ADD/ADHD and Midlife Career Change

Going through a midlife career change is tough enough. Having ADD and going through a midlife career change can be a lot tougher. ADD can make both the process of deciding on a new career and the actual choice of career more difficult.

ADD and the Midlife Career Change Process

The process of discovering what the right new career is for you requires a fair amount of organization. You need to know the steps in the process. You need to have a plan about how you are going to follow those steps. You need to keep track of where you are. When you start doing research, you need to have that well organized.

If you have ADD, you know it can make both staying organized and staying focused on whatever part of the process you are doing very challenging. To be successful, you will need to use all the strategies you have developed to manage your ADD. For example, keeping all paperwork related to your midlife career change process in one notebook will make all of your information easily accessible. I don’t have to tell you what the alte
ative is.

ADD and Your Choice of Careers

If you are a Baby Boomer with ADD, I am sure that you are pretty familiar with the fact that there are careers that work well for people with ADD and careers that do not. For instance, people with ADD generally do well in fields that require creativity or involve a lot of interaction with other people but do not do well in work that is detail-oriented and requires a high degree of organization.

Therefore, this needs to be part of your decision-making when you get to the point in the process where you narrow the long list of possible careers down to two or three that you want to seriously consider and explore. (This is Step 5 in the process that I lay out in my book “Discover Your Dream Career: 7 Steps to Finding the Career You Always Wanted.”)

How Do I Know If I Have ADD?

If you think that you might have ADD, there are quizzes and questionnaires online that can give you an idea about how likely that is (one of the best can be found at http://www.addresources.org/?q=checklist). A trained ADD coach can talk with you and give you their opinion about your situation. However, in order to get a definitive answer, you need to be tested by a mental health professional that has training and experience in treating people with ADD. The best way to find someone who does that is to get a referral from your doctor.