Coaching is an Adventure
Hello and Welcome
I am committed to the best practices in the coaching profession in order to provide you with a valuable coaching experience. This site is full of my personal writing about coaching and living with ADHD – I hope you connect with some of my blogs.
Please look around my site for general information and contact me for your coaching services. As Your Attention Coach, I am devoted to your growth and personal development through ADHD Coaching. My professional education includes specific training around the issues of living with ADHD. I believe there is a way to live with ADHD that is compassionate and satisfying – let me help you find your way to self fulfillment. I coach in person and/or on the phone according to my client’s needs.
Are you looking for change in your life?
What issue brings you to Your Attention Coach? I became a coach to help students and adults struggling with ADHD after my children with ADHD forced me to broaden my scope of skills. I become a better parent and a more grounded person. It’s been a fantastic journey of self-growth and I have so many practical tips and insights to share with you.
Are you ready to do something really different that you’ve always wanted to do?
Coaching will change your life with time and attention and a willingness to be coached.
Are we a good fit to work together?
It’s really important we want to work together. All my tips and insights have meaning when we click. Who you are matters.
An Adventure Begins with One First Step…
Contact Maureen Nolan, ACC at 404-713-0488 or email today and take your first step to change.
I’m Giving Away ADHD Coaching
It’s My Birthday and I’m Sharing It With You!
- What do you want?
- What will it feel like when you get there?
- What will it feel like if you don’t make it?
- Let’s talk!!
Email me at maureen@yourattentioncoach.com or call me at 404-713-0488 to make a 15 minute appointment!
This is my ADHD birthday gift to you!
Attention to MY Intentions in a Job
Did I intend to get fired?
It wasn’t my intention not to pay attention on the job…or was it?
The ghastly job seemed to have all my attention. I worried about it; thought about it; dreamed about it; talked about it; stayed late; arrived early and in the end I was fired from it. But what was my intention during that time?
This job was a dead end when I said yes. The first day of work the ‘boss’, the woman who asked me to apply for and then to take the job; who was the mother of my son’s friend, told me we wouldn’t become friends. That we would be working at the same place every day and then some, but we wouldn’t become friends. That was her intention.
My intention in taking the work was to provide income for my family while my husband began a professional transition. My intention was to support his desire to change his life. I had no intention to change my life or the world. My intention was not related to friendship, but it would have been an OK perk on the job to be friendly at least.
So, serendipity found me fired and quickly hired to work at a school for students with ADHD and LD where my intention again was to support my family. This time, however, I found a calling and a life’s work. In the end, I was completely changed and passionate about working in the world of ADHD. My strengths were used to create my job and my weaknesses were otherwise managed. I grew in confidence and stature knowing that in that environment I made a difference.
I’m a born coach, maybe even born again. I was the student and young adult who asked the questions no-one else thought about. That’s what I love – asking the questions whose answers will change your life.
What do you want in a job?
What are your intentions in taking the work?
How will you make a difference in this field?
Is there a future for you with this company?
My story is the story of many job seekers and office workers. If you can’t pay attention it may be because it’s not worth your health and the health of your attention to remain.
What is your attention-to-intention-on-the-job story?
Forgive me, Donald.
(http://www.abovethelaw.com/images/entries/Donald%20Trump%20You%27re%20Fired%20Above%20the%20Law%20blog.gif)A Lesson in Authentic Attention
Ah - Food!
My literary and food life converged today at the lunch counter at Tacqueria del Sol in Decatur. Next to me, a lively woman was talking about her recent trip to NY City and her encounter with the rudest/most authentic restaurateur in the city – maybe the world. Christiane Lauterbach (for the uninitiated, she has been reviewing restaurants in Atlanta for over 25 years) had been in NYC as a member of the review board for the 2009 James Beard Foundation Awards. Told by another critic not to miss this place, in the retelling of the experience, I was reminded of a restaurant in St. Louis in the ’60′s/’70′s when I lived around the corner at Grand and Lindell.
It was an Italian restaurant, very old with equally old Italian men servers. We were warned they were the meanest men alive and it was a point of pride to survive a meal. I was eighteen and student poor but we saved up to get a lunch and a lesson. Remember that age? My attention was on the dare, certainly not the menu. Their accents were challenging so it didn’t really matter what they said because I couldn’t understand them anyway. I knew Southern and Ohio accents by that age. I made it through the meal, wide-eyed and food innocent (the scent of burned food in my home was common, another blog topic on attention) linking Italian food and rude servers until I married an Italian (see blog on divorce and attention).
Maybe the issue was communication not insult. But in Ms. Lauterbach’s newly found restaurant, the insult was the entree of communication and the meal was all the better for it. This attitude she conveyed, is an authentic life lived through insult and straightforward passion.
My blogging is my authentic life, not an insult rather an entry to a life with attention as I know it. It’s not literary; nor a talent but an expression of my lifelong challenge and passion – Authentically my Attention.
What’s your authentic challenge with attention?
An Attention Hangover
Wendy at forty!
Frankly I’ve been in attention overload for a couple of weeks. Wendy invited me to her 40th birthday celebration, given by her friend Maria Maria Sangria. Need I say more – with an inventive name like that I should have been forewarned. We had found our way to a magical ten-acre untouched forest in way SW Atlanta where a giant forest spirit protected the land from being developed. And a reclusive creative artist kept the house and land as sacred space for visiting shamans and citizens.
We arrived after 10 pm in the warm April evening to meet women in long dark dresses and drapes, young women in bright dresses and skirts, men in street clothes, African dress and Jamaican hair and children and dogs of no particular description. It seemed not everyone there knew Wendy nor that it was her birthday. I discovered two Italian matrons who had just flown in from Italy for the weekend, and a Ghanaian spirit dancer on his way to the islands.
Only a little panicked I recalled attending the wrong wedding once and thought maybe this was the wrong party. But even in a forest glen like this, cell phones work and Wendy called to locate me. It was time for the drum circle and fire. I didn’t see a birthday cake or hear birthday songs, rather the drums started up and we gathered around the fire pit for a couple of hours of chanting, dancing, praying and a celebration of all of our lives.
In the dark, small lights lit semi-circles of chairs in the woodsy clearings up a straw strewn path past the fire pit to an outdoor open-air grotto. I grew up during the ’60′s and ’70′s in Atlanta; I saw the Allmann Brothers play for free in Piedmont Park; I didn’t make it to Woodstock, N.Y. but to Woodstock, Ga. for a similar festival, and I’d been to some unique parties in St. Louis during college, but I’ve never been to SW Atlanta for a Drum Circle celebration.
This was heaven on earth. People of all descriptions came and went with the wind, and when I left at 1 am the Jamaican music was just beginning. I was high on life for two days before the stimulation and pleasure of the evening began to wear off. I can only describe my state of mind as a kind of attention hangover – there was too much sensory input in the dark night with the drums and chanting for me to pay attention to time and space…can there be too much attention? Is too much attention simply an out of this world experience?
What is your attention hangover story?
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