© Bryan L. Hutchinson
Positive Thinking part5 post1:
I got lucky
I suppose by now you might be a bit curious as to how I got lucky after all. Well, as I mentioned before, we Adders attract attention.
As it so happened, a few years ago someone took notice of me with concern. This person could tell I had tons of potential, but that I wasn’t really living up to my true capability. When this person first approached me I really did not pay him too much attention. After all, I have been told all of my life that I am extraordinarily talented, that I have an abundant amount of potential and that I could do great things… if I wanted to.
After a while an Adder gets tired of hearing about how great he or she could be. How many times do we need to be told to get our act together or quit being lazy? Talk about broken records! I learned to just nod my head and ignore such talk, so when this person first approached me and told me what he sees in me, as far as potential, I barely even listened to him. Can you blame me? Every Adder reading this knows what I am talking about.
Friends and relatives can be persistent when it comes to their suggestions, advice and criticism. We Adders learn to tune out such talk and find our own way of doing things and succeeding, but the road of ‘trial and error’ is a long road and sometimes too much time passes for the lessons learned to be useful. When this happens depression and low self-esteem have the opportunity to take over and rule our lives.
The problem we Adders have is that we try so very hard and yet our efforts always seem to be in vain. Although we do indeed tune out those closest to us offering advice, we actually seek more and more advice to find some kind of clue to get us going, but we want to do it on our own and not be force fed what someone else thinks. Nobody really wants to be told what will work for them, especially Adders who have already tried just about everything under the sun!
One of the first steps for an Adder to become successful is to be diagnosed with ADD or ADHD. All the suggestions and advice in the world will not be completely helpful until a true diagnosis is made. Once a person knows he or she has ADD or ADHD we suddenly realize why we dislike friends and family giving us advice and we also realize that our friends and family are not the enemy. They give us advice because they care and love us! That is very, very important to remember, no matter how much we cringe when we know those familiar ‘wanting to be helpful’ words are about to be spoken.
I got lucky because someone hit a nerve and got through to me, even before I was diagnosed. It wasn’t the end all, be all—but, it was the start.
I will explain more about how I got lucky in the next part…
Bryan
