Skip to content
← Resources · Adult

ADHD · Our approach · Course part 1 of 6

Recognising attention and making room for honesty

Begin with one meaningful area of daily life, recognise qualities of attention in your experience and make room for honesty at the point of a choice.

Our approach · Part 1 of 6

Our starting point is that curiosity, joy, clarity and steadiness are already resources of the natural human mind. Hearing that idea can remain theoretical. We begin with an actual experience: a moment of interest, brightness or curiosity that you recognise in yourself, however brief. What was it like, and what helped it become available?

Begin with one part of daily life that matters to you: sleep, food, movement, phone use or rest, for example. It does not have to be a grand aim. Returning to one area gives you somewhere to observe what happens and develop a clearer relationship with your own experience.

Focus narrows onto something. Attention can also hold a wider internal and external experience and allow a choice of action. Becoming familiar with those experiences gives us more to explore than whether your attention is good or bad. Your own words may be more useful than the name of a quality.

Honesty at the point of a choice

Suppose you and your coach agree to try bedtime at ten o’clock, perhaps with a reminder. Ten arrives and you want to keep watching something or use your phone. You are allowed to choose that. Just before choosing, the invitation is to pause and make a brief, truthful journal note about your internal experience and reasons.

Wanting to keep watching because it is fun and sleep feels boring can be enough to bring back. The work is becoming comfortable hearing that reason, with somewhere to explore it and feel held within the honesty. Keeping the original bedtime arrangement is not the measure of whether honesty happened.

Questions to explore

  • Which quality feels familiar, and what was an actual moment of experiencing it?

  • What do I want at the moment of choosing, and what is happening within me?

Why this part is here

Recognition lets you experience that potential for yourself. An honest account gives us something to explore together. We begin developing confidence in what you directly experience and can return to that throughout the course.

See this part in the six-week outline →

Sources and further reading

Research notes and references

This part follows Nisha’s account of recognition and honesty, including her bedtime illustration. The companion articles develop the ideas and give their sources. The course outline explains the sequence and how its pace can adapt.

Read alongside this part

Further sources

Course outline and the reason for this theme · All six course readings