Dr. Russell Barkley

number two self-awareness the ability to monitor and attend to your own behavior both of these start very early in life each takes at least 10 years to mature if not more and then when those start to kick off you get the next two which has to do with working memory and the first one is non-verbal working memory but you know it as visual imagery which is a capacity to imagine

things.

You recall images in your mind from your past, call it hindsight, and you use those to anticipate what could happen next.

Foresight.

The fourth thing you're going to get is the mind's voice.

You're going to start to develop language to yourself.

It's all out loud.

Little children talk out loud to themselves.

But by the time you're eight to ten, that should be in your head.

You should be able to talk to yourself without people hearing you and without you moving your lips and your face.

And so now you've got four executive abilities.

You can self-restrain, you can monitor yourself, you can visualize to yourself, and you can talk to yourself.

And that's a little Swiss army knife of mind tools that allows you to control yourself.

Then you get the next three.

You use those four to manage your emotions.

So emotional self-regulation comes next.

And with that, right along with it is self-motivation.

And then finally, you get the biggie, the last one, which is planning and problem solving.

The ability to manipulate stuff in your head to come up with solutions to get around obstacles and help you get to your goals and solve your problems.

Those are the seven deficits that people with ADHD have to varying degrees.