ADHD and Forming New Habits

So the biggest thing that will tell you if a leader can be successful or not in their role is whether they can develop new habits and new routines. And this can be particularly challenging if you have ADHD. You know, I am someone who has struggled with ADHD. Fortunately, I have really good medicine, but I do see leaders struggle with this quite a bit.

And it's interesting because if you look at the percentages, they say, what about 6% of society has ADHD? You know, depending on the study, it could be another 14% of society has what they call sluggish cognitive tempo, which kind of shows up in the same way sometimes and depending on the type of ADHD you have, whether it's inattentive type or some other kind, it may be very, very difficult because it is a learning challenge to form new habits and new routines. Same thing with sluggish cognitive tempo. It's difficult to pay attention, it's difficult to stay on focus, it's difficult to let those habits and routines sort of form and help that take over your behavior, if that makes sense.

So what I observe is about that again, if you come If you combine those two percentages, it's about one in five have something that looks like ADD in society. And I would say that mirrors what I see with leadership teams. It's about one in five. There will be someone in there who struggles pretty consistently with habit, routine, formation, focus, the ability to think through problems, see patterns.

Pattern recognition is so key to being an A player. And again, it's a lot of cases, if they treated it, and sometimes it can be very, very difficult to treat because things that deal with executive function tend to be a little bit more resistant to medication, but when it can be treated successfully, you can see a big difference in those people. Now, in the workplace, you can't tell people they have ADD or ADHD or what you can do is ask, where do you feel you struggle? Do you feel you struggle with focus, being able to stay on task?

And a simple question is, are there things you can do to improve upon that? And maybe in that process, your team member goes, Oh yeah, maybe I could go get help with that. Hopefully something like that takes place and if that's something that they want to improve upon because at the end of the day, what you want to see is that this, the ability to form new habits and new routines is a springboard for developing new skills in a role. And that's what makes it so critical to be able to, you know, put in place some of the tools that we help organizations put in place.

They tend to be very routine based. They tend to be, like us consistent meeting rhythm where the team meets every day and talks about the most critical things very quickly so they eliminate other meetings. It's a focus on your priorities and time management around focusing on those priorities. It's how to make sure that you're looking at data consistently and how to be able to see further by being able to dig into what's behind and driving each of the KPIs that you own.

That in turn forms our ability to have better long-term thinking critically think through what decisions I have to make to be able to be more successful as a leader and in my role. And really not just as a leader, but any team member can struggle with the same things and in their role, they'll have challenges because they cannot form new behaviors off of pattern recognition that lead to new skills later on. So again, I encourage people that if you have this issue, if you notice this issue within yourself, and we do see it with CEOs all the time, and sometimes you don't want to take away the founder CEOs creative ADHD. Sometimes they have really good ADHD, which tends to be hyperactivity based ADHD.

And I know that some people struggle with the labels on these, but when it comes to inattentive type, which is, you know, the kind of ADHD that I struggle with and that can help you or can stop you from being able to see patterns, process auditorily, process visually, and make connections. That can be the one where it makes it really difficult to learn new habits and new patterns. And if you see people like this, like I said, hopefully you can help them self-identify without getting into any medical reasons. Maybe there are ways they can improve upon and at least go down the path of getting better because that really can change their life.