Hello. My name is Jonathan Hassall. I'm an ADHD and executive function coach based in Brisbane, Australia, and I coach people all over the world. I'd like to thank Henry and the ADHD UK team for inviting me to speak to you tonight on something that I think is very important. And this is the idea of motivation in ADHD. And to that end, I want to talk to you about the illusion of motivation in ADHD. So when we think about motivation, and particularly when I talk to my clients about motivation, they're pretty uniform in how they describe it. They talk about missing motivation. They talk about motivation that turned up and then fled. They talk about trying to find motivation to get things done.

And it seems to be this wonderful magical thing that just appears like a force of nature, drives them forward into action, and then vanishes just as quickly. Now, this seems like a very unreliable way of motivating yourself to get things done. So I wanted to look a little bit more deeply at it and try and figure out if we couldn't find some clues in this understanding of motivation that might help guide us to doing something about it. So tonight, I'm going to start off by talking about, well, what is this missing motivation? How am I hearing about it from my clients? Then, I want to contrast that with a more reliable presentation of motivation. In other words, the motivation that other people seem to utilize quite easily.

Also, I want to then consider what maybe we're seeing in terms of neuroscience behind this idea. Is there anything currently in neuroscience that might support what we think we're seeing here? And finally, I want to share a design design an approach which is going to help people with ADHD adapt to create far more reliable motivation. So let's start with some definitions. Now, motivation, a definition of motivation, is emotional drive by which humans achieve their goals. Now, we've got to remember that motivation is an emotion. And there's been some wonderful work done on emotion theory in recent years, particularly by a lady by the name of Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's a psychologist, research psychologist based in The US.

And very lucky, you can actually watch a lot of her YouTube videos at the moment where she talks through a lot of her research and how she's arrived at where she has. And I'd strongly encourage, you'll see the reference there, to review her book How Emotions Are Made. Now, she talks about emotions, she talks about emotions are constructs that our brains create to guide our actions and explain how we're feeling in a specific situation. Now, if we apply that idea to motivation, because motivation is forward looking, we must be thinking that it's a construct that helps us create a guide to future actions and how we're going to feel about them when we're doing them.

So now we've introduced the idea of a prospective approach to looking at an emotion, which is motivation, which I think is the first clue. So let's get in and let's have a look at what I hear. Because when I talk to my clients, and in fact, what I experience myself, that there are a lot more differences for motivation for people with ADHD. The first thing that I hear is that it's got to be rewarding or exciting. It's got to be the shiny new thing. If it's something I'm looking forward to that I want to do, then it's going to be easier to do it. And in fact, often, when people with ADHD seek out motivation.

That's what they look for. They try and find something engaging or fun in it that they can apply to it. Now, and I must add too, it's not always straight fun. It's very often challenge is a great appeal to people with ADHD because we do tend to love to problem solve. So just being told that something hasn't been done before is often incredibly motivating to go and do it. The second presentation that I hear about a lot is that it's an under threat. So in other words, I'm gonna be in really big trouble if I don't get this done. Yeah. You might argue that this is really motivation away from a threat by going towards something else. However, the outcome's still the same, that it's another high agitation state.

That relies on threat. Now interestingly too, what I see really uniformly across my clients with ADHD who do achieve more reliably is that they very often use anxiety as an activation tool. And this is particularly true in the women I coach, that they've learned over time that if I escalate this threat, if I make the threat more immediate, then I'm far more likely to be able to activate earlier. The third thing is that both these things have to be very close in time. So we've got to have a temporal proximity, which means that three weeks away, it's too far away for it to be a meaningful reward or a meaningful threat. Tomorrow.

Is close enough for it to be meaningful reward or meaningful threat. And, obviously, this will vary from person to person. And as I mentioned with people who utilize anxiety and threat to activate, they'll often just bring the time forwards. They'll say, well, if I don't do it today, I won't do it. So I better do it today. Better do it right now. And this is where they use that that, again, that heightened anxiety to bring the time forwards. So we have something that is a very high agitation state that requires external stimulation and is risky because it's very close in time. So with that, I think it's a reasonable argument to make that we're going to have something that's unreliable, extrinsically driven.

Which we know is a challenging motivation to have because it relies on the other thing being interesting or threatening. And it's expensive. It's expensive in the terms of the energy that we have to to deliver on this high agitation state, but it's also expensive in the terms that it's risky. We don't allow ourselves a lot of time to achieve things. So it's pretty easy to see why motivation is a challenging experience for people with ADHD. So what happens for the rest of the world? Well, let's say most of the rest of the world. So when we talk about motivation to people without ADHD, we hear a very different story. I remember I was coaching a young couple, and there was an argument about household chores. And.

They got to the point about you don't do enough around here, and the person with ADHD was becoming quite defensive. And the person without ADHD was getting increasingly frustrated. And at one point, the person with ADHD blurted out in frustration, It's not fair you like washing clothes. You like housework. To which the person without ADHD looked at them quite horrified and angrily and said, how could you say that? I hate washing clothes. It's it's one the most boring tasks in the world, and it's not particularly fun because we've got children, and so there's scary things in those clothes. So after we all calmed down a little bit, we had a little conversation. But the really interesting thing was the person without ADHD.

Looked at the person with ADHD and said, is that the only way you get things done? Do you have to like it? To which there was sort of this slow nod of, yeah. That helps. So now, firstly, that was a great thing in that moment, that moment of awareness where a couple shared an awareness of, wow, you see the world very differently to me. And I'll be touching more on those concepts in a talk I'm doing later in this twenty four hour period where I'll be talking about couples and ADHD. However, to move on to this story, we said to the person, well, how do you motivate them? And I said, well, you know, I guess, firstly, it's not a decision, will I or won't I, because I committed to doing it. So that sort of is done. Already decided.

But then I thought about it, and I thought, well, I imagined myself doing it. I saw the best time to do it, and now it just happens. Happens at this particular time of day, on a particular day of the week, and I get it done, and it's no particular problem. So I said, okay. Well, that's wonderful. What about if you particularly don't feel like doing it? Like, say someone's done something horrible in their pants. And the response was, yeah, I know what you mean. There are days like that. But I guess, I don't know, on days like that, I just imagine my family going out looking clean and feeling good in their nice clean clothes, which is really.

That person's feeling, not the family's feeling. But it was interesting. What they did was they visualized an outcome to help stimulate the activation of the task. But it wasn't really about their primary motivation of the task. The primary motivation of the task came from just being able to imagine it and see it happening in a realistic way. So it's reliable because it's self generated. It's intrinsic because it's self generated. It's not relying on the external thing to be interesting or exciting. And it's quite efficient because that was not a high agitation emotion. That was a pretty stable emotion that they were having. So it's very easily accessible whenever they really needed it.

So if we were gonna break down that experience and really understand it and think, well, hang on. That's sort of pretty cool that you can just do that. So let's figure it out. Let's let's let's have a look at it. Now, luckily, here's one I'd made earlier. I wrote a book last year with Madeleine O'Reilly, who's a wonderful psychologist based in Sydney, Australia, where we did exactly this. We broke down, well, what happens from an executive function viewpoint in terms of activating to task and getting things done. And we read a book called Decoding Doing. Now, in that book, we talk about a model called the Cima model, c I m a a. And we broke down what we thought were the stages of this process. So the first one is connect, the first c.

Which is basically a cost benefit argument. As I said with my person in the washing clothes, they'd already decided it was a good split of tasks, it was reasonable they could do it, and it would be beneficial to both them and the family. So the cost benefit was easy. Now, we should be aware there's a couple of traps in this particular stage already if you have ADHD. Because firstly, the cost may seem exaggerated if we can't clearly think through the steps of the task and see what's involved. We may also underestimate the cost if we can't see the actions in detail and we do the old 30,000 feet summary view of it. The benefit can both be underplayed and exaggerated too. And again, thinking about that temporal idea, when.

We're close in time, we can see the benefit or the threat. When we're further away, it can be harder to see that. The next step though, imagine, so see, I In imagine, I think is where we really start generating motivation to the extent of activation. The first one is motivation in terms of generally commitment to doing it. And it's helpful. It starts the ball rolling. But I think this is really the powerful part. That in imagine, we think of the process or how we're going to do it, which if we think in enough detail, we will see the resources required, including time and energy, and probably see them more accurately than we usually do.

And then, we have to apply it to context. So in other words, I have to see it happening in my life, which means we're going to be seeing the the best time for the task and the best time for me to do that task, whether it's about how I'm functioning at different times of the day or or whether just what my day contains and where it will fit best in my day. Now, one of the issues with ADHD, when we look at this sort of idea, we think through these concepts, but we don't tend to do it in enough detail or with enough organization, which makes sense if you think about executive function and working memory and attention management and even emotional regulation falls into it. But we'll talk about that a bit later. So we imagine it.

In detail, then we can see it happening, so it feels achievable. Which means we now have this nice little emotional package, this construct, as Lisa Feldman Barrett refers to, a little concise package that we can refer back to a feeling that it's doable and it's just the right time to do it. And I want you to hold that in mind because that doable right time is an interesting concept if you have ADHD because it's not a high agitation emotion. It's quite calm. It's almost resigned in a way, but it's still positive. So we have to be able to call up that memory of that emotion, in other words, that motivation, at the time when we want to activate to that task. Then when we're activating to the task, we've got to act.

Which is the real world conversion of the imagined stages, and involves usually some problem solving. And that act and achievement, again, reinforces motivation. As we're achieving things, we get little dopamine hits, we feel better about doing it. And so we wanna keep doing it. It's probably why one of the reasons why we often stay with the task too long, fiddling around the edges too. And last but not least, the achieve stage. Now, this is the thing we often don't do with ADHD, and it's where we stop and say, hey, that worked. Well done. But even more importantly, we acknowledge what made it work. In other words, what we did to make it work, because there's our toolkit for the future.

And we also can think about what would I do differently next time and how, and which is another opportunity we often miss out on. You know, when I coach university students, one of the things I'm constantly asking to do is straight after exams or straight after you get a mark from an assignment, sit down and write out what you've what you wished you'd done, and how you would do it differently, and what actually worked well for you. Make a note of it, and then put it in your calendar for just before you'd be due to start work on the next exam or assignment. Because we lose this valuable information. So this is SEMA, connect, imagine, motivate, act, and achieve. As you can see, there is motivational generating.

Components to all of them. However, as I said, the constructed imagining, I think, is the most critical part for that activation motivation. Now, what's the mechanism of these things? And I alluded to it a little bit earlier. So it's executive function. If we think about attentional regulation or direction, emotional regulation or direction, and working memory, which includes capacity, then all of these stages are reliant on them happening. We have to be able to direct attention to the right thing at the right time in the right detail. We have to be able to hold that information in terms of working memory, which can be particularly challenging with ADHD.

Which just as a clue is why we usually externalize it. And then the emotional stuff, we have to address the impulse control. It requires a lot of resistance emotionally to stay with the task that we haven't yet proven for ourselves. And the subsets of characteristics that fall under these core executive functions, as I've already mentioned, impulse control, but also time perception and management and context perception, which is that really big one about seeing it all fitting together. So let's talk a little bit more and maybe a bit speculative with the neuroscience. Now, currently, know we're talking in neural networks in terms of the brain, and there's been some great fMRI studies done and some interesting ones done.

To date, the ones that I've seen have been relatively small cohorts, but looking at the neural networks and ADHD. Now, the two I wanna pay attention to in terms of this mechanism is default mode network and the task positive. Now, default mode was there in red, task positive in blue. Now, default mode for the context of what we're talking, it does lots of things. But for the context that we're talking, it's very much an emotional association stage. So in other words, we get triggered, we pull on our pooled experience of life, which is why you've noticed it reached backwards into the brain, we think. It's actually drawing on memory as well. And we create an association. Now, the great thing about that is it's very quick.

It gives us a very quick idea of what might be happening next because we've sort of seen it before, but that's what we mean when we say an emotion. It's a construct that we've made earlier that tells us that when that happens, that's likely to happen next. Now, with ADHD, we live in that neural network. I would propose that that is our biased way of thinking. Whereas other people without ADHD are often much better at switching into the task positive network, the blue. As you can see, that's much more prefrontal cortex based, does reach back. However, it's much more about focus on the details. It's about being objective and seeing the details of what is actually happening now rather than being colored completely by the past.

And what you see when that happens, and there's a reason I did the graphic the way I did, is we actually see that the default mode turns down a bit while the task positive turns up. So that suggests that if we want to be able to see things in detail and project successfully in time, we need access to the task positive network and the corresponding down regulation of the default mode. Then once we can decide what emotion we want or summary is a better way of referring to emotions or construct in terms of Feldman Barrett's language, we can then create the emotion that we're going to utilize. So problem with that is with ADHD, as I said, I think we spend more time biased in the default mode network.

The studies that I've seen suggest that we do not activate the task positive network nearly as robustly as easily, and there isn't the corresponding down regulation of the emotional network, which has been theorized as to why we remain so easily distracted when we're trying to focus on things. So right there, I think we've got a neurological clue as to what might be behind this approach to motivation. It's very emotional. It's very emotionally driven and very reactive, which is what default mode's about. Task positive is about being more intrinsic and directed. So what are we going to do? Well, here we get to the crunch point. So with ADHD, we're going to realign definitions and our behavioral systems.

So let's start with realigning the idea of motivation, that motivations can be built. I remember, and it was in terms of emotions, but as I said, motivation is the same thing. I had a client, lovely man, very clever man, and we were talking about choosing the emotions we wanted to have. And I said, well, when was the last time you decided how you want to feel tomorrow? And he looked at me and said, what? You can't do that. Emotions are like the weather. They just turn up and you deal with them. And, yeah, I get that experience. I understand that feeling. But the reality is we should be creating our emotions and turn our motivation because they can be built and should be. That it's going to require directed attention.

And organized thought, which is working memory based. So these are areas we know we might struggle with. We've got to have to create new associations. So in other words, back to the idea that motivation can be built, we've got to create new associations or emotions, which there's a couple of tie ins with that SEMA model I talked about. And it needs to have a time relevant trigger. So it's no good just sitting there saying, oh, I'm gonna build my motivation today, and it's gonna work every time I try to use it for this project. We've gotta make it recreate at every point of activation. So let's coach this change. Let's break it down, make it usable in the world. First thing, we've got to define the task, and we've to define it in detail.

Which means we need to utilize attention and working memory. Now, attention is helped if we've got an externalized prompt, so in other words, like a checklist. But the other thing too is working memory is helped if we externalize what we're trying to do. So in other words, getting it out of our heads either by writing it down or by verbalizing, because we do love verbal processing and remembering that language is both a communication tool and a thought organization tool, then we can see all the detail. And if you wanna test that idea, just just try and write down what you had planned to do this morning, and notice what how many little steps you were skipping over in your head.

Second thing, we're gonna design the action. So while we're writing at the task, we may as well write, well, what will I actually have to do? So will I have to drive to the shops? Will I have to find my car keys first? Will I have to stop at the bank to get the money to pay for this or that? You know? So when I think about start breaking it down and seeing that action happen, visualizing it, I can actually break down and get the details of the of the actual actions within the task. And therefore, I'm gonna be much better at projecting the time and seeing it happen as a real life thing.

Then finally, I have to create a trigger activation at the right time. So alarms are brilliant. And just as a little tip, set the alarm for about five or ten minutes before you want to start, not at the time you want to start because everybody needs a little transition time. And particularly with ADHD, it's very helpful. So let's check that against the SEMA code. So, well, we've already connected. We're gonna do the task, and we maybe we can get a little bit more of that by defining the task. We're definitely imagining the process, resources, and context. That's process, resources, context as we both define the task and design the actions. And we've therefore created the motivational feeling, which is, remember, that it's doable.

And it's the right time. And that's the level we want, that it just feels doable in the right time. We do not need to be jumping in our seat excited to do it. It's lovely if we do, but we don't need to be there. And then we have to think about the motivation and action at the right time. So in other words, we got to be able to recall that feeling at the point where we want to activate. So we've got to trigger that activation. And finally, the achieved component is we've got to remember to review, reinforce that motivational emotion, and then create another trigger activation and probably some actions that go with it for the future when we wanna do this sort of task again. Okay. Well, I hope you found that helpful.

Once again, I'm Jonathan Hassall. It's my name. I have a coaching practice called Connect ADHD and EF Coaching. We're based in Australia, but as I said, we coach people all over the world and have been for the last ten years. We also, as I said, have a book out, Decoding Doing, which is available on Amazon. Obviously, we're speaking at this wonderful conference, which please donate. This is a really worthwhile event, to get free access is just incredible. Okay. Well, once again, thank you, Henry, and thank you, team. ADHD UK, this is a brilliant event, and I'm very, very proud to have been part of it. Have a great night.