Adult ADHD: Are You An Idea Machine?
By Tellman Knudson
Introductory comments by Royane Real - Author of “How You Can Be Smarter - Use Your Brain to Learn Faster, Remember Better and Be More Creative”
You have probably heard of children who have been diagnosed with a condition labelled ADHD.
The initials ADHD stand for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
A child with ADHD is often very impulsive, very fidgety, can’t sit still, and can’t follow instructions. Sometimes these children are labelled as behaviour problems and treated with powerful drugs.
Although many children of school age are diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, until recently, most doctors thought that children would grow out of this condition. Doctors and psychologists used to believe that adults could not have ADHD. Now some, but not all, researchers think that this condition can persist into adulthood.
Until a few years ago, almost nobody had heard of Adult ADHD. Now it seems that you can find articles about this condition in many popular magazines and on the internet.
Could you have adult ADHD? With the advent of the internet, many people are self diagnosing all sorts of strange conditions they have read about, convinced that they have whatever the current hot affliction might be. Most of the time, these self diagnosed conditions are incorrect.
Still, it is possible that as an adult, you may have some lingering aspects of a condition like ADHD.
Some of the symptoms that may be linked to adult ADHD include extreme distractibility, disorganization, and procrastination.
Not everything about adult ADHD is negative. Along with having a brain that is easily distractible, many people who have adult ADHD also seem to be especially creative. They effortlessly seem to come up with many innovative ideas, both practical and impractical.
This increased creativity seems to co-exist with increased difficulty in getting anything done. People with ADHD often start many projects, and don’t finish them.
The following article by Tellman Knudson discusses some of the positive benefits of increased creativity that adult ADHD can bestow on a person. If you are a person who has the twin blessings of a highly creative mind, and an inability to finish anything, this article may help you to understand yourself a little bit better.
( The above introductory comments were written by Royane Real. Be sure to sign up for my free, no obligation newsletter full of self improvement advice. Just fill in your information in the box at the left of this article. )
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Adult ADHD: Are You An Idea Machine?
Feature article By Tellman Knudson
Chances are, if you have Adult ADHD, you're an "idea machine"--you come up with great new ideas all the time, maybe several in a day!
Problem is, the ideas are often unrelated to what you already decided to work on, and so each new idea becomes a distraction that takes you further away from your larger goals. What can a person with Adult ADHD and too many good ideas do?
I have Adult ADHD myself, and I have 10 great ideas a day, minimum, that are "million-dollar ideas." How do I actually implement one of them and get something done? I don't want to just stop having great ideas. I love thinking about new ideas. Its one of the things I'm best at doing.
I say, "Okay, when I have a great idea, its my job to figure out how I can take whats really great about that idea, and apply it to what I'm working on--that is, working on ALREADY." This is something every person with Adult ADHD needs to train themselves to do.
Here's how it works:
Lets say I'm working on a website about Attention-Deficit Disorder. What happens if I have a great idea about a restaurant they should open up in my local town? I know it would be a great idea. Why don't I just go out and open a restaurant?
Well, I don't really want to open a restaurant. I've worked in a lot of restaurants, and I know that I don't want to deal with the restaurant business. For one thing, it's boring, and boredom kills people with Adult ADHD. But still, its a great idea.
So what I say to myself is, "Whats so great about this idea, and how can I apply the essence of whats so great about this idea to my Adult ADHD website?
Do you see how that works?
As people with Adult ADHD, we tend to think in an all-or-nothing, black-or-white kind of way: "Do I follow the entire idea and go open a restaurant or not?"
But what you really want to say, to make your Adult ADHD work for you, instead of against you is: "How can I apply this great new idea to the project I'm working on already?"
You train yourself to do this over time. You can even do it in conversations when you're brainstorming with friends or business partners or whatever.
When random ideas come up, just say, "Hey, thats a really good idea. How do we apply that to what we're working on? What makes that idea so good? Why am I so excited about that idea?"
In the case of the restaurant idea, the original idea was, "It would be great to have a Mexican Restaurant here because there isn't one in town and everyone wants one."
So, when I applied that concept to my current business, it became "What does everyone with Adult ADHD want that isn't being given to them?" If I can come up with that, then I'm all set.
The point is, if you can use your Adult ADHD to figure out how to flip your ideas up and switch them around to be focused on your bigger goals, then you're way ahead of people without Adult ADHD--because you have about 5 great new innovative ideas a day!
Just imagine how much progress you will make if you apply them to your main project every day, instead of getting distracted...you'll be a powerhouse!
Tellman Knudson, a certified Hypnotherapist, is CEO of Overcome Everything, Inc and Hyperfocus. Stephanie Frank is an internationally known speaker and entrepreneur and author of "The Accidental Millionaire." Together they founded ADDGold.com, the foremost resource for entrepreneurs to take charge of their lives and financial destiny. To claim your special Free VIP membership to ADDGold (value: $127) go to www.adhdgenius.com
http://helpguide.org/mental/adhd_add_adult_symptoms.htm
That website also has a lot of good information on many other mental health issues.
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