Have you ever found yourself thinking that there is so much going on? It feels completely overwhelming. Perhaps your head feels like it's spinning and you're juggling so many balls, and some are dropping, and you just start to feel guilty and stuck. Then this team at Unconventional Organisation, Skye and her team, this is what they help adults with ADHD to do all of the time, manage working memory. Now whether you have ADHD yourself as an adult, which often we know ADHD can be genetic or run in
families. So if you have a child with ADHD, it's quite possible that you should consider that for yourself as well. Or, just being a parent you have so much going on, it takes a lot of your working memory. Then this conversation is going to be helpful for you. My name is Veronica Hunter with What Now - ADHD, and I support families in knowing the broad range of choices available to them when their child has ADHD. So they can select what their unique family needs to grow in health and happiness. M
y own journey for this was challenging. And the goal here is to just make it easier for you and your child so that you can thrive together and enjoy each other the way you always wanted to. Whether you are just starting out on this journey or you have been on it for awhile, and you're looking for answers and still wondering what now? Then start here, enjoy this conversation, get some support with working memory, and consider joining our all in one ADHD community that helps guide you through a si
mple five step, whole family approach to helping your family thrive when you have a child with ADHD. Enjoy the conversation. Hello! So one of the questions we get all the time is how do I manage my child's ADHD when I'm trying to manage my own ADHD? My name is Veronica with ADHD - What Now? And I help parents to know the broad range of choices available to them to grow their happy and healthy family when their child has ADHD. Part of the picture is obviously that parents can have ADHD as well. A
nd to help with that today, we have Skye and her team from Unconventional Organisation, and they are ADHD coaches that specialize in helping adults with ADHD to especially work in the areas of scheduling, organization, and routines. One of the things that I love so much about their work is that they focus a lot on the research that really supports effectiveness for neurodiversity and what really matters most. So definitely check her out and her site Unconventional Organisation, I'll ask her to s
hare it too, but she puts out great stuff. So, we have posted inside of our Facebook groups, some questions and asked what guy you wanted to hear about. And the team here at Unconventional Organisation has taken that and put together to answer those questions for us. And so without further ado, I will turn it over to them to address what things you wanted to hear about this topic. Awesome. Great. Thanks so much, Veronica. And it's great to be here. So yeah, I'm Skye, I'm the founder of Unconvent
ional Organisation, as you mentioned, we're a research-based ADHD coaching service for adults and yeah, we're going to talk about parenting. So full disclosure, I'm a parent-to-be, so this is not a hundred percent something I have practical strategies in yet, but I'm very excited to be listening to Sue and Sarah who are both ADHD and parents, and we're all ADHD in this organization. And yeah, just wanted to say, it's really great that you guys are interested in working around your own adult ADHD
. As we know, and I think of becoming more aware, this is a highly heritable, or appears to be, based on the number of people who have children who also get diagnosed with adult ADHD themselves. And, you know, there is a lot of research out there that working on your own ADHD strategies can really help support your child. So yeah, it's really awesome that you guys are interested in this and yeah, I'll pass it over to Sue and Sarah to introduce themselves a little bit more. Hi everyone, I'm Sue.
So I'm one of the coaches at Unconventional Organisation. I have two little boys, two and a half and four and a half. So they keep me on my toes. There's no doubt about that, but certainly having, you know, been in the whirlwind of motherhood while managing ADHD, I know how important it is to keep on top of my own strategies. Not only because it makes things just run a little bit more smoothly, but I also know I'm, I'm really modeling things for my sons, so that if ADHD is something that they ha
ve to manage, they'll have seen me doing, you know, those strategies and modeling for them. So looking forward to chatting with you all this morning, this afternoon, over there it is. Hello everyone. I'm Sara. I'm another coach over at Unconventional Organisation. I have a seven year old son and we both have ADHD brains. You know, when remote learning became the norm, I obviously was spending a lot more time with my child. And I started to recognize how similar some of his behaviors were to mine
as a kid and also my brother's. So this pushed me to insist on getting tested. So yeah, I've just been kind of working towards, you know, gaining more practical skills to manage both of our ADHD. And yeah, I'm just really interested to share it all with you guys. You know what you'll find about a lot of these core issues and the strategies that we use to like combat them is that they are individualized. Basically all of them, you know, ADHD is, in our heads, it's part of who we are, but also we
're all still individuals. So the same thing isn't going to work in all areas. And, you know, I'll kind of try to give some more examples of that as I continue talking. But, you know, working memory is quite simply, active memory that we're using right now. And the research shows that people with ADHD really struggled to keep things in their active memory and then also struggled to transfer them to long-term memory. And then also struggled to recall them again. So, you know, a lot of different w
ays that we try to manage this is, you know, making lists, creating chore routines, but then actually printing them out and putting them in the places, you know, where you're going to need them. You know, if you have a bathroom chore routine, you're going to put that in the bathroom, and having that in the same location that you're going to need, it is also going to help with transition times another thing, and other core issues that people with ADHD can often struggle with. So the research arou
nd that shows that people with ADHD are just slower to switch from one task to the other when compared to our neurotypical peers. So, you know, as I mentioned, some strategies that we would use for that is to put things in their specific location, where you're going to use them, you know, trash bags by the bin, trash can, grouping similar tasks together. So when you're getting ready in the morning, if you have to make a lunch, we do the lunch and then while you're still in the kitchen, you know,
maybe you have to do some dishes. You'd really just try to do all of the activities in one room at a time. And so another way to kind of also help facilitate that transition for your brain is to really externalize it. So maybe it's something as simple as saying, "I'm going to do this now". You know, it could even include some movement, you know, moving our bodies can really help stimulate the brain. So kind of coming up with a regular routine around transitions can really help with that. I supp
ose, if you're getting up taking a break from work and you have to go check on the kids, well maybe before you're ready to go check on the kids, you get yourself a drink, you know, that's a quick way to kind of tell your brain, I'm moving, I'm doing something new and also providing yourself a little bit of that dopamine so that you're ready to go do the thing with your kids. It can be really challenging, but that's why we really need routines as ADHD brains. - I think another question that had c
ome up, you touched so beautifully on a bunch of them, and now I'm trying to find the one, but oh, there's so much - there's so much to remember, like that feeling of there's so much to remember. So when somebody is saying something like that, or that's the way they're feeling is that the working mem - like the trigger for working memory and like, I need some support my working memory area? Yes, yes. A big, yes. You know, it's really common for us to be involved in a task and then have kids come
and interrupt, you know, with that thing that they need us to remember. And then we try to go back to work, and we totally forget what they asked us to remember. So some tips around that are, you know,
some people will write notes in their phones. Some people will just take notes on the computer where they're at, or, you know, have a notebook. A lot of people with ADHD will just carry around a notebook to write down random things that they need to remember. The important thing though, about tak
ing notes is that we remember to go back to them. So we have to kind of build it into our routine to review our notes, make sure that we're, you know, assigning the correct notifications, like remind me to do this. You know, not everybody uses, "Hey, Google", but that has really made a huge impact for a lot of people I think. That we could just talk to the computer and it'll pop in a reminder for us. But yeah, that's definitely a big working memory issue. Any other last thoughts or final invitat
ion for anybody who is watching live to write in your question really quick, as I asked Skye to also share where to find your organization, like, how do we find you? Yes. So you can find us, we're at www.unconventionalorganisation (with an "s" not a "z ") .com and you can find us there. You can book in to have a 20-minute consultation with me. If you want to work with any of our coaches, we actually go through an executive functioning support survey, so you can actually see the areas that you've
got good strategies already. And then the areas that you want to work on, which a lot of people find really helpful because when you start, you don't always know exactly where you're struggling. You just know that you're struggling. There's also articles there. We post every week, different articles, pieces of research, things we've already discussed. And you can find us on our Facebook group as well. So strategies, Unconventional Organisation, you can search that. And I'm pretty sure Veronica
would leave links below because my working memory wouldn't pick it all up in audio. - Absolutely. - But yeah, that's us. - Wonderful. Well, thank you for being here for sharing all of that. It's been amazing and uplifting because just as knowing the choices and the options, and that there is help out there and where to go next, like that helps so much. So appreciate you and your work and your team and the value that you've added here today. Awesome. Thanks. Thanks so much. Thank you. A great bi
g heartfelt, welcome to Skye and her team at Unconventional Organisation. And I hope you've gotten a ton of value from this. So that you know how to handle the diversity of things that go on inside of life as a parent, to a child with ADHD, especially when you have ADHD yourself, if you would like some further support, then Skye and her team will be inside of our all-in-one ADHD community called Flourish. In order to join us for this coming month in September, where you'll be able to meet and in
teract with Unconventional Organisation, then sign up at WhatNowADHD.net. That's WhatNowADHD.net. And I look forward to seeing you there.
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