There, I said it. And I know that there are quite a few people out there that will not agree with me. I don’t mind. This is how I see it – for myself and many people I’m talking to.
“I’m visionary. I see patterns others don’t. I understand highly complext things, I’m passionte and crazy and addicitve. All thanks to ADHD. It made me an expert in this life.
I know I’m a great counselor. I know I will get those results for my clients. I know that I’m amazing at this. I know.” – A. therapist, ADHD coach / Australia
“I’m a great teacher. Nobody can connect to the kids like I do. Nobody comes up with crazy projects like I do. Nobody can create this closeness to neurodivergent kids like I can. Nobody can think of 20 different ways of explaining the same thing, like I do. I know I’m good and I know that I get the results.” – A. Teacher / USA
and I come across many more of those kinds of remarks – when I talk to people who have figured out their ADHD and how to make it work to their advantage.
Me too, I know I’m a great teacher trainer. I have ways of connecting with my trainees that not many have. I can guide them in special ways, I can make them feel a special way, I can make them dig so deep into themselves that they will bring out their best for the kids they teach. I can do that and I’m consious about it. I’m good and I know it.
That sounds arrogant, doesn’t it? Maybe overly confident? Maybe it is,
but it took me a long time to get there.
Before coming to understand that I’m really good at what I’m doing, I thought I was totally useless. I was unsure of myself. When I saw others teach and they seem to have the class under control, I would feel inadequate, actually when I saw anyone in their job whatever it was I would feel that way …
But let me explain to you what happened. Here is just one example of ADHD traits that no university can or will teach you.
I can read people’s faces and body language. No, I didn’t learn how to do it in a course. I do it naturally. You call it attention deficit disorder .. it’s not … I actually have too much attention at times .. just not where you want me to have it.
So I can see little details, “normal” people would not pay attention to. I can see the children’s faces and body language. I can see if that day they are off or on. When you probably would push them through I understand that this is not the time, that it’s time to give them grace. I see when they didn’t understand something but they tell you “yep, got it” and I can adapt very quickly to this. While – what I noticed – many teachers would just re-explain the same thing, as if you didn’t pay attention and needed to hear it twice, I would explain things in a different way. Because if you are deaf I can explain all I want as beautifully as I can, you won’t hear it. I have to adapt to you not hearing well, so I have to make it visual. Some of you will think now, “well yeah, that’s normal”. But it’s not. For neurodivergents it’s normal. For some neurotypicals, but for the majority, no.
I don’t know how I do it, I just do it
A psychiatrist told me that I should go out and raise awareness and then tell teachers how I do when I deal with those kids. I told her I cant, because I dont know how I do it.
I see every child individually. Its the care they feel, the sincerity, my interest in really helping them without agenda, the fact that I spend time out of my private life to talk to them, the trust they feel that I won’t tell their parents or others, they can feel that I am there for them and I would never betray them … and Im not controlling that.
Im not sitting down with a plan to manipulate them to open up. I can’t manipulate on purpose. I’m not sitting down and thinking how can I make him or her trust me.
I just see you and feel you and I react with my emotions. I can not help it.
And weirdly enough .. I can trust my intutition and emotions and show them with children. It so far has never gone wrong to my own perception. But I can’t do the same with adults unless it’s a very special person.
So how do you want me to teach this? The way I coach is not a training session and off you go into the class. I teach and then I follow you up. I see you in the class. I can see how you are, how the kids react to you .. and then I can give you feedback …
I see patterns. when I see behaviours in kids, I see patterns in their behaviors very quickly and I can react and adapt to that faster than others.
I’m not afraid of unconventional ways. Actually, when I got hired for my last job as a teacher I told them … I don’t like teaching with books, I don’t like you people intervene in my style AND my classes will be noisy, but they will learn, don’t worry … take it or leave it.
I understand that not everyone has the luxury to put down their conditions, but I was .. because I had earned my reputation and they were hunting me for the job, not the other way around.
Before that though
Before all that I would feel inadequate though, a failure, lazy, stupid, unworthy, frustrated with myself, guilt and shame, anxious about the future and fear of failure, self-doubt in every area, overwhelm, loss of motivation to even try again …
You see I have tried studying so many different things, to all abandon them. Many ideas that I started and never finished, projects of opening a school, language center, online business, have an own practice as a psychologist … when you have so many ideas and never get one up and running you come to point where you just resign .. for life.
You so wish you could get out of it.
You are exhausted by life itself. Just tired of everything.
This is something bad, right? It’s not a good place to be in. Especially when you don’t know that you have ADHD. Because the problem is not you. It’s how your brain works.
And even that is not really the problem.
The problem is the fact that you have working AGAINST your brain all this time, instead of WITH it!
Let me say that again … All this time you have been working against your brain, with methods that may apply for other people’s brain just fine. But your brain is different.
And you need to work with it differently.
It’s like you have one car that runs on diesel and one on gasoline. Both cars are still good cars. At least for people like me who don’t care much about them as long as they move you from A to B.
Diesel vs Gasoline
Gasoline is great when you live in the city and only do short trips here and there. Diesels are great on the highway, as they provide strong overtaking power.
Each one their pros and cons.
I have a diesel car. Not just in my mind, but also in real life. A while ago the gas station attendant put gasoline instead of diesel. I can not even start to tell you what a mess that created. It broke the motor in the end.
Lesson I learned .. even if you tell the person to put diesel and it’s written twice across the petrol cap .. don’t let anyone else touch your car!
Same for your brain … don’t let anyone else touch your brain. Unless they have a diesel car themselves or know what they are dealing with because they have seen many Diesel cars in their lives! And still ….
ADHD is complicated
I said it and I will continue saying it. It’s a spectrum and you will see many different colours of it. Even among ADHDers. Just because the other person has ADHD doesn’t mean you will be best friends now. I may understand you better, and I can relate to you in many points nobody else can, but … we may be completely different people.
When you try to read up on ADHD online by yourself you will usually come across two types of opinions …
1. It’s a superpower and everything is awesome kind of thing. It’s just a different way of seeing things. or
2. We are all doomed, it’s a disability and everything is really black.
When you listen to some scientists and ADHD coaches, those who should be rooting for you, I sometimes get depressed and wonder why on earth I should be still alive according to them? Apparently I’m all messed up. It made me feel so bad about myself. The problem was just that I didn’t see myself as that. Yes, I do mess up in certain areas, but I’m also exceptional in others … so what are you talking about?
Then I talked to a psychiatrist and an ADHD coach who put such things out there and asked them if they really believe that it’s that bad .. funny enough they told me .. not at all … they love their ADHD.
OH really … that does not come across that way … why are you saying such things then?
Because if you see it too positively, it’s not good – because people won’t take it seriously, like they do now, because eveyone is a litle ADHD, right? So they don’t see the seriousness of the whole thing. But we, with ADHD know how bad it really can be, don’t we? Oh yes, we do!
If you see it too negatively though, well then we would all be disabled and crazy people , totally not able to function half ways normal. I’m sorry but I don’t count myself among them. I did for a long time though. And I know that those who are still having a hard time with the whole thing will kick my behind now and tell me that I either don’t have real ADHD, that I don’t understand it or that I”m not taking it seriously … Maybe so, maybe not. I don’t claim to know how everyone with ADHD feels. Everyone has their own situation. The spectrum!
But what I’m saying is that staying in a victim mindset has never helped anyone. And I also hear everyone say now ;. but I tried everything … no you didnt. You thought you did. Just like I thought I had tried every diet that exists on this planet to lose weight. Decades of struggles … totally giving up …
just then to find out that oh I have ADHD and my brain doesn’t work with the methods everyone is claiming that work. So I have to find things myself and nobody can tell me how exacty that looks like. They may give ideas but in the end, I have to figure it out.
And suddenly all those other possible ways come up .. that I didn’t try yet. I love my brain when that happens! So things are not as black and white as we often like to believe.
Figure out your strengths
Edward Hallowell, an expert in the field. Psychiatrist and himself ADHD once said something that stuck in my mind. I just can not unsee it and it so resonates with me.
“You figure out your strengths and you will be on the superpower side. You don’t figure it out, you will find yourself among the unemployed, prison population, those who struggle with life in general.
And this is exactly what I see when I look around me. Remember the remarks of the people from the beginning of the blos post? I know many more like these .. but they all figured out to use their strengths. Those people are entrepreneurs, teachers, coaches, neuroscientists, biologists, graphic designers, homeschoolers, stay at home moms, ….
But they figured out ways to make things work for them in their own special ways. When you ask them how they run their home, their work, their families .. it is not what YOU would do. And that’s totally fine.
BUT here is the problem .. there are not many like that out there! Most of us are on the low side, why? Because many of us went undiagnosed and never learned to see their strengths. Or their strengths got destroyed by school and /or society.
With ADHD you are kind of forced to do what you are good at, passionate about, born to do. Or else we mess up big time. Start things, stop things …
Why do I even bother?
I talked to a therapist who told me I should use my ADHD to raise awareness around teachers and schools and help teachers and kids and parents … and I told her about my ideas and I was totally absorbed in all of this … and while I was so excitedly speaking about it, I would suddenly midsentence sink down in my chair and be sad. She asked me what happened within those seconds …
I told her how I just reminded myself that this is no use. I know myself, why do I even care to get all those ideas. It will just be like all the time. In a few weeks, I’ll get bored of it and I’ll move on to something else. So just forget it. Life sucks. One will always be on the lower end of the whole story …
She reminded me of something though … teaching. I never left it.
What I’m going to say now is not scientifically proven but an observation I made when I speak to people with ADHD who got it all figured out, at least seemingly so,
For many of us it seems like as if we have one big theme in our life that we gravitate towards. Kind of like we can hyperfocus on things and this hyperfocus changes onces the dopamine wears off. Just with this one it is like one big hyperfocus and we just keep loving it. Those people, if you ask them … they couldn’t imagine doing anything else. It’s like you can’t detach that person from their job or hobby they would kind of lose their identity.
For me it’s education – in any shape or form – so I thought. But I realized that all my life it has resolved not around what I teach, but it was always the wellbeing of the students I was interested in. I suddenly realized that when I gave trainings at my school. It rarely was actually about English teaching methods. It was always about connecting with your students, how to care about your students, if the students “did something” how to deal with it, if your class is off … if kids get bored, if they block on learning, if they have issues at home … it rarely had anything to do with how to teach English (even though that was my job).
And nobody ever noticed that I focussed too much on things that didn’t even concern me (regarding my job description) because … once you create connection and find the blocks of learning for the child and you help them on a mental level, all the rest falls into place quite easily. That’s at least my experience. Obviously this is oversimplified now, if I would break it down I would write a book, so just for the sake of this article.
When I realized that all the puzzle pieces of my life came together. LIke an epiphany.
I have been working in my job as a teacher trainer for years. How come, if I can’t even study one subject for a month at university without excrutiating pain?
Reasons why ADHDers struggle at work …
1. they are bored . If there is not enough stimulation in our work and the biggest part of our workday is boring … it’s very hard for us to keep at it.
-Well, for me … it never gets boring. You never know what you get when you get out of bed with my kind of work. You never know what the kids will be up to, you never know how the teacher will react to things, to which degree somebody will mess up something that needs repair or something awesome happens that will make you happy for the rest of the week …
2. Overwhelm. If you struggle with execute funtionts including prioritizing, time perception, working memory … depending on which project comes along that may be an issue
– I never read this issue because I work in an area with a lot of supportive people. Something my admin taught me from the get go was that “in our school, if we struggle, we tell each other. I will fire nobody for struggling, but I will fire them for trying to hide it. We are a school, we have the responsibility of the next generation. You screw up, means the children suffer. I can not help you if you don’t tell me. But if I find out you hid those things on purpose … I will not be happy.” And she made proof of always being there for the entire staff no matter how hard we all messed up, she would have our back, she would get us support, she would get people on board from outside to train us in areas no other school would, she would increase salaries for short amounts of time when somebody was about to lose their house or anything alike .. she would care about our own well being first! When I was ready to give up, she always knew exactly what to say to keep me there. And now, I am in the position to do the same for my trainees and my students.
God has sent me a lot of great mentors and people in my life when I comes to my job.
You have a great mentor, you will pass it on your own.
You have an idiot teacher … what will you learn from them? First off, you will not take any knowledge from them in the first place, plus you think about your worth being treated like that by others. No, but your worth is not determined how other people treat you. It’s all about who you are. And who you are is what you bring to the table of life on this planet.
3. There is not enough flexibility
– Oh I have that flexibility. My admins trust me, I can work when I want (to a certain degree), how I want and with who I want (I’m the one hiring the teachers I will be working with the next year).
4. Too much flexibility
– Yep, if I have absolutly noone to respond to, it’s very unlikely that I will actually get started. So while I do have all the flexibility, I do have to report to my admin and if she doesn’t like something I do, she will let me know and we will think together how to fix things or make things better. Luckily enough, we share the same values and we rarely clash.
Respnding to somebody doesn’t have to be an admin. I was self employed as a teacher before without an admin but the responsibility towards the kids has led me to stay consistent and doing my best.
4. The environment demands high masking of the ADHD symptoms
– I think that is a big one for a lot of people, especially teachers if we work under admins that are not helpful – and let’s face it, there are a lot of those out there.
I remember one day I got a call from my admin because my performance had dropped. She didn’t reprimand me. She asked me if everything is ok. I told her honestly about a situation in my private life and she told me with her soft voice … you should have told me, I would have stepped in for you. And without another word, she took some projects off my hand and did them herself, without decreasing my salary. That alone gave me enough motivation to get myself back together.
She has been able to create a team around herself in this school that is more like a family. We knew we could all count on each other, because we all shared the same vision and values for the kids and education. I know that if one of my coworkers is struggling with something, I will be right next to her. But we had to be taught that it’s ok to say that we struggle. And this is something I understand is rarely the case in any company, in any school. And yet, this changes everything!
This time, it is the right time
The therapist said .. what if this time is the good time and the right time … and this is your passion and this is what will change everything?
And suddenly I saw all those things in my life I had previously thought were failures .. how it all led up to this point. “Useless” internships, work that i started and didn’t finish, projects I started and didn’t finish, researches I started and never finished, studies … more internships … a lot of talking to people … talks I had with people … and more talks I had with people .. good ones and bad ones … people who supported me and people who left … every single thing suddenly made sense . It was like you have a digital map in front of your eyes like in Mission Impossible as a huge puzzle and suddenly all the pieces come together and form a beautiful image. Suddenly it all made sense.
Yes, what if this is the time … and this is the project I was born to do on this planet?
Actually no, there is no what if .. there is no other explanation. This is why I am here.
I have been blessed to have been put into those situations and having had so much support – often unknowingly. And yet, support means everything to us ADHDers.
We are treated a certain way by society at large, people cause us a lot of pain. But at the same time, the right people in your life can make all the change.
I’m good at what I’m doing. And I learned it the hard way. And I learned it because there were the right people in my life who guided me into the right direction. The way I needed it. And I’ll be forever grateful for them. Not many have this chance. Yes, my brain plays a major role in the way i see things, I perceive things, I deal with things … but it was also people who supported my kind of brain, who saw my strengths and maybe not overlooked my flaws but helped finding strategies instead or helped to take over those parts and adding my tasks that play into my strengths.
I just cant get this out of my head …
I have pros and cons in my brain, but you too have pros and cons in your brain .. so why the double standard .. just because there are more people of you running around on this planet … that doesn’t make you the one who is right … or better yet, there is no right or wrong. What if we were made to co-exist. Just like people of different colours, of different cultures and different languages?
Just like there are fish and monkeys on the planet and not just fish. Everyone their right of excistence. But you have to let the fish be fish and let the monkeys be monkeys. One will swim, one will climb … all in our own way and yet both together in the same ecosystem on the same planet for their own reasons.
Inside an ADHD mind 
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