DEBBIE WILLIAMS's Podcast
DEBBIE WILLIAMS's Podcast
Empowered with Dyslexia
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When a person is diagnosed with Dylslexia, the focus at the time is on what that person is unable to do, as opposed to the strengths of what that person can do. Today’s guest is Trevor Henderson who focuses on the empowerment of those with dyslexia and has formed a weekly chat group entitled The Rise of the Empowered Dyslexic.
Links: www.madebydyslexia.org
https://www.trevorhenderson.co.uk
https://www.facebook.com/groups/theriseoftheempowereddyslexic
debbiewilliamspodcast.com
When a person is done with nose of dyslexia, the focus at the time is on what that person is unable to do, as opposed to the strength of what that person can do. Today's guest is a public speaker, author and entrepreneur. He focuses on the empowerment of those with dyslexia and has formed a weekly chat group entitled The Rise of the Empowered Dyslexic. Sharing his story, please welcome Trevor Henderson. Hello, Trevor, and welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for the invite, Debbie.
SPEAKER_00Trevor, you had a group called The Rise of the Empowered Dyslexic. Can you tell us when did you discover that you had dyslexia and why did you start the group?
SPEAKER_01Interesting question, Debbie. Thank you. It was not too long ago. It was the end of my 59th year, and I'd been asked to deliver a speech, a dyslexic awareness audience, and the majority of the audience were young children. I gave a speech on how to overcome your fear of public speaking and how you can apply that technique to overcome virtually any fear. And the children's faces lit up and their mouths were wide open, and parents came up to me afterwards, children came up to me afterwards and said how wonderful it was. However, there was one lady she approached me with a few different words. She came up and said, Great speech, when did you know you had dyslexia? And I said, I haven't. And she said, Yes, you have. And I said, No, I haven't. And you can imagine way this conversation went between me and this lady, Elizabeth. And then she said, Well, do me a favour, don't stay in denial. Please go away. Check out this website and you can do a free online test. So I did the test and it told me that yes, I've got medium to moderate dyslexia. And I did what we all would do in the circumstances when told that we are different. I completely denied it and said no, that's not me, the test is wrong. A few days later I thought let me have another look. So I tried a different test online, and it came back with similar results. And still I denied it. So it was a week's now passed, and on the third test, again a totally different company, totally different provider. It came again with the same results. So then I started questioning, thinking, do you know, maybe there could be something in this? And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it started to answer some of the questions that I'd experienced through my childhood, through my life. And the first thing that sprung to mind was a conversation I had with my head teacher 13 years old, and in exasperation he said, Okay Henderson, what do you want to do when you get older? And I'd already had this discussion with my father and decided that I wanted to join the Navy and see the world. Because that was the advert that was on TV at the time. Because I am colourblind, I could only join the Navy, so I was told, as an NCO, a non-commissioned officer. So the thought was I want to become a doctor so I can join the Navy and see the world. So I told my teacher this and he leapt back in his chair and he smiled with his grey wrinkled suit and his cheap skinny tie and looked at me and said Don't be stupid, Henderson. You've got to be clever to be a doctor, and you boy, you're not clever. You need to aim lower, something like a milkman. So I did what we would all do in those circumstances. Pretty much gave up school. Whenever I could I would bunk off and not go to school, avoid classes and do anything, even sit outside the headmaster's office waiting to get a cane than be in class. And it was experiences like that that made me realise that yeah I had struggled at school, and then when I'd moved to a different school, the school who got me had taught me skills that, although I didn't want to continue with education, had helped me in life. And I went on ultimately to be working for the likes of big IT companies, IBM, World Bank of Scotland, Direct Line Insurance as a freelance IT consultant, earning a lot of money, and I did very, very well for myself, and that ultimately led me to wanting to work in IT to help other people. So I ended up in a career working as an assistive technology trainer, teaching people how to use technology to better their lives.
SPEAKER_00That's really interesting. So you overcame the challenge of being told you couldn't do something, and you mentioned that you changed schools and that new school helped you to overcome that challenge, and then you had a quite a fulfilling career afterwards.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, yes. Yes, I did. I had a very successful career. Successful career, not enjoyable because it wasn't a subject that I would have chosen to do, it was a subject that I just a path I followed because it paid well, because it had money. I think that's a challenge that we all fall into. We don't follow our passions in life, we follow what pays the bills, and I followed that path down a route of being a freelance IT consultant who would work every single opportunity. Even when the family went on holiday, I would stay at home so that I could go to work and stay in a contract earning money, and that ultimately led me to where I am with teaching people assistive technology because I could use my IT skills to help people understand how technology can help them.
SPEAKER_00Trevor, what is dyslexia and what are the main challenges for people with dyslexia?
SPEAKER_01So, as we have in the word dyslexia, lexical lexia to basically to read and write, to summarize it as quick as we can. It's the dis, the inability. We use this term dis to show that people are inadequate, are unable to do something. We use disability, disabled. We we love this word dis and we use it to describe someone who's not as good as us or not able to do what we can do. What the society's vision of normality is, we put the word dis in the front to say you're not as good at reading and writing as me. And it's a shame because the person with these skills, the dyslexic, the disabled, the person with the dislabel is quite often better at other things, in fact, most of the time, he's better at something else than the average person can do. But the unfortunate thing is in the society that we've created, where we are so dependent on the ability to read and write, and that is a skill they can't do, they've now been given a label of being unable to do something, as opposed to being given a label that they're exceptionally good at something different.
SPEAKER_00So, Trevor, can you give an example of the type of skills that people with dyslexia have that maybe other people do not have?
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes, I can. I can speak from my own experience and experience of other people that I've met through my journey. When I was young, when I was in my very, very early 20s, I joined an engineering company, a civil engineering company called Higson Hill. But at the time I had a particular skill and I didn't realise I had it, and other people noticed it and didn't even tell me that I had the skill at the time, they just took it for granted that I could do it. So I would do technical drawings. This is long before computers. We didn't have computers doing drawings for us like we have now. We would just have a large sheet of paper, set of pencils and pens, and a drawing board, and I would draw structures, I would draw parts of buildings, and I could do things like I could draw the concrete beams, and whilst I was drawing them and noting whereabouts they would go in the structure, I could gradually assemble these pieces in my head into a three-dimensional image that I could then draw as a 3D picture on paper. I just took it for granted that everyone at the time could do this and that they were giving me the jobs to do it because they didn't want to do it. As it turned out, no, they couldn't do it. They were skilled draftsmen, but they could draw the two-dimensional image, but they couldn't form the two-dimensional image as they were doing it into a three-dimensional image and put that to paper. So that was an early skill that I realised I had. Another skill I realised I I have that I have always taken for granted is when I work on my cars and motorbikes, I can visualise what needs to be done, I can picture everything in my head. I can just I can hear a sound and know what that sound means, why it's being made. I can see the internals of the engine moving around and what particular pieces making a strange noise. And as I say, I just assumed everyone could do this, but you've discovered that not everyone can do this. Other skills that people with dyslexia have are things like artistic skills. They could be exceptionally good at artistic skills, photography, they could be incredibly good at empathy. Now, empathic skills are in huge demand at the moment. Companies are crying out for people with empathy, and it turns out that a lot of people with dyslexia or neurodiversity have empathy. Now, neurodiversity, what what is that? Neurodiversity is a label that is given to a group of people who their brain works slightly different. So that is people with dyslexia, with autism, with ADHD, with ADD, and many many more, and they're all considered neurodiverse. Whereas people who don't have those abilities, those skills, as I would call them, are called neurotypical. But because the majority is considered to be neurotypical, that is considered to be the norm.
SPEAKER_00Trevor, in your opinion, what could be done to support the education system and employers?
SPEAKER_01Well, great question, Debbie. We are on the brink of a new era. We really are. About to embark on a new technical era. Now we may look around ourselves and see our computers, see our smartphones, our all audio devices, our our Alexas and Googles around that we can speak to and think we're in the technical era. No, we're not. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We are just entering a new era. Let's not forget that the Industrial Revolution has taken about 150 to 200 years to pass. And in the technical era, we're probably only about 30 years into it, maybe 20 years, and the technical era has given us the skills at the moment where we can speak to a computer and it will type for us. We can tell a computer to read to us. So our dyslexic person can now be on an equal footing to a neurotypical. A person with neurodiversity can speak to a computer and get a computer to read to it and be on a level playing field. That means that the neurodiverse person has their other skills that they're particularly good at that they can hone and still do what the neurotypical can do. And it's far greater than that. There's mind mapping software, there's a huge range of software out there that can do things for us that we don't necessarily want to do. And at the moment, the education system is really grabbing this and doing well with it. Within the UK, the education system's getting pretty good, even from as young as the primary school age, they're teaching them these types of skills, the skills they tend to teach students in a lot of schools, so that they, if a neurodiverse can learn it, a neurotypical can learn it as well. However, if a neurotypical can learn it, it doesn't mean a neurodiverse can learn it. So they're starting to embrace this and embrace this assistive technology that can help them do it. Unfortunately, most a vast, vast majority of businesses are yet to catch on to this. They're lagging way, way behind. There's a few a few large exceptions. There are a few big companies that are going with it and using assistive technology, but they're very much the leaders at the forefront of this technological era. Most companies, huge amount of companies, have no idea it's happening, let alone how to use it and how to get their staff to use it. Now, here's the thing: suppose a company has employees that have neurodiverse skills, but the company doesn't appreciate that they have it, they don't even understand what it means or what they can do, but they have these unique skills. But because they haven't embraced the technology, they've got them struggling to do the things they're not good at. Imagine if they could be freed up to no longer be chained to that keyboard and free to allow their minds to do the creative work that they should be able to do, that they can do. Not many people realise that the British Secret Service GCHQ actively recruit neurodiverse people because they think different and they can see the value in their thoughts and their skills. Now, how would a company benefit from that? How could they benefit from that and become better than their competitors because they've got someone who has unique skills in 3D visualization, in empathy, in artistic thought, in creative thought, in creating ideas that people have never even dreamt of. And if you doubt that there are those people out there, and if anyone's unsure of who these people could be, Richard Branson is probably the most famous in the UK, and there are hundreds and upon thousands of successful neurodiverse people. Here's an interesting fact around about 10% of people are estimated by the British Dyslexic Association to have dyslexia. However, it's also estimated that in excess of 20% of entrepreneurs have dyslexia. So 20% of the Richard Branson types out there. Imagine you're pitching to an entrepreneur. The likelihood is you could be pitching to another Richard Branson. If you haven't got someone that can empathize with his thoughts, his brain patterns, the way he works, then you're at a loss. You are now losing out. As we start entering a new technical era, we're going to see huge, huge changes in the world, and we're going to see the education starting to adopt this more and more. But we have to be very, very careful. We have to be careful that where we've in the past the person that cannot read and write as a beginner given a dislabel, the person that cannot do something has been given a dislabel. We have to be careful that the person who cannot grasp the technical age is not called dystechnical and cast aside. We have an opportunity to create a new world, a new era, a new technical era. And we have to be careful that we don't model that new era on that dystopia that we've created, but instead create a new utopia where everyone is equal.
SPEAKER_00Trevor Henderson, thank you very much for your time.
SPEAKER_01Thank you very much, Debbie.
SPEAKER_00We all have strengths and weaknesses, so let us empower each other by allowing our strengths to shine through. If dyslexia has affected you or someone you know, then please follow the links in the show notes.