Is it okay to be proud of yourself for the things you accomplish?

Understanding the self “warts and all” is central to making yourself an effective human. Can you turn your own weaknesses into what makes you uniquely beautiful and strong?

An exploration of ADD and how it has shaped “coping” and turned it into thriving.

One of my closest and dearest friends is an organisational theorist of the highest order.  The relationships they have with some of the world’s top business leaders reads like a copy of Who’s Who.  They are a player.

One of their pet projects is me.  I love the attention.  When the bossiness hurts, I step into it and accept it, because even what hurts we can learn from.  They know of my submissive tendencies, and this does inform our relationship to a certain extent, but never in a way that is out of balance.    That is what true friendship is.

This person looks at executives and their effectiveness for a living.  Looks at organisations and people within them and gets paid handsomely to figure things out that will make a huge difference to the bottom line, but never seems obvious to their clients.  Who is good at what?  What is so-and-so’s real talent, their super-power.

Well, they think my power is an ability to read a room.  To read emotion and to understand it on a deeper level.  It is their belief that my success at doing deals is a direct result of this, and of being without ego.  I had never really considered either of these “talents” or traits as aspects of me.  But after being confronted with them, I recognise their truth.  And yes, someone selling their business might say ‘no’ repeatedly to a colleague of mine but will say ‘yes’ to me after one meeting.  Or another might say, “no deal unless ‘girlie-boy’ [not my real name] is in charge.”

Other people say being around me is very soothing.  That I ooze calm.

We all have strengths and weaknesses.  Nobody is perfect or even approaches effectiveness without some degree of self-work.  For some it is a slog, and they might give up, for others, it is much easier, but no less required.  We all need to work on how we are in life.

I don’t mean to be reductive about ADD, or to over-simplify.  I also know that my experience is different than everyone else’s with ADD, and more so, with any other condition.  I also can’t stand the “American” tendency to self-label ailments, traumas, things that we might consider handicaps or challenges as badges of honour.

I grew up with tough love.  I remember the older sister of a girl in high school I dated [my first real girlfriend] doing sports with me one day, and I boasted to her that I had a heart murmur.  I had just had it diagnosed, and since it wasn’t fatal, or harming me overtly, I felt boastful about it.  Her reaction changed my life.  To put it in context, I had a massive crush on her.

She said, “I wouldn’t boast about a weakness if I were you.”  We talked about it a bit.  She made it clear she liked tough, stoic, and I felt in my bones that she was right.  Her words resonated because in truth I discovered that I felt the same way.

Enter ADD

ADD, like anything, comes in degrees.  It is the same for obsessive-compulsive, neuro-divergent, being on the spectrum, you name it.  Badges of honour.

I am aware that ADD is a potential handicap.  It can be debilitating, depending on the particular symptoms or their severity.

Whilst I resisted my own childhood diagnosis and resented being medicated then, as now, I have come to terms with it.  More importantly, somewhere along the line, through therapy and desire, I recognised that there were aspects of ADD getting in the way of my life (along with other tendencies).

More importantly than accepting it, which took me until very recently, I developed coping strategies very early on.  I understood through work with others the things where it was getting in my way—where I was getting in my own way.  Many people with ADD make lists, for example.  And I am not immune to this, with lists on scraps of paper all over the house.  I keep a note pad on every floor to deal with things that come into my head, and I park them by writing them down.  This stops their ability to distract them.  But I do something else with them too.  And this is what transforms them from being a distraction or a mess into an effective means of getting things done.

I have a four box grid whose headings encompass everything I want to do in life.  So, every to-do or thought that ends up on a scrap paper is also placed into one of these buckets.  After I write them down, I take the scrape paper and put it on the stairs.  As I go up to my office throughout the day, I scoop them up from where I have placed them on the stairs and take them to my desk on the top floor and place each one onto my grid.  I make sure to process them right then, because I know if I don’t the wheels will come off the bus.  And as I work through them, I throw out the scrap paper, and keep one master grid.  Every week, I review everything and start again, either on Sunday night or first thing on Monday morning.

It is very effective.

When I travel, I can struggle.  And I travel a lot.  I keep a paper agenda which helps, it operates on a week-to-week system, and I place the grid in it for the entire year when I buy it.  In the end, coping with travel and a more-rapid and less controlled list of to-do’s means an accumulation of scrap papers in each week, but which I can review and put aright on the grid as I begin fresh on Sundays.

What else? At work, I have had the luxury of having secretaries for much of my professional life, more so now. And perhaps by luck, my first one was a dominatrix. Literally. And because she also worked for my boss, she often knew at times better than I did what I needed to do. And she would tell me. And I learned almost immediately that pleasing her was the key to getting promoted, paid more, etc. And giving gifts to her, randomly, especially when I didn’t need something, was essential to happy office relations.

Later, I hired secretaries who owned me. I don’t mean this in a D/s sense, but rather in a mutually harmonious relationship which ensured my effectiveness at work. Part of this process was giving them permission to utterly own where I was, how long I would meet with people, what I would do. We would review things each week, and there were certain parameters, but the certainty and structure of it, and her making sure that I was always on time and always prepared was what made me. And I knew that I would have been incapable without her/their support.

I would love to hear from any of you on your own coping mechanisms for the chaos of ADD or its equivalent.

The irony of the above is that much of what I do professionally is to bring structure, process, and order into companies.  But I also do it with the knowledge that I can’t keep it up, and have to get someone else who is not limited in this way as I am…knowing what we are not good at, is just as important, if not more, than focussing too much on our strengths.

A metaphor from production and operations planning (how to run a factory for maximum throughput): you put the limiting factor at the front, so you slow the whole line down to what can be most efficiently handled.  It is the same to know your weaknesses, and therefore, why it is so important to make focussing on your weaknesses the sine qua nonof your personal existence.  It is not negative to do so, but its opposite.  For your ability and achievements will be more determined by how you hold yourself back and what you do not overcome, than what you are talented at.

I wrote recently about giving my children a “safe word” to prevent me from interfering with their dreams and aspirations.  This provoked some feedback from a cherished reader.  She noted a tradition in her family wherein they write one another’s New Year’s Resolutions.  There is a discussion about them, a process of acceptance, and then also a review at year end.  In other words, I might ask my children to tell me what they want to see me accomplish or let go of…I think we will try it this year.  They seem game.