What are your superpowers?
When we have ADHD we're SO good at putting ourselves down and feeling negative about ourselves. But by spending all our time making the things we’re not good at less bad, we’re missing out on using what we are amazing at and not only is it more fun to work on what we’re good at, but it’s also where we can have the most success.
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
So I have ADHD so I know what it’s like and even I can definitely be guilty about focusing too much on what I’m not good at, but I know that the things I am good at are the things people value me for so I try and spend as much time in that part of my world as possible.
I also like to call myself ADHD neutral - I’m someone who doesn’t think my ADHD is a bad thing or even a good thing. It just is. It’s something that’s part of my life that on some days means that I am struggling to get things done when executive function or emotional regulation are running on low. But it also is the reason why I became an entrepreneur, the reason why I have so many hobbies that bring me great joy and I love the passion and enthusiasm that it brings to my life. I don’t tend to use the word superpower about it, because I feel like it makes people on a bad day feel so much worse about their own, but I do think it has its good parts as well as its bad.
So I like to talk about them. In fact I have a previous post dedicated to talking about the good parts, the ways ADHD can be a strength despite the detriments it also has. But that’s not today’s topic, today I want to get a little more personal and talk about finding our individual strengths, that may or may not be touched by our ADHD but certainly are our personal superpowers.
The resource I want to talk about is one that I use with my coaching clients regularly. Now it’s not free but also I don’t have an affiliate link or anything so this is just me sharing a tool that I find useful rather than trying to sell anything for a kickback. The tool is called Clifton Strengths and you answer a questionnaire (the Clifton Strengths Assessment) and at the end you get a report fully personalised to you based on how you answered the questions, that details your unique strengths.
The tool I’m going to be using throughout this is the Clifton Strengths 34 report, however I also work with people on their top 5 report and leadership report as well.
Now I’ve actually used this report a number of times as part of previous leadership development programs and actually the first time I did it was long before I even realised I might have ADHD (and probably autism as well) so my initial read through of the results was a very personal one, reflecting on how these results interact with my interests and personality.
Post diagnosis however, I see it from a slightly different perspective, so I thought it might be interesting today to go through what the Clifton Strengths report is and then talk about it from the perspective of how it relates to my neurodivergence so we can see how the individual and the neurodivergence interplay.
So Clifton Strengths is made up of 34 themes as they call them across four Strategic Domains. The assessment is used to rank those 34 themes with your top five being the ones that show up more consistently in your life, in both a good way and a bad way.
One thing that is really interesting to talk about here is that these strengths can be overplayed, which means that if we rely too heavily on a strength or push it too far, then it can actually work against us and that’s when it becomes a weakness.
We can look at the example of competitiveness. Competitiveness can be a strength if it pushes you to be the best that you can be and encourages you to develop your own skills and personal growth. However, competitiveness pushed too far, or overplayed, can cause problems. It can mean your mental health suffers if you aren’t winning, or that winning gets in the way of doing the actual activities that can move you forward. And of course, people who are overly competitive can be annoying and it can affect personal relationships if someone turns every social interaction into a competition. This is the definition between competitiveness as a strength, and competitiveness overplayed into a weakness.
When finishing second in something generally inconsequential feels absolutely awful it might be a case of taking competitiveness a little too far.
Often when my clients receive their report, they actually go straight down to the “watch out for blind spots” section for each strength which basically cautions against the things that could make this strength overplayed and then tell me why their strengths are really a problem while ignoring all the good stuff written immediately above. Isn’t ADHD’s drive towards putting ourselves down amazing?
But even if we do look at these overplayed, they are just things to watch out for and we can bring our strengths back into the useful level and reap the benefits of those strengths so I work with my clients to do this, to recognise themselves in the strengths and work out strategies to make sure they don’t fall into the overplayed section.
The 34 themes are also broken down into 4 strategic domains which give us a bit more colour on how we use our strengths. These four strategic domains are executing, influencing, relationship building and strategic thinking. So if we have more strengths in the strategic thinking category for example then this is the area we tend to contribute most in, however these aren’t limiting. Just because you don’t have relationship building in your top five for example doesn’t mean you can’t build relationships, just that you use the strengths from your stronger domains to help you in relationship building, rather than relationship building strengths themselves.
The top five strengths are what’s most important, so the things that show up most in your life, and the strengths report emphasizes these the most. It also gives us information on how our strengths six to ten show up in our lives as well as ranking and summarising the remaining of the 34.
Recently with a client I went through the whole 34 so they could look in more detail at the ones they’re not good at. Through doing this they realised that the ones they were lower on were often because they overplayed opposing strengths, such as being super futuristic and forward looking rather than contextualising things based on the past. Or they were things that only came out in certain situations, rather than being strengths that showed up every day.
Just because something comes in at number 34 doesn’t mean they’re a weakness. My lowest of the 34 is actually empathy, which it describes as being able to “sense other people’s feelings by imagining themselves in others’ lives or situations”. This may seem counterintuitive, how can a coach not be strong in empathy?
Seeing this sitting there at the bottom of my 34 might be a surprise, but there’s a reason..
But it’s actually that this shows up in different ways for me. Maybe I don’t put myself into someone’s shoes directly, but I understand them through my input skill, the ability to take in information and contextualise that in amongst the other knowledge I have. I understand people through listening to them and contextualising it within wider life and learning, rather than trying to put myself in their shoes which when overplayed can turn into centring ourselves or assuming we know their situation because that’s what we would do.
So with that in mind, I thought it might be useful to take a quick look at some of my top five and what I’ve found there related to my neurodivergence. So let’s take it away.
So looking at these top five we see a lot of text under each and this text is actually personalised according to how it interacts with your other strengths. A close friend of mine and I actually share one of our top fives but the text below it is completely different. So how this futuristic strength of mine shows up depends on contextualising it with other strengths.
When I look at my top strength of futuristic as a whole, there are a few overriding themes that come up for me here. The first is actually entrepreneurship and in one of the action points to maximise my potential it does suggest that entrepreneurship might be a good fit for me. I could talk about the relationship between ADHD and entrepreneurship here but I just finished a post series on it, so if you’re interested, go and check that out instead!
A second point is that I love the way it highlights a high level of skill or knowledge about specialist subjects because that reads to me as special interests and hyperfixations which is absolutely true and something that comes up regularly within my strengths. I don’t know if this is just a me thing but I actually find this aspect of my neurodivergence the part I value the most because I think my hyperfixations and special interests have laid the foundation of much of my success in life as well as just my personal enjoyment as well.
Hey look, my niche interests are a strength!!
And certain aspects aren’t necessarily related to my neurodivergence, such as goal setting, I think there are aspects I wouldn’t have related to in the past that I do now, such as the comments it makes about building the future that I want to see which is something that I think my coaching business is.
When I move onto the blind spots, I think enjoying the present is something many of us ADHDers struggle with. When the mind is running at 10000 miles an hour we can struggle to be mindful and present. I know there's a lot out there suggesting mindfulness to be very good for ADHD but it’s something I’ve not had much success with.
You might be very surprised to see that focus is next because that doesn't sound like an ADHD strength. In fact, isn't focusing the thing we're not good at?
But actually, this one immediately ties in with futuristic and comments on me being forward looking and actually I feel like this point is a little more idiosyncratic, rather than being related to my ADHD or autism. It talks a lot about goal setting and being driven which I definitely am. I am very driven by having goals to complete. It piques my interest and motivates me and I struggle with a lack of direction.
It’s the third point that has my AuDHD written all over it. It says that I dive deep into topics that stir my curiosity and again this has hyperfixations and special interests all over it. It talks about information gathering on topics that interest me. That's my ND and that's why focus is there, for the strength it has, not for the drawback it sometimes is. Funnily enough, it also seems to allude to hyperfocus in its blind spots, a brilliant example of how my strength here can be overplayed.
A lot of these themes continue in the next strengths, with learner actually using the term “special interest”, though I don’t think it means it in the autistic way. It mentions habitually bringing together information from different places which is an argument I always talk about being an advantage for ADHD because of our varied interests we can bring things together. The second blind spot also feels very ND - don't get distracted away from important stuff because of researching your special interest or hyperfixation.
While my harmony strength doesn’t immediately seem aligned with my ND, I do notice it points out how I am generally accepting of differences, which I think ties in with our tendency to be accepting because we break social norms.
One of the things I love about ADHD and Autism is how accepting of differences we tend to be.
I also see references to emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitivity here with comments that I prefer emotional balance (which I often don’t get due to emotional dysregulation) and I should avoid cold calls based sales roles which is something I’ve attempted and HATED due to my rejection sensitivity.
We round out the top five with another reference to hyperfixations and special interests with input and its information gathering strength.
I didn’t want to dive too deeply into all five because I didn’t want to make this video “ooh let’s talk about me” but I hope that this was enough to give you an idea of how we can use a strengths finding tool such as Clifton Strengths to find out the ways in which we are uniquely amazing, and it’s those strengths, in my case the learning, the information gathering and the future forward approach, that build us to be the amazing people that we are.
If this sounds like something you’d like to do, you can do the assessment on the Clifton Strengths website itself. Like I mentioned, I don’t get a kickback from this at all so it’s purely if you would find this interesting. However, a service I can offer though is to go through this with you from a neurodivergence lens and see how your spicy brain interacts with your unique strengths and how you can use the two of them together to make the most out of your career.
References:
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
Want to see more?
Sign up with your email address to receive the latest thoughts on neurodivergent careers and leadership.