Episode 176: Thinking Differently: Neurodiversity at Work
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…you are struggling at work, but you don’t know why…
“I truly believed that at some point this knowledge or way of doing things would just kick in and I’d suddenly get it, and I just never got there, that day never came.”
Then you find out your brain works a little differently than other people’s…
“I did not suspect a thing. I called myself absent-minded and I thought I had some quirks, but it was completely out of the blue that this was even a thing ‘cause I found out in a really funny way.”
And every woman in this story lived with her condition for years before she got a diagnosis.
“It started making me think about the last, you know, 20 odd years and what's happened in my life, and it explained lot of things.”
Neurodiversity at work – how it helps, how it hinders, and what workplaces can learn.
I have to admit that when Emma Case messaged me earlier this year and used the word ‘neurodivergent’, I didn’t know what it meant. Since then I’ve felt like I’ve come across that or ‘neurodiversity’ everywhere. It’s the term used for brain functioning that differs from what’s generally considered the standard model. Emma said these women’s perspectives are largely missing from the mainstream conversation on women and work, and would I consider incorporating some into this show? So I’m starting with her story.
Emma grew up in the English midlands. She was always creative. At 17 she decided she wanted to work in the fashion industry. Which she did – she became a buyer. And she’ll tell you The Devil Wears Prada isn’t far off the truth…
“In many ways that is a good example of what the industry can be like. And what I mean by that is that it is tough, it isn’t easy, and while it is tough it’s but it’s tough for everybody. So I think that maybe masked my struggles.”
She says lots of people in fashion burn out at some point, and what she was going through at her last company could easily have been ascribed to that. It was a famous brand, and a dream for Emma to work there. But she found the transition from small companies hard. She says in the small firms where she’d worked before it was pretty chaotic – everyone doing something different, people getting up and down, going in and out. And she did well in that environment. She says it allowed her to burn off some of her excess energy. And she was able to make her role her own.
But at the big company, things were different. She worked in a silent room with the numbers people. The friendly chaos was gone. And she was expected to conform to company culture. She found all the rules and systems hard to keep on top of. In fact she found pretty much everything hard to keep on top of.
“I had this niggling feeling in the back of my mind for the longest time that something wasn’t right. As an example, I’d go away on holiday and I’d come back and it was almost like I was going into a brand new job. And we might laugh about it that we forget the password for our computer or those types of things. But it was more than that. It was things I was doing day in, day out and they just weren’t sticking.”
To take one example…
“There was a company I’d need to visit maybe 3 or 4 times a week – I’d need to hop on the underground and go to their office. There was a point in the journey where I would always get lost. I just could not remember the route and I would do it 3 or 4 times a week.”
But each time it happened Emma would put it down to not concentrating properly.
“When we struggle with things as women, and I am going to generalize, we quite often put the blame at our feet – we think there’s something that we’re not doing, that we need to try harder, that there’s something that we’re missing. So I remember making sure I wasn’t on my phone, wasn’t listening to music, and every time I entered that underground at a certain point it would feel as if I’d never been there before.”
But again, she blamed herself. She’d always had difficulties with certain tasks, anything to do with organization just wasn’t her thing. She figured she would master this route at some point.
And yet this kind of thing had been part of Emma’s life for years, and by now she was in her early thirties. She often had trouble turning up at the right place at the right time. She wasn’t good at paying bills, setting up direct debits, or meeting deadlines in her personal or professional life. Still…
“It was very easy for me to pass that off as someone who wasn’t paying attention or I hadn’t read the right thing or figured it out yet. So again, I kept putting it at my feet. And this was the thing, I truly believed that at some point this knowledge or way of doing things would just kick in and I’d suddenly get it, and I just never got there, that day never came. And as the years progressed it felt as if more was at stake. So I was watching my peers pass me by. Yes, people say comparison is the thief of joy, but that day when I sat on my bed thinking about my peers, thinking about where they were and where I was, thinking about how we started all together, it hit me there was something more to this.”
AM-T: “You mean you weren’t quite in the position you thought you should be in at that point?”
“I wasn’t in the position where I knew I should be. you’ll know this yourself. We know what we as individuals what we are capable of, and what my life felt like giving 110 percent and only getting 50 percent back.”
AM-T: “I’m curious, did you seek a specialist, did you think I’ve got to take this to the next level. How did you even come to be diagnosed?”
“I did that thing we all do now – I hopped online, I was putting in random words, searching on Google, and trying to find things. And at some point I found a woman’s story and I thought that is me. That is my story. And it just said, ‘and I have ADHD.’ And I was gobsmacked.”
ADHD. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Emma didn’t just settle for a Google diagnosis, she did seek a medical opinion and she was officially diagnosed at about 33 years old. But the reason she was so surprised is that, as she put it, ADHD was for little American white boys. Emma is Black. That’s how she thought of it – that’s who she was aware of having ADHD.
And she says many of us assume the same thing. That ADHD is about boys bouncing off the walls, not being able to concentrate in school, being disruptive. We tend to focus on the H – the hyperactivity in ADHD.
“For many women that H does not look the same way as it does for boys and men. So that hyperactivity is internalized, so for many women it manifests as anxiety – it’s an inner hyperactivity, that feeling of not being able to stop, the wheels don’t stop turning in your head.”
Emma ended up leaving her employer before she got her diagnosis of ADHD. All she knew then was that the environment wasn’t for her, that she wasn’t thriving there. She went into business for herself and later on she turned that business into Women Beyond the Box. It’s a platform to support neurodivergent women and to bring attention to their successes – she has a top 50 list of women there on the website.
As part of her work Emma coaches individual women and she’s hired by big companies to talk about neurodiversity and advise them on how to create a more inclusive workplace. One that accepts individual differences and capitalizes on them, rather than forcing everyone into a corporate box.
AM-T: “When I first spoke to you, you said this is a feminist issue.”
“Oh it is, absolutely, it is a feminist issue. There are so many women who are not being diagnosed or who are misdiagnosed. I say it’s a feminist issue because boys and men are diagnosed. Because when the studies were being done around ADHD it was men and boys who were in that sample – so all the key characteristics of ADHD are based on men and boys and what that looks like. So as I said to you about that H, that hyperactivity, it’s very rare you’ll find women or girls jumping out of their seats at school…we’ve been socialized to be…
AM-T: “Good.”
“Good, exactly. We don’t do that kind of thing, so all that struggle is internal, so what women tend to be diagnosed with is depression or anxiety or borderline personality disorder, so it’s mood disorders.
And this is not controversial for me to say that within medicine women are quite often not listened to, or we’re classed as being overly emotional, or hysterical, that kind of thing, so we have this lost generation of women who are secretly struggling thinking that they’re dreadful, knowing there is something good about them but who might never realize their potential. And it’s just sad.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, Paige Jeffrey was also diagnosed with ADHD as an adult.
“Well, I found out last summer actually. And I did not suspect a thing. I called myself absent-minded and I thought I had some quirks, but it was completely out of the blue that this was even a thing ‘cause I found out in a really funny way.”
Paige is 34. She lives near Thunder Bay, Ontario, with her husband and two daughters, they’re 4 and 8. And last year her sister told Paige that she might want to get her older daughter checked for ADHD. She said her own daughter had recently been diagnosed, the condition ran in families, and she saw some similarities between the cousins. So Paige started doing some research.
“…and I’ll say as much as I had heard that things express differently with women and I’m for equality and all that, it kind of never occurred to me that ADHD was gonna be it – and I looked into it and was like oh, that’s her, that’s her, and that’s her…and then, while I was doing it, I was like, oh, that’s me, that’s me, and that’s me!”
Paige had done really well in school but university felt so overwhelming, she didn’t complete any secondary education. She says she’s largely self-taught and she’s done well, but as you’ll hear in a bit, she often found office life a challenge. Like Emma, it seemed to her other people had a secret code for how this whole thing worked that she somehow lacked.
But when Paige sought medical advice for her daughter and herself, she hit roadblocks.
“The first doctor I spoke to said it’s probably not ADHD, your daughter probably has high anxieties, and I don’t think you have ADHD either, I think it’s just depression, and this was in the beginning of the pandemic, so she kind of assumed it was depression and anxiety for both of us and that’s how she was gonna treat it.”
Paige went on to seek a second opinion. And while she was told it was highly likely she had ADHD, she says to this day she hasn’t been able to get any diagnosis for her daughter, partly due to the Canadian medical system slowing down during Covid.
But once she knew she had this condition, she took steps to get to grips with it.
“And one of the things I ended up doing, I ended up getting a coach for ADHD, and it’s funny cause I remember listening to your episode on coaching and I remember seeing the advantages but thinking yeah, I don’t know that I would ever spend the money on it. But I will say that she is invaluable, she is just about the best thing ever…she’s given me so much insight into the way my mind works, and we have talked about how ADHD affects your executive functions, so like kind of the way your brain works.”
She says she doesn’t cope well with having a big, nebulous goal. Her brain needs to focus on something specific. Her coach helps her with that.
“So we really hammer down on action plans and set a time and a date to be accountable to. That’s one thing you’ll also see in people with ADHD. The procrastination is real. I know this probably happens with people in general, but you’ll find you procrastinate up until, oh, I have a deadline in a day, and you’ll blaze through it and you get a good mark anyways. It’s how I got through school.”
These days Paige has her own business, so she does need to meet client deadlines. She’s a web designer for small businesses, usually solopreneurs. I wondered if she ever tells her clients about her condition…
“When it comes to clients now, it can depend a little bit, I’ve got some clients who are a little bit closer, and sometimes I explain to them that this is a thing, and usually we do this when things are a little more conversational…but it’s not generally something I tend to reveal. I don’t know that I would reveal it to a boss necessarily unless I felt comfortable, and I don’t think people should have to be obligated to tell others, you know, but I also understand the reality of it. The reality is it would be really nice to be able to say well, everyone should be accepting of another person and not everyone thinks the same way as you, but realistically it doesn’t work out that way, you know, and that’s what happened to me.”
She says in her previous life as an office worker…
“I’d go into a new job, usually very enthusiastically. I tended to be that person in the office to whom everyone would come for help because I was usually able to figure out the problem…if I have the details of something I can take a look at it and be like oh we’re gonna do this, this and this, and we’ve fixed it. Even with processes in the office, I’m really good at going, if we did it this way this would be much more efficient. What I’m really good at is connecting point A to point B. What I am not good at is defining the A and B points and that is where I tended to trip up.”
She says a lot of people with ADHD have difficulty visualizing the end product. She says when people say, ‘think outside the box’ she can do that – IF she knows what the box is meant to look like first. But that can be hard to explain to managers.
“And how this worked out in practical terms is I would get a project, and the boss would be like hey, here you go, off you go. And I would say, hang on a second, I have some questions…because I would need to know what that blue box was gonna look like, what the end result was going to be in order to make sure I’d done what they were expecting of me, because often what was in their head was different to what I thought of in my head. I had that happen a couple of times, too where a boss was like, no, I’m done with this, do it, do it however you want…and they’d come back and be like no, you need to fix this, this is wrong. So I had a habit of asking a lot of questions at the beginning of the project and I’d get bosses telling me, well you have no initiative, why can’t you just take this project and run with it?
It’s not that I don’t have initiative, I absolutely have initiative, the problem is when I don’t understand what the end result should be I struggle really hard with getting started and proceeding forward. I found ways to work around this – at my last job I had a really amazing friend who was the office manager, who would help me understand what it is that our boss was asking for so I didn’t have to go and bother the boss.”
And once she knew what she was aiming for, she could bring all her creativity to the project. She just needed a little help kicking off.
Still, Paige always hit a point in a job when she got really bored. Once she’d mastered her role, her brain itched to tackle something new. So when Paige and her family moved north, away from the Toronto area to a small town, she decided to go freelance.
“When I had the opportunity to jump into my own business it gives me the flexibility to balance both large projects and smaller projects so I always kind of have things going on…and the fact that I get to work with a new client every time, and we’re always doing something a little different, you know there’s a new way of expressing it, they’ve got a new brand so it’s a brand new personality you have to work with, it reinvigorates everything for me all on its own. I don’t have to struggle with that, and that’s one of the reasons I like it so much.”
More from Paige a bit later in the show.
Michelle Jones is also from Ontario. And to tell her story we need to go back in time almost 25 years.
Back then, when she was a 19-year-old university student Michelle found out some weird symptoms she’d been having were being caused by a brain tumor.
But again, it took a while to get to that diagnosis.
“My regular GP basically put it down to stress in my first year of college. I was a female so I was going through, you know, hormonal things, and literally that I was a hypochondriac. And I remember that so clearly because my brother actually went to the appointment with me.”
He’d been witnessing the changes in her behavior and she wanted him there to corroborate what was happening to her. Still, that doctor wasn’t worried. Luckily for Michelle, others were. The tumor was found, she had a successful operation and an intense but successful recovery. And she went back to her classes…and her life, for the next two decades.
Then about five years ago she and her husband moved to the US, to the San Francisco Bay area. She started having some chronic pain and thought, I need to get this checked out. So she sees a neurologist, gets some tests done, and goes in for the results.
“And I was sitting in his office and he was reviewing this MRI scan with me and he basically just said, ‘you know, everything looks great. There's nothing of concern, but I will say that you have a large part of your brain missing.’”
Now initially Michelle thought well, maybe he’s talking about the brain tumor – so she said, well, yes, I had brain tumor removed when I was 19. And he said no, that’s not what I’m talking about. Part of your brain isn’t there.
“What he was pointing out was that one-third of my Corpus Callosum was missing. And the Corpus Callosum is the sort of mesh system, or, you know, the network that connects to your left and your right hemispheres. And so this is how your brain talks to - one side talks to the other.”
But with split brain – the term the neurologist used to describe her condition – that doesn’t happen. Each hemisphere is working hard but they’re not really connecting.
Michelle was shocked that she’d never known about this missing part of her brain, which must have been removed during her tumor operation.
“But also it started making me think about the last, you know, 20 odd years and what's happened in my life, and it explained lot of things.”
Michelle has worked in the UK, Canada and now the US. For years she was a manager in the travel industry. And her reviews would often mention words like ‘thorough’ and ‘cautious.’ She says looking back, she was pretty meticulous about everything…
“I always got feedback of Michelle is very cautious and she makes really good decisions, and she seems to look at every sort of scenario. And I really just thought that I was, you know, smart and, you know, looking at all angles of a problem before, you know, suggesting solutions or directing staff on how they could maneuver through different problems.”
AM-T: “Just to be clear, what you found out through your research on split brain is, this is part of the condition, right?”
“Yes. And now I've sort of come to the conclusion that each hemisphere kind of fights with each other. I think I really noticed going back to university at age 37, I went back to university to do a second BA in art history and then went on to do my master's in museology. And I had so much reading to do for every class, some semesters I had six classes, so I had tons of reading. And I was really struggling with doing the reading the night before like most students do, like I’ll read that the night before the class so it's really fresh in my brain. But I found that, um, I was reading things twice and it was because the first time our first run through was from my right side of my brain, and the second run through it was from my left side of my brain. And then after those two read-throughs, they would sort of have an argument with each other to say, you know, what are we reading here and how can we, you know, disseminate this into something that makes sense.”
She began to wonder if she’d ever finish her degree with all the reading that was involved – she was suddenly aware of this condition she didn’t even know she’d had before.
‘I guess not to use a cliché, but it really did my head in.”
She didn’t know what if anything to say to other people about it, either.
“I don't tell everybody about it because it's something that you can't see. And when I first told family members about it, their response was, but look at you, like, look at you, you're going to university again, you did this whole career in the travel industry. You're very successful, it clearly hasn't hampered any sort of progress or success in your life. But I was starting to think differently, like, what if I had have known and could have, you know, maybe gotten accommodations or let colleagues know that this is how I function and this is my brain and this is what I need in order to make those decisions. So I need a quiet space or I need more time to look at all different areas.”
She started to doubt herself… On the one hand it was all good, on the other, it was confusing. She’d found out that when you’re born with split brain, it can be really debilitating. So there was a bit of guilt thrown in there too.
But Michelle got her BA and then went on to do her master’s – with the help of an advisor she says kept her focused on what she could do, not what held her back. And all this time she was becoming gradually more comfortable with her new identity as someone with split brain.
Today she works as a museum curator and she’s focused on ways to open up the art world to all different types of people. She says split brain is actually perfect for this work…because it’s not all about coming to one conclusion.
“I was really lucky to study in an academic museum. So I was engaging with sciences, with math, with fashion students - and all coming in thinking about ways to interpret objects differently. And my brain loves this kind of stuff, because it then gives me the feeling that, because I think one way, I most often feel that I'm wrong because it's so different from everybody else. But when you get, you know, more than one opinion in a group setting, you tend to see that your view is not wrong and that everybody has a different view. And I think that's what I love about the art world and museums is that interpretation is up to the viewer.”
Like all the guests in this episode, Michelle hopes workplace can open up a bit more – be more inclusive for everyone. She thinks emerging from the pandemic might be the boost workplaces need to switch up the open plan office, for instance…which a lot of us were never crazy about…
“So it could be something like, you know, having a private pod at work that individuals can work, you know, separately in, well that benefits everybody, because no doubt, there's a time where a non- neurodiverse person could really benefit sitting in that pod.”
And enjoying a little peace and quiet.
Paige Jeffrey has some parting advice for managers with staff who may not quite fit the office mold. They could have ADHD or another form of neurodiversity.
“I would say to people in management or in a position where they may have people on their team who struggle with it and may not even realize it…don’t be afraid to answer questions, maybe you don’t want to spend forever doing the project for them, but sometimes just a few questions is all they need…and that is enough for them to run off and do it. And it will save you time in the long run if you have some of that understanding and if you realize sometimes people’s minds work a little differently, and it doesn’t make them a bad employee, it means that their strengths are in different places.”
As with her. As she said earlier, once she knows what that box looks like she can think outside of it. She says the way her ADHD brain works has given her a lot of creative freedom to do some amazing things. She just wishes more workplaces could think outside their own boxes…
“I think understanding is key to human relationships, period. Having some understanding, having some knowledge that some people think a little bit differently and that to play to their strengths is going to give you the best working team you could possibly have is really important and maybe something that isn’t always talked about in all workplaces.”
Paige Jeffrey. Thanks to her, Michelle Jones and Emma Case for being my guests on this show. I will link you to more information about women and neurodiversity under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com. And thanks to Emma for approaching me in the first place about covering this topic.
I also want to say thank you to Mary Sier for her help with research for this episode.
You listeners are a big part of The Broad Experience – every one of the women in today’s show is a listener with a story to tell…which just proves my belief that normal people are more interesting than most celebrities.
If you enjoy this non-celebrity podcast or think it could help someone else please pass it on – email, social media, however you want to do it.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time.
There will be a bit of a longer than usual break before you hear from me again because I’m taking the time to get some new interviews done for some new shows. I’m also traveling to see my family for the first time in 18 months.
In the meantime, I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks as ever for listening.