Seth Godin has a good post on types of people who critique your ideas. He generally divides people giving feedback into 4 categories
- I like every idea you have
- I hate every idea you have
- I’ll push you to crank your ideas up
- I’ll push you to tone your ideas down
so are you choosing your advisors consciously or unconsciously? Do you have a mix?
One big danger for adult with attention deficit disorder is that we often go to two extremes. Either we listen to much to the dream crushers, or go in the opposite direction of not having people ask us some of the tough questions we need to hear so we don’t spend all our energies going in the wrong direction or a million directions at once.
I’m going to democamp Vancouver tonight, and hopefully I’ll try and provide a good mix of the 4. Brainstorming about ideas is one thing adult with attention deficit disorder tend to be very good at. It’s one of my preferred methods of self medication, cranking up the dopamine through intellectual stimulation.
How do you choose which types of people to get advice from? Or is your ego to fragile and insecure to ask for advice?
It is a rare person I find who I can trust to tell me what they think, straight out. Why I married my husband, a quality in my best frined. One problem here, however. I don’t seem to immediatly detect the other trait that makes the firat a very, very destructive…the need to use these comments to tear others down, or build them up, not based on their acutal views of things, but based on what best serves them at the time. Unfortunatly also aplies to the 2 above.
One of my favorite people in the world is my sister-in-law (coincidentally, the wife of my brother, the only one of three also w/ A.D.D.) who will tell me “What did you do to your hair??” when I know I really messed it up w/ a do-it-yourself dye job, but when she tells me it looks good the next time I see her, I can actually believe her. It’s the genuine-ness that makes the difference for me. (And that I admire or think well of them in whatever sense so that I value their opions and feedback helps also.) Encouraging me is what I value more than being ‘brought back to reality’, though not holding back honest constructive criticism which I enjoy because I feel that I’m taken seriously, as most of my life I was put down just to be put down, or didn’t measure up to some vague image of what someone though I should be. Rambling is an A.D.D. trait also, isn’t it?