Finding Your Focus: Practical Strategies for the Everyday Challenges Facing Adults with ADD [Paperback]

Judith Greenbaum (Author), Geraldine Markel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2005

“Filled with tools, strategies, and checklists and written with a fine understanding of the problems adults with ADD face daily. This book is a gift to all who read it.” —Edward Hollowell, M.D., bestselling author of Driven to Distraction

Written by two expert ADD coaches with more than 30 years experience, this practical handbook offers adults with ADD practical techniques for coping with common everyday challenges. These simple proven strategies can help you focus attention, organize your thoughts, and manage time—so you can avoid missing appointments and deadlines, handle social situations, and improve memory skills. A safe alternative to prescription medications, it’s a complete home program that anyone can do.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Your guide to dealing with the everyday challenges of life with ADD--filled with tools and strategies you can use for a lifetime!

With ADD, every day can be like running a maze of lost car keys, missing files, and forgotten commitments. Simple tasks that other people take for granted can become challenges that test the limits of your ingenuity and patience. Now, there is a wise and compassionate guide through the labyrinth of everyday life with ADD. This book shows you how to become more focused and organized, arming you with proven strategies and tools to help you:

• Meet deadlines
• Keep appointments
• Conquer clutter
• Keep track of your most valuable items
• Overcome procrastination
• Bring order to your chaotic life
• Stop ADD from interfering with your personal relationships

Dr. Judith Greenbaum and Dr. Geraldine Markel draw upon the latest research, as well as their thirty years of experience coaching people of all ages with ADD, to supply you with:

• Numerous checklists to help you manage time, organize and complete tasks, and solve specific problems at home and at work
• Research-based techniques, including self-talk, visualization, and routines
• Tips on how to become more self-aware and maximize your potential

"A wonderful and much needed addition to the books on adults with ADD. The personal and warm approach of the authors comes through loud and clear."
--Sari Solden, M.S., LMFT, author of Women with Attention Deficit Disorder and Journeys Through Adulthood

About the Author

Judith Greenbaum, Ph.D., has a doctorate in special education and three decades of experience coaching people of all ages with ADD. She consults with schools designing special educational programs. Geraldine Markel, Ph.D., has a doctorate in educational psychology and a master's degree in reading. She is a professional consultant, speaker, and ADD coach.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (September 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071453962
• ISBN-13: 978-0071453967
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #904,284 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Just Meds thinking, Take Charge of your Life!!!!, February 5, 2006

By 

Gerard Montigny www.gerardmontigny.com (Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Finding Your Focus: Practical Strategies for the Everyday Challenges Facing Adults with ADD (Paperback)

In this book authors Judith Greenbaum Ph.D. and Geraldine Markle Ph.D. string together a phenomenal amount of information in a concise and straight to the point fashion. This is definitely what I would call a life skills book focused on strategies for overcoming many of the daily problems associated with adult ADHD. The authors have wisely decided to stay away from spending too much time on biological root causes, instead focusing on practical tips and strategies for maximizing success in daily life. The book seems to blend elements of cognitive therapy with a well defined process task analysis system.

This book is both honest and positive in its approach to managing ADHD, and is structured in an easy to access fashion allowing readers to easily jump around and focus on what their own particular interests are.

Part one of the book focuses on helping readers better understand what ADHD is. It then moves on to helping them identify what their strengths and weaknesses are, and ends by providing readers with a series of six tools they can use in order to better manage their ADHD.

Part two of the book provides practical tips and strategies for problems often faced on a daily basis by those who live with ADHD. This part of the book covers topics that will help readers learn how to stop losing keys, wallets and even provides a strategy to help one from losing their car in a parking lot.

The second part of the book also provides strategies for helping with household organization, time management, and how to actually break down complex tasks using a well developed and thought out to do list system. This section of the book closes by providing some interesting and helpful tips around improving ones social skills.

Unfortunately, part three of the book spends what I consider to be too much time on medication, and I think could have been avoided completely as there are already tons of books dealing with the issue of medication and its management. Having said that the last part of this section entitled Making Decisions and Setting Goals is definitely a gold mine of information, again using a well-designed checklist system approach that will help readers better set, plan out goals and move into the future successfully.

Overall, this book is excellent, and one that I highly recommend as an essential addition to any adult ADHD resource library be it a personal or professional one. This book is filled for the most part with the type of information you are not going to get from your psychiatrist or doctor. It's what I would call a nuts and bolts book, which can help an adult with ADHD build a better life for him/herself one day at a time, it's the type of book readers can keep going back to whenever new problems arise or old ones crop back up.

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great!, May 9, 2006

By 

dame ethel (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Finding Your Focus: Practical Strategies for the Everyday Challenges Facing Adults with ADD (Paperback)

"Finding Your Focus", by Judith Greenbaum and Geraldine Markel, offers practical advice for common difficulties faced by adults with ADD.

In this book, we learn techniques for utilising our visual, verbal and/or kinesthetic strengths - to prevent hurdles from popping up (and to help us when they do).

"If your home works for you (and your family), it is, by definition, not cluttered and disorganised, no matter what it looks like."... Though if you tend to lose your bills under piles of debris, it probably does deserve the label "cluttered"... and that's when the "tool box" comes in.

The tool box consists of:
1. verbalisation (e.g., internally describing what you see around you; self-talk)
2 visualisation
3. information from the other senses (e.g. consciously feeling the keys in your hand)
4. routine (NB. They advise building up routines, but only slowly, one at a time)
5. checklists
6. STOP! (A way to assess your thoughts and actions and bring your mind back on track when it wanders away from something important)

The authors suggest (in very clear and detailed, step-by-step fashion) some ways these tools can be used - for quite a few specific situations. (Addressed are issues such as, losing keys, losing your car [in a car park you go to frequently, in an unfamiliar car park], etc.) But the ideas can be adapted to many different situations.

I really appreciate the user-friendly layout of this book and the non-judgmental tone - it isn't at all overwhelming or preachy.

Highly recommended.

26 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good introduction, but more substance needed, July 20, 2006

By 

lectorvoraz (Rocky Mountains) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Finding Your Focus: Practical Strategies for the Everyday Challenges Facing Adults with ADD (Paperback)

I was disappointed.

This might be a good book, perhaps even excellent, for someone who is newly diagnosed with ADD, or for someone who is new to working on coping strategies. But I didn't find that much that I haven't come across elsewhere before.

I was surprised to find out that both of the authors have doctorates, because it seemed to me like the book was written at about a seventh-grade reading level. At times as I was reading the book, I felt like I was being talked down to, the language was that simple.

Part of the problem with the book is that it attempts to cover a lot of material in only about 170 fairly sparse pages. As a result, for example, it spends only 9 pages dealing with medication issues, a subject worth much more. It covers the subject of goal-setting in too few pages also; you'd be much better off reading "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" or something similar.

The advice in this book is very sound, and I found a few strategies that were new to me (such as how to not lose my car in a parking lot, which happens nearly every time). But for someone who is fairly well-read on the subject, there simply isn't enough here.