Life with ADHD is a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week-adventure. If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with ADHD, then you know how challenging it can be at times. Unfortunately, most of our focus is on the “negative aspects and problems” of ADHD and rarely are the strengths or positive qualities of ADHD appreciated or celebrated.
These amazing attributes are the other side of the coin. They include such talents and strengths such as: out-of-the-box-thinking, creativity, innovation thinking, humor, musically intuitive, perseverance, adventurous, intelligent, charming, great problem solver, willing to take risks, curiosity, imaginative, tenacious, resilient, unique…just to name a few.
Innovative means using or showing new methods or ideas. People with ADHD are definitely “innovative!” One of my favorite stories is of a college student’s ingenuity to make sure he got out of bed and didn’t miss his morning classes.
Each night as he got ready for bed, he prepared the coffee and then set the alarm by his bed. However, experience had shown him that the alarm by his bed would seldom be enough to get him on his feet. To solve this problem, he set the timer on the coffee pot to go off exactly five minutes after his alarm. His fail-proof innovation? The smell of coffee you’re thinking…nope.
When he made the coffee the night before, he made sure the coffee carafe was not under the coffee maker! If he didn’t get up after his bedside alarm, the morning coffee would end up all over the floor! According to him it never failed…that’s innovative!
Adventurers are in their element when they are discovering something new or experiencing something different. When my son with ADHD was young, he was always out front on hiking trips. He was also the first to try things like sushi, enjoy the treasures of rock hounding and sign up for the Navy to “see the world”.
People with this awesome quality of adventurous spirit know that with great risk comes great reward and people with ADHD are almost always at the front of the line when it comes to seeing adventure as a great opportunity when it might leave others dead in their tracks.
Statistically, most people with ADHD have a higher than average IQ. Unfortunately, this innate intelligence does not always perform well on standardized tests or in the current academic structures, so this intelligence is overlooked or missed entirely. Rather, persons with ADHD show their intelligence in such areas as:
· An aptitude in math, English, writing, sports, computers, performing or visual arts, nature, etc.
· Creative and productive thinking that generate new ideas and solutions and inventions
· Having a great sense of humor because they often see connections to ideas or concepts others miss
· The ability to become submerged (hyper focused) on a task that is innately interesting to them
· An innate sense of curiosity
It’s important to remember to include these other areas of intelligence when judging the “potential” of people with ADHD.
Everyone’s brain and ADHD are a bit different. We all have gifts and talents. With ADHD they might just look different…and that is not a bad thing. When we can appreciate these awesome ADHD qualities in ourselves and appreciate and honor these strengths in others…that is happiness.
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