Stacking Wins to Achieve Goals

I'm not a huge fan of New Year's resolutions. One thing that I like to do with goals is set a goal and set it with specific steps. We do this at my work and with my daughter Emily all the time. With Emily in particular, it was actually kind of hard to set some goals at the beginning because she was deflated and defeated. She didn't feel like she had been successful. I use the phrase stacking wins often. If we think about goals in that same context of stacking wins, we want to look at what is the smallest possible thing that we can win at and start there. 

I'm going to use school as an example because for parents of kids with ADHD school is probably one of the biggest hurdles that we encounter. One of the things that we did is we started something really small and planned out our way. If I were to set a goal, and I was starting out fresh, as a parent trying to help increase my child's self-efficacy in regard to showing up at school as their best self, I would start out with scheduling on Sundays. 

What does that look like? It looks like sitting down with a planner for the week. We're not going to use a planner in the sense that maybe you think that you use a planner. In this case, what we're doing is we're actually time blocking. We're looking at where we are going to spend our time. For somebody who has ADHD, time blindness is a real thing. You lose track of time, you think you have more time than you really do, or maybe more time has passed than you thought. It can be pretty deflating when you have a lot to do, and you only have a short amount of time to do it. One of the biggest things that we did to start stacking a win was we planned out our week, and we talked about where our rewards are for getting some things done. Our goal was to do this every single Sunday, which we've done now for the past two years of outlining when we're going to be working on schoolwork and when we have free time. 

For Emily in particular, free time is her most important time and it is a great reward for her. Whether it be that she goes and reads a book, she plays on her phone, she goes to hang out with friends, or take a nap. Free time is her most treasured reward. Find out what your child most easily resonates with as a reward, and you want to find out how to put that on the calendar. By doing this, we can talk about it and say, "What is it that we want to do for fun? How can I help you get something that you don't want to do done? Once it's finished then you can go do something that you want to do." That's a small step. And we can start to stack wins really quickly.