Did you know that you have a very special gift? You do, it’s yours and it has been with you all of your life. It is the gift of Hyper-Focus. Some think of it as a curse and some think it has no purpose, but in truth, it is the most important part of our being.
There are many, many rituals people use to connect with their inner selves and become focused in the things which are of concern to them. It takes great effort to turn on the focused mode of the mind and create that awareness of understanding and comprehension, but for us ADDers this very same focus, what we call ‘Hyper-Focus’ is available to us all the time, every day, in every situation we can use it. Some take drugs to capture such focus and some meditate for days trying to create such a focused mode… and yet we ADDers find our focus factor each and every day, but there’s a problem: We usually do it on accident and at times which can be inconvenient.
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Hyper-Focusing has many elements to it and some of them have negative ramifications. Without control our focus factor can really get us into some trouble, make us distracted, inattentive and seemingly unconcerned with what’s going on around us. Some ADDers even call it the void, the dark hole and many other negative terms.
The secret to capturing and using your Hyper-Focusing ability is to realize that it is turned on to what interests you. If you’re not interested it won’t work and worse still, if you are not interested in a situation that you find yourself involved in the focus factor turns itself on and takes your mind to something else which you are interested in. That’s why we seem to get distracted.
Some non ADDers spend their whole lives trying to find the type of focus we can call up in an instant. And yet many of us hate it, curse it and loath it. However, understanding the on and off switch to the focus factor can change ADDer lives.
Be interested. If we decide to interest our minds on any given subject we can become not only proficient, but experts. The Hyper-Focused mind of an ADDer can take in everything and anything, compute it and understand it and use it. When we are not interested in something, well, we know it right away and this is our warning sign that things could go wrong. To get interested start asking yourself questions about the subject, the more questions you ask, the more likely your mind will become interested. Too many of us write things and situations off because we know we will not be able to focus, but if we take a moment to look around and ask a few questions we can raise the awareness and attention of our minds. The more questions we ask, the more our mind gets involved and once we hit a key question or two the focus factor will click and like turning on a light switch our minds will wake up and take over!
ADDer children do this all the time. They ask so many questions and it is because as children we seem to already know what it takes to become involved and therefore interested. We usually give up on the questions at a young age because we tend to annoy those around us with those never ending questions. However, as we get older we should not stop asking questions, those questions have purpose and are very, very important. The questions don’t even need to be said aloud. That’s very important to know. Simply asking those questions internally can propel you to seek out the answers and turn on the Hyper-Focus mode, especially on subjects which appear to be boring on the surface. Einstein asked a lot of questions. If he truly was an ADDer then we can better understand why he asked those questions.
Ask and you shall receive!
~Bryan
