The Villain Within
I then asked, “How do you have so much success curing kids, curing adults, and in many cases, taking them off medication?” He said, “Let me give you an example. When a kid has ADD, and he is sitting in class trying to read a book, and his foot is tap- ping on the ground and his focus is drifting, the truth is he prob- ably really doesn’t want to read that book. To anyone with ADD, trying to read a book of little to no interest is harder than it is for other kids. And most times the teacher who wants what’s best for the student thinks to herself, ‘Johnny is going to sit in that chair and not get up until that book is finished. I’m going to teach him how to sit still and read like the rest of the kids.’ And when the teacher makes him sit in that chair to the point where he can’t handle it anymore, Johnny finally gets up and runs around the classroom or walks into the hall or just gets up and does anything but read that book. Now, not only does he have ADD, he also has ADHD. It’s unfortunately a self-fulfilling diagnosis. “What I do is I go and find out what Johnny is good at. Whether it’s art, baseball, math, science, or whatever it is. Ev- eryone is good at something, if not multiple things, so we dig for it and find it. We get his teachers, friends, and his parents involved, and together we help Johnny take what he’s good at and help him become great at it. When he becomes great at that one thing, his confidence goes through the roof, and it trickles down to all areas of his life. All of a sudden you fast-forward a couple of months and Johnny is in that same classroom reading the book because he wants to.” Can you relate to this in any way? Have you been holding on to a weakness? Have you been letting it somehow define you, diminish your true value, or make you feel inferior? If so, can you see how it fuels this inner success-robbing villain? And can you see why it has to stop today? I went through school struggling like the hypothetical kid in Dr. Hallowell’s example. No one in my early years of school saw all the things I could do well and the talents I had. They only saw what I couldn’t do and what I was bad at. I was shy and insecure, and truly felt stupid regularly because of it. Yet what they didn’t realize at the time, and I’m not sure I did
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