The key to making people like you is to be open, honest and forthcoming. Improve one’s self, be nice, caring and forgiving.
Seems like solid advice and to a degree I am sure it is correct, it is the code I live by, but the reality is that not everyone is going to like us. No, no matter how lovable and adorable, or perhaps cool we may be. Actually, statistics indicate that some people are in fact predisposed to not like us and if we spend our time trying to make them like us, we may be wasting a lot of our time. As ADDers, we tend to waste too much time already.
On the radio yesterday, I listened to someone give these statistics:
- 25% of people are predisposed to like you
- 25% of people lean towards liking you and could be convinced to like you
- 25% of people are predisposed not to like you, could be convinced, but it would be tentative at best
- 25% of people are predisposed not to like you and regardless of what you try to do, they will never like you (I say beware if they pretend to like you)
I don’t know how factual these statistics are, but let’s say for the sake of this post that they are correct. How much time then, are we wasting trying to make people like us? I am not talking about being professional, courteous and getting along with others. I am talking about spending excess time on people who have shown obvious disfavor, but for some reason or another we spend too much time trying to make them like us, change their mind’s about us or going the extra mile to do something nice for them.
As someone with ADHD I have been particularly stubborn in the past (sometimes still) and since just about everything was challenging for me while growing up, I tended to seek even more challenges through-out my life. I thought that’s the way things were always supposed to be, even if the challenges were not worth the effort – I will go so far as to say especially when they were not worth the effort.
Challenges can be stimulating for those of us with ADHD (too stimulating, at times). Because of my apt behavior to be attracted to challenges, I now understand that I tended to discount people that felt right to me and who seemed to want to get to know me better. Even though certain people felt right, I had this odd belief that easy was somehow wrong. Yes, society and culture play into this type of thinking too. Easy is a seemingly appalling term to label someone with. Now, I don’t think so, I think most of us want to be around someone who is easy going, friendly and likable, but the term easy has gotten a bad rap.
How many of us spend too much time on challenges and ignore the easy going, likable people who just feel right to be around? I do not think we do it intentionally, it could be habitual concerning ADHD and, oddly enough, because there is a stimulation factor we think it is what is supposed to feel right if challenging, more so the better, albeit frustrating, but it may not be right, it may just be the stimulation which is scratching a particular itch.
It would seem, and when I think about it long enough, I realize that there are friends out there who have been left, and are being left, to the way side, because they seem too good to be true, or, are not challenging enough and the reality may be that they are in the upper tier of the people predisposed to like us, and possibly due to innate ADHD traits, we may not have realized that it is okay for certain people to not be so challenging. We could even go much deeper and discuss not letting one’s guard down because we have been hurt, and yet, maybe the above explains partially why we have been hurt?
If the statistics are correct, some of us are wasting a lot of time, but the good news is that the next time someone is open and courteous, we can be more attentive and recognize that not everyone needs to be a challenge to get along with, especially if they are not a challenge.
What do you think?
~Bryan
