Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Use your strengths
Build your work around what your mind does well, novelty, hyperfocus, big-picture, not only around your gaps.
You will go further leaning on your strengths than endlessly sanding down your weaknesses.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Say, carry on in your own way (Quran 6:135). You are allowed your own way of working; lean into how you were made.
قُلۡ يَٰقَوۡمِ ٱعۡمَلُواْ عَلَىٰ مَكَانَتِكُمۡ إِنِّي عَامِلࣱۖ فَسَوۡفَ تَعۡلَمُونَ مَن تَكُونُ لَهُۥ عَٰقِبَةُ ٱلدَّارِۚ إِنَّهُۥ لَا يُفۡلِحُ ٱلظَّٰلِمُونَ
[Prophet], say, ‘My people, you carry on as you are, and so will I: you will come to realize who will have a happy homecoming in the Hereafter.’ The evildoers will not prosper
Qur’an 6:135read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Deliberately using your signature strengths, in fresh ways, lifts engagement and wellbeing; a life arranged around what you do well beats one spent only patching what you do not.
Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N. and Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist doi
Using one's signature strengths in new ways increases wellbeing and lowers low mood.
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Using your genuine strengths raises engagement and wellbeing, which carries the harder parts.
Where this sits: Strength-based interventions.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Look for something genuinely hard that sits on top of something you are already good at. Too easy and your attention wanders off. Too far beyond you and it just becomes another thing you failed at.
A relationship with no friction in it can leave an ADHD partner restless rather than content. A bit of heat is not the same as a bad marriage. What matters is what happens afterwards.
Some of the low, grey stretches are not depression. They are what happens when there has been nothing on the go for a while, and the colour comes back when a project starts.