Mental coach Dr. Richard Coop has worked with numerous top athletes, including the late Payne Stewart*. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Chapel Hill Magazine:

Chapel Hill Magazine: What kinds of demons did Payne face on the golf course?

Dr. Richard Coop: Payne was a deep thinker about golf. He was much smarter than a lot of people, but was also very impulsive. He had a bad case of ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder] and so we worked with that. One thing about athletes with ADHD is that they can hyperfocus when the tension level is high. They can sit for hours in front of a video game or perform in a major championship. I used to watch Payne’s eyes in a major championship and he was hyperfocused, but in the John Deere Classic, he wouldn’t show up mentally. That’s one of the things we really had to work on hard with him. When the intensity level wasn’t high, his mind would go on vacation. We had to find ways to make a challenge out of something that he didn’t think was a challenge.

The worst shot I saw him hit was a plain vanilla chip, just something simple that you or I could hit very easily. It was too easy. He would have three or four different ways of playing it and he wouldn’t commit to a specific way. He would get caught in between.

So I would have him call his shot out loud to his caddie to commit to himself and to another person, and to be responsible for his shot. If he had a shot where he had to stand on his head and flop it up over something, he was fantastic. And those were the ones he wanted to practice, like a basketball player who just wanted to practice H-O-R-S-E shots.

–David Droschak, The Mental Side of Golf (Well, what other side is there?), in Chapel Hill Magazine, July/August 2007.

In three paragraphs, Dr. Coop vividly describes what can happen to many executives with attention deficit disorder. We excel when we face big challenges that play to our ADD nature, but we fade quickly when our ADD has room to play and distract. Not long ago, a client told me about one of his former colleagues who “was never happy unless there was a crisis. Unless there was a fire to put out, she didn’t know what to do with herself.”

Naturally, I couldn’t “diagnose” the former colleague without knowing more, but I might hypothesize two things: (1) she didn’t have a plan, and (2) it would have been nice if someone had pointed this out to her. That said, “knowing” her problem wouldn’t necessarily give her a cure.

David Droschak may well have known something about ADD when he asked the question, “What kind of demons did Payne face on the golf course?” To know your demons is an important first step. But to actually deal with them requires much more. Professionals like Dr. Coop can be a massive help. And when the stakes are high enough (e.g., for a professional golfer or for a business owner or executive), the results are well-worth the expense.

*Payne Stewart died in 1999 due to an airplane malfunction. Full story here at About.com’s Payne Stewart bio.