Did You Know Having ADHD Can Be an Advantage?

Here are three problems you can turn into tools.

When people are diagnosed with ADHD they are often dismayed by the diagnosis. For adults, there’s an Ah-Ha moment that explains a lot of their behavior. Others will join the ADHD crowd in order to have an excuse for being unproductive.

Regardless of when, how or why ADHD became a part of your life, it doesn’t have to become a reason for not succeeding. There are three main issues that those with ADHD struggle with. Each one is a problem in its own right. Each one can also be used to accomplish more.

Paying Attention

This is likely the most common issue that people with ADHD struggle with. The inability to pay attention has caused many to be dismissed as not caring enough about anything to focus. It often lands them into trouble because they become bored with the topic or task at hand.

However, the misunderstanding is that they don’t pay attention because they don’t care. More often than not, they lose interest in what they’re working on. At least for a time. When given another task to work on, they will come back to previous tasks after a while.

This is how you turn a disadvantage into an advantage.

By using a water mill approach, you can feed the need to change focus while still gaining ground on multiple venues. Placing time limits on the things you’re working on will help keep your mind sharp. It will also keep your focus fresh so your thoughts can remain organized.

Once the time limit has been reached on one task, you can move on to another one, then another one. As you move from one task to another, you circle back to where you began and repeat the cycle. Each cycle will bring you closer to accomplishing what you originally set out to do.

Impulsiveness

Generally speaking, being impulsive can lead to disaster. This isn’t true only for those with ADHD, but for anyone who has an impulsive nature. It can be as simple as running across the street without looking to getting married on a whim.

Being impulsive isn’t always a bad thing. Seeing someone in danger and acting to save them is an impulsive action. You act without thinking about the harm that can come to you. Your instinct is to save the other person.

Impulsive thoughts can be a source of inspiration. Keeping a notepad, digital or paper, can be used to keep track of those ideas. Those ideas will turn into projects later on down the road. During times of calm, you can go through what you have written down and decide on which to keep and which to discard. Davinci was impulsive and likely worked on several of his inventions in cycles.

By acknowledging impulsive behaviors you can begin to train your mind to control your impulsive actions. When you have the urge to do something, turn your attention to documenting it for later. Some impulses should be acted on, others should be written down. The difficult part will be in figuring out which is which.

Restlessness

No one likes it when a meeting drags on. It’s even worse if you have ADHD. You’ve stopped paying attention fifteen minutes into the meeting. You come back around after you’ve given your attention to something else for a while but during that time, you don’t really hear anything.

Then you get ideas of things you can be doing, should be doing, want to do. During the meeting, your attention turns to working out how to accomplish the things that are running through your mind.

After a half-hour, usually less, you start fidgeting where you are. You’ve been ready to go since you walked in. Your body is telling you that you can’t sit still.

You’re restless.

Being restless can be a good thing. Most people think that you’re just fidgety, and in a way that’s true. There’s more to it than that and yes, being restless can be useful.

Lethargic people aren’t restless.

People who are content to stare at a computer screen all day aren’t restless.

People who work on the computer, then do something physical, then do something lethargic are restless people.

Your mind is on a constant rotation of ideas and projects. Your body swings from being full of energy to being drained of it.

You need to have more than one type of project going all the time. Some projects work on the intellectual and others on the physical. You need to have your logical and creative sides stimulated in a back and forth manner.

The Water Mill Approach

A water mill takes water from above and pours it onto paddles, or into paddle buckets, causing the paddle wheel to turn. The paddle wheel typically has six to eight paddles. At any given time, only three paddles are covered in water with only one at a time being a focal point for the water.

As the wheel turns, it rotates a shaft that is connected to gears that rotate the mill inside. The objective is to grind, roll or hammer something for production.

Using the Water Mill Approach with your ADHD, you can have several projects going at a time. Each project is a paddle on the wheel. By changing out which paddle, project, you have your attention on you continue to turn the wheel of production.

When you have several projects or even aspects of a project, that are connected to the same desired outcome, you can switch from project to project and still end up with the desired finished product.

Using the Water Mill Approach, you address your need to alter your attention, act on your impulses, and utilize your restlessness. While other people are struggling to turn the wheel with only one paddle, you will have multiple paddles working together to achieve your goals.

ADHD can be an advantage when you learn that spinning your wheels isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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