Co-Authors

Grace Friedman was diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) at twelve years old and has experienced all the life-challenging effects it presents. Grace is an advocate for young people with ADHD, author, speaker, and blogger and founder of the ADDYTeen.com community, which is visited by people around the world daily. She is a blogger at The Huffington Post, and at fifteen wrote Embracing Your ADHD, a guide for teens which has been downloaded by thousands from her website. After recently graduating with a BA in Psychology, she works with teens for the State of Washington, mentors others with ADHD, and has plans to become a clinical psychologist. Grace, now thriving with her ADHD, brings a spirit of generosity and purposefulness to everything she does.

Karate master, Peter Johnson, is a seventh-degree black belt in Karate and also a master of Tae Bo®. He has been teaching students in the martial arts since 1993. He sees Karate as a way to help kids with ADHD build “mental discipline muscles.” Indeed, martial arts have had a dramatic effect on the lives of many people with ADHD (based on statistics from the National Association of Professional Martial Artists on the positive scholastic benefits of karate in children’s lives). Peter’s philosophy is that martial arts is not simply about acquiring physical skill, but more importantly is about acquiring a drive for excellence in all areas of life. Sarah met Peter while training in a form of kickboxing called Tae Bo® at his dojo, and additionally watched him train her kids in Karate, and was very impressed by how he has motivated all kinds of people to work hard to meet their full potential. She realized that the ideas that a coach routinely instills in his athletes can also apply to the treatment of ADHD, and she would like her ADHD patients and others to be able to internalize these strategies to be the most successful they can be.

Sarah’s husband, Dr. Benjamin Cheyette, is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, where he sees patients, teaches medical students and psychiatric residents, and runs a scientific laboratory exploring the molecular origins of psychiatric illness. In his clinical practice he has treated patients with ADHD, including professionals who qualify for this diagnosis. He is also a black belt student of Peter Johnson, and has witnessed the transformative power of successful coaching strategies on goal-setting, focus, and achievement in the dojo—as well as the generalization of such strategies beyond athleticism to other spheres of life.