ADHD: Learning to Ask Questions Can Be a Game-Changer
"I use this technique all the time now. 1 told a friend of mine about it, who’s ADHD himself, and he told his CHADD group about it."
Hunters are famous for interrupting people; most will tell you it’s because they know if they don’t blurt out their thought it’ll vanish into the mist by the time the person they’re speaking with has paused.
But there are strategies to deal with this, as Steve in Atlanta found out.
From Steve in Atlanta:
I learned something from a sales training seminar that has really helped me out. I’m ADHD and it shows up by my always blurting out my comments and opinions and interrupting people.
So I went to this sales seminar, and they said that the best way to sell is to ask questions: that way you learn what your client wants or needs. You then can use his own words to tell him how your product will fulfill his needs or whatever.
I started doing this with sales prospects, and learned something else about asking questions. If you listen carefully to people’s answers, they’ll tell you what is important to them. Not just with their words, but with their tone of voice and their body gestures.
So I started asking people questions about the things that seemed important to them. Pretty soon people were telling me all sorts of things that they probably wouldn’t have bothered to let me know about otherwise. I was learning enough about their businesses so that I could sell to them really well.
But there was another benefit to this. I also started doing it with my personal life.
I started with my wife. It was really hard at first, but now it’s becoming second nature. When we’re talking and I see that she’s animated about something, I’ll ask her for more details about that. She then goes off on a tangent, and 1 learn something new; she knows that I’m really listening to her.
It was incredible for her, too. The first time I tried this, we had about an hour-long conversation. Normally, with my short attention span, I would have been out of there in ten minutes, but the challenge of looking for those little signs of what was important to her kept me there.
I kept asking her questions especially about those things that made voice got loud or higher, or when she started gesturing Suddenly, after about an hour of this, she stopped and gave me a funny look.
“What are you on?” she asked.
“Huh?” I said.
“Have you been smoking pot or something? Did you finally go see the doctor and get that Ritalin you’ve been talking about for months?”
“Nope,” I said. “I’m just enjoying listening to you.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Of course not! Why would you think I’m kidding?”
That led us off on another tangent. When we were finally done she told me that after being married to me for five years that was the first time since courting her that she really felt I cared about what she had to say.
Of course I nearly always care about what she has to say, but because I’m usually so busy interjecting my own opinions, or wanting to move the subject along, or wanting to get up and do something else, she never felt as though I cared about her.
I use this technique all the time now. 1 told a friend of mine about it, who’s ADHD himself, and he told his CHADD group about it. A week later, he told me that there was a shrink at the meeting who said that that’s called “active listening,” and it’s one of the skills that they teach psychologists in school.
I wish somebody had taught me that in school!
A police officer in Phoenix adds:
One of the basic techniques of interrogating a witness is to watch for their emotional cues. When they start to squirm, or their eyes move around the room, or whatever, then you know that you’ve hit a button with them.
This is a good skill to have in general life, too. While an interrogation with a suspected perpetrator can get brutal, you can just as easily look for those emotional cues in normal conversation and use this information in a positive way.
If you just observe people as they talk, they’ll tell you what they really want to tell you, what they’re really interested in.
Most people just don’t bother to watch for the cues. But even for a distractible guy like me it wasn’t that hard to learn.
Questioning has always been a part of my nature, though not driven by a desire to learn about other people. My questions from an early age were about things I saw and grabbed my interest. I also questioned what I was told that did not make sense. It resulted in me receiving corporal punishment in catholic school. by the age of seventeen I truly accepted that I a born skeptic, and atheist.
Listening to others is a skill I need to cultivate more. My wife likes to talk about social interactions, something she is far more adept at than I am. It is often hard to focus because she has details of her social world that I have trouble retaining. She has dozens of birthdays in her head. I know hers, and a few others.
I am very passionate about the current political landscape. I am alarmed by the rhetoric coming from someone who claims to be the absolute arbiter of truth. It is a "truth" not unlike the one the nuns tried to force on me. My wife, being the social person she is, does not like that beast either, but is far more tolerant of people who do than I am. It causes tension.