Ep41: Neurodiversity 101: Creating Thriving Workplaces For All Minds

We’ve researched the top-asked questions around neurodiversity and our incredible expert guests have answered them for you. 

We’re thrilled to welcome our guests to the podcast:

Professor Nancy Doyle

Professor Nancy Doyle is a Professor of Organizational Psychology specializing in neurodiversity at work, who was named one of the world’s most inspirational D&I leaders in 2022. Nancy is the Founder of Genius Within, a neurodivergent-owned and led business with a mission to help neuro-distinct individuals access their inner genius and be at their best at work. She is also Co-Director of the Centre for Neurodiversity at Work, Non-Executive Director of Project 507 and perhaps above all, a proud ADHDer.

Jan Stewart

Jan Stewart is a highly regarded mental health governance expert and advocate. She is the author of Hold On Tight: A Parent’s Journey Raising Children With Mental Illness, Chair of the Board at Kerry’s Place Autism Services, Canada’s largest autism services provider, and previously served as Vice Chair at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, among many other governance roles.

Kristen Carder

Kristen Carder is a mindset coach for people with ADHD and the host of the “I Have ADHD: podcast. Kristen’s extensive experience supporting people with ADHD began in 2012, and since, she has provided coaching and consulting to thousands of ADHD adults. Kristen’s life’s purpose is to help adults with ADHD accept themselves and move from Point A to Point B.

So hold on tight – we’re about to answer all your questions about neurodiversity!

Resources

All the links mentioned in the show.

Connect with Nancy:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/prof-nancy-doyle-0887767/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/NancyDoylePsych 
• Genius Within Website: https://geniuswithin.org/

Connect with Jan:

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/janstewartauthor/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/janstewartauthor/
• Website: https://janstewartauthor.com/
• Jans’ Book: https://janstewartauthor.com/books/

Connect with Kristen:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristencarder
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/i.have.adhd.podcast/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ihaveadhdpodcast
• Webiste: https://ihaveadhd.com/
• Podcast: https://ihaveadhd.com/podcast/
• Newsletter: https://ihaveadhd.safechkout.net/ihaveadhd/newsletter

Connect with your hosts

• Connect with Al on LinkedIn 
• Connect with Leanne on LinkedIn
• Join the discussion about this episode on LinkedIn
• Email: podcast@TruthLiesandWork.com
• Follow us on Instagram @truthlieswork
• Chat with us on Twitter @truthlieswork
• YouTube channel for the podcast @TruthLiesWork
• Check us out on TikTok (LOL!!!) @truthlieswork

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The Transcript

⚠️ NOTE: This is an automated transcript, so it might not always be 100% accurate!

Prof Nancy Doyle 0:00
There is no point hiring people until you’ve got your shipshape. Otherwise you’re going to hire them and they’re going to fail and it’s going to be awful and you’re going to feel bad and so are they.

Leanne Elliott 0:14
Hello, and welcome to the truth lives and workplace culture podcast, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio plus nation for business professionals. My name is Leanne and business psychologists, my name is Al I’m a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of people and create amazing workplace coaches.

Al Elliott 0:32
We have got a jam packed episode for you today, because we’re talking all about neurodiversity is not something that it’s not a simple subject. Is it clear?

Leanne Elliott 0:40
It’s not and if I’m being honest, not an area of my expertise when it comes to psychology, which is why we have engaged some awesome guests. So we are talking about neurodiversity, and asking and answering the questions you might have as a leader, and perhaps some that you’re afraid to ask.

Al Elliott 0:57
Yeah, I think the biggest issue for most business owners and possibly leaders is they feel they should know what to say and what not to say. But they don’t. And I had this problem when I was doing when I was doing some of the interviews here then I was I was asking them asking my guests like how do I how do I describe this thing? Is it offensive by me using this particular word, which we’ll come on to in a minute? And then how do I describe it? Am I doing it right? Because it’s it’s a minefield, isn’t it?

Leanne Elliott 1:25
It is it really is? So yes, to do this, we definitely need we need some experts, and we have them.

Al Elliott 1:32
Before we meet our guests. Just take a moment we take 90 seconds to tell you about a another podcast on the network that we’re really enjoying right now.

Leanne Elliott 1:38
The first I am very excited to welcome to the podcast. Her name is Professor Nancy Doyle. She is a professor of organisational psychology, specialising in neurodiversity at work. She was also named on the world’s most inspirational DNI leaders in 2022. Mansi is also the founder of genius within a neurodivergent earned AMOLED business with a mission to help nurture distinct individuals access their energy and yes and be at their best at work. She’s also co director for the centre of neuro diversity at work non Executive Director of Project five or seven, and above all a prayer ADHD. Let’s meet Nancy.

Prof Nancy Doyle 2:16
So I’m Nancy Doyle. I am a fully paid up member of the ADHD massive and somehow managed to get a bit of hyper focus on the old psychology and disability inclusion in the workplace that has Believe it or not lasted 25 years I run genius within which is a social enterprise, a nonprofit organisation which is employee owned. We are staffed by 68% neurodivergent and or disabled people. And we provide neurodiversity support for individuals no matter where they are in their career. So we work in prisons, we work with people who are long term unemployed, and we work with you know, footsie 100 companies and executives. We also work with those companies to create inclusion policies and inclusion strategy, and provide training and things like that. I also co founded a research centre with my longtime academic collaborator, Professor Alma McDowell, and we together run the Centre for Neuro diversity research at work, which is based at Birkbeck college in the University of London.

Al Elliott 3:23
Our second guest is Jan Stewart. Now Jan is a highly regarded mental health governance expert and advocate. She’s the author of an amazing book called hold on tight a parent’s journey raising children with mental illness. She is chair of the board at Karis place autism services, which is Canada’s largest autism services provider. And He previously served as vice chair at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, among many other roles. Let’s go meet Jan.

Jan Stewart 3:47
I have two kids, as I mentioned, and it’s been quite a journey my children have my son has autism, Tourette Syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder, ADHD and learning disabilities. And his younger sister Ainsley has also Tourette Syndrome, ADHD and learning disabilities, along with severe mood and anxiety disorders. They’re grown now they’re in their 30s. And they’re both working. But it’s been, as I said, quite a journey.

Leanne Elliott 4:17
And finally, I’d love to welcome to the podcast Kristen Carter. Kristen is a mindset coach for people with ADHD. And host of the I have ADHD podcast. Kristen has extensive experience supporting people with ADHD began in 2012. And since then, she has provided coaching and consulting to 1000s of ADHD adults. Kristen’s life’s purpose is to help adults with ADHD accept themselves and move from point A to B. Here’s Kristen, but

Kristen Carder 4:43
my name is Kristen. I have ADHD and I support adults with ADHD. And I do that through my podcast. It’s the I have ADHD podcast and I also have a large group coaching programme where I support adults with ADHD all over the world, it is really the joy of my life to be able to get to know people with ADHD and help them to reach their potential and succeed.

Al Elliott 5:09
Okay, let’s stage regular listeners will know that it’s usually a news roundup, but we just don’t have time. We don’t we simply do not have time. There is so much here. Imagine trying to get three amazing experts and try to just condense everything down into the time slot we have allocated. So, Word of the Week and the roundup. We’ll have to wait until next week. Sorry about that, guys. I feel like we need like a sad sound. So let’s get straight into the meat and potatoes. Leanne has done all the work for you. She’s researched the top asked questions around all of this. And our experts have answered them for us. So hold on tight. We’re about to answer all your questions about neurodiversity. Let’s just start with the basics. And by that, I mean probably the question that most of us are too afraid to ask, what is neurodiversity? Here’s Nancy.

Prof Nancy Doyle 6:00
So neuro diversity is the broad concept that humans aren’t as diverse in the way we think as we are in the way our faces look or our fingerprints. We are kind of all unique and distinct. And that kind of diversity in our in our neuro type in the way that we think is is natural. It’s an evolutionary advantage. It means that we have specialists as well as generalists in a community, you know, some people that are really good at some things, some people that are quite good at most things, some people that you know that that diversity of what people are capable of, is an evolutionary advantage in a community. So this is the kind of baseline understanding, as argued by Judy singer, the Australian sociologist who published her thesis about neurodiversity in 1998. Like many

Leanne Elliott 6:54
topics when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Gen Zed, and millennials have started this conversation publicly, on Tik Tok on Facebook, on Instagram and all the socials. They are embracing it. Much like I think this is a talk called Page Lail.

Al Elliott 7:09
Yes, got about 2 million followers. And her entire account is all about neurodiversity.

Leanne Elliott 7:14
It’s called we’ll leave a link in the show notes. But if you’re wondering kind of how common it is, the typical stat is that one in five people are neurodivergent. And there are plenty of famous people who are proud to be neurodivergent his jam to explain more.

Jan Stewart 7:29
Absolutely lots of examples of people that are highly successful with mental health disorders. I mean, very famous celebrities, Howie Mandel, Billy Eilish. David Beckham, the soccer player there, you know, Catherine Zeta Jones are a number of them that have different mental health disorders, and the list goes on. So we know

Leanne Elliott 7:50
that one in five people on neurodivergent. But what are examples of neurodiversity is neurodiverse. Just autism? What are the most common types of neurodiversity? The most common type of neurodiversity is dyslexia. And that occurs worldwide regardless of culture or language, and affects about nine to 12% of the population. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD is also common, affecting between four and 5% of the population. You may also heard of a DD attention deficit disorder. So I asked Christian, is there a difference?

Kristen Carder 8:24
Psychologists have come to a consensus where now we just call it ADHD it’s kind of an umbrella term. And then there’s three different presentations. So there’s hyperactive presentation, there’s inattentive presentation, and there’s combined presentation. It’s all called ADHD now and so people will kind of distinguish between hyperactive, inattentive and combined teknor.

Al Elliott 8:47
Autism is also common amongst the neuro divergence. A further like one or 2% of people have what’s called an autism spectrum disorder. Together, these three syndromes constitute around 70% of all neurodevelopmental disorder diagnoses. Goodness, that’s difficult to say. Luckily, here’s Jan, to explain a little bit more about autism.

Jan Stewart 9:11
You have to first understand what autism is, you know, it’s a complex developmental disability, it’s not considered a mental illness. It’s a neurological disorder that affects the functioning of the brain, the brain happens to function differently. And what you must understand as an employer is that hiring or meeting one person with autism is meeting one person with autism. It’s a lifelong disorder, but Symptoms range from mild to severe, and then change across individuals and even within the same individual and across all boundaries, race, religion, ethnicities, culture, sexual orientation, it goes on. So what you generally see with people who have what again, what used to be called high functioning autism, are social communication in some difficulties and Some repetitive restrictive behaviours,

Leanne Elliott 10:02
or the types of neurodiversity can include dyspraxia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and Tourette Syndrome. So now we have an idea of what neurodiversity is. How is neurodiversity classed?

Al Elliott 10:13
Okay, so this is the first of many questions that I’m going to categorise as Can I asked this question? So is neurodiversity the same as a mental health disorder? Jan’s children are complex cases. So she’s highly qualified to answer this.

Jan Stewart 10:28
So when I say that my children have severe complex mental health disorders, you know, not everyone has the complexity that’s involved here. But my son with his Tourette Syndrome, when he was nine, he suddenly burst forth out of nowhere, with to our terrifying frightening screaming rages almost every day for nine months until we found a wonderful new developmental paediatrician who prescribed the right medication, and those stop those rages in their track. But that’s commonly associated with Tourette. He then started non stop compulsive rituals associated with his obsessive compulsive disorders, OCD. He couldn’t walk through a door, for example, without slowly counting to 14, because his brain told him then unless he did, his sister would be kidnapped. And they escalated history and rubbing his head against poles. He got down on the filthy subway floor and licked it and went from there. He knew the rituals made no sense. These are hallmarks of OCD. And unfortunately, the rituals only temporarily relieve those terribly disturbing thoughts that drive them. You know that his sister would be kidnapped, that we would be hurt that he would fall through a drain pipe was one of his big ones. But the brain overrides reason in this disorder and forces the individual into this endless loop of repetitive rituals. With those came a lot of impulsivity, distractibility, both children had that tics, learning disabilities, my daughter, totally on the other end much easier as a baby and toddler with thought rate. We only have one but no, we were lucky we have to. She got to school and started shouting out jumping on desks running around totally disturbing. The class was constantly sent to the principal’s office. And I was so drained by those everyday calls. And then came paralysing anxiety, both generalised anxiety and social anxiety and she’s still battles that today also check some learning disabilities, and the inability to read social cues. So she gradually lost every friend she had in the neighbourhood. This has a lot to do with ADHD and what’s called executive function, which is the if you think of it as the conductor of the symphony in the brain that lets you complete tasks time management, organise, simplify, but she struggles with those today too.

Speaker 2 13:03
Now, there is some variance here when it comes to classify neurodiversity in mental health conditions. And this is one of those cases of, of psychologist not being quite able to agree or it depends. So some argue that neurodivergent in and of itself is not considered a medical or mental health diagnosis. Rather, it describes someone whose brain works or develops in a different way, in the brain of a neurotypical person. But for some having neurodivergent traits may create challenges, especially when navigating settings where there are social expectations. And these differences can lead to or be associated with difficulties including mental illness. So for example, nearly three in 10 children diagnosed with ADHD have an anxiety disorder. Autism has also been associated with high rates of anxiety, as well as eating disorders, mood disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, personality disorders, schizophrenia and substance misuse genius within which was found by Professor Nancy, however, also recognise that any neurocognitive profile that is not neurotypical could be included as a minority group, which might include intellectual disabilities, mental health conditions, acquired brain injury, or more. Other common questions about the nature of neurodiversity include intelligence and learning is neurodiversity a learning difficulty, or are neurodivergent smarter. This is where it can get a bit confusing. So neurodiversity is a term that applies to all those with neurological difference. specific learning difficulties is an umbrella term for dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and ADHD, but specific learning disabilities appear across all range of ability and with varying severity. So it may be more useful to think in terms of learning differences, or the different way information is processed and learn is having a specific learning disability does not mean that children young people or adults cannot achieve and succeed in learning. Christen also highlighted that the link between a ADHD and intelligence is a common misconception. I think another

Kristen Carder 15:03
misconception is that ADHD is connected to intelligence. And it is absolutely not. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence is completely separate from ADHD. And, you know, across the spectrum of people who have ADHD, you’re going to find people with extremely high intelligence, and then also people who are lower on the intelligence level and have learning disabilities. It has nothing to do with intelligence. There’s a lot of diversity in intelligence in the ADHD community

Al Elliott 15:34
question of the two of can I ask this question? Am I going to look weird? Is neurodiversity actually a disability, then

Leanne Elliott 15:42
you can ask that question. And again, the answer isn’t straightforward. Yes, no. So I guess the thing is, it’s important for employers to understand that an employee’s neurodiversity could qualify as a disability under the Equality Act of 2010. That’s in the UK. However, not all neurodivergent employees will consider themselves to have a disability. So under law employees have the right to identify as having a disability, or the right not to identify as having a disability. But the legal definition of disability under the Equality Act means that neurodivergent workers are likely to meet the conditions.

Al Elliott 16:18
So I think we’ve covered there a little bit about how his class how to neurodivergent people think, like, we know that being neurodiverse isn’t linked necessarily to intelligence, like, you know, as the famous one like the rain man, and all that kind of films. But it is different, it is linked very much to thinking differently and learning differently. So two of the most common questions that are asked seem to be one, what skills do neurodivergent people have, that that neurotypical people might not? And what are neurodivergent people good at? We asked Nancy,

Prof Nancy Doyle 16:52
we have this concept in neurodiversity of the spiky profile. So if you think about people’s abilities, most people have an IQ of 100. And most people at IQ isn’t one thing. It’s made up of verbal skills, visual skills, how quickly you process information, how well your memory works, and your attention. And so you’ve got these kinds of different areas. And most people, when you plot their abilities on a graph, all of the areas will be more or less 100, there’ll be somewhere between 85 and 115. And 67% of the human population will score between 85 and 115, for all areas of IQ. And then you’ve got your neuro divergence. And what we will do is have some of our scores 140. But then another thing will be sort of down at 75. So we’ve got these big spikes between our strengths and weaknesses. And what we’ve gone into is the autistic spike, which is the people that are really, really good at fine detail processing. And we’ve kind of maxed out on that. But my neurodiversity strengths. The one that I have the highest IQ point is visual spatial reasoning. It’s abstract reasoning, which makes me a good problem solver. I see gaps, I see risks, I see problems, and I see gaps way before anybody else does. And this is even true in my company. You know, I’m going wars because a bit problematic. I’m a bit worried about that number there, I think that’s going to be an issue. And then three months later, it turns into an issue and everyone goes, Oh, I didn’t listen to Nancy three months ago,

Leanne Elliott 18:20
the spiky profile is the perfect way to think about neurodiversity. Nancy has ADHD. But as we know, this is just one type of neurodiversity. She went on to highlight the different and often complementary strengths offered by other neuro minorities.

Prof Nancy Doyle 18:34
Jackie is our CEO. Now I gave her the CEO role and took myself out of it because I’m too inconsistent for a medium sized company. But she is very consistent. She’s dyslexic and dyspraxic. So she has a completely different skill set to me. She has a much more even span of attention, and much more even kind of energy level. She doesn’t have the peaks and troughs in energy. And she’s a great storyteller. And she’s really visually competent, but she doesn’t have my abstract reasoning and my kind of massive hope spotting big risk spotting thing. And then we have Fiona she’s our token neurotypical. And she, she has the very, very consistent calm thing as well. And she’s a slow thinker. So Jackie, and I think quite quickly and we sort of spar off each other and chat chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, chit chat, and then Fiona will come back to us three days later and go, you know, that thing that you two were chatting about three days ago, what I was thinking is this and we will go Oh, never thought of that. So it’s about having different thinking skills and working together.

Leanne Elliott 19:41
So if we think back to the spiky profiles month explained with the peaks come the troughs. So what challenges do people with neurodiversity face? Some tasks come easily, others are more difficult. Chris explains how this can manifest for people with

Kristen Carder 19:55
ADHD. Somebody who is hyperactive is going to have Have a lot of trouble regulating their body. So it’s not just their attention that they’re struggling to regulate, they’re also struggling to regulate their body, you might see them as a child, which is what most of us think of when we think of ADHD we think of a little white boy in a classroom, that’s mostly the picture that we have. And so that child might be bouncing off the walls, throwing, you know, things around the classroom and just kind of being a disruption. But as an adult, that can look like really impulsive decisions really fast driving, kind of switching jobs a lot, lots of leg bouncing, lots of kinds of word vomiting, excuse the term, like lots and lots of talking, interrupting that kind of a thing. A lot of inattentive types kind of fall through the cracks, because they’re not disruptive. They’re going to be internally distracted and spacey kind of daydreaming, maybe looking out the window, and not quite present in the moment. And they still struggle to regulate their body, but it’s more like I struggled to regulate my emotions, I struggled to regulate my exhaustion levels, and I really struggled to get myself to do the things. This is classic for all types of ADHD. I struggled to get myself to do the right thing at the right time.

Al Elliott 21:24
Right. Okay, so this the point where potentially, I get cancelled, because I’m going to ask is neurodiversity just a buzzword? Now? Obviously, this isn’t my personal question, but I have noticed that a lot of people ask me these kind of questions is that they feel the neurodiversity is almost like a badge of honour these days. Now, I totally get that. It shouldn’t be a shameful thing anymore. We were having this conversation, which is fantastic. So everyone’s dying to learn more about it. But do remember those kids are used to wear fake weird glasses, you know, they’ve got no lenses in the glass, that just glass just to look cool. So some people feel that people are saying they’re neurodivergent, just to be cool. Is it some kind of trend? Obviously, this isn’t necessarily our opinion. But this isn’t what people are saying. We asked Nancy, when did neurodiversity become a thing,

Prof Nancy Doyle 22:18
we have all these kinds of variant neuro types that have been swimming around for about 150 years, where people who are essentially people who are unusual in the way they think, get categorised and labelled, and find it hard to participate in mainstream education, and mainstream society for one reason or another. So in mainstream education, let’s take education because that’s a universally known experience. So if you think about the modern classroom since then, since the industrial revolution, in order to succeed, you have to survive the classroom. And that involves sitting still, for eight hours a day, six to eight hours a day. It involves being literate, being numerous, doing fine motor control, handwriting, and socialising in a large group. So if you think about that context, anyone who can’t do that got a label, basically, around the industrial revolution. But prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was no need to do those things. So if you think about reading and writing, it’s a weird skill to D sequential code. And we’re going to do all our communication like that, after evolving for hundreds of 1000s of years to communicate through song, through movement through eye contact, or not eye contact, and just voice and you know, so all of these kinds of flexibilities went out the window and all of a sudden, we have to read and write

Al Elliott 23:39
a Christian acknowledge that yes, ADHD, and other neurodiverse concepts are trending right now. But actually, this is long overdue.

Kristen Carder 23:46
I understand that ADHD is trending right now. But it hasn’t been like this is new, right. And so adults with ADHD had been underserved for decades. I mean, hundreds of years if we’re being honest, but like, decades. And so I really had just like this burning desire to help a community of people who I really felt were not being helped. When I went to Google, like an ADHD coach. At the time, nothing would come up, you know, and I would go on different websites and look, and I would just be like, This is too hard. It shouldn’t be this hard for someone with ADHD to find help. And so I just felt like I was called to fill that gap,

Leanne Elliott 24:29
my feel is that people are reclaiming these terms. That once had negative connotations. And as awareness improves, we’re actually just seeing more people be diagnosed. So Nancy agrees are efforts to raise awareness around neurodiversity has been happening for decades. And while there has been a few breakthroughs, there is still a long way to go and ensuring all variations of human cognition are accepted and enabled.

Prof Nancy Doyle 24:52
20 years ago, I was kicking people’s doors down to get them to talk about neurodiversity, though, anyway. They just weren’t interested and Now everybody is interested, it has become a much more celebrated thing. And in some ways, there’s also a danger in that because what we’ve got at the moment is this kind of stereotype of the autistic tech genius. Typically white, typically male, autistic working in tech, that’s our kind of, that’s our motif of the brilliance of neurodiversity, which, when it first kind of came out about 10 years ago, was great. It was it was a game changer. It was like, oh, okay, so we can do disability inclusion, because people are good at things, and not disability inclusion, because we’re having a pity project. And we feel sorry for people, which is, which is you know, it’s a 180 in terms of what businesses are doing. But I feel like we’ve got stuck there. So we went to quite a privileged industry. And we went to an industry which is predominantly white, predominantly male, and predominantly based in western economies. And we did a bit of inclusion there. And it proved a point. But we’ve got stuck. You know, what about what about the Autistics that don’t like tech? What about the autistic musicians and the autistic graphic designers? What about the ADHD is what about the Dyslexics have dyspraxia? It’s the people that have three of those? You know, we haven’t quite, we haven’t made neurodiversity diverse enough.

Al Elliott 26:20
So here’s another one of my questions should I shall be asking this, it feels like we’re at the beginning of this movement. And that is cool. And there’s people like Nancy and Kristen, and Jan, who are helping everyone understand what’s going on here. But this does seem to mean that it is easier to label yourself as ADHD. Is it really that prevalent? I mean, is it is it just a way to get out of working hard,

Kristen Carder 26:43
there’s often a stigma that people with ADHD are lazy. And that is because we really do struggle to get ourselves to do the right thing at the right time. There is often you know, a misconception that ADHD is over diagnosed. And that is that one gets me really angry. Sorry, I’m like getting fired up. ADHD is not over diagnosed, it’s actually under diagnosed. There are so many people with ADHD walking around, not even knowing that they have ADHD. It is not a common diagnosis. But it is something that’s trending on social media right now. And so it might feel like it’s kind of in your face a lot. But it is not overly diagnosed. There are specific criteria that must be followed in order to obtain a diagnosis. And I speak with many people who have tried to go through the diagnostic process and just have been misunderstood and not diagnosed. It’s actually quite difficult to get a diagnosis. And so that misconception gets me really fired up. All right, on

Al Elliott 27:49
to our next question, how are you going to get diagnosed as neurodivergent? So it’s definitely a real thing. And we know this, we know it’s under diagnosed. The how do people actually know then you’re a divergent. While it’s also common, many people don’t actually realise they are neuro divergent until they reach adulthood. This can create challenges because people are going to find ways to adapt to the differences in how they think and process information. We ask Kristen, what advice do you have for someone who thinks they may have ADHD?

Kristen Carder 28:18
So I would say first, just begin to do a little bit of research and start to build your bank of evidence that you think you might have ADHD. I’m not necessarily saying self diagnose, but often clinicians are not going to know very much about the disorder. And so if you can go in with a list of symptoms, if you can go in with some evidence already of the reasons why you think you might have ADHD that can be really helpful.

Leanne Elliott 28:49
I think Christians at five can be expanded to merge neuro diverse types there. And she did mention that clinicians may not be familiar with neuro diversity. You know, the knowledge can be biassed based on research or common presenting symptoms or observed behaviours. Yes, where there again, neurodiversity is another example of the gender health gap. Let’s hear more from Kristin to test

Kristen Carder 29:12
Stickley. More males are diagnosed with ADHD than females. But I have a theory and I mean, a lot of people believe this as well that there are just as many females with ADHD as males, but women and girls are socially conditioned to behave themselves to be quiet to people please to show up in a certain way. And so often women and girls are overlooked. And actually the median age for female diagnosis of ADHD is 38 years old. So it’s much later than most males.

Leanne Elliott 29:48
Nanci shed her firsthand experience of the gender health gap and how that delayed her diagnosis with ADHD until later in life until she was 38.

Prof Nancy Doyle 29:57
And the reason I didn’t have the ADHD diagnosis Since because yeah, because I was female basically. And then the year I was 38, whenever that was occurring where that was, the rules changed there on how you diagnose ADHD used to have to be that you have to have symptoms before the age of seven. And then they changed it to before the age of 12. And they did that because they realised they were missing all the girls and girls just generally are trained to be more compliant and more quiet. So we don’t act out in the same way we do daydreaming and hair twiddling, rather than shouting and cheer throwing. So we have a different presentation. And, you know, some scientists and psycho psychiatrist got together and realised that all the girls were falling through the cracks. So they moved the first symptom of symptoms, barrier to 12 from seven, and then bingo,

Al Elliott 30:48
do we think that the numbers of neuro divergence are actually increasing? Or are we just hearing about it more? Or is it perhaps that a lot of people fell through the cracks, and are only just being diagnosed, Christian thinks is the latter,

Kristen Carder 31:01
I have supported people in my programme, who have been diagnosed in their 50s and 60s and 70s. And I will say that it is very difficult for someone who is you know, past middle age, even to wrap their brain around all that they missed out on, because they never had the privilege of a diagnosis. And, you know, a lot of people struggle with being diagnosed. And I always try to frame it as a privilege, it is a privilege, first of all, to have access to health care. And second of all, to know, what is happening in your brain, that is a privilege, it’s a privilege to be able to understand what you’re dealing with, and potentially be able to treat it and a lot of people feel massive amounts of grief because of what was potentially lost from not being diagnosed. And that can be really heartbreaking. And so, a big part of my work is walking alongside of people and helping them on that journey of acceptance of grieving, and of kind of figuring out Okay, now what, you know, I’m now I know this, how do I want to proceed? Now, these

Al Elliott 32:15
types of late diagnosis diagnoses can be down to a lack of understanding or a lack of access to medical care. As a result, this has led to a trend of self diagnosis is that a good thing? I don’t know, I know someone who does is crystal again,

Kristen Carder 32:30
there is no perfect healthcare system there. There are people waiting years to even speak to professional about ADHD, there are people who are being overlooked there. You know, it is a very subjective process where someone has to be really vulnerable, and meet with a clinician who, who may or may not be an expert on ADHD. And it can be really tough. So, because of that, a lot of people are self diagnosing. And I will say that in my community, we 100% accept science, self diagnosis. We don’t, you know, you don’t have to, like show your ADHD badge to get, you know, into the community. But I always recommend that people do pursue a clinical diagnosis, because without a clinical diagnosis, you don’t have access to medication, and medication is the number one, proven treatment for ADHD. And so self diagnosis can be really helpful in understanding who you are, and understanding how you show up and relate to other people. It can help you to decide on the kind of coach that you want to work with and what self development books you want to read, but it cannot give you access to medication.

Al Elliott 33:50
Lea, I need to ask you as a scientist is, is this a curable thing? Do you grow out of it? Is it even offensive to ask whether it can be cured?

Leanne Elliott 33:58
I don’t know if it’s it’s offensive, but I would I would maybe

Al Elliott 34:02
err on the side of course. Yeah,

Leanne Elliott 34:04
I would. You know, neurodiversity refers to the unique way that each person’s brain develops. So that means it’s not really preventable or or curable, but it is treatable and manageable. And Kristen shared her own experience with treatment.

Kristen Carder 34:18
My dad was diagnosed when he was in his 40s. And I was a teenager. And he read Ned Halliwell’s book driven to distraction and essentially self diagnosed and then went to the doctor and said, I really think that this is happening. He was diagnosed and medicated for ADHD. And this was in maybe the late 90s. And then he started talking to me and saying, I think you have ADHD, but I was like, 1718 I was like, whatever Dad, wait, when you’re 18 years old, you’re just like your dad doesn’t know anything. And eventually I was double majoring in college and completely overwhelmed to depressed, anxiety, lots of anxiety, struggling with binge eating, not able to get myself to do anything that I needed to do. My grades were like, ranging between A’s and F’s. There’s a lot of like a lot of discrepancy in in the grades. And I finally reached out to my parents and said, You know what you mentioned ADHD, maybe I’m ready to get diagnosed. And so I went, I was 21, by the time I was diagnosed, medicated right away. And that was very helpful, very, very helpful. But I will say that my personal relationship with ADHD has been interesting, because even though I was diagnosed and medicated, I didn’t know anything about ADHD. I didn’t know anything other than it just meant I struggled to focus. And so I was still dealing with a lot of shame, and guilt and self blame. Because even though I was medicated and doing a little bit better, I still couldn’t reach my potential, I still couldn’t get myself to do all the things I wanted to do. And it wasn’t until I discovered more about ADHD. And that pretty much everything I hated about myself was a symptom of ADHD. And so I was able to forgive myself for so many things. Because, you know, the way that I was impulsive, the way that I showed up late to things, the way that I kind of handled myself in a quirky manner, that those were out workings of my ADHD. And once I was able to forgive myself and accept that, and then I discovered coaching, it was like, I was really able to manage my symptoms in a much more productive way. If you find a doctor that you trust, follow their advice as far as medication. And then I would say, really begin to learn and understand what it means to have ADHD because that is a very big component of all of this, it’s got to be more than just taking a pill because pills do not teach skills. And so there needs to be more learning, understanding, maybe self development, if you choose to go that route, maybe therapy, coaching, whatever it feels right to you. But I would just really encourage you to begin to understand and learn about the diagnosis. Kristin also

Leanne Elliott 37:26
explained the challenges people can experience being diagnosed later. And how often people need to grieve before they’re ready to move forward.

Kristen Carder 37:34
I had ADHD and I wasn’t supported. I didn’t, I didn’t have the tools I needed in order to be successful. They’re seeing maybe the loss of relationship or divorce or fractures in relationship with family or friends through the lens of this was an all my fault. I now understand that I had ADHD at the time that was not being treated. And I didn’t have what it takes or what it took to navigate this relationship. Was I to blame was ADHD to blame? Is there a difference between me and ADHD? I mean, it’s just a really complicated process. And I think where most people land if they spend enough time in that grief, which is very important, I always recommend that my clients take lots and lots of time to go through those memories and to grieve and to process it in in those new ways. So

Al Elliott 38:28
it seems that an early diagnosis is good. You could potentially sidestep all the shame, Kristen refers to that. But our parents ready to label children early. What if they’re mislabeled? And what if the parents just don’t want to accept their kids and you’re a diversion. Now, Jan’s a perfect person to explain this, because Jan was kind of the other end, it was pretty obvious to her from the start that she had a challenge on our hands. So we asked her how she felt when her reality was very different to our hopes and dreams.

Jan Stewart 38:56
Both my husband and I started our lives as young parents with the same dreams and hopes that I’m sure you and everyone else had we wanted happy, successful children. And yet our reality couldn’t have been more different. You know, we were terrified of Andrews, the screaming rages and his rituals. When I say two hours a day, it was two hours a day and these bizarre rituals. I was so drained, as I said earlier by the principal calling me about Ainsley multiple times a week, and her paralysing anxiety, but the key to being able to move forward, it is to accept that your life is not going to be as planned for or hoped for these disorders, wreak havoc with marriages and partnerships with every family member. There is going to be fear, anger and resentment. You know, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear or looked at myself in a mirror and said, Why me why us but that perseverance, grit determination, you’ve got to have it to move forward. And it’s breathtaking when Do

Leanne Elliott 40:00
I ask Kristen about this too, about the perceived stigma around diagnosis? And what advice or encouragement she gives to any parents listening? Yeah, this

Kristen Carder 40:08
really breaks my heart because in many families, the child’s is blamed for not being able to do simple things. Why can’t you just finish your homework? Why can’t you just remember to, you know, find your shoes? Why can’t you just show up on time? Why can’t you stop talking. And many times that child is struggling with a neurodevelopmental disorder. And nobody just even really knows. And so what I would say is, if you have a sense that maybe your child might have ADHD, I would encourage you to follow that sense, I would encourage you to follow your intuition. And really pursue that because it can be so validating for you as a parent, and the child to hear Hey, you’re not a terrible person. You’re just struggling with ADHD, hey, because that’s what happens is that somebody with ADHD internalises self blame for not being able to do the simple things. Why can’t I just show up to work on time? Why can’t I just remember to hint at my homework, like, what is wrong with me that I can’t do this. And an ADHD diagnosis can be so validating, there’s nothing wrong with you, you’re struggling with ADHD and now we’re going to help you and support you, so that you have what you need to thrive.

Leanne Elliott 41:33
If you are a parent listening, we highly, highly recommend that you get hold of a copy of Jan’s book hold on tight parents journey raising children with mental illness, she tells a raw and emotional story of her two children and impart valuable insights and advice from her lived experiences. And importantly, she shares her

Jan Stewart 41:51
journey to find the right support the right psychiatrists, the right psychologists to schools and inclusive employers, and we can talk more about that as we want. But really, I’m so proud of them. They have had great heartbreaking adversity, but such perseverance, grit and determination, and they really have found their niches in life.

Al Elliott 42:12
Here’s a tricky question. What language should I use? I loaded this a little bit before when I was prepping my questions for jam. I found myself pausing of My Word choice. What do I call someone who is neuro divergent? Of course now I know it’s neurodivergent. But at the time I was sidestepping around this, I was like, How do I refer to someone who isn’t neurodivergent? Now the first thing that sprung the first word that sprung to mind was the word normal. Now again, before you cancel me, I don’t mean it in terms of normal I mean, in terms of statistically, statistically normal is someone who falls within the majority of the results. And that is exactly right, because neurodiverse don’t fall into the minority and either side have a kind of one of those, those weird Bell diagrams, which you had at school, but I felt this wasn’t right. Like I was saying that everyone should be normal. And if you’re not normal, you abnormal you’re wrong. So I just didn’t know what do I call somebody’s neurodivergent

Leanne Elliott 43:03
individuals will have their own preferences, right. So we’re going to always have to have to speak to the people in terms of how they want it to be described. You know, we’ve heard Nancy refer to herself as a preferred ADHD ear. But in general, there are there are a few widely accepted terms and those are no minority neurodivergent and neuro distinct, it’s understandable to reach for the word normal to describe someone who isn’t neurodivergent I get it and and particularly in terms of districts, I completely get that. But yeah, that the preferred term is neurotypical. As I mentioned, you know, with any minority group language preferences can vary. And I’ve been guilty of toxic positivity when it comes to advocating for neurodiversity, by referring to come to strength as superpowers. But as Kristin explained to me, this can minimise the struggle.

Kristen Carder 43:53
That’s an interesting question, because I am someone who is very careful not to say that ADHD is a superpower because I think it often minimises the struggle. What that can do is, if you think about it in terms of a child, if a child is struggling in school, they’re struggling to make friends. They can’t make themselves do their homework. They’re getting a lot of negative feedback and you say the child’s Honey, your ADHD is not a problem. It’s a superpower. The child is like, hello, my life is falling apart. Why should I write like this is actually really, really difficult. And so it’s very confusing and I think it’s the same for adults. Everyone has a superpower. And as we begin to medically treat our ADHD do our self development work, make sure that we’re taking responsibility for the things we need to take responsibility for. Our real superpowers can be uncovered. Many people with ADHD are very creative, but not all are and so when there’s a blanket statement made that’s like oh, it aged years or so. Creative like that’s a superpower. It’s not actually true. Not every person with ADHD is creative. Not every person with ADHD thinks outside the box.

Al Elliott 45:10
Now, there’s another part of this because Nancy thinks that employers can embrace neurodiversity, and provide opportunities within your diverse to do meaningful work that ultimately reduced on happiness on a much broader level. If we could

Prof Nancy Doyle 45:23
have businesses and work that was healthy, inclusive, gave people a chance to be at their best, we would have less unhappy miserable people who needed clinical psychology support, because work isn’t just a workers, but you know, we know that people who are unemployed are less mentally well, and less physically well than people who are employed. We know that employment is good for your social integration, as well as your finances and your ability to eat well, and put a roof over your head. So the power of good work is transformational for people’s lives. And more and more as I was working with, with unemployed people, I was just like, oh my god, they’re all dyslexic. None of them can read and write. These guys can’t sit still for more than 10 minutes. This is why they’re not working. They, this these guys have got their heads up. They’re trying to bury the set. You know, I was like, you’re all neurodivergent. What’s going on here?

Leanne Elliott 46:22
If you’re a business leader, or entrepreneur listening, just take that statistic. 35% of entrepreneurs are dyslexic, or maybe neurodivergent. In other ways. That means that roughly three and 10 of every single one of our business owner listeners are neurodivergent.

Al Elliott 46:40
That’s a pretty good way to put it. I hadn’t thought about before. Yeah, it’s

Leanne Elliott 46:43
common amongst entrepreneurs to be neurodivergent. It says it I guess, it’s like, if you can’t, if you don’t feel comfortable in the world business has been created for you, I’m gonna go and create my own. So that is one of the reasons why neurodiversity is so important, because we need these disruptors in our business worlds, to drive change to drive innovation. But is neurodiversity important in the workplace? And the short answer is it is. And not just for the societal impact or doing the right thing, as with most human centred strategies, it’s not just good for the individual or workplace culture is good for business, isn’t

Prof Nancy Doyle 47:21
it? So what you should be doing as a business owner is thinking, you know, are we stuck in the in in a loop of all thinking the same way? Do we need someone who’s going to come in and think in a different way to us who’s going to add value by spotting problems that we can’t see, by kind of coming up with solutions for those problems that we wouldn’t have thought of. And that’s really the value you get of diversity in your in your team. And that’s a cut. That’s actually a research has demonstrated that that is effectively true. And that diverse teams are more creative, and more innovative, and generally more dynamic than homogenous teams, they take longer to form. So if you measure the team’s performance a week after kind of making it more diverse, what you’ll find is that people are a bit creeped out, and they’re like, whoa, I’m not sure how this person thinks, I don’t know how to talk to this person. This is a bit odd. She talks really fast all the time, but am I gonna get a word in edgewise? Or vice versa? They talk so slow and falling asleep, what am I going to do? So you have that kind of group storming phase, and that can last a bit longer in diversity. But over the long term, what you get is a much more innovative and dynamic team

Al Elliott 48:33
Hold on a minute, though. So putting my sales and marketing hat on for a second, with more and more people choosing to buy from brands that just get them, then surely embracing University is not only about leveraging the different way people think, but as a great branding play to we ask Nancy about this.

Prof Nancy Doyle 48:50
The other reason for doing it, I think more than anything is because you know, your customers are neurodivergent, there’s actually quite a lot of us, we’re about 15 to 20% of the human population, when you add us all up all the different variants. So if you want to design a service, or a product that meets the needs of your customers, you need people in the design room that think like your customers, and a lot of them are going to think quite straightforwardly, but there’s a bunch of us who think in a really unusual way, we’ll find the problems in your design that will affect your uptake.

Leanne Elliott 49:20
So at this point, you know, it’s important to have this diversity of thought in your workplace. But how do you know if you have neurodiverse employees? And how do you ask them about it? Here’s nothing. If you have

Prof Nancy Doyle 49:31
a business with more than 20 or 30 people, you’re going to have at least a handful of neurodivergent people. So I would kind of reach out with that as an approach, offer offer offer forum for some interest from within. If you if you put a call out and no one comes forward. That’s telling you something very, very clear about the psychological safety of your business. People aren’t disclosing it’s because they don’t feel safe to disclose and that’s you do need a consultant at that point because you need to know what

Leanne Elliott 50:00
Is it me now? Or do I smell a theme here?

Al Elliott 50:03
You always smell a theme. What are you? What are you? What are you? What are you picking up?

Leanne Elliott 50:07
psychological safety, employee insights, getting external support, it seems to me that regardless of the people and culture concept that you are trying to understand or improve in your business or embrace within your business, it kind of comes down to those things, psychological safety, employee insights, external support.

Al Elliott 50:27
I think this is kind of refreshing for business owners and leaders who feel a little bit at sea with this, because you go, well, actually, it’s just the basics, getting the basics right, making a place where people want to go feel comfortable, feel safe, and feel valued. And surely that’s like, you know, that’s that’s the secret to a great workplace culture. Now, what Jan was saying was that open communication is key to building an effective employer employee relationship, I as to how an employer should be tackling these kind of conversations, how do you avoid being condescending? Here’s John, well, I think

Jan Stewart 51:01
you can not be condescending if you say to yourself, how do I how would I want to be treated? How do I treat the rest of my employees and treat them the same, if you find it’s not working, you can sit down with the employee and say, I’m having challenges with this helped me problem solve with the employee. Now in Andrews case, because of his limited cognitive capabilities, and again, in some cases, this will happen, but not in most, my husband and I are his legal guardians. And so that partnership I talked about is very important for us, because he cannot really he can advocate for himself, actually, surprisingly well, but to a limited point. And so that’s when I’ll step in and help. Many employees don’t need that. And they might may or may not have an advocate to help them. Many of them are very articulate about what their challenges are and what they need. So work in partnership with them. It’s like anything else in life? Remember, everyone mental health disorder or not has challenges.

Leanne Elliott 52:04
When I was researching this episode, one of the most frequently asked questions I came across was, how do you manage neurodivergent staff? Well, like all staff, really, it’s not that different. either. You manage people with trust, empathy, flexibility, genuine care, by providing a clear role, consistent recognition and the required resources. It actually isn’t any different to Margie neurodiverse person, as you would a neurotypical person. But to use perhaps a word that we’ve used a lot recently, it does take a little bit more intention. Here’s Nancy, with an example of a client she worked with recently.

Prof Nancy Doyle 52:38
So what I had a client once who was really struggling to get on with his new manager, and he was autistic. And the manager, I noticed too, I was coaching him. And I start I thought, right, I’m gonna have to coach the manager as well, I just don’t understand what’s going on here. So we started doing something called co coaching, which we do a lot actually for when when things are going wrong. And so I started to talk to the manager, I said, What case? What is it that you need him to do that he’s not currently doing? So while eating, you know, the problem is he doesn’t play the game at all. Okay, so what you say to him, because he’s a, he’s a, he’s a quite typical autistic in that he will interpret things literally. So if you say to him, you need to stop playing the game. He’s going to wonder why you want him to play games at work? Because it’s work. So he’s my son want me to play a game at work? What game what game? So I said, Look, so what do you mean by play the game, he said, Well, he needs to be more proactive. And I said, I still don’t know what you mean. What does proactive look like? Like if I was being proactive now? What would I actually do? What’s the concrete behaviour. And it took me about five minutes to get out of this guy. But what he wanted, they had weekly meetings. And they wanted him to come with a bullet point list of things he had done last week on one page of a4, and a bullet point list of things he was planning to do next week on a page of a4. That’s it. And that behaviour had been labelled proactive, not proactive to reactive. So because he didn’t come with those things to the meeting. He was not proactive, he was reactive. He wasn’t playing the game. You know, he was badly prepared. And this guy was just I just don’t know what he wants from me. And when he said, Well, I just want you to come to the meeting with a list of things you did last week, and a list of things you did next week doesn’t have to be too detailed one page of a for each fine. Now he can follow the instruction. And he was doing it. So so there’s there’s that kind of that’s what we need to do to make it easier for neurodivergent people to get along in the workplace as they enter the workplace. And those kinds of accommodations of environment, schedule, the way that you communicate, managing senses, ringing in some coaching, if it’s not working, rather than assuming that they don’t care and they’re not been bothering. That’s the other thing the manager could have done at that point because everybody doesn’t declared as a, he’s not really bothered. He doesn’t want this job, you know, and he could have gone down that track. But don’t make that assumption, assume it’s a communication issue and work on it. And if you need external help to work on it, get external help to work on it.

Al Elliott 55:15
It was interesting asking Jan, because she’s sharing her son’s experience from a parent’s point of view, and how a change of management had a catastrophic effect. Here’s Jan, talking about son Andrew.

Jan Stewart 55:26
So Andrews first employer was a major retailer, here in Toronto. And they hired a minister cashier. And I remember thinking, Oh, this is 1012 years ago, how was he going to make change, we still had pennies. But he had no problem. And if he did, a customer helped him he was never ripped off, it surprised me. And I was very happy. I even snuck in one day. He had been there about three years just to see how he was doing. And I started crying with happiness, there were four or five customers on his line, and three other cashiers said empty, and I heard staff trying to redirect them to the empty cashier, so we wouldn’t, and all the customers refused. And that’s because Andrew engaged with them. He knew their names. He knew the ages of their children, what was going on in their lives, and he made their lives better. Each day was happier when they interacted with him. Now, five years into that job, new management came in. And without telling Andrew any reason why they pulled him off cash and had him in the back stocking shelves. So I waited a few weeks to see if this was just temporary because of the need. But it became pretty apparent that they were needlessly discriminating against him because he looks disabled. And so you can imagine that I took action and wrote a fairly scathing letter. And to their credit, he was placed back on cash, but trust had been broken.

Al Elliott 56:58
So I think we’ve discovered that a workplace can be amazing. If we embrace Euro divergence, not only we bring the opportunity that might not be around previously, but we’ve got a whole different way of thinking about problems, that how do we start? How can we make our workplace more inclusive for neurodivergent people without looking like, we’re just doing that stock photo, everyone’s different colours, everyone’s smiling. We asked Nancy,

Prof Nancy Doyle 57:23
they need to start recognising people for their talents. And we need to look at the way we do appraisals and manage performance. Because if you think performance appraisals, are about kind of jack of all trades rather than specialists. So you’ll have people in data analyst jobs being asked if they’ve got team influencing skills and not being able to progress until they do. And you’re like, Jimmy, Team inferencing skills to get data analyst or do you need to be incredibly accurate, unable to work at a fast pace. Or you’ll you’ll have people that can’t get promoted out of being a graphic designer, because their emails are full of typos and grammatical errors. And so we’ve got to start aligning our assessment methods to the skill that we actually need in the job rather than this kind of generic, one size fits all, you must be a team player and able to work independently, you must have detailed processing. And think of the big picture, you must be good at literacy and good at design. You know, this is this is where we’re going wrong in thwarting neurodivergent careers because we’re asking for, and we’re measuring for generalists. And actually, that’s not what we need.

Leanne Elliott 58:38
I’ve talked on the podcast before about how the easiest way to build a diverse team or an inclusive culture is by reviewing your recruitment process. I think I talked about it on the toxic superstar episode, and I definitely covered it in our very early episodes on recruitment. If you don’t have an evidence led competency based recruitment process in place, then all likelihood there will be bias embedded within it. That’s step one to an inclusive culture, remove bias. Nancy shares a fantastic example of this in action. About 10

Prof Nancy Doyle 59:11
years ago, it changed the game, which is fabulous. But for me as an occupational psychologist, what I’m sitting here thinking is right, okay, so 10 years ago, we changed the way we recruit and hire and manage people, in order to be inclusive of some specialists. worked really well. Those specialists doing really, really good job, actually. So my question is now is what we haven’t done a lot. We haven’t done the double loop learning, which is carrying on changing the rules for certain specialists, when what we actually should have been doing is going hold on a second, the way we were recruiting and onboarding was systematically excluding people who turn out to be really good at the job. So we shouldn’t keep running autism at work programmes we should change the way we recruit and onboard for ever Everybody, because then we’ll be able to bring in the autists with the neurotypicals. And the point is, we will have people that are really good at the job, no one has to disclose a personal characteristic in order to get work. And we’ll just be making the selection methods appropriate to the job we want. You know, I’m a big fan of work sample testing, rather than interviewing for things like that, you know, and that’s essentially what they did. So, in order to get more autistic people through the door, they just jumped the interviews and started giving coding tests, and, of course, the artists but flying through them and getting hired.

Al Elliott 1:00:36
So while we’re talking to Lanza, we asked her what are the tools that are required for neurodiverse employees, Nancy recommended both flexible and remote work

Prof Nancy Doyle 1:00:44
options in my company we work with between 500 and 1000 unemployed people a year, and we know how to how to kind of get that journey from unemployed into sustainably employed complete, and it’s and it’s not easy. And I think that’s the that’s the rub. People don’t know what to do. It’s you have to have certain provisions for neurodivergent people because we are disabled, you know, and we need, we need tools, we need scaffolding, we need slightly different rules. But once you understand the principles of what we need, it’s really easy to just do this across your business. And actually, you’ll find that most people benefit. The things that neurodivergent people need are we need to schedule flexibility. We need to be able to travel when it’s not commuting hours, because we find the cognitive and sensory overwhelm of commuting, really intense. And so we you know, if we’re if we’re doing a hard commute, we will get to our office in a state of kind of rabbit in the headlights and not be able to function. So flexible hours worked really well. remote working options work really, really well. We if we’re going to do kind of odd concentration tasks that require us to minimise distractions, we need to physically minimise distractions, because we find it really easy to get distracted by someone having a little chat over there. What’s that? Where was I? Oh, what’s that? Oh, where was I? Oh, what’s that, oh, where was I and all of a sudden, you’ve got a piece of work that’s full of typos and incorrectly entered data or, you know, whatever it is that you’re doing. So we need to that we need to buffer our sensory. And then the other thing is that we need more explicit instructions then you might be used to. We also asked

Leanne Elliott 1:02:27
Kristen, and she explained that she uses and recommends body doubling as a useful technique to help her complete the more boring task she has, as a person with ADHD. If you’re not heard of it, body doubling involves working with another person around to basically help improve your motivation and focus his Christen on the value of body doubling.

Kristen Carder 1:02:47
So I am a company leader, I am the boss and I have ADHD. So how do you navigate when you’re the boss with ADHD? Right? So I know myself very well, I can do a lot of big complex things. That easy, mundane, boring tasks, I just want to cry, please don’t make me do them. And so what I will do is I will ask my team to get on a call with me while I do the boring, stupid stuff. And that will work so well for someone with ADHD. If the boss just says, Hey, Karen, I see that you’re struggling with these expense reports. Would you like Bill to sit with you while you get them done? Karen will be like, Absolutely, yes. Bill doesn’t even need to be working on expense reports. He can just be doing his own stuff. But he’s just there as we call it a body double. It’s just someone there who is willing to be in your space while you’re doing the thing that it’s just very, very hard for you to do. So a lot of accountability, a lot of deadlines, a lot of praise and feedback, like, Hey, I see you’re doing these things really well, great job. And then a lot of opportunities for body doubling would be really great as well.

Al Elliott 1:04:01
So John also shared her approach as a parent to securing a reasonable adjustments that her kids need to thrive in the workplace.

Jan Stewart 1:04:10
So the first thing that we did was Andrew and I met in a group team meeting before he started after he was hired, but before his first day, with his managers with human resources, and they also at Rogers have a well being department so they came as well. And we discussed Andrews profile, which importantly included his strengths. He has a great sense of humour, and he’s very kind and caring. And then we talked about his disorders I explained as I have to you but in more detail what each of them was and how they translated into the workplace, which as I said, is largely impulsivity, anxiety. In his case. We talked about what they could do to maximise his success and to help themselves and they’ve put that well meaning into Action. Let me give you a few examples. First of all, and probably most importantly, they brought in a job coach to help both them. And Andrew, there is a national organisation in Canada called ready, willing and able or WA. It’s funded by the government of Canada. And it helps employers hire and retain employees with autism and intellectual disabilities. They’ve been a godsend. So they helped Rogers integrate Andrew, then to this day, which is four and a half years later, they meet monthly with Andrew and his boss, sometimes alone, sometimes together. And, and if an issue comes up, they meet more often. So that’s the first thing they’ve done. They’ve customised accommodations, just for Andrew. Andrew has a lot of difficulty with change and transitions. This is typical with his suite of mental health disorders. And so they’ve set his hours from 830 to 430. Every day, while the rest of his team members work on shifts, they chunk his work in smaller, more manageable pieces, they give him a few more breaks, that he has more medical appointments than other people. And they accommodate that. And he works longer hours, then on those days. They bring in a willing co worker, what I call a special mentor, whenever there’s a large group meeting, so that they can be sure he understands what’s being said, or they have learned how to reframe it, get him to say it back and make sure he really gets it. And most importantly to me, is the word partnership. They treat me as a true partner. They listen to what I have to say. They respect my advice. And they shared their career thinking with me, you know, a few months ago, at Andrews fourth anniversary, they called me and said, you know, Andrew has been here for years, shouldn’t we be thinking about career enhancement. And now I said please don’t do that. That will get his anxiety through the roof. At this point, he’s not ready for that. But what you could do is think about career enhancement, not advancement, enhancement. And that’s what they’ve done. So they’ve been a role model of inclusion and diversity. And what did they get in return? They get a hard working, loyal valued employee who’s known throughout Rogers, by the way, he participates actively in their inclusion and diversity initiatives. He’s a great representative from them externally. He wants to be the best employee that Rogers has ever had. Not the best, not the best disabled employee. And he wants to stay there until they 70.

Leanne Elliott 1:07:52
So that’s neurodiversity through the lens of being an employer or an organisation, but what about an individual? Should you tell your employer if you’re neurodivergent? A question that came up on almost every neurodiversity term that I Googled was, am I neurodivergent? Or just weird? And there’s Nancy explains, you’re not weird the world is.

Prof Nancy Doyle 1:08:14
The argument of neurodiversity is it’s the world that’s weird, not us. Basically, the world has gone weird. If you can’t do the literacy and numeracy sitting still and weird, hyper social communication thing, there must be something wrong with you. You need enable. And now you’re weird. So that’s, that’s our kind of argument from the neurodiversity movement, which is, it’s the world’s weird, not us. But the reality is, that is the world and we do have to live in it. And so because of that, lots of us find it very, very difficult to survive mainstream education. I didn’t. I was hospitalised at 14, I simply couldn’t cope with it. And I spent the last two years of my secondary education working from home on a Monday going into school on a Monday picking up my work, and doing it from home for the rest of the week. And that’s not an unusual experience for neurodivergent people, we find the mainstream education system incredibly difficult, increasingly, so actually, it’s got worse since I was at school. And then we go into the workplace with these kind of hangups and shame and lack of self esteem, and then we struggle in our careers. Or we find our niche, and we go absolutely, brilliantly, you know, it’s kind of like nowhere in between. Well, when I was younger, you know, I was just I was the square peg in the in the round hole. You know, I absolutely hated school. I found the social side of it kind of overwhelming and confusing. I found the sensory burden of it overwhelming and unpleasant. And also, I was kind of bored if I’m honest, as well in most of my lessons, and I was got a quite a big comprehensive school in a in a city. And it just wasn’t a very nice environment. So I was I was diagnosed with anxiety, depression, eating disorders. It was like a bingo card. At one point. It’s like oh, that One, that one. And then my favourite diagnosis, which was school phobia.

Unknown Speaker 1:10:05
I was like, yes.

Prof Nancy Doyle 1:10:06
They don’t call it that anymore. They call it school refusal. You see how that’s subtle? Uh, no, it’s awful, isn’t it? I know, I really fell for my generation, this generation, you know, being diagnosed with school refusal rather than school phobia is a very, very different thing. But I’m also aware that, yeah, so I should have had an ADHD diagnosis then in there. But because I’m female, I didn’t get one. And in the 80s, and 90s, you basically had to be throwing chairs across classrooms and be male, to get an ADHD diagnosis, and girls didn’t get a look. But I knew that I was different. And I was quite clearly different. And so that experience of difference was, was kind of quite motivating to me.

Leanne Elliott 1:10:51
Now, the question of disclosure, should you tell your employer if you are neurodivergent is both complicated and personal. It really does depend on you, the organisation you work for, and how comfortable you feel speaking with your manager, Christina finds it before you think about disclosing your your neurodiversity to your employer, maybe take some time to figure out your own responsibilities and how to advocate for yourself.

Kristen Carder 1:11:15
I would say first, that a huge amount of responsibility falls on the person with ADHD because they are the ones that need to advocate for themselves. And so this is why I started my podcast four years ago. This is why I work with adults with ADHD every day is to help them understand what it means to have ADHD so that they can take responsibility for themselves for their own work environments and be able to self advocate. Because if you don’t understand what you’re dealing with, if, for example, you think it might be a superpower, you’re not going to go know what those are. But I also really liked some support. Nobody’s going to do that with a superpower because it superpowers the superpower, right? And so we have to be really careful in the way that we frame this and saying, Listen, this is something that will hold you back until you learn about it, you understand yourself and you’re able to advocate. And so going into a work environment, it’s very important for someone with ADHD, to know their specific strengths, which they will have so many, and also understand that they have very specific weaknesses and how to ask for help for them.

Al Elliott 1:12:30
John also agreed that it’s a personal choice, especially given the latest data. But she does highlight that not disclosing may mean you’re not actually protected.

Jan Stewart 1:12:39
I remember a survey back in 2019 by upsets. And it surprised me it said that 75% of employees with mental health disorders. These were working age adults, were reluctant or wouldn’t disclose a mental illness. Now we’re not talking about severe mental illness where it’s obvious, right? And why? It’s because of a fear of stigma, not wanting to be labelled or treated differently, fear of consequences of losing their jobs, which would be absolutely terrible. They don’t want to be seen as different or inferior. So that’s a driving force for why an employee might not disclose the guideline that I recommend, as a parent. And remember, please, I’m not a professional, but as a parent, is to ask yourself if you can perform your job without any accommodation or help. And if you can, it’s your decision. But if you think you do, I’d recommend disclosing, you know, this is not straightforward disclosure. It’s up to the individual. But remember that if you don’t disclose, and you’re fired for performance, you’re disciplined. You can’t use your disability.

Al Elliott 1:13:54
So regular listeners will know that we don’t just leave you drop you in the shit. We’re always trying to tell you where you can get more help and support. We ask Nancy, as a business owner, what’s our first step,

Prof Nancy Doyle 1:14:11
the first step you could make us to talk to the neurodivergent people you already have. If you have a business with more than 20 or 30 people, you’re going to have at least a handful of neurodivergent people. So I would kind of reach out with that as an approach. Offer offer offer. Forum for some interest from within. Do not start with a hiring programme. That’s the last place you should go. There is no point hiring people until you’ve got your shipshape otherwise you’re going to hire them and they’re going to fail and it’s going to be awful and you’re going to feel bad and so are they. So the first thing you do is you look at what you already have. And if you you know if you’re a very small business and you don’t have any neurodivergent people and you want to hire some in then go and find a consultancy to work with like genius within we have You know, or so if you work with us on our unemployment programmes, all the work all the support you need in terms of training for your staff, looking at your policies, working out what adjustments would be necessary, that gets funded through the DWP, if you work with our unemployed clients. So there’s a free way to do it if you’re a small business with no representation, and that is to work with genius within in our employability work. If you’re not and you’ve got more resources than that, then then start by finding the people you’ve already got form an employee resource group, and get them to give you some feedback on what’s working and what’s not working. But don’t use your ERG as a as a replacement for professional services. I’ve seen so many ERGs where the first thing that happens is they get inundated with emails from everyone in the business, wanting help negotiate or just negotiating adjustments and help with this and help with that. And it’s not fair on them. It’s a confidentiality issue. But it’s also not fair to ask disabled people to work for free additional to their hours to help other disabled people. That’s just not fair. So if you’re going to have so the ERG is for advice. It’s for pulse checking. It’s for signposting. It’s for critical appraisal of procurement of professional services, but it is not for delivering those services themselves. So get your ERG in place, get some advice and see what they say. And take it from there.

Leanne Elliott 1:16:28
Some great advice there from Nancy in terms of where you can access support as an organisation as a business owner, both Nancy and Kristen offer support to individuals including help with diagnosis and training genius within and I have ADHD, or to recommend coaching as a powerful tool in managing neurodiversity. Here’s Kristen, to explain more.

Kristen Carder 1:16:48
So somebody with ADHD is going to struggle with self awareness. That is one of our executive functions, which is housed in the frontal lobe, which is deficient. So that is like known in the community. It’s proven, researched, self awareness is difficult for people with ADHD, that in times, we’re not aware of our thoughts. We’re not aware of how we feel we’re not understanding how to motivate ourselves toward our goals. And so mindset coaching helps build that skill of self awareness mindset coaching helps with self regulation, and emotional regulation, which is also another deficient skill of someone with ADHD. So someone with ADHD struggles to understand feel, process their emotions, so we’ll often look really explosive, we’re often going to make impulsive decisions from a big emotion, we’re often going to like, like, maybe quit a job in the heat of the moment, or maybe like get married in Vegas in the heat of the moment, like those impulsive decisions because of our big huge emotions that we just don’t know how to regulate. And so that’s where mindset coaching comes in, is a building of awareness around our thoughts, and our emotions, and how to get ourselves to take the actions that we want to take. So it’s very different from a therapeutic relationship, which would be more like digging into the past and really healing trauma and making sure that you’re understanding your family and how it’s impacting you. Now, what this is, it’s more of building an awareness of your thoughts, building a willingness to feel your emotions, and beginning to develop an authority over the actions that you’re taking in the moment so that you can persist toward your goals.

Al Elliott 1:18:43
Okay, Leah, my head is spinning. We’ve gone through so much here, but it’s all been really really good stuff. By the way, there is a transcript of this on the website, you’ll see a link in the show notes, you can read through it all and reread through the bits that that interested you. How are we going to wrap all this up here?

Leanne Elliott 1:18:58
Yeah, it is. It is. neurodiversity is complex. It’s personal. And it can be challenging both individuals and organisations and I think the conclusion I’ve come to really occurs the ethos of genius within and the work of Professor Nancy Yes, neurodivergent people tend to find some things very easy and other things incredibly difficult. And that can lead to inconsistency in performance, which is an organisation may not sound ideal. But neurodiversity can be a competitive advantage when individuals are in the right environment, making use their strengths, instead of constantly trying to overcome challenges. Once we bear in mind that while there is a tough market for acquisition, embracing neurodiversity will very likely put you a long way ahead of your competitors but to achieve this, we must create inclusive spaces to work and learn that enable all of us both neurotypicals and newer minorities to thrive.

Al Elliott 1:19:48
Bravo, bravo, bravo. Okay, so as normal there will be lots of resources in the show notes. Make sure to look those up make sure to go follow all our experts mentioned the gun by Jan’s book and just let’s all work towards making things a little bit more inclusive. For those people a little bit different.

Leanne Elliott 1:20:06
Yes, we will leave links to all of our guests in the show notes, along with websites with books with articles or publications, everything you need. As always, if I forgotten something, just give me a podcast. Bye for now.