Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Hi.
I’m G.
I’m queer.
I’m nonbinary.
I’m married.
I’m a parent.
I’m a business owner.
And I’m autistic.
Like many people,
I was late in discovering the fact that I’m autistic.
It was only when my own child was going through the diagnosis process
and I was faced with this long list of traits and behaviors
that indicate that somebody might be on the autistic spectrum,
and they all seemed eerily familiar,
that the pennies started dropping.
I spent 30 years
believing that the reason I struggled to make friends as a child
was because I had the wrong accent.
When I was five, we moved house.
We only moved 20 miles,
but I believe the reason why I couldn’t make friends very easily
and the reason why I kept making social gaffes
was because I spoke the wrong way.
It was the only thing I could think of
that would explain why making friends with other kids was so hard.
In retrospect, it might have been because I thought
the make-believe games that everybody else wanted to play were dull and boring.
It could have been because small talk,
even the primary school playground variety,
was something I had zero interest in engaging with.
It could have been influenced ever so slightly by my belief
that the only toy worth playing with and talking about was LEGO Technic.
And maybe, just maybe, my social skills left a little bit to be desired.
But primary school me didn’t have the capacity to comprehend all that yet,
so I just stayed in my bemused and lonely little bubble,
until I was 10
and somehow I was given the lead role in the school play.
When I was on that stage, playing Oliver in “Oliver,”
I overacted terribly and the other kids laughed.
They laughed with me and not at me.
They were connecting with me for the first time.
It was a huge lightbulb moment.
My peers started to like me when I played a role for them,
and there began my journey into learning how to mask
and how to adapt who I appeared to be to the outside world
so that they would accept me.
This is not an uncommon story for an autistic person.
Now, although it may seem as though this story is “Oh, woe is me,
I only got by in life by compromising myself
and pretending to be somebody that I’m not,”
that’s not the case.
I was blessed with a loving family
who were always open and accepting of my quirks.
When I realized I was queer at 15, they accepted it without question.
I never felt I needed to hide it - and back in the 90s, that was a big thing.
Once I started to master the basics of social etiquette
and I got to high school,
where I found other kind of geeky, socially awkward kids,
I started to form friendships,
some of which have lasted to this day.
I always did well academically.
I came out of uni with a first class honours degree in design,
and life looked pretty rosy,
until I had to start fitting into the workplace.
It turns out that this autistic brain,
the same brain that really didn’t understand
why anyone would ever want to play make-believe
is equally incapable of sitting back quietly
when faced with a business practice and a workplace
that doesn’t make logical sense or seems inefficient.
Now, to a degree, this can be helpful.
I’ve been able to point out things to past employers and businesses
that have enabled them to change the way they work
and innovate in ways that have been helpful.
But in the grand scheme of things,
somebody that finds “the way we’ve always done things” totally unacceptable
if it compromises efficiency,
someone who’s constantly trying to innovate
in a big system that doesn’t move very easily,
eventually overstays their welcome.
I never once held down a job for longer than 18 months
before it was clearly time to move on.
Workplaces, like schools, function through order.
They’re made up of boxes
that allow these big, cumbersome structures to hold together
and do what they set out to do.
But those boxes don't fit everybody.
So I left one job and then another,
and then I had kids.
I became a full-time parent.
And then because, as we all know, it’s virtually impossible
to find a job that fits around juggling small children -
but I have the skills -
I set up my own design business.
I had no idea at the time what a revelation this was going to be.
Yes, it enabled me to start earning an income
whilst also being a primary parent,
but it also freed me up to do things my own way.
I was no longer tied down to the way things “should” be done.
Let me give you an example.
Here we have the traditional design process.
This is the way that I was taught to work with a design client.
The client writes a brief, sends it to the designer.
The designer creates multiple possible draft solutions
and sends them to the client.
The client picks one -
the rest are immediately thrown in the bin, never to be seen again -
and asks for revisions.
The designer makes those revisions,
and then the two play email tag for as long as it takes,
until the client is happy with the final design
or until both parties lose the will to live,
whichever happens soonest.
This process can take weeks or even months,
and I could never stand it.
So I stopped doing it.
When I had my own business, I sat down with my clients, in person.
We wouldn’t write a brief; we’d have a conversation.
There’d be no email to ask for a darker shade of blue
because they could ask right there on the spot
and they could see how it looked in an instant.
There’d be no waiting for weeks for the end result
because we’d create it together, right there, on the spot, in a few hours.
What started as a way for me to bypass the need to create designs
that would never be used
resulted in a methodology that also got results many, many times faster.
It was a win-win.
But bearing in mind my autistic traits,
it also had all the benefits for me personally.
In this traditional way of working,
I'd have to have multiple jobs running concurrently.
This autistic brain multitasks about as well as these hands juggle -
it is not pretty -
and eventually I start dropping balls.
Multitasking is not a skill I have,
but in this way of working, it was the only way to do it.
But over here,
I only have to do one thing at a time.
In fact, I get to use my autistically enhanced ability
to obsess totally and completely on a single subject at one time:
my client.
I get to laser-focus on that one job with no distraction,
which not only gets it finished faster,
but it also means that once I know that job is done
and my client’s needs are met,
it’s done and I can leave that mental space.
Once I do, my brain no longer has to carry it around,
and I can’t tell you how freeing that is.
Because I run my own business,
I’ve been able to adapt a working practice that didn’t work for me
into one that did.
And whilst doing so,
I inadvertently created a new way of working
that is also brilliant for my clients,
which has been brilliant for business.
And I am not alone.
When I look around me in the entrepreneurial community,
I see neurodiverse business owners everywhere -
not just autistic people, but people with ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia.
I see a world full of people who, just like me,
have wonderfully different brains that don’t fit into the boxes
that traditional career paths try to put us into.
Those people, just like me, chose to make it their own way.
And pretty much all of us have lived through years of ultimately trauma
because we have been trying to build careers for ourselves
in a world made up of boxes that do not fit us.
Many of us arrived at self-employment and entrepreneurship out of desperation,
and that sucks.
Entrepreneurship is brilliant.
It allows people to build businesses on their own terms.
For neurodiverse people,
it can be a vehicle for them to create businesses,
to generate income and to build lives
that allow their unique brilliance to shine
without having to spend years in forms of employment that squash them
or, even worse, teach them that they are incapable of succeeding.
In a 2019 study by the Institute of Leadership and Management,
half of all leaders and managers reported that they would not employ somebody
who had one or more neurodivergent conditions.
This is the world of employment
that neurodiverse people have to walk into.
I never held down a job for longer than 18 months.
But I have now been running my business for nine years,
and I have reached levels of success that I never dreamed could be possible,
which is great,
but it’s actually not why I’m standing on this stage today.
I’m standing here today
because it took me 36 years to figure out why I was different
and why some things were so hard.
I stand on this stage as a parent of neurodiverse children.
I don’t want my kids to have to go through years of not fitting in
before they have the opportunity to forge their own way.
I don’t want any kids to have to go through that.
Did you know that careers advisers are not taught to suggest self-employment
or entrepreneurship as an option?
I do, because I asked them, as I prepared for this talk.
I wanted to know if their careers advisory world ever say to people,
“Set up your own business!
You’ve got a brilliant different brain and brilliant different ideas.
You should do it your own way!”
But it turns out that’s not in the manual.
We might want to update that manual.
We are getting better all the time at diagnosing neurodiversity.
But all the support that’s on offer after that diagnosis
focuses on teaching the neurodiverse person
how to change their behaviours,
how to change themselves
so that they can more easily fit into society’s boxes.
We need to stop doing that.
And when it comes to supporting neurodiverse people
to find jobs and careers,
we need to start promoting entrepreneurship
as a viable career choice.
We should be doing that for everybody,
but especially for neurodiverse people who have wonderfully different brains
that will only excel when they’re not using most of their capacity
just to get through a workday that somebody else designed.
We need to tell our differently-brained young people
that they can forge their own path.
They can be the innovators, they can be the leaders,
and they can lead the way for everybody.
We need to tell them they can do it,
and we need to believe in them when they do.
And to everybody here watching this, all of you,
but especially if you’re neurodiverse -
then let me be the one to tell you
that you do not have to fit into a neurotypical box.
You do not have to fit into the boxes
that the world has been trying to put you into,
because those boxes were not made for you.
You can make your own box.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)