Ah, that’s why her desk looks like that.
I’m a great believer in ‘doing what works’. Fellow coaches/trainers/psychologists with a Solution Focussed background will recognise it as a basic principle of this approach.
It sounds so obvious.
What I’m getting to is how often I am surprised by how hard it is to put into practice… And I don’t even mean the discipline of consciously doing what works. I mean that it is hard to focus on figuring out what actually works, rather than what should work.
Example: A clean desk is good practice, right? Tidy, clear, helps from getting distracted, keeps focus, all that good stuff. And for me personally this is very true. I work better with a clear (or semi-clear) desk. It stops me from feeling overwhelmed. I sometimes tidy my desk if I get stuck and I need a bit of clarity.
Because it works for me, it’s really easy to assume that it works for others, too. So it becomes very easy for me to suggest to a client (or my daughter) that it will help if they clear their desk. But so often it doesn’t work and it doesn’t help. Or it takes so much time and bandwidth to clear that desk that one has to wonder if it is worth it. Because they are not me.
What should work (because it does for me, so it does for everyone, right?) doesn’t. Because of a neurodiverse brain instead of my (more) neurotypical one, or because of a different personality type or temperament from me, but mostly because my solutions come from my experience, my experiments and from what I know about myself, and that will be different for everyone else. So they actually work for me, but that does not mean they should work for someone else.
I still forget though, and sometimes suggest them anyway. Because it seems so obvious (to me), and I like to be helpful. Even though I do know better….
What does work is asking my client - or my teenager- about what works for them.
And what I´ve heard from clients is:
Keeping stuff on the desk because if it gets put in a drawer, it gets forgotten about. Even if it is important. (Ah! That’s why her desk looks like that! Makes complete sense now.)
Writing the same reminder in a different colour after a week or so, when ‘blindness for familiar things’ has happened. Then it stands out again and is therefore helpful.
Playing computer games before starting work because it helps to get their brain into gear.
None of the above work for me at all. But they don't have to - that’s the great thing. The whole point of ‘doing what works’ is that when someone figures out what actually works, they can purposefully do it more often or in more situations. Which is really likely to be helpful, because they already know it works for them. This is true for everyone of course, but it is especially true for those with neurodiverse brains.
If you have ADHD or a non-mainstream brain there is even less chance that what works for most people is going to be useful for you and it saves a lot of time and frustration if you can skip straight to figuring out what actually works for you. If this is interesting to you, contact me and we’ll get to work doing just that.
I would like to close by apologising to my SO that it has taken 20 years for stuff to get labelled in our house. (I am sorry. You did tell me it works for you, which it really does. I guess we should do more of it… x)
Also, I´m curious. What do you do that really works for you but doesn’t for other people?
