Do any of these symptoms apply to you?
You find that your life is chaotic, unmanageable. You are easily sidetracked from the task you started on. You flit from job to job. You can’t follow through on a project.
If so, chances are you’re part of a fairly substantial segment of the population who have been diagnosed with ADHD, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder.
Often associated with children who face learning challenges at school, adults experience the condition as well. Shanna Pearson, who was diagnosed with the disorder eight years ago, started a business one year later to help people cope with the condition.
Called One Focus Total Success, Pearson’s company provides coaching assistance to people who want to get their lives under control. It does so by having its coaches direct clients to focus on one specific task at a time. With a coach on the phone, the chance of an ADHD sufferer procrastinating or getting sidetracked is reduced and the coach can verify through a number of means that the client is following through on the advice, she said.
The advice is tailored to meet the needs of each client, Pearson continued. If a person is hamstrung by a messy, disorganized desk, the coach will give specific instructions on getting it cleaned up – not later, right now. Instructions will be given and the client is expected to photograph the desk, before and after, and email the images to the coach while they’re still on the line.
That way, the client stays on task and implements the very practical advice they receive. “That’s what we do that people love us for,” she said.
If cleaning a garage is a problem, the instructor helps create a system for storing, and monitors its implementation. It could be storing like objects together, or perhaps – especially for women – keeping things together that share the same colour.
“The system has to be easy for the client to implement. Everything is simplicity,” Pearson said.
For people with ADHD, getting organized can be a problem, Pearson continued. Prioritizing is an important element in that clients are advised to schedule their most important tasks at the time of the day they’re most productive; save less important jobs, like checking email, for less productive times of the day, she advises.
“We’re teaching them how to create a system and to implement the system,” she explained.
Clients are billed at a rate of $99-$149 per week. They receive one coaching session per week, along with a follow-up text message or email.
Most clients stay with One Focus for six months. They pay by the month, and they’re able to cancel at any time.
Coaches, who are mostly based in the United States, receive one-third of the fee. Of the company’s 22 coaches, only one is from the Toronto area.
At any current time, One Focus has more than 400 clients and that number is doubling every year, Pearson said.
Surprisingly, only a small percentage of clients are Canadian. Like the coaches, many are American, but One Focus has clients across the world.
“The hardest part of the business is hiring people,” Pearson said. “These people have to be the best coaches on the planet. They need to be motivational, quite good at prioritization and they have to go deep into people, who’ve been living lives with ADHD.”
Coaches have to really understand their clients, who often “have issues of commitment. A lot get overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task and they become paralyzed and go do something else.”
Most of her staff are counsellors, psychologists, social workers or teachers. Surprisingly, she’s had no success recruiting personnel from a U.S. school that specifically trains ADHD counsellors.
Those people follow a different model in which the coach listens to the client and tries to get them to come up with a solution to their problems.
“We stimulate their brains. [Clients] learn by doing, not by talking,” she said.
Given her personal history, Pearson understands the challenges people with ADHD face. She worked for years for a number of non-profits in the Jewish community, but kept on leaving after a relatively short time.
She also worked for the Ministry of Health Promotions, designing large health wellness programs for career counsellors.
Nevertheless, she found that her life was chaotic and tumultuous, and she wasn’t meeting her career and relationship goals. “I was very quick and ambitious, but I was not able to follow through,” she said.
Over time, “I created a system for myself and found that it’s the basis of all our coaching.”
Completely self-taught, Pearson designed the One Focus program based on what worked for her.
It seems to be working for others as well. The company is so busy, she is currently hiring three new coaches. And she no longer has time to do any coaching herself.
She’s delegated that task and set her priorities. Looks like that part of her business life is firmly under control.