'll pay the bills tomorrow – that will give me time to find them."

    Professional ADHD coach and expert Nancy Ratey helps readers better understand why their ADHD is getting in their way and what they can do about it. Nancy Ratey understands the challenges faced by adults with ADHD from both a personal and professional perspective and is able to help anyone move forward to achieve greater success. Many individuals with ADHD live in turmoil. It doesn't have to be that way. You can make choices and imagine how things can change – this book will teach you how. By using ADHD strategies that have worked for others and will work for you, as well as learning how to organize, plan, and prioritize, you'll clear the hurdles of daily living with a confidence and success you may never before have dreamed possible.

    Nancy Ratey has the proven strategies that will help anyone with ADHD get focused, stay on track, and get things done - and finally get what they want from their work and their life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 1, 2008
    ISBN9781429929516
    Author

    Nancy A. Ratey

    Nancy A. Ratey, Ed.M., MCC, SCAC, is a Strategic Life Coach who specializes in coaching professionals with ADHD. She earned her Master's Degree in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is certified as a Master Certified Coach by the International Coach Federation and a Senior Certified Coach by The Institute for the Advancement of ADHD Coaching.  In addition to her private coaching practice, she lectures at conferences and symposiums worldwide, and writes on the subject of ADHD.  As one of the founders of the ADHD Coaching field, Nancy is internationally recognized as one of the foremost authorities on the topic.  Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Newsday, Wired, Vogue; on ABC, CBS and NPR. Nancy currently practices in Wellesley, MA, where she resides with her husband, Dr. John Ratey.

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    Reviews for The Disorganized Mind

    2.5/5

    9 ratings3 reviews

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    • 1/5
      This book has a great focus on dealing with things with ADHD plotting and planning. I'm hoping it helps just normal focus issues, but so far, it's still dealing with the writer's past stories and how she worked through her ADHD struggles. Still waiting for the strategies to begin.Normally, when books like this are written, even a person with a more normal brain can take things away. I don't know if it's the reader, the subject, or what, but I just can NOT get into this book. They talk coaching for getting through ADHD, but it just sounds like babble. I'm marking this a dud. Moving on.

      3 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I've just finished reading The Disorganized Mind by Nancy Ratey. It's filled with practical suggestions for living with ADD/ADHD based on the author's years of experience with the condition, both in her own life and in the lives of her clients. The best part about the book is that it's filled with ideas that are explained in detail, based on actual people and the strategies they've developed for living successfully in a non-ADHD world. Ratey's advice is, above all, realistic and clearly stresses the importance of developing an awareness and understanding of one's own individual issues. Once we understand our own needs, we can each consider, choose, and adapt from the strategies Ratey outlines for us. I wish I'd said it first, but as one Amazon reviewer said, "Nancy Ratey rocks!" The book is kind and compassionate, but also firm about the need for taking personal responsibility. It is well-written and easy to read, but filled with useful information. This book is helpful for people living with ADHD, either in themselves or someone they love, but it could be just as helpful for anyone dealing with the daily stresses and demands of living in modern society. Each of you should read this book!

      3 people found this helpful

    • 2/5
      If you think someone with ADHD writing about ADHD, aimed at an audience who have ADHD would be a colossal mess.

      You would be right.

      Ratey meanders from topic to topic such as she will spend a paragraph discussing how terrible her dyslexia and ADHD are and hurting her academic life, then OMG. SHE GOT INTO HARVARD! Another paragraph how she spent her entire life living with military precision but once she got into college, she would spend hours shuffling papers about preparing to study. So she went from 18 years of living a very organized, timed, military life to a slob in under a semester? Really?

      Once you get past the meandering, unrelated chit-chat and her overuse of her clients for examples, she has some good strategy to manage your ADHD and how to make it work for you. But I couldn't get past the touchy feely attitude and the poorly organized book to get to the meat of the matter. I also found the content structured to be distracting which makes reading this tile, a book on helping those with ADHD, a joke.

      2 people found this helpful

    Book preview

    The Disorganized Mind - Nancy A. Ratey

    PART I

    Coaching

    Who are you, and what do you love? a close friend once asked me. I’m outgoing and talkative by nature, and I’m rarely at a loss for words, but I was stunned into silence by my friend’s question. I had no idea how to respond.

    Don’t worry, she said, sensing my discomfort. I didn’t expect you to answer. I only wanted you to imagine the possibilities of who you might be.

    It’s hard to know what different roads any of us might have traveled had we early on imagined our lives shaped by our loves, by our bone-deep passions and beliefs. But I don’t think that when we begin to imagine is what matters. What matters is that it happens finally, that we come to believe such a life is possible, and that we determine, at last, to live it.

    It has been awhile since my friend posed her question, and I’ve thought about her words a lot. Today I can answer confidently, I’m Nancy Ratey, and I love the same things that most of us love: family, friends, some modicum of personal success.

    But I can also answer another way: I’m Nancy Ratey, life coach, and I love that the ADHD that once might have devastated me has translated into my life’s passion and work: helping others with ADHD cope.

    This is a book about possibility for those struggling with the symptoms of ADHD. It’s about the possibility of taking control, of maintaining control, of loving the way that you live. It’s about how I did it, and it’s about my belief that you can do it, too.

    CHAPTER 1

    How I Came to Coaching

    Nancy! When are you ever going to learn from your mistakes?

    Decades later, I can still hear my father’s voice, a frustrated cry of accusation and plea as he turned toward my stammering self. I had left a crayon in the pocket of my best white pants, and now the pants, and my father’s white underwear, had turned a perfect pink in the wash. I had done so many things like it before, and both of us knew I would do them again. In retrospect, I can’t blame my father for the things he often said.

    Although I would never have admitted it as a child, I was fortunate to have been brought up in a strict and structured home. Looking back, I have no idea how my parents did it. I was the last of their four children, the oldest of whom was twelve when I was born, and I was three when they began moving us back and forth across several continents, all in conjunction with my father’s work and all within a ten-year span. Clearly, someone had to take hold of the reins if we were to function as a family, and my father, a passionate and loving man of German heritage, seemed perfectly suited for the task.

    Maybe he had come to his role in the family naturally, or maybe it was his background in academia and the military that had shaped his intractable ways, but the value my father placed on order and structure was evident in everything he did. My friends likened my home to a military boot camp, where we observed daily routines and abided by the strictest codes of conduct. There were time limits for almost every activity imaginable: the two-minute phone call, the three-minute shower, the thirty-minute meal.

    Not one of us was spared our individual trials. My brother, Jed, always as slow as the turtles he collected, could never make it out of the house on time to catch the school bus, so my father developed a routine to get him moving. Stopwatch in hand, Dad timed Jed repeatedly while he dressed for school, packed his backpack, and walked to the bus stop. Then Dad conducted the drill: Do it once, return and repeat, do it again, return and repeat, over and over, time after time, day after day, until at last Jed was able to meet the requirement of Dad’s clock.

    Soon after I’d turned twelve, one of my daily chores was sweeping the kitchen floor. Stop! he yelled, after he’d been observing me for a while. Watch what you’re doing. The angle of the broom is all wrong. Determined to demonstrate a more efficient way to get the job done, he came over to me, tilting the broom at a sharper angle and moving my arms along with it. See? he said. If you hold the broom this way, you get more dirt per sweep and you don’t have to work as hard. And look, you’ll get the job done faster.

    From then on, no ordinary task would ever be the same, becoming instead more like a puzzle to be solved than a job to be endured. I’m not sure why I didn’t hear my father’s words as criticism the way my siblings and my friends did. It’s enough to know that something clicked in me, and it has stayed with me ever since, influencing the way I react to others’ remarks and shaping, in turn, how I speak to them. I can see now that I was learning something about listening, about processing others’ comments as feedback to be considered rather than as judgment to be taken to heart.

    But that’s an observation I am making as an adult. As a child, all the listening in the world couldn’t cure the stuttering for which I was teased and the math problems I never could solve, so I struggled through special remedial classes, misbehaving often, but managing to accomplish what would have been impossible without my father’s intervention: I graduated from high school with honors. True to form, my father had designed a tight schedule for me, with specific blocks of time for each piece of homework, and to make sure that I’d stay at attention, he would check in on me often—what seemed like every five minutes to my impatient young mind—without fail, and with his trademark tap on the table to keep me on task.

    I didn’t know it as it was happening, of course, but through all those rituals I was also learning about structure and accountability, concepts that would serve me later in life and ultimately become the basis of some of my coaching principles. My father was making me use my brain, and he was helping me analyze what I was doing and why.

    The Diagnosis

    Whatever stability I might have lost as a child traveling back and forth overseas was easily offset by what I gained. Living in and learning about other cultures while I also learned their languages shaped my ability to understand a multitude of people without prejudice or judgment. The constant during all those years was my father, whose sense of order and discipline set parameters within which I could thrive.

    But left to my own devices at The Ohio State University, I was lost, with a litany of reasons why. I could never get to class on time. I had no defined curriculum. I spent hours preparing to study yet never got around to actually studying. When I did sit down, I either shuffled papers for hours, not knowing what to start working on first, or jumped from one thing to another, ultimately accomplishing nothing. It seemed as though I knew what had to be done, but I could never get around to doing it, even when I stayed up all night in desperation. My frustration was deep, for sure, but it was probably equaled by that of my professors, who could not understand how someone they described as verbal and bright would be late turning in every paper or would perform so poorly on tests. Something was obviously amiss, one told me. He suggested a different kind of test. This one revealed dyslexia.

    What’s in a Name?

    Give me a name, one of my colleagues once told me about the sudden swelling in her legs, and at least I’ll know what I’m up against. Then I can figure out how to deal with it.

    Hearing that I wasn’t stupid, that I wasn’t really the space cadet my siblings had labeled me, I could begin to contemplate the possibilities of a wider world. Immediately, I took advantage of accommodations made by the university for students with dyslexia, and my performance improved dramatically, partly because of my own efforts and partly because of my father’s continued monitoring at the weekly lunches we’d arrange. A few years later, buoyed by degrees in international relations, Portuguese, and Spanish, I headed off to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I worked for eight months as a foreign student adviser to candidates in the master’s degree in public policy program before the position folded and the increasing confidence with which I had headed east slowly evaporated.

    For two years I was unemployed, unable to keep even a handful of temporary jobs. In one sense, my employers were right about my shortcomings: I did misfile papers; I did cross phone lines as a receptionist; I really couldn’t type or spell. But those problems notwithstanding, I truly believed I had much to offer. I had grown up on three different continents, and I spoke several languages. I also had useful analytical and people skills. Yet to a prospective employee, that rich life experience could not compensate for either my inability to do basic administrative work or my obvious challenges in reading and writing.

    It has been more than twenty years since those dark days in Cambridge, and sometimes I still wonder if something else had been hovering just below the surface of potential employers’ minds. At the time, it seemed there were more misconceptions than facts about dyslexia, and I often felt I was the target of silent discrimination because I was so open about my own. My diagnosis was double-edged. It made available to me services that helped me succeed, even as it prompted work-related doubts that I actually could.

    At Harvard

    Going to Harvard changed my life, but not for the obvious reasons. Few, if any, would have predicted that I’d earn a graduate degree, especially those remedial high school teachers who had often assigned me detention. But given my wandering attention and inability to sit still, neither would they have been surprised at the difficulties I experienced before I had the degree in hand.

    As a proud student in the master’s degree program in administration, planning, and social policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I wanted to be a model of excellence, completing my work on time and earning the grades my effort and preparation would deserve. I was deluding myself. Instead of the success I was envisioning, I experienced the all-too-familiar setbacks of the past. Like a tourist without a map on foreign terrain, I wandered through a setting without structure, seeing where I needed to go but unable to follow the road to get there. I was crushed.

    Countless therapists and psychiatrists later, I was given a name for the symptoms I was exhibiting and, with that name, a way to understand my brain and what I might do to harness it. I was tested yet again, I was diagnosed yet again, and with medication that I was subsequently prescribed for the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) the doctors discovered, I began to develop the self-awareness to know when I was getting off

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