Good morning, everybody. Welcome. For me, it’s early on a Monday morning, and I know for some of you, it may work as well. It’s absolutely lovely to have you here today. For the very first session of Facet5 Live 2023, I’m thrilled to be with you, and I’m gonna be with you for the next hour talking to you about neurodiversity.

So let me start off giving you a little bit about me. Who am I? Why do I talk about neurodiversity so much?

My background is in learning development. So, I am a coach, I am a trainer.

But I’m also neurodivergent.

Just gonna say hello to those that just come in. Good morning. Welcome.

My back off mute. For those that have just joined, if you wouldn’t mind popping your cameras off today, just so that we can keep the boarding going, my name’s Haley Breckley for those that that have just come in and, my background is in the world of learning development. I’m a coach. I’m a trainer. And my own personal journey is a journey of neurodivergence.

This journey very much started when I was a child in school with lots of turbulent moments. A phone call to my mom on the very first day of school asking if she would please come and kindly collect me and, explain to me that it’s not great to be biting other children on first day of school.

This moved on to me as a teenager struggling to sit still in the classroom struggling to engage with work and struggling with social situations as well. When I was fourteen, I was diagnosed with what back then was called ADD, and now we understand to be ADHD.

And, I also picked up a dyslexia diagnosis as well.

I entered the workplace, and I did a couple of different jobs where I found the stillness challenging. I found the quietness difficult, and I found repetitive tasks a real struggle.

I moved into the world of the fire service where I found myself thriving. It was a wonderful environment. It was fast paced. It was filled with adrenalin, and people whose brains worked in the way that mine did a lot of the time.

Unfortunately, I had an unpleasant situation with somebody that managed me who simply decided that my face didn’t fit and that that was not acceptable, not the way that she wanted things to be. And on the back of that, I ended up having a mental breakdown.

My recovery brought me to train as a therapist myself, also as a coach, and then as I said getting into the world of learning development, where now I have the privilege of combining my entire life history of being neurodivergent the research that I’ve done into the world of neurodiversity and neurodivergence and being a coach and trainer and bringing those two things together.

The final piece of this puzzle is that a couple of years ago in talking more to women, particularly, and adults who have autism is I discovered that I’m also autistic.

And so, I have the three neurodivergent differences or my neurotype would be described as ADHD autism and dyslexia.

So today, what do I do? I run my own learning consultancy where I have the joy of facilitating sessions such as today.

That’s enough about me. Let me tell you what else we’re gonna cover today. What we’re gonna look at is what is neurodiversity. We hear the words so much and some of us might have a great idea of what it is, and some of us less so. So, what is neurodiversity?

We’re gonna look at the labels and language that sit behind neurodiversity.

Then we’ll look at personality and how that intersects with neurodiversity.

And finally, we’ll finish up with a little bit about neuro inclusion.

What is neuro inclusion? How does it work? What can we do to be neuroinclusive?

So, let’s start off with what is neurodiversity.

Neurodiversity is the blend of two words very literally we’ve got neuro, meaning brain, and diversity, meaning difference.

So, we combine them together to recognize that everybody’s brain works differently.

So, all of us today that are here All of us have brains that work in a different way.

Some of us absolutely thrive on putting things in writing. Other than others cannot stand to put in things in writing and would much prefer to have a conversation about it.

That is one element of neurodiversity.

Some of us really enjoy being in loud spaces in big groups of people. And again, others of us find that much more challenging and would rather be in a much smaller group or indeed on their own.

So, if neurodiversity is all of us, that means that as a group, we are neurodiverse.

So how do we describe somebody like myself? Somebody whose brain works in a way that is different so much so that we categorize that as being different.

That’s when the words neurodivergence come into play.

Neurodivergence describes somebody whose brain operates thinks processes in a way that’s different from the majority.

Now when we’re talking about quality, inclusion, equity, belonging, diversity.

It’s really important that we have flexibility in language. So just as neurodiversity, covers all of us and neurodivergence covers those of us whose brains think and work differently.

We’ve also got some other words that come into play because some people don’t gel with the idea of being neurodivergent as an individual or having a neurodivergence.

And so, they might use the words neurodistinct, neurominority, neurospicy.

And for us, it’s really about reflecting that language just as we would in any other inter section of inclusion, it’s about acknowledging that the choice somebody makes about the language that they use about themselves is really summing up who they are. This is important to somebody as their name.

Now we’ve got neurodiversity.

We’ve got neurodivergence.

What about everybody else?

Sometimes we can find ourselves in a situation where we’ll almost start calling people normal.

I invite you to think. Do you know anybody that’s normal?

I certainly don’t. I don’t think there really is such thing as normal. And so, in the world of neurodiversity and neurodivergence, we don’t use the word normal. Because actually that’s suggesting other people are abnormal.

We use words like neurotypical or neuromajority.

And what we’re referencing there is that there are a group in our society of people whose brains operate in a way that is like the majority of other people, but it’s not being normal or not normal.

Now you might have seen statistics that say that fifteen to twenty percent of our population are neurodivergent.

And depending on how we look at this, that may be true. But actually, what we also know is that diagnosis and assessment is massively under representative of what’s actually out there. So, the statistics let’s take with a little bit of a pinch of salt and let’s acknowledge that the actual number is likely to be much higher than that.

The other thing that happens is that we don’t have consensus as a group of people working in this space. On actually what falls into neurodivergence.

Because when we look at it from a clinical perspective, we look at things mainly like ADHD, autism, Tourette’s. When we look at it from an educational perspective, we’ll add in dyslexia, dyspraxia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia.

But if we look at it from a society perspective, from a social perspective, actually just as this umbrella demonstrates and becomes so much wider, there are so many other things that would fall into the idea of neurodivergence.

And with statistics showing one in four of us will experience mental ill health at some point in our lives, actually, it makes the statistics of twenty percent, i.e. 1 in 5 of us, incorrect by default. And so, what we know is that if we look at it from this perspective, this larger umbrella that covers so many different things, actually, if we can think about making our workplaces really accessible for somebody with any one of those things under the umbrella.

The chances are we’re making it accessible for anybody.

Because ultimately that’s covering everybody.

So, let’s have a think about the spiky profile. The spiky profile is something that’s often spoken about in the context of neurodivergent.

And to talk you through it, I’m going to pop up a graph and talk you through what happens on the graph.

Now at the bottom, we’ve got across the bottom of the graph, perceptual reasoning.

Perceptual reasoning is our ability to understand the world around us that’s not put into words.

So, patterns, That’s a key part of perceptual reasoning, noticing just what’s happening. That’s another key part.

Within our verbal reasoning, verbal reasoning is conversely the things that are put into words.

We have memory. And in this context, what I’m really talking about is our working memory.

Now I describe our working memory as a whiteboard, and each of us within our own brains have got one of those white boards with the dry white markers.

Some of us, our white boards are three meters long. They’re beautifully color coded. And that means if somebody gives us some information, gives us a list of things to do, then we can pop that information up on our whiteboard.

And when we need to, we can go back to that information and recall it.

Some of us, on the other hand, have got a whiteboard the size of a post it note. And it’s much more challenging because you can add some information, but by the nature of the fact that it’s so small, actually you can’t add a great deal.

Some of us, and I’ve put myself into this camp, have got a whiteboard that is somewhere in the middle. It’s not small. However, what happens is that our pain is a bit dodgy.

So, some days, we can remember all of the things on the list. Another days, we can remember absolutely nothing. And remember, this whiteboard is what’s inside your brain.

So, if I asked you to times together two thousand seven hundred and eighty six by nine hundred and twelve, in order for you to do that, unless you were really hot on writing it down, you would need to recall those numbers. You would need to use your working memory to bring those numbers back before you can even attempt any maths with it.

Similarly, when you’re given a list of seven actions to take, you need to be able to remember those options in order to be able to do anything. The final one here is processing speed. Now processing speed in us is much like processing speed in a computer, except in us, There’s lots of different nuances in the way that our processing speed works.

You might have in your life answered somebody with Sorry. What? Yes. That’s fine.

And the reason for that is because it took a little bit of time for your brain to catch up. On exactly what it was you were hearing.

And so, you asked the person to repeat themselves or you referenced that you’d not quite heard it but actually you had, you just needed that extra bit of time.

Now, if I add into this graph, our first person here, this person is, likely to be neurotypical.

This person doesn’t have huge differences between what they find easy and what they find difficult.

I can add this person in as well. And this person, again, doesn’t have huge differences with what they find easy and what they find difficult. However, overall, their abilities are slightly higher. They’re probably gonna find most things a little bit easier.

If I add a next person, this person is likely to be neurodivergent.

Now this is what we mean by a spiky profile.

There’s much bigger gaps in what that person finds easy and what that person finds difficult.

It could be the other way around.

So, we could have somebody that finds perceptual reasoning much harder and verbal reasoning much easier.

So overall, these individuals are going to have differences in the way that they perform, in the way that respond in the way that they work, in the way that they think, in the way that they experience the world, and indeed a workplace.

If we take person labeled number four, we’ve got really low perceptual reasoning. So that that pattern spotting at just seeing, just noticing things that are going on, is going to be much harder for them. However, the verbal reasoning is the best of the whole team. And so if something is put into writing or into words, that’s gonna be much easier for them to understand.

But their memory, it’s really, really poor. It’s not even a whiteboard sized So it’s not even a post it note sized whiteboard. Actually, this is the back of a receipt in a broken pencil.

This is if they’re not physically writing something down somewhere, then actually their brains not retaining that information at all.

The processing speed on the other hand, it’s again one of the biggest strengths of that whole team.

So, we couple this up as a as a person. We think of this as holistically one person.

We’ve got somebody that struggles with spotting patterns, struggles with noticing things, put it in writing, put it in words, speak it out to them and they’ve got it. They can process that really quickly, comes really easily.

Relay on their memory on the other hand and they’re probably not gonna be able to take it away.

So, I’d like to ask you, add a add a comment into the chat if you will. If this were a team, what would the strengths be?

What might their challenges be?

What assumptions might be made?

And what would help.

So, thinking about the way that that team works differently, And while you’re chatting, while you’re typing into the chat, while you’re adding a couple of comments for me, I’ll just carry on talking through Actually, person number two. So, person number two here is somebody that we would describe as being neurotypical.

Their ability, a little bit higher. Their processing speed’s slightly, slightly lower than a couple of their colleagues, but their overall ability slightly higher. We’re gonna imagine that their IQ is higher than the majority of other of other people. But if we compare person number two, person number one and person number four, what we’re gonna notice is that, actually, we can’t quite tell who’s got the highest IQ now because person number one and person number four has got such differences in what they find using, what they find difficult.

Now we bring this into a workplace.

We don’t often sit around having conversations about our IQ, but when we do generic assessments, what we might notice is that actually It’s harder to tell who’s got higher abilities.

I can see in the chat, thank you, Louise, communication challenges government for different styles and methods of communication. Absolutely.

If we are just relying on everybody needing to understand really long wordy emails, we’re gonna miss out on a few of these people.

Conversely, if we’re relying on stand-up conversations that are pacey and quick and invigorated and all of those other things that we like to say about our workplace, then actually we might be missing out for person number four because they’re gonna struggle to take that away. We might also be missing out for person number one. Because they need to absorb the words there to be able to do anything with it.

We’ve got some more things coming in, strengths. You can distribute work based on skills you absolutely can. And isn’t it wonderful when we have a workplace that looks at what do you do really well? And helps you to work up to them.

We’ve also got the biggest challenge will be communication, but if they work on it, just trying to read.

Yes. Absolutely. If they work on it together, they can be the best team that they can be.

A great range of ideas, viewpoints, challenges with communication, listening skills, need to create variety in checking with all team members to see what they’re taking away to action. This is a fantastic point. Absolutely.

How do I buddy up in the team for each other, and that’s another key point. So, making sure that our team are taking the actions way that we think they’re taking away. When we come back to this person number four with that really low working memory, I’ve seen this person in your workplace. And unless we’re really curious about what’s happening, unless we’ve got really great practices, the assumption is that they’re disinterested not motivated or lazy because they talk the talk in a meeting, and then they go away and don’t follow-up on it. It’s none of those things. It’s simply that they’d forgotten it.

Another thing the buddying. So often, and I’ve seen this in my own life, often we buddy the person with the highest strength up with the person with the biggest challenge. So the opposite ends of the scale.

Now if you think of a buddy up, number one and number four to with the idea of helping number four to increase their levels of perceptual reasoning, to increase their level of pattern spotting.

What’s gonna happen is number one is probably gonna say something as helpful as well you just kind of look at it and then it happens.

And number four is gonna be like, well, when I look at it, it doesn’t happen.

Now, probably in this instance, better odds, buddy in three and four together, to help that because they can work on strategies between the two of them and checking in with number one on is there anything we’re not seeing. And if there’s something we’re not seeing, what is it that we might need to do?

Question, how do you assess who has which strengths and measure them across these four dimensions? So, there’s a variety of assessments out there that cover similar things to this.

And they are neurodiversity or neurodivergence based assessments.

However, you can also do it a bit more conversationally and anecdotally by having some really good conversations and simply asking people what works well so that we don’t necessarily end up with a graph exactly like this, but actually we might end up with an idea that you know, Fred finds this challenging and Francis finds this challenging, but this is how that works out for them as a team.

So let us move on and start to think about labels.

Now I’m gonna flip back now and talk a bit more about my personal story and just to have a sip of water before I do.

I mentioned to you that I have three diagnoses, three labels, if you will.

And sometimes we can feel like labels are not helpful, not the best thing to be doing. You know, why do we need to label everybody?

And to some degree, I absolutely agree.

However, before I had the label of ADHD, autism and dyslexia.

The labels that I had were lazy, disorganized, chaotic, messy, antisocial, difficult, stubborn.

All of these things aren’t really what they seem on the surface, but they were the labels that I held.

I was well into adulthood before I realized that I’m not a lazy person.

I’m absolutely not.

However, my task initiation for boring mundane things is a huge, huge challenge, which makes me look quite lazy.

If we flip that, we think about actually what is it that we’re labeling?

How does that work?

We can start to see that labels can give us understanding.

They can take us away.

From saying that somebody is bad, that somebody is lazy, that somebody’s antisocial, that somebody’s stubborn, that somebody’s too chatty or not chatty enough and all of those things, and actually we can start to accept people for who they are and understand perhaps why they work in the way that they do and why that’s really good for them and what can help?

Now adding into this, we think about how let’s use Facet5. I’m sure that all of you have heard of Facet5. If you haven’t, then I’m sure you will do by the end of this week. Facet5 is a personality measure that looks five areas of personality.

And how does that work for somebody? What it doesn’t do is label somebody as useless at this. Terrible at that. What it does do is look at them as a holistic person. How does this work well for them? What is it that would make things easier and what would make it harder?

What could we dial up on? And what might we like to find ways of dialing down on as well.

And that really brings us to the idea of cognitive diversity.

One of the questions I often hear is how does personality and neurodivergence fit?

Now, as yet, and bear in mind that the concept of neurodiversity as a workplace of idea is still relatively new. It’s not new. Back in the early nineteen hundreds, things were first referenced, and actually back in Tudor times there was writing about those who worked in the courts, the royal courts, having traits that we would absolutely identify alongside autistic traits by the current day. But from a workplace perspective, this is really still quite new. And so, what we haven’t got yet is lots and lots of research about personality and neurodivergence.

But what we have got is many neurodivergent people that have had personality assessment done. And what we can recognize is that actually there’s not massive correlations.

It’s not that every autistic person comes out with this particular person multi type.

And really, it’s about how they blend together to become cognitive diversity.

Our personality is what underpins our behaviour and under our divergence or under our type is what the way that our brain works, the way that our brain processes the world around us, the way that we communicate, the way that we interact the way that we understand the way that we perceive the way that our senses operate, all of those things fit into our neurotype.

And so, the two really sit together to form a bigger picture rather than being overlaid onto each other.

The great thing about personality though is that we can start to understand the way that people work, the things that drain them, the things that make things easy for them.

And we can look at this through a strengths-based approach. Now again, I come back to Facet5, I remember Facet5 was one of the first personality assessments I’d ever done. And although I’d got my ADHD diagnosis, although I’d got the dyslexia diagnosis, I still was trying really hard fit myself into this very round hole as a very star shaped peg. And I was trying to be really organised and really disciplined and plan everything and have spreadsheets that monitored every single facet.

I was trying to be the person that would volunteer to write the meeting minutes, even though they take me absolutely hours.

And then I had a personality assessment, like I say, I had a Facet5 profile.

And what was really interesting was I looked that. And I understood the difference between somebody that’s naturally disciplined, planning comes easily to them, their level of, in Facet5 we’d say as a control score, they had a really high control score. Now my control score came out as one. And actually what that meant was I was pushing myself so hard to be all of these things. And what that also meant was I was putting myself into positions where everybody else was judging me on those things as well because that was what I was playing to, playing to one of my biggest challenges.

When I had that assessment done, I looked at what was up on the other end of that, and actually what’s at the other end is creativity, that big picture thinking, coming up with something new, being able to throw the rule book out the window and think of a different way of doing things.

And actually that’s the huge strength.

Now both in personality and in the world of neurotypes, neurodivergence, What we can do is we can look at the strengths that we have.

So I invite you and again add it into the chat if you’d like to. To think about something that’s a challenge for you.

And actually, where’s the strength in that?

And whilst you add into the chat, if that works for you, I’ll talk you through a couple of the people that I know.

I know somebody where they thought that their challenge was that they really struggled to work in noise environments.

Actually, what they found was that their strength was that they weren’t reliant on anybody else. They could independently crack on and do their work.

I know somebody else who thought that their challenge was that they were quite domineering.

But actually in the right positions with the right workload, the right focus, and being mindful of the way that they dominate, what they discovered was that actually they were really good at driving something forwards when other people were struggling to come to consensus, they were really good at saying, let’s just get this done. Let’s move forwards.

I know somebody who felt that their challenge was about people pleasing.

They’re incredibly altruistic, but actually their strength is that they’re able to look to do the right thing.

And what helped them was a bit of scaffolding, a bit of an idea about how do you be a people pleaser? How do you, be altruistic in a way that doesn’t grate against you with a person.

To really think about for yourself, what do you find difficult And how could you reframe that? How could that be a strength for you?

You’ve may well of seen this before.

Albert Einstein. I mean, we can’t talk about brains without bringing Albert Einstein in really can we?

Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it’s stupid.

Our whole social construct is really looking at how do fish climb trees.

Because we see monkeys climb trees. So, we think let’s get the fish to climb the tree too.

Now Actually, if we dial this back and think about, why do we want the fish to come true?

If we had a whole array of animals and we’re asking them all to climb a tree, why do we need then those animals to climb that tree?

Is it to look at the leaves? Because if it is to look at the leaves, well our elephant, our elephant doesn’t need to climb a tree at all to look at the leaves because our elephant can just reach out grab a leaf and have a look at it. Add your giraffe? Well, a giraffe’s head’s in the leaves anyway, so it definitely doesn’t need to climb tree.

Our fish? Well our fish swim in its natural environment in the place that it works at its best.

There’s leaves in there.

Actually, the leaves fall off the tree into the water, and that’s when the fish can go and have a look.

So really, out of all of these, none of them need to be climbing a tree.

The monkey on the other hand.

The monkey probably does – to find that leaf.

Probably gonna be really helpful for the monkey to be able to climb the tree.

The penguin?

Well, then we really need to be questioning penguins don’t eat leaves, leaves don’t exist, particularly in a penguin’s natural habitat.

Why are we so determined that a penguin needs a leaf?

We could actually, probably doesn’t particularly need a leaf. We probably don’t need to ask the penguin to climb the tree at all.

Now, we apply this to our world, the way that we work as humans.

We have things like exams.

And we say in order to be successful, you need to go and sit in this room with loads of other people and they’ll all be sniffing, and maybe their stomach will be rumbling, and somebody will drop a pen every so often. And you need to go and sit in that room, and you need to regurgitate two years worth of knowledge onto a piece of paper.

With a time pressure, and silence. Well, I say silence, but, you know, I previously mentioned the pen’s dropping and the sniffing and all of those other things.

Now, is that how we get the best out of people?

Or is that really asking all of those animals to climb a tree.

Exactly the same with the world of work. We ask people to come in and sit through a really stilted conversation.

Come in and tell us all about you while we stare at you and write about it.

That’s not really a fair indication of how you would perform in the role that you’re gonna do.

And coming back to Einstein.

We’re kind of judging again the fish on its ability to climb tree.

And what impact does that have?

I can see that many of you have given us lovely examples of your own strengths based and how that works for you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

I want to talk to you about kerbs.

Particularly, this bit of a kerb. A bit of a kerb that’s lowered, a dropped curve.

Now kerbs were first dropped to provide accessibility to people who use a wheelchair.

And then we added the bobbily bits of pavement so that the wheelchairs had some friction and they wouldn’t just roll into the road.

What happened was that many other people ended up using the dropped part of the kerb.

So, push chairs, if you’re pushing a push chair, you’ll often go up that bit. If you’re wheeling a suitcase, you’ll often go up that bit of the kerb.

If you’ve got a child on a scooter, they’ll often go up that bit of kerb. Or if you’re really cool and you like to get about on a skateboard, you might find yourself going up that bit.

Even if you just have lower mobility and reaching your leg up step of a normal kerb, again, the dropped kerb might be a bit easier for you.

So, what we did here was we changed the design of a kerb for a minority group for a few people in our society.

What ended up happening was we benefited lots and lots of people by accident.

And really, we haven’t disadvantaged anybody. I’ve yet to find somebody whose life is worse because there are dropped kerbs on the pavement.

This is with what we call the kerb effect, or we might refer to it as universal design.

Universal design is a way of us looking at how do we create something where everybody gets to be their best self. Where everybody has the opportunity of access. Where everybody has the opportunity of work.

And this is on the back of us looking at what doesn’t work. For those people.

To put this into a neurodiversity context or a neurodivergence context, Historically, what would have happened if you were dyslexic and you’re in the workplaces, you may have had access to read/write software. And so that would allow you to dictate your work or to, listen to it back to you.

Now that would have been a case-by-case adjustment that was made for you.

And the licensing on that was really quite expensive. So, it wasn’t something that was given to everybody.

Microsoft, in their latest, edition, launched 365, and within 365, there is accessibility features for everybody. So not only do we have the ability to dictate to Microsoft Office, for example, we have the ability to listen to that really long or email that somebody sent to us. We could also change the colour of the background.

We can change the spacing in our letters we can change the layout. We can change the width of the columns in which we’re reading.

And can put it into an immersive reading mode, which basically makes it look a little bit like a karaoke so that you follow along the letters and the words as it’s as you’re reading.

And this is for everybody.

So what we’ve got is something that was put in place one by one for individuals.

But then when we thought about it, helped so many people that we made it part of universal design.

Exactly the same thing can happen in workplace.

It might be that you recognize that for one individual, fifty five minute meetings, are the thing that’s gonna help.

But actually, who doesn’t want the option to go and get a drink in between meetings? Who doesn’t want to be able to take a comfort break or just finish writing your notes before you go straight into the next one? So again, that universal design, fifty five minute meetings or twenty five minute meetings across the board, becomes a really great way of working.

If you’d like to?

Tell us tell us what helps you, and that might be something that’s adjusted one by one. Or that might be something that actually across entire workplaces really works well for you, allows you to play for your allows you to think about what helps you to be your best at work because that’s what we all wanna be. Right? We all wanna come to work and have our various day. We talk about making adjustments for people, but actually, what we’re doing is facilitating great work. We’re providing that opportunity.

I wonder how many of you know these characters.

Again, pop it in the chat. If you know who these are, tell me tell me who they are.

I’ll give you I’ll give you a few seconds just to see if anybody can tell me who either of these are or what it is that they’re holding.

Okay. No. Oh, yep. Amazing. Thank you so much. We’ve got Superman and we’ve got Popeye.

Absolutely right. And thank you so much. We’ve got kryptonite and we’ve got spinach.

This is a really nice way of looking at what enables you and what holds you back. So for Superman, he can do extraordinary things. He can work really, really well. He has absolute incredible strength.

Until he sees the tiniest bit of kryptonite.

Kryptonite totally disabled superman.

We look at Popeye.

It’s the opposite way around. Popeye has nothing extraordinary about him.

Goes about his day as a very generic person, and then he gets himself a can of spinach. And all my word, he has the most super strength ever. And this is an ability that he has.

Now if we think about this in our own world, in our own context, we each have a spinach and a kryptonite.

We have more than one.

For me, Kryptonite is an email that’s longer than about four lines with some actions muddled in to the text on the email. There is nothing that’s gonna get me avoiding like that. Similarly, if I have to write something up, if I’ve got a really great idea, but I have to go through some long document to put that idea forwards.

Guess what? That idea is gonna stay secret.

Conversely spinach.

Spinage for me as an individual is being able to talk things through. Being able to have a chat with people, being able to make it as light touch on the writing as possibly can.

Thank you, Alan. Isolation from my team is my kryptonite. Yeah. Absolutely.

And It’s gonna be so different for different people than what you might find is that what one person’s spinach is another person’s kryptonite.

And this is something that we sometimes try and mitigate. We try and find a way of making. It just fits so beautifully together. But the reality is we’re humans. We’re organic. We’re not designed to fit beautifully together like a jigsaw puzzle. We’re designed to figure out ways of working well.

But if we can have conversations with people, if we can understand watch your kryptonite, watch your spinach, then actually we can get to a point where we allow people work to their kryptonite, work to their spinach.

And if you have got that brilliant example where you’ve got two people who could swap something so that they both end up with spinach and neither of them end up with kryptonite How brilliant would that be?

Golly says writing notes is my kryptonite and remembering detail that others don’t is my spinach. I love that. Fantastic. Thank you so much.

One of the activities that I do with Teams is I have exactly this this picture and I will stick it up on a display, or I might use it. If I’m doing it virtually, I might use a whiteboard, pop it on a whiteboard, and I ask people to put post it notes. On that describe what their finishes and what their kryptonite is. And what I find is that so often teams are really surprised by each other’s kryptonites and spinagers because we don’t talk about it just like back in the day when I was trying to be that person that was amazing at admin, amazing at planning, amazing at writing things up.

And I really downplayed the fact that, you know, I can talk pretty well. I can present pretty well.

But I was surprised that they were the things I found difficult because I worked so hard on it, but I was exhausted and nobody was getting the best out of me in that situation.

So as we start to think about how do we take this forwards?

Really, this is about fostering belonging. Now people ask me sometimes for, you know, this utopian plan of how do we how do we be inclusive? How do we inspire neuro inclusion?

And ultimately, it’s about creating a space where every single person gets to belong, gets to come and be the best self.

Accept in their reality.

My reality is not your reality, and it never will be.

Your reality is never my reality and it never will be. And you know what? Isn’t that a gorgeous thing?

I don’t have to know your reality to accept it. If you tell me that something’s really difficult for you, I might be curious to see if there’s a way to help, but I’m not gonna dismiss it. I’m not gonna say get on with it or, you know, well, it’s fine for me. So it’s easy. I’m gonna accept that we’re different on things.

Offer flex. Now depending on the environment you’re in, depending on the degree of flex that you can offer. But if we always go from a viewpoint of How can I fix to help rather than what we often hear which is, well, we don’t do it that way? That’s not what we do.

I think the pandemic lockdowns, they really got us to think things differently.

For years, we have workplaces that said, we can’t offer the flexibility of working from home. It won’t work.

And then all of a sudden, they went, oh, and that it does work. And, yeah, we’re not gonna be paid for an office place anymore because it works so well. And that’s exactly it. We need to lift out of where we’re stuck and think about what camera they’re pointing.

Avoid judgment and be curious. Now if I take your mind back to that graph, that spiky profile that I showed you. Remember that person with the really low working memory, a judgment of them is likely to be that they’re disinterested, that they’re lazy, that they’re not motivated, that they don’t care any one of those things.

If we avoid that judgement, which is an inherent part of being a human being, by the way, But if we can avoid judging or if we can be mindful of putting that judgment to one side and be curious about Why is this working in the way that it is? What could be done differently to make it work better? And actually, we’re gonna create something better for everybody.

Support with task organization and initiation.

Now I do use so much one to one coaching with people who are neurodivergent.

And one of the biggest things is that people really struggle with getting going on stuff. They struggle with the overwhelm of all of these things they need to be doing.

So if somebody can sit down with them and say, cool, talk me through what you need to do. Let’s look at where you start. For them. It’s like magic, absolute magic. I say for them, for me as well, I’m exactly the same.

So having that open mind that actually the most helpful thing that you could do for somebody might be to spend three minutes with them figuring out how they get that thing started.

Rethink in productivity, many neurodivergent people will have a different way of being it. And what that might mean is that instead of working in this nice steady kind of way throughout the day is that They go for a walk, and then they do absolutely loads. And then they have a rest, and then they do absolutely loads. Again, much more spiky.

Now if we really value how often somebody sat at their desk appearing like they’re doing some work rather than the actual productivity that’s come out of it, then we wouldn’t acknowledge the strength of that second person. We’d only be thinking of a person that’s sat all day long.

Raising awareness, the more we understand about the world of neurodiversity and neurodivergence, the better it can be, the easier it is for somebody to be able to come out and say, this is difficult for me. This is really easy for me. I can do that really well because guess what? That’s just that’s often just as hidden as the things that are difficult.

It’s not just about neurodivergence, though. It’s also about working to strengths. It’s about us being different and that it’s absolutely fabulous that we’re all different. We need just as much awareness as that. And so if that means that you go back to a team, and you share with them, this is my kryptonite, and this is my spinach.

Probably give them the context. Otherwise, they’re gonna wonder why you’re talking about spinach. At half past nine on a Monday morning.

But if you can really think about what’s easy for you and what’s difficult and how that works, we’re gonna get to something brilliant.

Fine a couple of things. So mentors and buddies.

Like I said earlier, when we’re talking about that graph, mentors can be one of the most powerful things for us to have access to in workplace.

But it needs to be the right person. It needs to be somebody who can kinda see where we’re coming from that doesn’t assume that these things are easy, that these things are simple. Because if they do assume that, then they’re probably gonna oversimplify it. And then that’s not gonna help.

That’s probably gonna make the person feel worse. So thinking about how do we buddy up people, how do we assign mentors, also, how do we be the best mentor we can be? Because we really have to recognize that our starting points are not the same. It goes back to that reality.

The final thing on my list is to actively include.

If I look back through my career, the worst possible moments for when nobody made the choice to actively include.

Where I was judged to be that person whose face just didn’t fit.

And actually, by one person making a decision that says, I’m gonna include you. I’m not gonna I’m gonna go along with the, you know, what the team’s doing, what everybody else is doing, but I really wanna make you feel included That would have made such a difference.

And each and every one of us gets to make that choice. We get to actively include And that’s really where the most value comes out of it.

So as I start to wrap up our session today, what I want to ask you is what’s your takeaway?

And at this point, if you’ve got any questions you wanna throw into the chat start typing them, and I’ve got a few minutes to be able to answer some at the end.

But I’m also going to ask you to reflect on watchful takeaway.

Because we can sit and we can learn for an hour about a different topic, and then we can go and we can carry on our day.

Or we can take an hour’s learning, and we can think about what is it that we do to apply. We need to put a bit of effort into that. It’s not gonna just osmosis into our world, but we can really think about what is it that we’re gonna take away? What might we do differently?

What might we do the same? What might we have learned a little bit about that actually would really like to go and learn some more about what’s gonna help them?

I’d really invite you if not immediately at some point today to think about what are you taking away from this?

And for every session that you do with class at five this week, thinking the same thing.

So finally, this is me. If you wanna stay in touch, please feel free. That’s my LinkedIn QR code. You’re very welcome to to connect with me. Take a bit of time.

I can see we’ve got no questions coming in into the chat just yet. So I’m gonna hand back over to Sonia to finish this up for the day. Thank you so much. Oh, we have got a question. Sorry. Sorry, Sonya. I called you in prematurely.

But it’s always the catch up between the typing and talking. So I’d like to learn more about the four aspects of the spike profile because I think it would lead to very productive conversations among my team.

It’s a really great one. There’s a lot of information. So literally, if you look on the internet, what you will find is loads of information out there. If you look for spiky profile, what you’ll find is it’s much more than just those four areas.

The the spike protocol covers load, but obviously today we were here for an hour. So I’ve cut it down into four areas.

But absolutely, really good way to bring in conversation.

We’ve also got a really liked virtual challenge and watch for strength in that. I can use some more practice and it’s been a different site. Thank you. I’m a small governor and they’re linked by another saying, this is going to be so useful as I continue my learning.

Fabulous. I absolutely love it when someone takes us into school because you know what that is? The foundation is on it. School is the foundation of us going into the rest of life into adulthood.

Thank you.

You’re very welcome. Thank you to those that are saying thank you. As somebody who, gets a little dopamine hit and has dysregulated levels of dopamine, I massively appreciate your thanks, so thank you for giving me them. The idea of the curve affect make an adjustment to the minority which can benefit everybody else, and I worked so well. One of the things that I didn’t mention was we see neurodivergent people as being like the canary down the line. So canaries were used in the mine to show if the levels of gas were unhealthy for humans to breathe. And so basically at the point that a canary was no longer able to breathe and fell off its perch, that would be the point that the miners would leave, which out because the canaries were no longer singing, they’d know that it wasn’t safe.

We so often see neurodivergent people as the person who is like that canary, the person that struggles first, doesn’t mean that everybody else in a struggle, it just might mean that everybody else has slightly more tolerance before they get to that point. Thank you.

Sonja, now I’m gonna turn it back over to you, and thank you all so much for being here today.