The sooner you register and the more you take, the more you SAVE

The entire Certification & Licensing Curriculum – Part One and Part Two
ALL Certification & Licensing modules, including ADD-8500 – The ENTIRE Challenges Curriculum Series (please see Catalog)

The curriculum that is making its debut in 2007 has been, as I like to say, "slow-cooking" for a very long time now. I am amazed and excited that the time has finally come to begin the actuation of a long-held dream -- offering comprehensive training in an assessment-based coaching structure that objectifies and amplifies a client's progress.

Although I posted The Challenges Inventory™ on the ADDCoach.com website to be taken by anyone with interest, when I put it in together in 1994 I designed it to be used with the guidance of a coach trained to work with it, and licensed to do so.

"Being" an Institute for over a decade has been an all-consuming task!

It has left little time to do much more than introduce the Challenges concepts - briefly- to the OFI Associates. Each OFI graduate is licensed to royalty free use of The Challenges Inventory™ in any one-on-one client setting, but its promise as a coaching tool has gone virtually unfulfilled all these years. There are only a very small handful of coaches who understand even a tenth of its potential.

Every time I am hired for a two-hour Challenges Inventory™ Interpretation I become newly impressed with the power for real change it sets in motion.

For those who take advantage of the full interpretation, shifts in self-esteem are practically immediate; abilities to structure action seem to skip light years ahead as we speak. Mind fog begins to burn away as they look at the mirror of their functioning that their Challenges Profile™ represents, allowing a glimmer of self-acceptance to shine through – often for the first time in a long time.

I have noticed with those who have gone on to become clients that there is much less back-tracking and second guessing, so they progress more rapidly than clients who didn't start with the full Assessment – and their coaching is more effective from the onset

I promised myself last year that I would take December of 2006, when OFI holds no classes, to put together at least the beginning of a Challenges Inventory Curriculum - something I have been eager to do since before the turn of the century, when I held the first beta classes!

As I emerged from hyperfocus shortly before Twelfth Night 2007, I was astonished to note that I had managed to pull together a decade's worth of consistent, yet relatively unstructured, progress toward this goal into a coherent whole that could actually be delivered as I had always imagined it.

My personal challenge now is to find some way to describe the structure to YOU in a way that will encourage you to enroll. Like explaining the process of tying a bow, it's a lot easier to DO than to describe in a fashion that makes it sound do-able. So here goes --

The scores are plotted on a grid that gives a visual representation of relative functioning in nine key areas. Most of the Challenges are problematic to some extent in most adults, but ALL of them are problematic to a much greater extent in most ADDults – no accident, since the genesis of its design was a group of the most overt functional challenges implied by an ADD diagnosis.

The particular relationship between the scores distinguishes a "pattern" – a Challenges Profile ™– that you will learn to identify, telling you how (and in what areas of life) a client's specific combination of Challenges is causing trouble. It will also allow you to be able to strategize effective ways to coach them to "end-run" their Challenges.

The questions fall into nine different categories - The Challenges - the mastery of which would be useful to ADDer and non-ADDer alike:

1. Attentional/Focusing Issues
2. Hyperactivity
3. Stress Tolerance
4. Mood Swings
5. Impulsivity
6. Time Management
7. Transition Management
8. Perfectionism and Black & White Thinking
9. Organization & Task Completion

The nine Challenges can be further grouped into 3 categories,
in alignment with The Dynamics of Attending:

1. Intentionality
• Organization & Task Completion
• Attentional/Focusing Issues
• Hyperactivity
2. Getting Unstuck
• Stress Tolerance
• Transition Management
• Perfectionism/Black & White Thinking
3. Staying on track
• Impulsivity
• Mood Swings
• Time Management

Once you understand the underlying concepts, you will find that:

• You will "suddenly" be able to understand how to coach your clients more specifically.
• You will be able to develop systems and strategies that will be effective a much greater percentage of the time than will ever be possible without an effective way to quantify functioning and progress.
• You will be able to "explain your clients to themselves" in a manner that will not inspire oppositional reaction. Some may even accuse you of reading their minds!

As you begin to develop facility with making the connections, you will find, as I did, that:

• You will have a structure to anchor the bazillion shards of ADD information in a fashion that things "suddenly" begin to coalesce.
• Your ability to listen for The Challenges will become almost an instinct, even with clients who never complete The Challenges Inventory™ to give you a chance to interpret it for them.
• You will begin to feel like you really know what you're doing because you will be able to see coaching's effectiveness in the lives of your clients, who will tell you how much coaching is working for them.
• Coaching will begin to feel "seat-of-the-pants" easy in a manner that is almost scary!

The significance of the individual scores themselves is not nearly as important a predictor of functioning and follow-through than the patterns formed by the relationship of the scores to one another – a client's Challenges Profile™.

For example, because of the particular way it relates to some of their other scores, a client whose Impulsivity score is 90 may find that impulsivity is a great deal more troubling to them than you find it is for you – even though your Impulsivity score may be 135.

It will "show up" differently in the two of you, causing slightly different problems in each of your lives, and your client will respond to interventions quite different from the ones you might develop for yourself.

One size never fits ANYONE very well!

The Certification & Licensing Curriculum [CCL], will teach you how to interpret the scores in Part I, and will train you to deliver a 2-hour Initial Interpretation in Part II – to clients who will take The Challenges Inventory™ on the web. The client will find your name on an exclusive listing of the ONLY Coaches who are certified and licensed to do the Initial Interpretation, and the list of CCL Coaches will be returned right along with their results

Once you understand how to illuminate the areas that need focus, along with your recommendations for a path through their Challenges, a great many of the people who hire you for an initial consultation will want to continue with coaching – with you!

You will also be licensed to use The Challenges Inventory™ with your existing clients, and as a tool to attract new clients through other means. Administering and interpreting The Challenges Inventory™ can become a lucrative income center to augment the rest of your coaching practice.

The Challenges Curriculum SERIES (the entire Challenges Inventory™ Curriculum), designed to be taken by anyone, is the backbone of CCL Part I Curriculum. You begin by acquiring a thorough understanding of each of the Challenges and each of the Triplicities.

The CCL-specific training modules will teach the systems development skills necessary to coach clients through these areas, individually and in combination, augmented by required Challenges Lab hours to make sure you become fully proficient before graduation, certification and licensing.

The Challenges Labs are where you will practice coaching each of the Challenges and combinations of Challenges in a group setting that will be ideal to help you understand enough of the tricks and the traps to try your wings on one of the CCL Sliding-Scale Clinic clients (Year 2)

Each month, coordinating with the order of The Intensives, we will take a specific Challenge, explore areas of coaching impacted, and practice coaching them.

Students in Part II will coach CCL Clinic clients in the same setting -- an observed Coaching Lab for them and a chance to watch the impact of various styles of delivery for the Part I students.

The class (and TCL) will have a period where they will add depth to the interpretation and, once the client is no longer present, we will hold a supportive RoundTable discussion, offering feedback on Strengths and Growing Edges (so that every Challenges Interpretation you deliver can be more detailed and more useful than the last.)

Clinic Compensation structure will be detailed in CCL-8601, Introduction to Licensing and Certification (yes - earn while you learn!)

Part of the structure of the 2-hour Interpretation each CCL coach will learn to deliver is the fee: set at $250, no matter which of you does it. (Read more about that from the Challenges Inventory Consult details page on every month of the ADDCoach.com calendar)

• Differentiating between time & transition struggles – and how to coach them
• The 3 phases of transition management: where clients get stuck – and how that changes what you do
• Blending black and white to Shades of Gray™
• Getting it done vs. doing it right
• Organizing by category (and filter!)
• Lengthening the gap between impulse and action
• The Challenges that lead to Procrastination – and how to Sherlock the relationship between scores to get your client back in ACTION
• Mood management & Boggle™
• In other words, coaching to individual attentional differences

Get ready to play full out – no hanging out modestly "at the back of the room.". will be permitted!

• Clients are not "uncoachable" simply because a certain number of coaches believe that they are not.
  • One size never fits very many people very well!
  • Consensus has NEVER been a very reliable measure of truth (remember, most people said the the world was flat at one time, and 'sup with that story about The Emporer's New Clothes?)
  
  
• Clients are not "uncoachable" simply because the coach doesn't have the appropriate skill-set to coach them.
  • I have found a great MANY of those "uncoachable" clients respond positively and dramatically to the right skill-set.
    
  
  
• I invite you to take the opportunity to come learn some new skills and watch your practice expand.
  • A LIFE is a terrible thing to waste.

If the shoe doesn't fit . . . don't blame the FOOT! ™

More about the Challenges Inventory™ Curriculum can be found in the pdf Challenges Catalog — on the ADDCoach.com Downloads Page; in the list of documents available, you will also find one that explains Bridges and Bridge calls (for those of you who are new to this type of call — it's EASY, just a little different)