ADHD Breakthrough at Work w/Amy Lightholder, Agile Coach for ADHD

In this episode of Creating Communities, you will hear our guest Amy Lightholder discuss her ADHD diagnosis and how she found a way to use the aspects of ADHD for the benefit of the individual with ADHD and employers:

1. Amy was diagnosed with Depression and later with ADHD.
2. Amy found career success with the Agile Method of work, meaning, working in small groups.
3. “Depression is Unreasonable Optimism”
4. ADHD is hyperactive attention disorder. Smaller working memory, and memory is what makes finishing projects better.
5. The typical workplace with its linear way of working doesn’t work for ADHD people.
6. ADHD can create a spotty job history, an unregulated work pattern.
7. People with ADHD have to control how information and stimulus comes to them, when possible. “ADHD slows down the processing of information.”
8. The Agile Methodologies help the workplace evolve and accommodate the needs of the various people working in a specific environment. Work is divided into mini-projects; and slices the future of the larger projects into small manageable pieces, along with making groups working on each aspect of the projects smaller in size.
9. When people work in smaller groups, the layers of skills and talents that each group member has can come to the surface and contribute to the success of the project in a way that could not be foreseen at the onset of the project.
10. Neurodiverse issues were being recognized around 2008 at large, and very much so in the technology industry.
11. ADHD Female Entrepreneurs is a group of about 24,000 members that formed on the Internet as a result of the tech industry allowing employees to flourish regardless of ADHD diagnoses.
12. Small Group Philosophy can be the most flexible and productive, especially if employees are quirky. Quirky people do well in small groups. More humane and humanistic. Agile emphasizes working in small, autonomous groups.
13. “Employers who invest in accommodating employees’ unique needs can unlock hidden potential and increase productivity,” Amy Lightholder.
14. Emotional safety. Cohesion and social harmony. A small team can make the most of their strengths. Flexibility
15. No one is smarter than all of us together.
16. Treating people as widgets. Large corporate thinking. Allows executives manage extremely large workforces. Executives can’t wrap their heads around individual employees in a sea of workforce humanity.
17. As a coach Amy deals with her coaching clients’ personal issues around work and life.
18. Employee retention improves if employers allow employees to flourish. Employees flourish if allowed to be themselves, whatever that means.
19. Your child has skills and talents. Redefine your child’s skills and talents for their future employers.


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Amy Lightholder Biography

Amy Lightholder is an Agile Coach and teacher with 20 years of experience in the field. Lightholders background is in the tech industry where working in small groups and allowing individual uniqueness to express itself works for the greater good of the company.

As an Agile Coach, Lightholder works with people affected by ADHD: individuals, small groups, primarily independent entrepreneurs and freelancers.

Amy can help improve her clients improve their workflow, their general productivity, and work/life balance, while transferring those basic principles to people’s personal lives.

www.Agile4ADHD.com
a.light.holder@gmail.com