Maureen Nolan, ACC is an Atlanta ADHD Coach credentialed in ADHD coaching by the ADHD Coaching Academy, is a certified ACC by the International Coaching Association, is the only ADHD Coach in the country certified by Dr. David Grand in Brainspotting and has studied at LifeWorks in Atlanta in Body/Mind Coaching, Positive Thinking and the Law of Attraction. She is a creative coach, small business owner and is an active member of the ADHD Coaches Organization. In addition she has taken extra ADHD Coach training by Jodi Sleeper-Triplett through the EDGE Foundation to become an EDGE Foundation Coach for academic success of students from ninth grade through a lifetime of academics. Maureen believes in the healing aspect of coaching especially of ADHD coaching – not curing it but healing the impact of it on life’s decision making, through improved information processing, goal setting and personal achievement.
Experience and Passion for ADHD Coaching
Before forming the Your Attention Coach business, Maureen was a former trade magazine editor and Communications Specialist for a school for students K-8th grades with ADHD and LD, she also edited Kids Enabled Magazine, an Atlanta-area resource that addresses the challenges of caring for and teaching children with learning differences and has been published in ADDitude Magazine. She led ADHD support groups and ADHD coaching groups for goal achievement. Her son is a graduate of Landmark College, a premier two-year college for students with ADHD. Maureen’s two children live with the impact of ADHD and are the reason she was similarly diagnosed and eventually became an ADHD coach.
Positive Thinking and ADHD Coaching
Maureen’s increased focus in attention coaching is an outgrowth of the Positive Thinking movement. Her coaching instructs clients in ADHD education,
as L.B. said ‘I learned more in one hour with Maureen about ADHD than in six months with my psychiatrist,’
with a belief that education is power. She also believes in collaborative relationships with all the support professionals a client brings to the relationship, or is referred to through their work together and instructs clients in community building for their life-long support. In addition to the conventional education and training, Maureen is interested in Graphology (Handwriting Analysis) as an assessment for attention – as attention is a state of consciousness that is expressed in handwriting.
Maureen Nolan, ACC, Your Attention Coach has practiced ADHD Coaching with bilingual clients, clients as far away as Dubai and is passionate about international ADHD coaching. ADHD does not distinguish among nations!
Atlanta, Georgia schools in the 1960’s did not recognize the relationship between ADD-ADHD and education. I was a straight C+ student, very quiet and reserved, not a problem to anyone (but myself): a classic female inattentive ADHD student. My sister was a brilliant ADHD student, not very quiet and full of anger at the unknown impact ADHD had on her life: a scholarship winner and summa cum laude college graduate. There’s no doubt our lives would have been different with early diagnosis and ADHD coaching for symptom management and success.
Not much has changed in the ensuing thirty-five years. Students and ADHD go hand in hand but now there is Maureen Nolan, ACC an ADHD Coach to walk with clients through the morass of misery with untreated ADHD symptoms.
Call Maureen Nolan Atlanta ADHD Coach for your ADHD needs.
Atlanta ADHD Coach Maureen Nolan, ACC coaches adults and students with ADHD attention challenges. Maureen wants you to be focused, attentive and stimulated at home, at work, at school and at play. ADHD is marked by inattentiveness, distractibility and disruptive or hyperactive behavior that changes over time and with age. ADHD coaching clients are ready for change, for creating exciting life challenges and opportunities, are tired of their ’status quo’ and don’t want to repeat their mistakes anymore. Maureen was trained in part by Jodi Sleeper-Triplett as an EDGE Foundation Coach:
Call Atlanta ADHD Coach Maureen Nolan, ACC, for ADHD Coaching to achieve direct goal accomplishment through focused attention to your passions, for creating your attention flow in any environment and for your focused pleasure in life. Maureen is an expert in coaching for your attention needs. Maureen Nolan, ACC is Your Attention Coach.
Which Came First: Consciousness or Unconsciousness?
National Public Radio played an interview with Cal Tech scientist Cristoff Koch on the source of consciousness. I looped around in my head for a while looking for a landing spot to store and process his concept. The best I could do was to believe he was saying the less you pay attention the more you pay attention. It’s like dreaming for answers; disconnect the left/logical brain from the right/creative brain and you’ll be there, wherever that is.
It oddly made sense to me since I use dreamwork with clients for brainstorming and problem solving. In other words the less you try to force a solution the more clear the solution becomes. Daydreaming really works and is a form of consciousness that is sorely underrated. So if you’re looking to solve that dratted math problem stop trying so hard to pay attention. Let your eyebrows relax. Move in to your unconscious to find the answer.
Excuses, excuses. They are the bane of life with ADHD. How often are excuses used and how much creative energy goes into making them believable? How close to lieing do they come? Are they lies and deceptions? Is there an edge of excitement that goes along with an excuse? Is it believable? What is its value? Can you keep track of the excuse and how often is the same one used?
I first remember thinking about excuses when an aunt told me she thought my mom had made too many excuses for me and my sisters when we were young. The comment felt like a double insult – one to me and then one to my mother. I still have a physical reaction when I remember her comment. Then years passed and excuses were made and used to get me into and out of trouble – too many commitments, too many appointments missed, too many friends miffed at me. Something began to dawn on me – a routine use of excuses was unhealthy. It was not mindful living.
Change behavior and change your life.
Once I got it and it took a really long time to get it – then I began to see that excuses weren’t necessary. It’s a simple thing to say no in the first place; it’s important for me to gauge my time because no-one else will do it! I realized I made excuses for my children, just like my mom with the same unknown dimension: the ADHD factor. Learning about ADHD I have learned about excuses.
My clients learn that in our coaching the ‘homework’ is done or not done. The excuses have no meaning unless we backtrack to the core event, emotion, feeling or challenge that puts the excuse mobile into motion. I struggle with disruptive behavior of my own, inattentiveness and distractions all day every day. I’m a pretty classic case study of standard ADHD so I know what’s going on for my clients.
I believe that a twelve step approach to changing your excuse use will get it under control while simultaneously learning about your brand of ADHD will lead to more time living in success and less time living in fear of being ‘found out’.
What was your most creative excuse and what is your new understanding of the inherent value of excuse recovery?
Attention is a state of grace and after losing my attention over and over again I want a better relationship with grace. Keeping my attention is like keeping God in my mind. What can be done to live in that attentional grace space?
Two years ago the Dalai Lama convened a symposium on mindfulness as a treatment for depression at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. It’s a short drive from my home, so I invited my sisters and daughter and together we attended the weekend event with some close friends all of whom live with ADHD or who work in the field of ADHD service. Representatives of major faiths presented their organized religious perspectives on mindfulness or meditation to the Dalai Lama. Scientists presented papers to the Dalai Lama on studies on meditation and its impact on mindfulness. The Dalai Lama was conversational, inquisitive, funny and friendly as the material was discussed in front of a few thousand attendees. He was serious in his investigation on the value of the Buddhist practice of mindfulness as a means towards health and wellness which impacts our ability to attend to what is important in our lives.
Since that event, I’ve recommended the practice of mindfulness to clients, teaching them on the spot how to live in the present moment as anxiety is an expression of future fear and extensive regret is related to living in the past. All we have is now.
When you have anxiety or regret that feels overwhelming, get two balls and juggle them slowly, back and forth from hand to hand. Do something you think is silly; anxiety and silliness cannot coexist in the same moment. Feel the position of your body – where is it? Where is your foot, your hand, your fingers? Tell yourself what you feel tactilely – how does the fabric you’re wearing feel? How does your hair feel? Pull yourself into the present moment and practice this mindfulness.
Tell me, how are you now? What do you want to pay attention to in the present moment?
humanistic in nature. Clients are accepted unconditionally in their presenting situation.
a collaboration and partnership. I honor your experience and perspective.
is discovery. Are the present beliefs working for you?
is about movement – guiding you to be in the flow of your life and toward the development and achievement of your goals.
affirming of your right and capacity for self-direction.
facilitating your goals.
supporting of self-initiation.
is preparatory – what will you do when x happens?
is intentional.
is reflective.
is affirmative.
Coaching is based on a Five Stage Model for Change
1. precontemplation
2. contemplation
3. Preparation
4. Action
5. maintenance
Coaching is carried out in a safe environment for change to occur by:
Promoting insight
Promoting self-evaluation
Making a commitment to act
Identifying and avoiding situations that produce non-productive behaviors (i.e., being late)
Using rewards for goal attainment
Role playing
Exploration of the problem/challenge from a different perspective
Encouraging self-advocacy
Encouraging supportive relationships both professional and personal
This definition of ADD Coaching describes the backbone of a coaching relationship. It is derived from a presentation at CHADD National 2009 in Cleveland, OH developed by Sandy Maynard.
Where did the time go? Since my last post I’ve been distracted by the NC mountains, a town called Sylva and an area that easily distracts me from my first breath of fresh air in the morning ’til the weather shifts at night to cool me off for sleep. My attention to this country is new for me with friends and activities. It is a convergence of coincidences that my intuition tells me to take time and be with these people in this place.
What does your intuition tell you to pay attention to?
There’s a web of skin between my little finger and ring finger with a bug bite, a little red, raised itchy angry spot shouting for my attention. And there’s another one on my left ankle. And another on my middle right toes, not counting the river of bumps under my right forearm. Something is is under my right shoulder blade and suddenly my left front thigh is shouting out for an equal opportunity scratch.
By now, you’re itching, aren’t you. Don’t stop. Share the agony with me. This itch is something that I want to share with everyone. I’m bitten up from my toes to my neck, from shoulder to shoulder, from stomach to lower back. I feel like the little girl I once was who woke up one morning to discover bites all over my stomach and back because of a hole in the window screen.
This time however, I was way more active seeking out the bugs from the meadow to the lake to the waterfall and back again. I worked at acquiring each and every bite walking up the steep slope and down the dirt path. That night my friends and I laughed at stories about bed bugs while anesthetizing ourselves with fine wine. I had a ball but next time, I’m bringing bug spray.
What do you do about bug bites? Epsom salts? Crosses made with fingernails. Share your favorite remedy…and hurry!
This is a practical attention issue, there’s nothing esoteric about it. However, for the most recent research on scratching, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/health/07itch.html.
Remember when George Costanza in ‘Seinfeld’ had a bed built under his desk at work? It seems he wasn’t off the mark at all! Reported by Behavioral Health Care Journal this week, napping is now encouraged at the office for an increase in sociability. Finally, I can nap and quote a study that shows it’s not only good for people in the South American countries, but for everyone. Today on Oprah, Dr. Oz supported the need for 7-9 hours of sleep per night – it’s even supposed to help reduce weight! Now that’s something to pay attention to.
At the SLEEP 2009 conference in Seattle last week, researchers from the University of California – Berkeley revealed results of a study that ’showed naps with rapid eye movement sleep refresh the brain’s perception of positive emotions.’ It seems study participants taking a 60 to 90 minute nap mid-day with REM sleep were much more receptive to happy facial expressions than those who didn’t. In fact, participants without a nap had an increased reaction to negative emotions. Have you ever been called cranky because you reacted to the way someone looked at you after 3 p.m.?
Once again we learn that we knew all we needed to know in kindergarten – a nap a day keeps you alert to pay attention.
BHC Journal interviewed two of the principal investigators of the study who were at the conference: Dr. Matt Walker, Professor of Psychology and Director of the University of California – Berkeley Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory, and senior research scientist Ninad Gujar.
1. Sign up for Your Attention Coach RSS Feed and receive up to the minute news.
2. Sign Up For My Newsletter Today!
Fill out the form below to get my occasional blog newsletter which features my latest articles and informs you of special events and material on ADHD and attention development.
As an added gift for signing up, you will receive a booklet on using handwriting as a method to assess the quality of your attention.
My strict privacy policy keeps your email address 100% safe & secure.
