Being diagnosed with ADHD when I was 8, I was constantly reminded that I was very smart but also had a learning disability. And if you’re anything like me, you didn’t realize until later in life that you actually learn much faster and more effectively than your peers.
That is because ADHD is not a learning disability, nor is it an an attention deficit disorder. In fact, when it comes to something you’re interested in, you have an abundance of attention, not a deficit. And thats why you’re able to hyperfocus when you are engaged with something you’re highly interested in.
The downside to that is if you’re not interested in something, its almost like your brain does not allow you to focus on it because it is always seeking something that does spark interest. For this reason, many of the methods I use to help my clients manage their ADHD involve tapping into their interests to make boring things more engaging.
While your unique way of divergent thinking may be a setback in your educational and professional life, it is also your ticket out of an environment that holds you back.
My life’s mission is to help divergent thinkers and people with ADHD leverage their unique brain wiring to build a dynamic environment that allows them to be curious for a living. But learning how to learn effectively is an essential first step.
Do you want to develop positive habits? Learn a new skill? Explore a new creative pursuit? Get to know yourself and others better? Make sense of the world around you? All of these things require understanding how to best optimize your learning potential in order to maximize your return on focus.
I’m not talking about memorizing information and regurgitating it back on a test. I mean actually turning a new experience or encounter with information into valuable knowledge that you can share with others effortlessly.
Demonstrating effective learning can be summed up with the Feynman technique, is simply that if you want to understand something well, explain it. The Feynman technique is comprised of four steps:
1. Select a concept to learn.
2. Teach it to a child
3. Review and refine your understanding of the concept
4. Organize your notes and revisit them regularly
You may hear me reference the Feynman technique often because I am a strong believer in it’s efficacy. But techniques are like tools. You can look at it and understand its utility, but using it requires learning it as a skill.
This is where processing modalities become the secret weapon to identifying how to extract and process information from your environment.
The 8 processing modalities are modes include:
1. Auditory
2. Conceptual
3. Kinesthetic
4. Visual
5. Verbal
6. Tactile
7. Emotional
8. Intuitive