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.