ADHD Superpowers: part two: The Correlation Crew
The ADHD concept is a complete package of both challenges and strengths. After coming to grips with the challenges, its only fair to highlight the strengths. Last time we explored the ADHD strengths we affectionately called “the life of the party line up”. But, fun and games isn’t all ADHD has to offer. Unique, insightful, and inventive skills others might not even think about are also included. This set of strengths helps us make wise, diverse, and plentiful connections that are often essential for our neurotypical peers to know.
Five ADHD strengths called the Correlation Crew:
Creativity- The classic ADHD weak stop sign in the frontal, or organization part of the brain often results in many different ideas getting scrambled all together. This can actually help us make unique connections between concepts that on the surface and by themselves seem totally unrelated. Insights galore!!
Multiple ideas at once- The racing thoughts from lack of the mental stop sign helps you see infinite possibilities from one stimulating prompt, which is great for problem solving.
Keen memory- A more sensitive nervous system leads to noticing subtle details, which can boost memory as the details are matched to specific situations.
Determination- The emotional difficulty of noticing you learn differently than others can result in a strong dependence on your own faculties in order to manipulate information in just the right way that allows concepts to actually sink in and make sense. This can lead to a certain learned independent persistence that perhaps would not be present otherwise.
Eye for beauty- Being more sensitive to subtleties also includes noticing the positive and beautiful details of life that are often often overlooked by the neurotypical eye.
To wrap up, although ADHD is not our culture’s typical way of functioning, it has provided us with several interwoven strengths that are free for us to leverage to our advantage. The life of the party isn’t all there is to them either. Reading the above list has hopefully helped you rest assured there are useful, intuitive, and effective skills among all that fun and energy and that their quirkiness and ingenuity is exactly what makes them essential for everyone’s success, ADHD and non ADHD alike. Stay tuned for next time on tangible ways to embrace your new identity and set those strengths free to blossom to their fullest.