Welcome to that time of year. Again. The time of year that may have brought you here to my website. Welcome! The time of year that can be kryptonite for ADHDers. The time of year when time slows, speeds up, does a double backflip with a twist, and makes us feel like we need to do, something.

Why can it be kryptonite? The stillness, the returning to performing outdated family roles, the stillness.

The tamping down of everything we have learned this year for a couple of crawling weeks.

The closing down of the places that anchor our routines: cafes, workplaces, bus timetables, and the temporary fragmentation of our usual support networks.

In the middle of this enforced stoppage, we not only feel like we have enthusiastically flung any developed habits out of the window, but because of our different sense of time, we feel like we are never going to get those habits back again.

We are hard on ourselves,
we are hard on ourselves,
we are hard on ourselves.

While searching for other ways to turn the unkindness within, throw in spending time with loved ones who may not be validating your recent (ish) diagnosis, despite displaying similar traits of their own that are now glaringly obvious to you.

There’s often a reason the phrase ‘but everyone does that’ hurts so hard when it’s said to you about your ADHD traits – and it’s often because it’s coming from someone who is close to you, who may have undiagnosed ADHD as well.

So the New Year’s resolutions loom: decisions driven by guilt, shame, self-denial and punishment. Setting yourself up for unrealistic goals.

Trying to make yourself look like the portrait of you that has been drawn by other people. These are things that may have brought you to look up ADHD Coaching.

And if that is the case, I hope that before you send me a query, you find another part of yourself that is researching coaching, because you have found that being hard on yourself is starting to get boring.

That those times you’ve given yourself a small slice of the empathy and compassion you are happy to give to so many others, haven’t felt so strange after all.

That empathy, turned inward, can be used to look kindly on the habits you have been working on building, how much you have achieved so far, and how you can tell yourself, kindly, that they can be revived with a bit of dusting off.

Think of your other ADHD traits: your optimism, your resilience – in the face of all those times we tried to take advice that, in our gut, we knew was not the right fit for us, that we found didn’t work. Instead of giving up entirely, we tried again, tried differently, dug deep into our resources, hopeful of a different result.

Before you start making any changes for the new year, think about those times you’ve directed inwards a sliver of that hopefulness, that willingness to experiment, that kindness towards failure that you have so often given to others.

Kindness is not a non-renewable resource. It isn’t meant to be rationed. You being kinder to yourself as you start to make changes, does not mean giving less to other people.

Giving yourself the space and empathy to try things out that may work better for you, because they have been created by that same empathetic, optimistic, resilient you, is what I am looking forward to helping you with in the new year.