[MUSIC PLAYING] This is a global player, original podcast. Hello, and welcome back to a brand new series of your wrong about ADHD. I'm Katie Breathwick. And I'm Sam Pittis, and it's great to be back. Great to be back with you, Katie. We've been away for a while. We did have a bonus episode recently speaking to Henry Shelford from ADHD, UK, about some of the big topics making the headlines at the moment about ADHD. If you haven't had a chance to listen to that, do go back and have a listen. Things like peer-pun access to work, all those big stories that are out there at the moment. But it's good to be back, Katie, because there's still lots to talk about. How are you? Do you know what? I'm really, really well. I have been implementing some of those tips that you and I discovered along the way during series 1 to 3. And one of the things I'd really like to talk about in series 4 is decluttering. It's basically taking control of the chaos because I have been trying to do that. I can't say that I'm winning the war necessarily, but I'm certainly trying to get there. And I would really, really like to talk about how we, as ADHDers, can take control and pour oil on waters, shall we say. Yeah, and it's all about using those strategies that we've talked about and just about how they're working. Something I'd really like to talk about is masking. I think it's one of those things that I didn't really consider ADHD masking. And the more I've looked into it, the more I realize that it's most of my life summed up. So I think we'll look at that in a future episode as well. But we're kicking things off properly with a guest we've been really looking forward to welcoming back. Dr. Nancy Doyle. Nancy is a psychologist. She's a researcher and a really powerful advocate for neurodiversity in the workplace. We're going to be talking to her about the hidden strengths of ADHD, how to create a truly inclusive work environment. Actually, whether we need to be changing the way we think about ADHD as a society, I won't be talking to Nancy in a moment. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, Nancy. So great to have you back. Hi. It's great to be back. How are you doing? Doing really well. Last time we spoke to you, you gave us-- I think it's best to say quite a lot to think about. Katie and I have had lots of chats about our conversation with you. And I think place we'd like to start today is in an ideal world, how would you like people to view or describe ADHD? In an ideal world, we're tigger, aren't we? We're tigger. And there's something charming about tigger, and innocent, and invigorating, and passionate. So yeah, it's a tigger personality. It's a tigger soul. It's a tigger neurotype. And everyone needs a tigger. Don't need an entire room of them. Sometimes when there's too many tiggers, it's a little bit much, although the tiggers enjoy that. But just don't come into that room if you're not a tigger. It is a room full of joy, Nancy, a room full of joy. For the last time we spoke to you, I have to say, you completely repositioned where I think I am with ADHD, which is so interesting for me. And also my husband, I've always slightly put us in silos. I think he is on the autistic spectrum, and I think I've got ADHD, therefore we kind of meet each other's needs the way we do, because we engage with this world very, very differently. And actually, I went home after I last conversation, and I realized that you are absolutely right. In that, he definitely has ADHD traits. And I definitely have autistic traits. You talked about how you think we're all in this one area of society, and that we all kind of have different elements of autism or ADHD or neurodiversity. Do you think we should be thinking about it in a completely different way? Are we trying to label these things too clearly? I don't know, because the problem is, the reason we need the label is because the world is very standardized and rigid and inflexible. And so if we take the labels away, but we don't change the world, we're going to leave people pretty defenseless, and we're going to leave people without resources to get the accommodations and adjustments they need. So it's a chicken and egg question, really. Once we've made the world better, personalised, and more flexible, and more understanding, then yeah, let's lose the label, because it sucks, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. What even is that? I mean, it's much more about having a lot of attention. Do you know the Maori word for ADHD? Now go on. It's a raw routine, and literally, translating it means attention goes to many things. Mm-hmm. Isn't that gorgeous? A much better description. Yeah, it is. And the Maori word for autism is Takuiwatanga, which means in their own time and space. And I love that too, too. Yeah, absolutely. Because they're very positive descriptions of what we're experiencing. They're just descriptions of what people are seeing. They're not pathologised, they're not negative, they're not deficit, rarar. Have you ever played that game where you try and pathologise neurotypical traits? You know, sedentary, dependent concentration disorder for people that could only concentrate when they're sitting down? But that's a really good point, because we are looking at ADHD as a disorder. And as long as we're meditating, creating a whole industry for writing strategies to manage it, it's very difficult to get away from that, isn't it? Mm-hmm. Yeah, it is. It is. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, I remember-- I didn't medicate for ADHD when I first had my diagnosis, and I was doing all the things like-- well, I was a triathlete at that point in my life, so I was very active. I was running cycling, jumping around generally. When I was doing my PhD thesis, I had a bit of a breakdown. We said a lot of a breakdown at that point in my life. Not just because of the PhD, for lots and lots of other reasons. And I was seeing a clinical psychologist for support. And she said, why don't you medicate for ADHD, Nancy? And I said, well, it's because, you know, I'm not broken, and I don't need fixing. And, you know, when I'm like living in-- when I was living in Vermont last year, and I was out in the snow, and the big blue skies, and the mountains, and skiing, and cross-country skiing, and being physical and active all day, then, you know, I don't feel like this. I'm just kind of-- you know, I don't think that ADHD needs medication. And she just looked at me and she went, yeah, but Nancy, you're not living there. Are you? You're in England. And it's winter. And we've got gray skies. And you've got to sit still for 12 hours a day and write your thesis. And then she just said, why are you giving yourself such a hard time? And I thought, ooh, you know, so that's the thing about the social model of disability and the neurodiversity movement. It is about that interaction with our environment. And when we're in the right environment, we're not broken and we don't need fixing. But when we're not in our environment, we can feel pretty broken. And if there are fixes out there that can help us to cope with those environments because we have no choice but to move through those environments, then we can't judge people who take them. It really drew to me how much privilege I had in my life that I have created a context for myself, in which I very rarely have to do long periods of not moving, of long periods of being counter to my instincts. I've been self-employed since I was 25. So I've created a workplace that allows me to have fits and bursts of energy in the way that I like to do. When that got difficult because the business was too big and as a CEO, you can't do that, you've got to be more consistent. I was able to hire someone else to be the CEO and take a seat back so that I could carry on working in that way. That's an enormous amount of privilege in my life. And I just started thinking about all the pits, people who are single parents raising kids that have to work a job that they don't necessarily enjoy. We need the labels because we do need that medication sometimes. And we do need the support sometimes. But I think what will happen in reality is it will just gradually start to shift, won't it? Katie and I have had that conversation as well. We are incredibly privileged. We have got into jobs and found the place that really works for us and isn't a typical working environment. To be doing what we do. But something that you said to us last time really struck with me. We've created a narrow range of normal behaviors in society to conform to, which I totally agree with. But that is a big barrier to break down. So how is it going to shift? I don't think we've got any choice. I think the internet is making that happen. The world of work is going to be unrecognizable in 50 years. We've set up offices based on the Industrial Revolution. We've created offices which made sense when ledgers were made of paper and clerks had to sit next to them. And that doesn't happen anymore. Nothing is stored on paper. Everything is stored on the internet. But the reality is, is we do not keep things in offices anymore. We have the flexibility to move around as we speak, to move around as we're having meetings. I was listening to a podcast this morning, a guy who has meetings whilst walking. He just puts his headphones on and has walking meetings. He does eight or nine kilometre walks and stacks all his meetings so that he can have them while he's walking. And I just thought, you know, that's the sort of thing that certainly wasn't possible when I came into the world of work. It has become more and more possible. It's become more and more routine and more and more normalized. And as those things start to change, yeah, the kind of people who experience that as disabling are going to change, aren't they? Some workplaces, some corporations, are going to be slower to get there than others. They know who they are. I mean, the ones who are doing it well, we know who they are too, because we've been sort of dazzled by the fact that they've got table tennis in the office or table football or whatever. We were dazzled by that years ago, but there are still some companies that see it as woke for those things to happen in those environments. And how do we have to legislate to bring those people on board? No, I don't think so. I mean, we have legislated to keep big those people on board and it doesn't work. The legislation has opened a door and made a lot of things possible. It's created an innovative industry around adjustments, which has been great for things like speech to text software, mind mapping software, AI assisted planning. Loads of things are emerging as a result of that technology. But the real cruncher here is that those businesses that are doing that are really rich. They've made an absolute ton of money. And so what I notice is that where performance is at a premium, those things have happened. So yes, the tech industry have done that. And they've done it pretty well and they're pretty famous for it. And they're very happy about that. They're very smog and very excited about how well they've done. But they're not the only place where that's happening. The other place where that's happening that I don't see it, is actually happening as much as in the tech industry is in defense, military, and intelligence. And so again, where people are focused on performance, where you have people with my qualification, I mean occupational psychologists work in the military quite a lot because in fact, we were invented by the military. Occupational psychologists were the first specialism of psychology. Discipline was created by military need to go, how do we recruit people and make sure that we get the right people for the right job? How do we type people so that we can understand which kind of person is going to make a good officer and which person is not going to make a good officer? So when you've got that huge premium on efficient high performance, that is where people are doing a good job of this. So you've probably seen GCHQ in the paper. They've got then you're a divergent team. There are other defense departments that I work with, one of whom 65% of their staff and you're a divergent. Wow, 65%. 65% yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This leads me onto something that, I mean, it's quite personal, I suppose, but there's work to be done in terms of awareness about ADHD, explaining to people what it really is, rather than what perhaps they think it is or what it's been portrayed as. But there's also work to be done on how we view ourselves and those of us with ADHD. I think and I feel quite often that I have a disability. I've had a diagnosis, I've had a nervous breakdown, I've had some intense treatment, which while positive, sort of reinforces the sense that this is a disorder. That is quite a big bit of work for us all to do as well. Well, I mean, isn't it just like anything in life? We really like to go to absolutes, don't we? We like to go to it all this or it's all that. But the reality is it's both on different days, on sometimes on the same day it's both. We're people with extremes, we have extreme, remember that little nursery rhyme that girl with a little curl on the middle of her forehead when she was good, she was very, very good and when she was bad, she was horrid. You know, it's that kind of. That's one of the other. Yeah, it's one of the other. And we don't sit in the middle kind of just trembling along very much. So there is that sense of disabling. There is also that sense of sense of joy and passion and creativity. And I think a lot of the disabling as well comes from an exclusive school system. I mean, if I look back at the things that have made me had to really work on myself and do healing work, a lot of them are nothing to do with ADHD, part of it is school trauma, you know, not going to school for two years, feeling completely unable to access education from about the age of 14, well, I actually know way before that really, I was 12 when I stopped going to school. The reality is I was at home lying under my duvet, feeling guilty for getting put my mum in trouble, feeling worried about what was happening, but feeling actually unbearably unable to get out and go into school and put myself in a position where I didn't feel safe or happy or like I belonged and desperate to access education and vicious wanting to go forward, that is traumatising. Yeah. It's funny that you should say that because there's one area that I am really seeing that at the moment as the mother of two older children is in a university setting. And it is, I think, one area of society where I think we've been very, very slow to catch up on this. We still make kids sit in lecture halls for an hour. And then we put a heck of a lot of pressure on them to present a seminar to their peers. And you know, we know that some kids have been so traumatised by that that they've left education altogether all worse. That is possibly one of the last mountains that we're going to have to climb here is to find a way to help those kids who are all leaving home for the first time and are all dealing with all of the executive function issues that they have, as well as realising that a university setting is a really, really hard way to learn in lots of places. But I mean, personally, I was getting into my groove by the time I got to a university. It was secondary and sixth form that were the absolute deal breakers for me that I couldn't do. But I didn't go to university until I was five years past leaving home. So I wasn't trying to do all of that stuff at the same time. And I also worked full time through my full time degree. And I think what I think would work there is just less pressure on the timing. I don't think that was a bad thing. I think the fact that my executive functions had finished maturing by the time I went to university was actually very, very, very helpful. Because you know our executive functions don't finish maturing until we're in our 20s, right? I completely agree. I think for some kids, they're sent to uni. They're too young. Yeah, exactly. It would be almost better for all of our ND kids. Yeah. They went off and worked for a couple of years for-- That's exactly what I did. But also that bit older and that bit more capable of dealing with sitting down for a little bit longer. Because it doesn't go through asking for help. Or sitting down or asking for help. Yeah. I mean, and they've just cooked a bit longer. I have a-- I'm just into this conversation. And look, I know I have a reputation on this podcast as always being the voice of doing. And I'm not. I agree with everything you're saying. But to me, it's just-- we're talking about the school system, the university system. It's we're at the workplace. How the hell are we going to change all these things? [MUSIC PLAYING] I don't understand how that's all going to change. The point that she makes about deadlines, I think that's a really interesting one. Because some universities do things differently. They do modules. And they'll give you three weeks to do an essay over a period of time rather than making you sit down and do-- Why should we be-- --presumably Nancy, we're not just talking about incremental change. We're talking about massive cultural change, aren't we? Think about cultural changes of the past. How do they happen? Do they happen overnight? Well, something sparks it. Yeah. Sure. Something's spark it. But have we not already had that spark when it comes to neurodiversity? And neurodiversity is big. It is fashionable. Look at you guys doing a podcast. Do you know what I mean? That wouldn't have happened 10 years ago. No, that's a mystery. So we've already had that spark. It just feels like it's taking a long time when you're in it. But when we look back from this position in 40 years, time will go, oh my goodness, you know, that period just after lockdown, the whole neurodiversity thing made a massive change in the way that we think about work and education. And we're just living through it. That's all. We are literally living through it right now. I'm with you, Nancy. I think-- I am. I hope you're right. I really do. Do you know why? I tell you why. It goes back to what you were saying earlier. That essentially, this makes money ultimately. This makes money. And that's the-- that's the society we live in ultimately. Totally. I know. If we live in a capitalist society where if it makes money, go on then. All right, we'll do it. And I think the fact that we can now prove that if you meet people's needs, and you don't ask them to do the things they're rubbish at, the business does better. Totally. We've got to reframe this. It was disability. It's now got to be about performance, not just neurodiversity, all disabilities. We've got to stop looking at reasonable adjustments as things we do to help people. And we've got to start looking at them as ways to enable optimum performance and unleash ambition. If you've got someone who could be absolutely nailing their job, but for the want of some oil-cancelling headphone-- with what kind of idiotic employer is going to say no to that? Tell you what, carry on hitting 75% of your targets and listening to everybody else talking the office all of the time as they rabbit on about what color they're painting their bathroom. Because that's exactly what I want to have happened. Of course, that's not what people want to have happened. But we've just got this ridiculous mindset that it's a favor that we're letting people do things that are-- you know, it's like some kind of advantage. And we've just got to lose all that. And I think we will. When the businesses that are at the cutting edge and the workplaces that are at the cutting edge of innovation and performance are already doing it, everyone will catch up. It'll just take them a while. And I think things do change. I went to school when people were smacked at school. I spent most of my school life studying a corridor. Yeah, do you know that's true for me too? And I was either studying the corridor because I'd been bad or I was putting the corridor because I'd finished all the work. I spent the last two years of primary school every math lesson sat in the corridor because I'd finished the math curriculum for primary school. So I was either in the corridor because I was too good or because I was too bad. But either way, I was in the corridor. And you know what? That is a real encouragement because school has changed. I mean, that has changed. And you're right, if you start to look back, you can see where the change has been made and we hope that the change continues. It's probably a good place to say then. I mean, and again, your positivity is so encouraging. Let's talk a bit about genius within. You're the chief science officer, neurodivergent led and owned business, helping neurodivergent people access their inner genius. So what sort of things do you do? What sort of work do you do to help people harness the strength of their neurodivergence? We do lots of different things, lots of different services and products, but they're all aimed at helping people work out. What is the thing that I uniquely do, that I enjoy, that is me in my zone, and how can I do more of that and earn a living at it? So around that kind of unifying objective, we provide diagnostic assessments, we provide workplace needs assessments and coaching, training, HR consultancy, we work in prisons, we do career coaching for people in prisons, we do career coaching for people who are long term unemployed. I have done that, my whole career, I've done that for over 20 years, I've worked in social justice spaces. I like to think that we work with people across the entire career span. So no matter where you are in your life's journey as an adult, we can support you to get to the next stage and we can help you work out what that next stage is, what that looks like, what's going to work for you, and then the logistics around getting there. So that might be if you've just had your first promotion to the board and you're feeling out of sorts because you're on the board now, or it might be that you're in prison and you've never had a job. Whatever your space, we're there for you as a neurodivergent person. And we've also recently started doing more things online because it's annoying that we, I mean, we cost, it costs money to do that. And I don't want to be a charity. I deliberately wasn't a charity as genius within. We're a nonprofit, we're a B-Corp, 65% of our profits get reinvested back into our community each year. We sponsor amazing organisations like ADHD Babes who you need to have on here, by the way, Vivian Aisbore. If you don't know her, you need her, she's great. But we do things like that. There's a principle for me, which is that people work hard to get trained to do this stuff. And we deserve to be paid a fair wage for a fair day's work. We deserve to be recompensed for the value that we add. And we add value to businesses. So we're businesses and tax payers are paying our wages. We are preventing unemployment. We are increasing productivity in those businesses. So I think it's about fair exchange. But equally, there are a lot of people out there who aren't going to get access to our services. So we've put a bunch of e-learning on our website. And we've also done something that I call the Genius Finder, which is a profiling tool, which helps you profile which workplace-related skills are your skills. It helps you find your genius, which are the things that I like to do at work that I think I'm pretty good at. So it helps you work out what those things are. And then for all of the things that you're not so good at, it connects you to a selection of 430 recommendations that I've kind of synthesized from 20 years of coaching, things that work. But things you don't need permission for or cost so that you can kind of maintain confidentiality. You can print off this little report. Know where on it does it give you a pretend diagnosis that you've got off the internet. It just says, these are your strengths. These are your challenges. Here's some stuff that might work for you. I think knowing what you're good at is about making sure that that's the primary driver of your role. It's not going to be the, you are going to have to do things that you're not good at. You can't go into a job and say, I'd like to do 75% of the things on the job, but I'd like you to pay me 100% of the money. Is that okay? So I'll do 75% of the work for 100% of the money. No, that's never going to happen. You are going to have to do some of the things that challenge you. And there are lots of ways you can be supported to get over those things. But what tends to happen is that people spend all of their time thinking about those things and they forget about the things they do well. So we've got to reorientate people around the things that they do well because that's what gives you hope, motivation, ambition. But the other thing that gives you hope, motivation, ambition, is knowing that you can cope with the things that challenge you. I'm not the best at kind of closing and finishing and doing paperwork, but I tell you what, I do it. I am actually really good at doing it. I'd rather do it and get it out of my head. I've learnt strategies for doing it. My colleague, Jackie, who runs our business, she's dyslexic and she absolutely hates paperwork. She will do it. She produces brilliant white papers. But what she does better is she'll tell a story through a PowerPoint deck. So if we're trying to think of a way to present some information to a customer or create a working document inside the business, I'll write loads of words because that's what I'm really good at. And then she'll see my words. She'll listen to them on her headset and she'll turn them into pictures and the PowerPoint. And then we can give people both. So it's not about you can get out of things you don't want to do. It's about how can you do those things in a way that suits you. I think that's a really important explanation. And it's really important that you've made that clear. Because I think it's actually how I've learnt to manage my ADHD. It's how we're sort of taught to get on with our ADHD, which is to identify what you're good at, identify what you struggle with so that you're prepared to have a strategy in place to deal with the thing you're not quite so good at. Rather than finding yourself in a situation where it comes at you and you go, "I'm panic, I don't know what to do." - Absolutely. - And sometimes, sometimes knowing that you're not very good at something is the only thing you really need to sort of help you get on with it and do it. - Totally. - You know that. That the ADHD diagnosis for me has really unlocked elements of those difficulties for me. Because I know that I'm rubbish at it. Therefore, I've sort of had to make myself be a bit more grown up about it, I suppose, in the olden days, I would literally just ignore it and panic. And then, you know, hide under the doofay, I can't do it. It's making me miserable and now I'm depressed. Because I've done none of it. But now that I know that I have an issue with it and I also, obviously, I also ask for help, which is something I never used to do. Because I felt so ashamed and so guilty of the fact that I couldn't do those things. So I think, you know, that's one element of what you were saying earlier of why we need a label. Sometimes we do need that label to. - And sometimes people are just in the completely the wrong job. You know, this is the other idea with the genius finder. I did some coaching once for a woman whose job it was to work in a call centre where people would give her a string of numbers over the phone and she would have to enter them into a computer and she had a working memory deficit. And I was just like, love. - No. - You know, you're such a creative, wonderful person. - Oh, I was. - This job, your job is literally the worst thing you could try and do with the kind of brain that you have. So I think you need to know what your strengths are so that you cannot make mistakes like that and not go into jobs that just do not suit you at all. You know, I realized very early in my psychology career that I was never going to be a clinical psychologist because I was not going to be able to work for the NHS. It's too big, it's too bureaucratic. And I would have. it would have stifled me. There is absolutely no way I could have handled it. So you need that self-awareness so that you can direct yourself into a job that will suit you. But once you get there, no, you don't get to only do the things that you like to do. You have to do everything. I do think a lot of. You're a divergent people sometimes think that it's some sort of get out of jail free card. You know, like, I'm your divergence. I don't have to manage how I speak to people. I'm your divergence. So if I lose my temper, that's because I've got a sensory overwhelm and you'll just have to suck it up. Like, no, actually, no, if you've lost your temper, yes, it might be because of sensory overwhelm. So we don't have to decide that you're a bad person because of that. But you still have a job to repair that relationship and to reassure people and to kind of work out how to prevent that from happening again at a workplace. There are limits. I'm so pleased you've said that. I'm so pleased you said that because for me, my diagnosis was about taking ultimate responsibility for myself and my actions. It wasn't a piece of paper that said, "I don't have to take responsibility for this." It was an explanation of why I behaved a certain way and then it was the starting point of finding new ways to manage. And you've had to work really hard because you can't medicate. So, I mean, that's, you know, you've had to find every other way of treating your ADHD as well, haven't you? Yeah, I can't medicate very often either. Not with stimulant meds. I'm fine with the other meds, but not the stimulant meds. But yeah, it's difficult, isn't it? And yeah, but it is about giving yourself less of a hard time. You know, once I realized that I had a working memory deficit, and it wasn't that I was deliberately forgetting what people have been up to lately and not asking them about their life because I was insensitive and I didn't care about them, it was because I had a crap memory. I was like, "Oh, okay." Now, I can stop thinking I'm a bad person and I can start putting in a strategy for that. What am I going to do? So, you know, little things like, on the 25th day of every month, my Google calendar sends me a reminder of who's birthdays are coming up. So that I don't forget who's birthdays. So, you know, it's like, right. And that's what I've put in the genius finder. You know, all of those little tips and tricks and ideas and things you can do to help you manage the memory issues you've got, or the self-organization issues you've got, or the literacy issues you've got. I want to kind of give people easier access to that stuff. That just feels like a big sister going, "Oh, right. Let me just save you 10 years of heartache, try all these things." And then when those things are not quite enough, then maybe come for some coaching and da, da, da, da, da. But, yeah, just that stuff needs to be more freely available, I think. Fascinating. And we could carry on talking to you, but I think we probably need to bring this to a close. Nancy, so grateful for your time. I think we're going to go and both look at the genius finder now. Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for coming on again. That's it for this episode. If you're wrong about ADHD, if you found this conversation helpful or eye-opening, do please rate, review, and share the pod. It really helps us out. And we'd love to hear from you. You can get in touch with us at
[email protected], send us an email with your stories and experiences, and do look out for our bonus episode coming soon with more thoughts and reactions to our conversation with Nancy Doyle. Take care and keep embracing your wonderfully ADHD brain. I'll see you next time.
PodcastTranscript AI