Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood and I'm your host for the Inclusion Bites podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation around the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. If you'd like to join me in the future, then please do drop me nine to jo.lockwood@seechangehapen.co.uk. That's S-E-E Change Happen dot co dot uk. You can catch up with all of the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places. So plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is Episode 91 with the title "Beyond the Corporate Robot".

And I have the absolute honour and privilege to welcome Sam Warner. Sam is a neurodivergent communication specialist, and when I asked Sam to describe her superbach, she said, I'm blessed with the ability to take very complex subjects and simplify them when they need to be explained to others. Hello, Sam. Welcome to the show.

Hello.

Hi. It's great to see you again. It seems only a week since we were in each other's company in a medical centre place in Stoke.

Indeed. I used to meet people in the most interesting places.

Yes, it was very interesting. Nice car park, nice sandwiches. Lovely. Thank you. So, Sam, "Beyond The Corporate Robot". That's intriguing. Tell me more.

I shall. So, around about 2015, I left the world of corporate, and there's a really good reason why I left the world of corporate. And there'll be some people, I guess, who can relate to this. Maybe even you, Joe. I don't know where I felt like I was swimming up a river all the time and I was tired mentally and physically, and it was just really the whole square peg in a round hole. I can never seem to do right by everybody. If I'm doing right by that person, I'm doing wrong by the other. I can't play the political game.

They all seem to be playing some sort of game and I haven't got the rules. And I just got to that point where I was like, okay, I'm done. I can't play anymore, I'm out. You carry on playing on your own. I need to play a different game. And it's only after that, really, that I delved very deeply into why I might be feeling like that. I'd had some idea already for a few years, dabbled with the idea that I might be neurodivergent, which, if you're not familiar with neurodivergent, it's quite a new word, I guess it's autistic, it's ADHD dyslexia, dyspraxia, sensory processing disorders, all sorts of stuff like that. And as it turns out, when I explored that more and I researched it more and I'm really good at research, it became really apparent to me that I was wired up so differently to everyone else.

It was as if it was as if, Jo, that you'd picked me up and popped me into japan and gone, off you pop, love. Work it out. Because that's how confusing it was. The different laws, the different ways that you're supposed to express respect to each other, the do's and the don'ts, all of that kind of stuff. And even just language in general. Because what I've discovered is people don't tend to mean what they say and say what they mean. It's all this sort of woolly kind of stuff. They were supposed to work it out, apparently, so that I found really challenging.

And I'd reached my zenith, I'd reached the end of my tether. And then the epiphany I had was, well, there's loads of stuff I'm actually really, really good at and it just doesn't suit this corporate world. It's not that I can't work, it's that I can't work there. And I noticed that as I came from, my last job was in it for nearly nine years. I realised that there's lots of other people struggling in a similar way to me. And then these sort of ideas popped into my brain. They were hatching. And I've always loved coaching and teaching people very much on a side hustle kind of way.

And I realised I should be doing this. This is the thing, this is why I'm here. If we've got to look for purpose in our lives, I need to use my talent to help other people understand all of this and thrive. And that's how come Get Your Message Across was truly kind of birthed into the world as an organisation. And so now I go into organisations and I help them to attract and retain neurodivergent talent, to support them in a fantastic way. Reasonable adjustments, accommodations and adaptations, usually costing the company nothing, which is amazing and actually happy side effects. It benefits everybody, there's no losers. And then on the side of that, things come to you.

I've ended up helping individuals who also want to do fantastically well at work and thrive, so it sort of exploded and I'm really happy about that. So, yeah, I'll stop talking so you can get a win in h waste.

Thank you. No, absolutely. Have a sip of coffee, that would do you good. I got to ask, have you had a diagnosis or are you self diagnosed or are you clinically diagnosed?

So I have a clinical diagnosis. I got that last year because I saved up all my pennies and spent 1500 pounds getting my Autistic and ADHD combined. Diagnosis.

Yeah, that was obviously important to you, otherwise you wouldn't have invested so much money in it. So what was the big game changer? You knew, presumably, you were going into the diagnosis expecting to be diagnosed, you weren't going in there to be expected to be filed. No. You're not neurodiverse enough. Sorry.

Yeah, exactly. That's why there's all this stuff in the news about so many people being diagnosed with ADHD. I'm like, yeah, because all the people who think they've got ADHD are going for diagnosis. Duh. It's expensive. But for me it was validation. So even though I was 99.9% certain because of all the research I'd done anyway and met so many people like me, there was that 0.1% of me that had impostor syndrome that kept going how can you be doing this for other people? How can you call yourself the neurodivergent communication specialist if you can't prove that you're neurodivergent? What if someone asks you for proof? And that was always like this nagging little elf on my shoulder. So I flicked the elf off my shoulder and I've got it.

Not one person has ever asked to see my diagnosis. But I did cry for 3 hours afterwards because they were validated.

I felt a bit similar when I was diagnosed as trans psychologist and I got my letter saying DSM 64 one transsexual tick and it was kind of like so what? Thank you for telling me something I know already. But it was validation. I think that's the whole reason that I and many others who are trans, obviously you're neurodiverse or whatever it may be, is you want someone to say you're not making this shit up almost. This is real, it's tangible and it's me.

Oh, definitely. And there's a real stigma for people who are self diagnosed for often gatekeeping by diagnosed individuals. Weirdly, even though we're all supposed to be part of the same community and supporting each other and you're like, hang on a minute, I don't think you've thought about this before diving in and attacking someone or accusing them of not being diagnosed, therefore not really neurodivergent.

Oh no, neurodivergent enough. You're not a real neurodivergent.

You're pretend letter from your mom. And for a lot of people it's really hard to get diagnosed. I mean, there's some shocking statistics at the moment for trying to be on waiting lists. I think I won't name it, but there's one county in the UK and their waiting list is seven years.

I think trans people have it hard because we're looking at about six or seven years for first appointment. So yeah, not too dissimilar. So many parallels because the trans community, we have people who are policing people saying, well, unless you got diagnosis, you're not trans enough, you're not proper trans person, you're just making it up. It's like it's incredible how we do that.

My goodness. No, I know actually.

Your respective my respective communities, we're about gatekeeping and policing and then the pathway to proper diagnosis is either go private or sit in the queue knowing there's something not right or knowing that you need some validation and you have to wait six, seven years. I guess even best case, it's going to be four or five years. Even if you get really lucky with your postcode.

Oh, yeah, for sure. And there's another twist to the whole private thing. So for a lot of people, particularly with ADHD, which for some people sometimes medication can help. I'm being very clear that that's not.

A given written or something like that, is it?

All sorts of things. They normally give written children, because why.

Wouldn'T you give the Bart Simpson sort.

Of pill or whatever it is to children? That sounds wizard, doesn't it? And then, funny enough, when they get to 18, they can't have it anymore because it's a controlled substance. Yeah, let's not go down that road. But the medication thing is, the point I'm making in that if you go down the private diagnosis route, you then have to pay for your medication privately for the first two years. And it's like 200 pounds a month until the NHS will agree, hopefully, to take you over so that you can have a normal prescription like everyone else has. So it's more than just scraping together the money you need for your diagnosis. It has wider implications financially.

It's two and a half thousand pounds a year for the meds, isn't it? That's what you're saying as well.

It's just horrendous.

So two year cost is 5000 plus 1500 at six and a half thousand pounds for your first two years of being yourself and having been validated.

And so the whole diagnosis thing becomes a privilege for people who can afford and that's why they go, oh, is this a big epidemic of people being diagnosed? What's going on? No. So we've only been diagnosing autism since about 1980. Shockingly. And we've only been diagnosing ADHD since 1968, and that was mainly men and children rather than adults.

Hyperactive kids, really, isn't it? Disruptive kids? Effectively, yeah.

There was a real belief that you grew out of it, which is just interesting to me, shall we say, was.

A bottom set in our schools, where there was a whole group of young children or children who were the no hopers. They were either unsuccessful in exams or academically or they would lark around, they were uncontrollable. So the bottom set was always the they can go and play with the toys all day because there's nothing else we can do with them and just trying to teach them what they can. Otherwise they were forgotten children. And just I hate to use the word, but labelled as thick or stupid.

And that was kind of disruptive r word that we don't use anymore.

Oh, yes. No, the R word.

Yeah, we don't use that anymore.

Which nickel stupid? Either, but yeah, the R word, indeed.

They would have found that they had talents in other areas that just simply weren't academic. And there were people like me who were academically gifted. I was able to follow the rules and do what I was told, and I found the work really easy because I have really logical brain. So you just follow what it says and there you go. Bob's your uncle. But I was bored, bored out of my head. I wasn't stimulated. There was no curiosity fostered, if you could wind the world back 40 OD years.

I'd have loved to have gone to a Montessori school or something like that. That fosters that kind of creative thinking, that curiosity, that's exactly the kind of teaching that I needed not learn this and then regurgitate it in a year's time for over 4 hours at a desk where you can't talk to anyone. Oh yeah, that's an exam. Right. So where in my working life will I ever have to do this again? Oh, never. What? Doesn't make any sense to me at all. At all. So I flew under the radar in school because I was a good girl and I did as I was told and admittedly I was still a bit of a handful.

So I was board monitor, milk monitor, playground monitor, and they were trying to keep me busy because of my hyperactivity, so I get it, I'd probably do that as well if I was my teacher, but I'd read all the books in the library, they didn't know what to do with me. Now, the boys who were academically gifted were put up a year, not the girls though. Oh no, you have to stay with your peers. Why? I don't have any friends, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm always on my own.

Yes. So you weren't hanging out with the boys and in the playground and doing hopscotch or handstands against the no, no.

I was frequently to be found on my own making up stories in my head. Gosh. I don't know if you ever did this as a kid, Joe, but we used to get part of a stocking and a tennis ball. And you put the tennis ball in the stocking and you stand against a wall, and then you hold one end of the stocking and you kind of throw the ball, and it goes doof doof, doof, doof, doof either side of you. And then you can do it between your legs and above your head, and you try and do all sorts of things with it. I did that a lot. I remember that, people away from you.

If I've got too close, you could.

Yeah, they're going to get hit by it. Yeah, dear, the silly days.

Definitely in the East End of London it progressed to a snooker ball in the stocking, doesn't it?

I would throw myself at whatever extracurricular activities I could, so even in primary school we would do like a bit of music and dance or something, or a little play, and I'd be the first one with my hand up going be meep, me, pick me, pick me. Because I was desperate for stimulation and desperate to be involved and feel like I was useful and nourished and mentally and then I went to grammar school and I thought, I thought everyone at grammar school was going to want to be at school and want to learn and be like me. Turns out that's not what it was like at all. It was just the kids that passed the Eleven Plus.

Who probably had the privilege of parents who pushed them through it as well and motivated them.

Yeah, or they were just bright, but they were still horrible. Horribly, horribly bullied through school. Hated every second of school people. Oh, yes, it's really good. Even if it wasn't good for you, you would have learned some really valuable lessons. Yeah, I know which people to stay away from. I know where the good places are to hide. And I ended up playing bridge with the math teachers at lunchtime to get away from the children.

I mean, what 13 year old plays bridge with the math teachers at school?

Yeah, we used to play chess in our break title. We used to have chess sets and magnetic chess to sit outside under the shelters whenever I was playing football. Me and a couple of friends used to play chess every lunchtime, things like that. But my school career, I suppose if I look back on it, I was really polarised. So if you looked at my school report, I was either A or E. There were subjects I was always E and there were the classes I got thrown out of. I had to stand in the corner of my hands on my head. There were the ones I was disruptive mainly, so things like French, geography, history, all those kind of like those sort of subjects mass physics, science I was always on the A side.

And when it came to my exams, I think I sat nine GCE at the time, back in the early eighty s, and I got five and I did five as a walk on part. I don't remember actually revising at all. I just walked into Math physics. I only got B's, but if I'd have tried I tried to get A's. Yeah. And I was completely polarised. Of course. My parents just saw the left hand column, the E's.

They didn't see the A's. No one twigged and said, give this person stimulation on this column and don't try and stimulate them in that column because it's not going to work.

And that hasn't changed. We're 30, 40 years later, and kids are still being trained to look at, oh, look, you got a D in such and such. Never mind your ten A stars, you got you've got a D in history. They might hate history, they might not like the teacher. There could be any number of reasons why history is not working out for them, so don't force them to do history.

But as it happens, I'm actually quite interested in history today. I'm interested in it because it intrigues me now. I actually care about it now about the intricacies and the detail of it. But then I didn't care about Egyptians.

Well, yeah, and we did World War II. Okay. I think it's important for us to learn about those kind of things, but the teacher was awful. It wasn't that he wasn't knowledgeable, he was let's call him quite the character. He used to walk around with a cane that he did not need to walk, it was a prop and he would whack it on the desk right next to your hand and tell us how he'd come from a boarding school where he was allowed to hit the kids and all this kind of stuff. He was there to terrify us and enjoyed every second of it. Is it any wonder my history grade was not good? Really?

Yeah. I've still got the dent in my forehead from a geography teacher in the board. Rubber.

Yeah. He used to throw chalk and stuff at us as well. Yeah. I sat in the front row because and this is before I knew about ADHD or anything like that, but I found it really distracting if I could see the other kids in the class, like lucking about and doing all that stuff. So I found if I sat in the front, I could block out most of the class and try and concentrate on the teacher and I used to tell people it's because I wore glasses. Wasn't that until I could see fine. I mean, I did have glasses, but it was a great way of explaining why I wanted to sit at the front all the time. Yeah.

You talked about your diagnosis and I talked about my transiness diagnosis, if you like. I've often considered am I on some kind of neurodevelopment spectrum? Probably hyper focusing, the hypertensive type stuff, rather than the disruptive element these days. So I obsess over things, so I have to pull it apart, put it together, put it apart, put it together, pull it apart, put it together, pull it apart, get together. Right. Board now. Next thing, pull it apart. So I've got a whole pile of things I've done. I very, really revisit once I've done them, I've done them.

I've kind of loaded the module in my head sort of thing. But I suppose having been through the process to get diagnosed as trans, I don't need someone else, I've realised I don't need validation anymore. I just need to know that it doesn't matter. I don't need to identify as or have a diagnosis as if I am, I am. If I'm not, I'm not. If I'm not quite enough, it doesn't matter to me. I've learned to cope with myself.

I think you're kind of the same as me in a way, in that you like to sort of this might not be the right way. I'm saying this so I quite like the idea that I'm holding up a torch and I'm saying, Look, I've got an idea how we can do this, the whole being a human thing. Come with me and I'll show you what I know kind of thing. And I kind of get that feeling that you're like that too. It's not that you know it all and you've got all of the answers, it's just, look, come with me, I know some stuff and it might help.

Yeah. My brain's been processing this in the background for like, 30 or 40 years, and I've got 30 or 40 years worth of analysis that's occurred in my head. So things very rarely pop out without a lot of deep thinking. And I've learned to realise that what I've got to be careful of is I spit out my mouth as a complete idea, forgetting that nobody else has had the backstory. So I've got to start sometimes I've got to wind myself back and go, okay, then there were dinosaurs. Dinosaurs died out through a meteor. Then we got to go and eventually we get to the point where Joe has this idea, okay, we're all up to the same page now. Yeah.

Otherwise Marie, my wife, often says to me, what are you thinking about? And I go nothing. I've just shut down my external senses because something, the processing is going on the back of my head somewhere. I'm not aware of what's going on, it's just conjugating and processing. And if you keep talking to me, I have to keep stopping, pressing pause, bringing myself back into the conscious and impulsive self again and then carrying on the processing. So, yeah, I do a lot of staring into space processing, trying to simulate ideas and put them together and come up with thoughts I see in pictures. And everything I do is around navigating the world as a virtual world in my head. I process everything in that sort of way.

That's cool because I have aphantasia, so I don't see pictures at all.

You don't see pictures? Wow.

And I'm a professional artist, so write that one out.

So think of an elephant. You're going, what?

Well, no, I have a knowing of an elephant, right? I have seen an elephant. I could draw an elephant for you and it wouldn't be very rudimentary, it would look like an elephant, but I do not see an elephant. When I close my eyes, there is no picture there. It's just sort of I've got this.

Tachyoderm in a waterhole in Africa somewhere with its trunk and this little baby elephant next to it, and there's lions. I've got the whole picture, the whole serengeti's out there. It's going on there now.

And yeah. So places I've been to multiple times, particularly rooms, I can draw for you from memory accurately and with all full perspective, with all of the detail in it. Like if there was a window open, usually the window will be open. If there was a broken something, that'll be in it. If there's a door in a kitchen that's not quite hung, right, that'll be there, because my memory remembers it latches.

Onto difference or latches onto the unique or something that's not quite right. So you spot those things as opposed to you're optimising out, the defaults spot, the difference games.

I'm really good at that kind of stuff. I'm really good at things like pattern recognition and do you remember, like, 52 card pickup with the playing cards face down? And the idea is that you'd got to find the pairs. Have you ever played that?

We used to joke about the playground. Someone says, someone comes up the pack of cars, you say, if you play 52 car pickup, they go, what's that? You pick up the car, someone throw them in the air and go, There you go.

You call 52 car pickup that isn't that one. Yeah. And you lay them all down, face down, and they're all kind of randomised. And the idea is that you remember where cards were in order to make.

A yes, I know what you mean. Yeah.

And I just kept winning it all the time. I don't know how I remember where it is, I just do. I can't tell you the process that's going on and then later on in life, I realised that there were things that I could relate and match up together, like using a metaphor or an anecdote or something like that, that would help someone understand something that was quite complicated. And then they, oh, yeah, I totally get it now. Oh, that's much easier. And I could see little light bulbs going off in their eyes and I was like, I seem to be quite good at this whole reducing really big, complex level down into some sort of simple forms. And it became especially helpful working in It, when you're often talking to business managers who aren't techie, but they're all about the people. So being a project manager, I was able to sort of distil translate stuff to the business managers, get a decision and then beef that back up again in order to translate it back to what technical decision has just been made.

When I was in It, I was my It company, so for me, it was kind of the translation was, it's broken? It's going to cost you a lot of money. Do you want to buy it? It was kind of sistering it down into sort of simple terms that, yeah.

You can well, an old honesty piece. So a lot of people, when they've got a customer, they don't really like telling the customer bad news. They don't like saying, no, I'm sorry, you can't have that. I want a blue button. You can't have it. You have to have a red one. What do you mean? After I want a blue button? It's not possible. That doesn't exist yet.

Right. We don't have the technology to make it that colour, so you have to have the other colour. So that's being honest with the customer, even though it's bad news, even though they don't like it, that's a fact. And some people really can't cope with that. They feel that's very confrontational. They find it hard to be assertive, to stick up for themselves, to ride through the customer having to go through that process of grief because they thought they were going to get that and they're not going to get that, and they're really angry about it. And then they come out the other side and they go, okay, well, if that's the way it is, that's the way it is, and everything's all right again. But because we're never taught how to have that kind of conversation, which be useful, wouldn't it? If we're taught that school how to have difficult conversations with people, then we'd be so much more honest.

There'd be less of this woolly pollux that's just said, that doesn't mean anything, or it's just a lie. And everyone I speak to, whether they're neurodivergent or neurotypical, everyone says they want clearer communication. I haven't had a single person who said, no. I like it when it's really woolly and hard to understand. Not one. Not yet.

So you just use two terms, they're neurodivergent and neurotypical. And this is another one of those spectrum conversations where everybody's somewhere on the spectrum. It's a bit introvert, extrovert. Well, there's also the bid in the middle, where you're not and you're trans, you're non binary. Everyone loves a spectrum, don't they? So neurodiversity ASD autism. Whenever we have a terminology, there's always a spectrum. There's really? Really. And not so much over here.

Surely we are, as a species, so diverse and so varied in our brains and everything else, is there really a typical neurotypical?

I don't think there is, which is why the DSM Five is such a joke, because it's based on a small group of people in America, mainly men, mainly men who have made a decision about what they think normal is or neurotypical is. And therefore, if you are not that, then you are divergent from that. Therefore, you are then up for diagnosing, pathologizing, medicating, hospitalisation, the whole works. Institutionalisation. I mean, don't forget, it wasn't that long ago they were putting women in institutions for being hysterical.

Yes, menopause.

Childbirth. Raise your voice. Me. Put her away.

Hysteria. That's a diagnosis of hysteria. That was a real diagnosis.

How dare she? Good job I wasn't born back then. I can tell you.

We need to steal her property offer that a recent deceased father left her. We need to lock her away. Either marry her off or lock her away. And we can tell.

So we've still got a long way to go in terms of how we interpret our brains and what that means. But you're right, Joe. If we put that all to one side and we just make sure that everybody at work, which is where I thrive, I work with people who are in work. If we just allow them to have all the reasonable adjustments, accommodations and adaptations they need to be their very best selves at work, regardless of what's going on in their head, surely that. Is the answer. There is no stigma. Everyone can choose what they need and the organisation can put parameters on things. I mean, if someone's a driver of a logistics firm, you might not be able to allow that driver to take multiple breaks during the day, start late and do the things that they might need to do to preserve their energy.

Perhaps that's not the right job for them. Yes, perhaps there's a different kind of job that will allow them to do that. Maybe still a driving job, if that's what they want to do. Maybe a taxi driver might be a better job where you can start later.

And you can Uber.

Amazon delivery, not so much. You're under the Kosh on that one, I think. But there are other jobs that might be more suitable with different kinds of rules and boundaries. I think we have to make sure we don't frighten organisations by saying, oh, yes, you just got to let all your workforce do whatever they want. No, that's not what we're saying, and some organisations are scared of that. What we're saying is, if you have a neurodiversity policy, which many places do not have, yet, you are able to describe what this organisation will tolerate in terms of reasonable adjustments, accommodations and adaptations, and to reassure the employee that that's not an exhaustive list, a conversation can be had.

The starting point. Yeah, starting point.

What we say we will agree, and that's hunky dory. And you need to talk to your team leader about how that fits into the team dynamic, how it's communicated, et cetera, et cetera. And some things might have a pound sign cost. It might be that someone needs some specific software, just like any other person who might be disabled and need something that's a bit special. But the greatest analogy I've ever heard, Joe, I've got to share this with you, right, is if I'm sat next to someone at work and they are not wearing glasses because they do not need glasses, right, if I take my glasses off, right, I'm now the same as them, right? That's equality, right. However, I can't see. I'm blind as a bat. Minus eight.

You're both eyes, right? Now, my reasonable adjustment is putting these fantastic glasses on, which means I can now see like the person next to me. Do I have an unfair advantage now? No. I was disadvantaged and now I'm at the same place as the person who can see without glasses. And that's what reasonable adjustments are. They are an opportunity to put everyone on step one. So actually, it's making the whole workforce a fairer place to work.

Yeah. And I think you touched on it at the beginning that don't see a workplace adjustment, accommodation as something just benefiting one group or one minority or one characteristic. The lift, the elevator benefits all, not just the people who are wheelchair users or immobile. It's recognising that by putting things in place, it benefits all. You may go skiing, come back with a broken leg. You are not technically disabled, but you are at that moment for six to eight weeks. So we're all one frivolity away from a broken leg or a broken arm or a cracked skull. So I think we got to recognise that these adjustments we're putting in other people benefit, like quiet rooms.

It's not just the people who are yeah, I would consider myself an introvert. I can exhaust myself in about an hour of higher networking or involvement in things. I just want to go and shut the door and I want to work around a quiet room, because the default is you don't talk to me, you come in or maybe wink at each other or nod gently. But apart from that, there's no pressure to talk. If you start talking, I'm just going to ignore you, because that's the rules of the quiet room, which is what annoys me on trains, when there's suddenly there's a whole family of people getting all kind of chatty. I said, Just want to I want my own space to do nothing here, so get out of my head. So quiet rooms, prayer rooms, faith rooms, all of those things benefit everybody, not just somebody who you think it's there for.

Absolutely. Same as a disabled loo. So everyone thinks a disabled loo is for a wheelchair user and nobody else. And I'm like, okay, so quite often I have to use the disabled loo, mainly because there are hand dryers in so many loos and there is no soft furnishings in public lose. And so the sound of the hand dryer bounces around the room and it's that percussion shock I experience on my ears. Literally feels like someone is boxing my ears. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And I'm escaping and trying not to cry, it's so horrible.

And so I end up having to go into the disabled loo so that I don't have to experience that, because I just can't cope. I just freeze and turn into a five year old with my fingers in my ears, like, no, stop it. You know, and I'm 50, it's not good. And there are lots and lots of hidden disabilities, lots of reasons why people might need to use a private loo. All sorts of conditions, like crohn's, IBS, all sorts of things. That where you might need to be in a very private space, because we don't tend to have sinks inside the cubicles. You might need to get to a sink for some reason. If you've got a colostomy bag yes.

Where you need to have running water to deal with that, to change anything. Do you really want to be doing that out in a sink in a public loo? Everyone's going to go, it's going to be horrible.

If you're a gentleman, there's very rarely any sanitary disposal or bins in the gent toilets, so it's embarrassing. And, yeah, at least in the female toilets. You probably get more empathetic people and disposal facilities in the female toilets.

Well, can you believe most of the time there is no bin in female toilets? No bin. So you might have the sanitary bin?

Sanitary bins, yeah, in the cubicle, but.

Anything else but that in it. So if you have other things that you might need to dispose of, like because you might be changing your stoma or something else, you can't put it in that bin. And there are no other bins because they have got no towels, they've got hand dryers. So in their head, there's no reason for you to need a bin or you've got a bit of rubbish, or you've just taken a plaster off. What do I do with this? Where do I put it? There's nowhere to put it. So a lot of things that are supposed to be perfectly okay for everybody are not fit for purpose. For everybody. Anyway, at the minimum, how many times have you opened a stall door and you've had to smoosh up next to the toilet in order to shut the door? Why is that about?

You have to sort of do the Okie cokey, don't you?

It's like self over the loo. Great.

Get your boobs out of the way. Hang on a minute.

And someone said to me, well, you can't have opening outwards because then you'd smack someone in the face. And I'm like, when was the last time someone stood directly outside the door waiting for it to open? And even if they did, you could put a sign on it saying, this door opens outwards, could you?

Yeah. The issue is that toilet cubicles are designed for men. They're not designed for women, because there's no room for the sanitary disposal. You end up trying to sit on the loo and one bum cheek is on the sanitary disposal. You end up standing on the pedal and it flips open where you get on the loo. They try and get in and out with your handbag, your coat. You try and lift your skirt and you dress up. It's like there's absolutely no room in there.

And you actually need to be about six inches wider. And I think they'd been designed for skinny men 50 years ago.

Yeah, well, and there's obviously a bug standard size, because if I found out there wasn't a bug standard size and they could have made it bigger, that's worse.

Well, I'm pretty sure they're all saying, because I've studied this. So the sanitary disposal units are pretty much a standard size and they literally squeeze between the porcelain and the wall, aren't they? Or the cubicle size. They must have decided that is the standard unit of sanitary disposal size, because.

It tends to fit the cubicle itself, the length of it, or whatever you call it, and not having a hook on the back of the door. I know so many women don't just have a handbag. Some women don't have handbags shopping. We will have a coat they want to take off or shopping or a hat or whatever it is. They want to be able to hang up because they're doing something else. Right now, I know when I go.

To the cinema, the floor when I go to the cinema, I know that some of the cubicles don't have hooks and I know the ones that do, so I always go to the ones that do. So, again, you can hang your coat, put your egg on the back of the door or do something, because you don't want to be trying to one.

Down the end where you can open it outwards, because I feel less yes.

That'S the accessible one generally, isn't it? Because it's the one that's wheelchair accessible. Tends to open out, doesn't it?

Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? But it's relatively simple to solve these problems. I've even been to some places where the cubicles were like brick, so fully enclosed, like a little room, if you like, and the door opened inward, there was no gap, no window, so if you fainted and collapsed behind the door, you're staying there, love. There's no getting out and there's no getting to you. You'll die if it was major. I'm like, that's so dangerous. Mind blown, completely blown. And that was a council property. I was like, really?

Yeah. I think it's just old design that no one's stood back. You've become kind of blinkered to the world around you. You walk in there, you see it every day, you don't necessarily question it unless you're new to the space, and then you go, It's obvious. And you say to everybody, what about that? They go, oh, yeah, I never thought of that. It's obvious, isn't it? You go, yeah.

And they do nothing about it. Yeah.

How to it's like, well, we've got no budget for that. That means knocking the block down. This refurbishment, that's 20 k's worth, we haven't got that budget, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, I suppose. Hey ho, hey ho.

So going back to we talked about the spectrum earlier. We talked about some of your experience of workplace adjustment. Neurodiversity, or neurodivergence or neurotypical has become a buzword probably in the last 18 to 24 months. Before that, it wasn't largely spoken about, really, in the workplace. The last couple of years, there's been a boom, if you like, of practitioners, consultants, talking about university, bringing the profile up, talking about it, some high profile examples talking about it. Workplace are now becoming neurodiverse, jury version, friendly, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sure you're going to say, no, our workplaces doing enough right now. What is one little thing they could be doing that they're not?

So I'm glad to report that some are doing a really great job. Can I name Cheque One? I'd like to name Cheque one. So PebblePad are doing a fantastic job. One of my clients here in Telford. They were already doing a great job when they got me in and I was able to confirm what a great job they're doing. And we made a couple of very small tweaks, and there are a poster child for what you can do. You can do it, right? It's like this. Look, they're already doing it.

So even that quiet space would be a fantastic first step, right? So if you're bringing everyone back to work either every day of the week or one day a week, they're still going to need that space. So whether it's a meeting room that's hardly used or even a broom cupboard with a chair in it, let's face it, I wouldn't mind if it was a broom cupboard with a chair in it. As long as I don't feel too claustrophobic and I won't get locked in, I'm good. I'll use a broom cupboard and you.

Can open the door without having to sort of shimmy around it.

Yeah, that'd be nice. But even a stairwell, as long as that's not too noisy, somewhere where I can go, where people are just going to leave me alone for a little bit, would be fantastic. But really, not making assumptions is the big thing because how many people have I talked to where I'll be starting the conversation? We'll be talking about neurodiversity. Oh, I know all about neurodiversity. I've got a nephew who's six and he's autistic and I know all about it. And I'm like, okay, so you know your nephew who's six who's autistic. That's fantastic that you've got to know him super well and you can support him and help him, but he's just a guy with autism or who is autistic, and he's probably got a personality, an upbringing, a culture, lots of different layers of personality can really change the way you present. I know lots of people who are neurodivergent, who are assholes, as well as lots of very lovely people.

Just because you're neurodivergent doesn't mean you've got a halo. Really doesn't. And the whole assuming that because you've heard about something somewhere, you know it all that's dangerous. That's where you get into a sticky wicket. So my biggest advice, I guess, apart from the quiet room area, if you can do one, is don't make assumptions, ask, and don't embarrass the person when you ask. Take them to one side and ask, depending on where they are today, if you've ever heard of spoon theory, that's a really great way of people explaining how much energy they've got today to just function. And they might be able to express that with you, who are a team leader, and say, do you know what? I've got about three spoons today, so what do you want me to work on? Because that's all I'm doing. And then they might what do you.

Want me to do with it? I can hit you on the forehead with it or you can leave me.

Alone, this project, but don't talk to me. An extra spoon to have to stop and talk to you because extra energy shift. It doesn't mean that person can't work, it just means they might need to change they work today, change the way that they work today. And that whole, I think I know what you need is not a good thing. It becomes very parental. And in fact, there's someone else who talks about this, I think it was Andrew Bryant, who talks about the fact that when you're at work and you're a team leader or a supervisor or a manager or whatever, you are not their parent. And a lot of managers manage like a parent. We don't want another parent.

Some people are done with parents. We actually just want a leader, show us the way and support us and have our backs and all that kind of stuff. So a lot of the work I've been doing more recently is helping leaders by giving them the language they might need when they're giving and receiving feedback, giving them the language they might need when they're giving instructions to people. Like, if I was going to give you a set of instructions, instead of just going, I want you to do this, this and this is that. All right, Joe? I would go, I want you to do this, this and this. Joe, can you repeat back to me what I've said so I can cheque that I've told you everything. And that means we've made sure we've got group understanding. Yeah.

And if you can't, you might say, actually, could you pop that in an email for me? And I'll tell you if there's anything I don't know. Brilliant. Now we're communicating honestly.

Now we're finding my wife says that all the time. She said, you're going past the shop. Can you get me this, this and this and this? And I go, no. She doesn't totally mean no. I said, if you text me the list, I'll get it, but don't expect me to remember five things. But I remember the bread, that's all. I'll come way back with bread. She said, what about the other things? I only remembered bread.

It's like a generation game cuddly toy.

But the other thing she does, she adds one more item onto the list after a whole load of other text messages, I said, no, that's no good. You have to cut and paste the entire list to add one item on. Otherwise I can't cope with going back up the list and trying to work out what I've got, what I haven't got. I want one list, one list, and then I can process it. But yeah, so I get that.

And how great that you've had that communication between you. She knows that about you.

Texas, 36 years.

Yeah, I know. Well, so with my hubby so we've been together for 1617 years and he can't have more than one task at a time. And also, he has pathological demand avoidance and so do I. So we don't respond very well if people tell us what to do, and I'll give you a scenario. So, when I was a kid, my mum was a clean freak and I knew that if I spontaneously went and got the Hoover and vacuumed the lounge, mum would be really pleased and happy with me, because I'd done it and I hadn't been asked. As I walked towards the Hoover, my mum said, can you go and vacuum the lounge? And I went, well, now I can't, because you've told me to do it. Which doesn't make any sense when you say it out loud, really, but that's how my brain works. And people who've got pathological demand avoidance acutely can even go so far as ending up homeless, because they can't respond to phone calls, they end up with CCJs, they can't pay bills, they can't work, there's all sorts of things they can't do because their brain goes, that was a demand, not doing demands.

And it can be really disabling in that way with Dave and I. We're not that bad, but I still have to give him a choice. So I'll say the washing up needs doing and the Hoovering needs doing, which would you like to do? So it's a given, it's going to happen. But he does get a choice which one he wants to do and I'll do the other one. And that has really worked for us, as long as we both do the chores at the same time.

Yes, that's fair. Yeah, I get that. I can get that. Yeah. So we talked about neurodivergency or neurodivergent, we talked about this spectrum and there's loads of different phrases and terminology within that. So things like ASD autistic spectrum disorder, Asperger's, which I understand is kind of an older term, not used so much these days. That high functioning, whatever that may mean to people.

Yeah, we don't use that one.

Dyspraxia dyslexia dyscalculia. The demand avoidance, all this kind of stuff. So there's all these terms all under this. This is just like trans, honestly, you've got this umbrella, umbrella term of all these things underneath it. So neurodivergency is kind of an umbrella term for all of these different characteristics that people may or may not have in small or large quantities. Barely, I guess people have all of them. They are either grouped my sister in.

Law, some area my sister in law is the most neurotypical person I've ever met in my life. I've even tested her unofficially. Yeah, she is the polar opposite to me.

Logical and empathetic.

She's not those things.

Yeah, you're logical and empathetic and she isn't. I don't think that's neurotypical, then, is it?

Well, so neurotypical people this is really going to be problems here. So neurotypical people generally think that they're really empathetic, but they're not. They're sympathetic most of the time, and what they seek is sympathy from others, and they call it empathy. And that's why a lot of neurodivergent people get labelled as, oh, you haven't got any empathy. Well, actually, that's not true. I've got so much empathy, I can't control it sometimes, which is why I wail when I see the donkey advert about the poor donkey with the hooves that are all wrong and the cats and the dogs and the orange PCA. I have so much empathy, I can't stop. Not just for animals, for humans as well.

Usually if I see someone else cry, I will tap into that emotion and I will feel it just as strongly as they do, even though they're acting or someone I don't know. However, sympathy a lot more challenging. So if you came to me, Joe, and said, oh, I want to share a problem with you, I need your empathy. What you're generally saying, if you're a neurotypical person, is, you want me to go, oh, they're there. Yes.

Feel sorry for you. Feel sorry for me, rub it better for me.

Oh, yeah, exactly. Right. Which is the same as small talk. It's pointless. Right. So I can't stand it. And I tell people who know me, don't come to me for sympathy. I don't do sympathy.

I am an empath. So not only can I stand in your shoes and imagine what it's like, not only can I feel the same emotions as you, I now want to take away your pain and solve your problem. Because there's three different types of empathy and I feel all of them, usually simultaneously. But what people want is they want to see the progression of me going, oh, they're there. Oh, I feel as bad as you do. Oh, do you want to fix it? Only I don't. I don't want to feel all the pain. I just go straight to I move very quickly through them and I go straight to, let's fix it.

Let's take away your pain. So, again, I tell people, don't come to me for sympathy, come to me if you want me to fix your problems.

The analogy I use is, remember Baba off the Green Mile when he sucks all of the bad stuff out of people? That's kind of how I do it. As you say, I'm not really interested in we didn't talk about it for half an hour. I get it right now, as you say, go to the fix, go to the solution, and if you're not interested in, let me help you, then go away.

Absolutely. Come back when you are. Yeah.

Don't ask me for help and then not listen.

Yeah, that is very frustrating, for sure. And quite often I'll say when it's not clear that they want help, or it's not clear how I can help, because they obviously don't want a fix or it's not possible for me to fix it's out of my hands. I'll have to actually be really upfront and I'll go, what can I do for you? How can I help you? And sometimes they'll go, I just want you to listen. And a little bit of me inside dies.

I've got to tell you this. I've got to tell you this. Marie knows that I don't have active listening, so you have to give me a wake up word in order to get me to listen. So Marie's learnt this. Now she just stops talking. I missed the first two sentences or something. She now has to say, Are you listening? I don't hear that either. Joe, are you listening? I go, yeah, get on with it then.

You've now occupied my brain for almost 30 seconds and you haven't told me anything. I need to know. You've got my attention now. Just get on with it. Tell me. I'm bored again. I'm bored. I'm off.

Yeah, we have to put pause on the TV because if I haven't got Dave's full attention, he tunes me out.

Well, what I do is I'm so engrossed in the TV marine to talk to me, I have to pause it because I have to say that I can't concentrate on you because I'm engrossed with it. So I have to stop and then do one and then come back. And then if you finish now, can I carry on? It's like click.

And I do reassure Dave and I say, Dave, the reason why we use the pause button is because you're more important than the telly. So I will pause the telly. I can watch. More interested in what you've got to say than what the telly's got to say that may or may not be true.

It depends if it's strictly on the telly or not, or something like.

Love me a bit of David Tennant.

Yes. Yes. This little super special has been really good. I really enjoyed Sam. It's almost an hour. I can't believe this. We've been well and minutes in the green room as well. We've been yaking on and nattering and thank you so much.

How can our listeners get in contact with you if they want to find out more about creating a more neurodivergent, welcoming environment? At work, at home, at play, in society?

Yeah, well, there's a couple of places. So I'm on LinkedIn. So if you go into LinkedIn and you just put LinkedIn.com in Sam Warner slash, there I am, nice and easy to find. I'm the one wearing the cat eyeglasses and the hair up. I look like something from a different age, but that's okay. That's just my look. And I've also got a website with all those of stuff on it, so that's get your Hyphen message across. I know.

Bit of a gobble. Turns out gaima G-Y-M-A is a drink. And it's loads of other stuff. It's loads of products, so couldn't shorten it, but Get-Your-Message-Across.co.uk with Hyphens in between. And that's my website.

Fantastic. Maybe you should change it to beyond the Corporate Robot or something. B-T-C-R. Beyond the corporate robot, maybe. Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much. And also thank you to the listener who you've tuned in.

You've got to this far, you got to the end of the podcast. Yay. Go you. Thank you. Please do subscribe. If you're not already subscribed, subscribe. Click the little button, ring the bell, you get notified. All the usual things that people tell you to do, because then you'll get notified of future episodes of the Inclusion Bytes Podcast as bit.

Yes. So this is episode 91. It's going to be episode 100 soon, and I can't wait to see who that's going to be. They're going to be exciting. Sorry, Sam, you came out too early. But yeah, maybe I'll have a hundredth birthday celebration and get some other guests back and do a special one. So I've got a number of other exciting guests lined up over the next few weeks and months. Also, if you'd like to be a guest, drop me a line.

And also if you've got any suggestions or feedback, I'd love to hear them. So my email address is jo.lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk. And my name is Joanne Lockwood. It's been absolute pleasure to host this podcast for you today. Catch you next time. Bye.