Practices

Ask about the family properly: parents, brothers and sisters, children, then aunts, uncles and grandparents. Include drinking and drug use, in them as well as in the person sitting with you.

This tends to be the highest yield few minutes of an assessment, because the condition runs strongly in families. Relatives who were never assessed…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 12:87

Ask for the most frightening moment of their life, then the next one down, then the next, until there is a scale running from one to a hundred. You get the ladder you needed, and they get something they did not expect: fear comes in sizes.

Do it slowly and write it in their words rather than yours. Most people arrive believing anxiety is one solid block that either has hold of them or…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 21:83

The family history is not the warm up before the real assessment. Give it proper time and it will often tell you more than any single rating scale in the folder.

Walk through the family rather than asking one summary question about it. Who struggled at school, who could never sit through a meal, who changed…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 49:13

Note who is a first degree relative and who is a second, instead of writing 'runs in the family'. Parents, children and siblings sit in one ring. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins sit in the next.

A simple grid helps: names down the side, then relation, what they were like, what was ever diagnosed, what was ever treated. The picture comes out…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 58:11

Ask whether anyone kept the old school reports. The same lines turn up generation after generation: not working to potential, talks too much, never has the right books with him.

They were written by teachers who had never heard of ADHD, about children nobody was going to assess, and that is exactly what makes them worth…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 96:5

If someone is about to send off a saliva kit to fill in the family history they never had, have a conversation first. These tests hand back more than health information, and they hand it back with nobody in the room.

A father who is not the father, a sibling nobody mentioned, a donor conception no one planned to explain: these arrive by email on an ordinary…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 42:38

'I am disorganised' cannot be treated. 'The post piles up on the hall table until something ends up with a debt collector' can. Spend the time getting the problem down to something that specific.

Push for the particulars: which task, which moment, what was happening just before, what they did instead. Where you can, ask someone who was there…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedADHD skillsQur’an 2:31

For the child who flies off the handle at noise, labels and crowded rooms, with no autism diagnosis in the picture, a free parent completed sensitivity questionnaire will tell you more than another behaviour chart.

It gives you a structured way to describe the reactivity without reaching for a diagnosis the child may not have, and it points at what to change:…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 4:28

Run the assessment yourself and watch while they work. Under real effort you will see the small movements, the tics and the overflow that never appear in ordinary conversation, and none of it reaches you if a technician or an app does the testing.

Sit where you can see hands and face. Note what happens as the task gets harder: the tongue that comes out, the leg that starts going, the free hand…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 3:159

Before intensive work ends, turn what you have learned about a child's thinking into things a teacher can actually do on a Tuesday morning. That translation is what decides whether any of the gains survive going back to school.

A profile written for clinicians is no use in a classroom of thirty. Give three or four concrete actions instead: where this child sits, how…

Twenty minutesGetting assessed and diagnosedCoreQur’an 3:159

If sitting still with your eyes closed has never worked, do it moving. Walking, washing up, gardening: the exercise is the same, and there is something to hold on to.

Sitting meditation asks for the hardest possible version of the task, sustained inward attention with nothing outside to grip. Attach attention to…

Twenty minutesGrounding and settlingMindfulnessQur’an 3:191

Walk somewhere at a deliberately slower pace than normal. Stop now and then to look at something properly, and let your breathing settle into the pace.

Choosing to go slower is itself the exercise, because it is a small piece of holding back that you can actually feel. Ten minutes is plenty. Outdoors…

Twenty minutesGrounding and settlingMindfulnessQur’an 67:15

If your child is learning to settle, learn it alongside them rather than supervising. Parents who practise report less stress of their own and less flying off the handle.

Attention difficulties run in families, so the adult in the room is often working with much the same wiring at the end of a longer day. Practising…

Twenty minutesGrounding and settlingMindfulnessQur’an 16:80

If your imagination runs away with you, use it rather than fight it. Guided imagery gives a vivid mind somewhere to go.

Being able to disappear into a scene is a real ability, even when it has mostly got you into trouble at school and in meetings. A recording that…

Twenty minutesGrounding and settlingMindfulnessQur’an 40:64

Left, right, left, right. Walking, swimming, drumming and rowing all give the body the same steady side to side rhythm that the seated techniques are copying.

If tapping your own shoulders feels odd, or you would rather not do anything that looks like a technique, go for a walk instead and let the rhythm do…

Twenty minutesGrounding and settlingBody basedQur’an 20:53

Your settling kit should cost nothing. Tea you already buy, a photo already on your phone, an old jumper, a smooth stone, a puzzle that takes your whole attention.

Anything you have to buy first becomes a reason not to start, and for anyone short of money it can add a layer of shame to the thing that was meant…

Twenty minutesGrounding and settlingBody basedQur’an 16:80

Choose one good thing the person did and carry it forward in your own life this week.

A habit of theirs kept alive, a kindness they showed passed on, keeps their good present in the world.

Twenty minutesKeep the bondGriefQur’an 28:77

Knowing something calmly and feeling it are two separate achievements, and the second takes longer. If you can say the reasonable thing but it does not touch how you feel, you are partway, not failing.

The gap does not close by arguing with yourself harder. It closes by living it: doing the practice in real situations, in your body, while the…

Twenty minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 87:8

Pick the news channel you cannot stand and watch ten minutes of it on purpose. The only job is to notice what rises in you and let it go by.

Real provocation turns up when you are least ready for it. This gives you the feeling with nothing at stake: the indignation, the tightening, the…

Twenty minutesMaking it stickMindfulnessQur’an 41:35

When something is genuinely alive for the person in front of you, work with that. Whatever you had planned to cover keeps until a quieter week.

Teaching over the top of live feeling does not land, and it tells the other person that your agenda outranks their week. When there is heat, follow…

Twenty minutesMaking it stickCoreQur’an 18:23

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.