David Reynor, founder of Professionally Neurospicy, a comunity

David is the founder of Professionally Neurospicy, a peer support community for neurodivergent professionals navigating work life unmasked. With over a decade of experience in SaaS and enterprise software, he brings a unique lens to the intersection of neurodiversity, workplace culture, and professional identity. David is a passionate advocate for creating spaces where neurodivergent people can connect, be seen, and thrive — not in spite of how their brains work, but because of it. When he's not building community, he's probably thinking about baseball, emerging tech, or his next deep dive into something that caught his attention at 11pm.

You can join https://www.professionallyneurospicy.com, and find connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidraynorit/

Transcript

Speaker 2 0:00

Hi, I am, is she Abel with the Horse Human Connection Matrix and. With the new podcast, the Is She Able Show? So I'm here today with David Rainer, who has been a friend for many years. He and his wife. I heard about a new website he's developed and I wanted to get all the information about it and share that. So tell me a little bit about your motivation for this change and what's going on, David?

Speaker 0:28

Sure. I, it started percolating in the back of my mind here, several, over the last couple of years. But really it goes back to when I was diagnosed A DHD in my early thirties. So a little bit late diagnosis, but after. 10, 15 years of struggling and underperforming and being told, Hey, I, you have a lot of potential by my managers and stuff like that, and just never meeting that potential and not being able to figure out why. I couldn't figure out why. My managers could figure out why. The diagnosis kind of made it all, made make sense, but there wasn't anything to help me. That. Diagnosis makes sense of my past, but it doesn't really help me make sense of my future. There's still a lot of work I needed to do to figure out what this meant for me personally, but also professionally. Like how has it caused my failure to launch provisionally and how can I fix that in the future? And so I've been thinking about that for a long time. Had some experiences, did a lot of soul searching, a lot of learning, and there wasn't any resources that helped with that. And

Speaker 2 1:44

should be really clear, the diagnosis is just a DHD, but, and that is a part of Neurodivergence. Yeah. Just like autism is. And I believe being diagnosed as genius is also on that neurodivergent scale according to some so I've heard a lot, with my late diagnosis of autism about masking. And understanding that from my perspective, I have not heard a whole lot about it. As far as a DHD, is that something that you experience also

Speaker 2:13

masking a whole hundred percent?

Speaker 2 2:15

Tell me more about that. Yeah.

Speaker 2:17

A DHD as you probably know, can be very impulsive. It can overshare on a regular basis. It can be very passionate about one, about something, one minute, and then not care about it. The next, and it's just those hyper fixations the time blindness, the, all those things there. I have to tamper myself down a bit. The struggle to not interrupt people because I have understood their sentence and think, or think I have at the very least. And I'm done waiting for'em to finish their sentence'cause I'm ready for the next one. I'm ready to move on. And that kind of I mean there's social learning there of just. It's better not interrupt people, let them finish their sentence, but the time it takes for waiting for their sentence to be done so we can move the conversation forward is in interminable,

Speaker 2 3:13

I know exactly what you mean. And then sometimes if they're just pausing for a breath, you're thinking they're done and you're ready to go and, it, it can create a lot of interesting dynamics. There's a there's something I wanted to tell you about too, because you'd mentioned the platform what's it called again? The platform you're gonna use for the group?

Speaker 3:33

Oh, WordPress.

Speaker 2 3:34

No, the the meeting one.

Speaker 3:37

Oh, discord.

Speaker 2 3:38

Discord. Thank you. Yeah. I went to an autism support group on Discord and there's a guy. I've actually interviewed him. His name is Sean.'Cause he does. Support groups for different neurodivergent people. And one of them is really large and one of them is really small. I was in the really small one'cause the other one was full. And there were times where we're dealing with just this thing you're talking about, not interrupting. So either there's three or four people talking at once or nobody's talking and everybody's waiting because they're not sure if it's anybody's turn yet.

Speaker 4:09

Yeah. 100%. And yeah, so there's a lot of just self-monitoring that happens with the, for me and or the, for me, I process my thoughts better when I'm moving. So when me and my wife would get into serious conversations would usually start, we'd be sitting together and as the. The conversation progressed. I would get up and just start walking around doing things like cleaning a shelf or something and I had to be moving to process things. It wasn't conscious, it's just something I did. And of course, to her, with the usual social coding, when somebody gets up and walks away from a conversation, it means they don't care as much about what's right, what's happening. And so she thought, oh, it's not important to him. He not involved, he doesn't care. And that's, not a great.

Speaker 2 5:10

It's not a great dynamic for moving forward.

Speaker 5:12

Not a great dynamic. The

Speaker 2 5:13

conversation, even though she has a diagnosis too, right?

Speaker 5:17

Yes. She doesn't have the hyperactivity part. She is more, daydreamy staring out the window inattentive type of a DD,

Speaker 2 5:28

which really surprised me because she is one of the most organized pers people that I know. But it comes as a result of her compensating and even oh, excelling at compensating to become, something that she isn't naturally, I think.

Speaker 5:46

Yeah. And some people do that. I'm not an organized person. Never have been. And I think naturally, some people. Become super organized and resolve their life around stress to try to overcome that. Deficiency and I, for whatever reason, was just like I am just not gonna be an organized person then, and so I haven't. I haven't had to resolve, revolve my life around stress the way that some people have to get that organization done. So me and Sarah have a saying, my wife, that between the two of us, we make one functional adult.

Speaker 2 6:21

And you

Speaker 6:22

know, because I'm spur of the moment and I live in the moment and I have fun and I'm impulsive and she is not, she has had to train herself not to be.

Speaker 2 6:31

Yeah, it's interesting how we fit together and how we compensate for blind spots and deficiencies and we're all just such individuals and so different. So I'm imagining that some of those things were what was holding you back, right? Without, before you understood and knew about the diagnosis.

Speaker 6:49

Yeah. And all those behaviors popped up at work too. I don't do well sitting down for long periods of time. And when you're at an office, that's basically what productivity looks like, is sitting still at your desk, working all the time. And I just can't function that way for long periods.

Speaker 2 7:13

So the masking the masking that you would have to do in these situations, I imagine caused pressure and stress and was hard on your nervous system?

Speaker 7:24

Probably in ways I don't fully understand yet. Eventually I did get to a place after my diagnosis and after some, a lot of self-reflection and learning. I was very technical. I was in technical support. I did going up that track where the assumption is you get more and more technical as your career advances. And what I realized with after in probably my late thirties, early forties, a few years ago, a little technically in my early forties is that I'm. I like people. Also, I am very relationship focused. There's a reason I don't blur my background. I like the conversations that happened oh, it's distracting. Yeah, that's fine. These are the paraphernalia that start conversations and those conversations build connections. And that was a subconscious thing. I didn't realize I was doing it because I was relationship focused, but as. I've come to learn about myself. I was doing it because I like people. And so I had to, when people would try to push me into a more technical role, I had to say no. Once I learned that about myself, I,'cause I knew I wouldn't be successful, I did not want to be more technical. I wanted to take what I had learned technically and my passion for people and my experience with people. Move in that direction, blend the two. And that's what led me to a community, a job building communities.

Speaker 2 8:58

That's amazing. And I love how all of this comes out of learning about ourselves. Yeah. And then being able to share that. So tell me about the platform you're developing and the things you're gonna offer.

Speaker 9:12

What I am doing is building a resource that I didn't have, that I wish I had, that there's a lot of resources for. What does neurodivergence look like and how does it impact our personal lives? Our interpersonal relationships, that kind of thing. There's not really many resources out there for the narrative urgent professional. What does it mean for your career choices? How do you have that conversation with your boss about what you need in your environment to thrive? How do you choose jobs that will work with you? Instead of trying to. Make yourself fit into the job For a long time, I saw myself as, the square peg in the round hole. I saw myself as a square peg. That wouldn't fit into a job. And then I realized I am the round hole and the job is to square peg and I need to find a job that fits with me because I am not, I can't change these things about myself.

Speaker 2 10:17

I think that's one of the hardest things that people don't understand is we can come and sometimes it takes a really long time to fully understand our blind spots, but they're blind spots. It's not like linear learning when you're just like learning and personal growth and you can have an aha moment and change of behavior. These blind spots are like. Walking in a completely dark room and there's balloons and you can't tell where they are. You can barely tell when you kick them or run into them because they just move. And it's that kind of invisibility and elusiveness of trying to compensate sometimes and fix that. Exactly your analogy of the square peg, or finding a round peg that actually fits rather than trying to fix it because

Speaker 11:06

Yeah,

Speaker 2 11:07

it's really not fixable.

Speaker 11:09

Yeah. And it, it's the unstoppable force and movable object. I, our diagnosis will not change what our, with a DHD, at least, what our brains are interested in and will be good at. It doesn't change. Like we can't just, we can't choose. It changes, but we can't choose what it enjoys, what it Gets feedback from. And so I have to find a job that feeds that. I cannot force myself to fit into a job. I need a job that fits me. So I am the round hole. And that's been very empowering because it gave me the confidence when people pushing me in one direction to say. And know for myself, I will not be successful at that because I know enough about myself to, to project and like I won't be good at that, and I couldn't do that anymore. So how will, what people told me, even though it won't work,

Speaker 2 12:03

right, how will, just the knowledge of this is enough and just being able to have a place to talk about it is enough. But it sounds like maybe you're going a little bit further than that with what you're offering on the platform. How is it designed? What can people expect?

Speaker 12:15

Yeah. Like I said, there wasn't any of this kind of learning available. For me, when I was learning it, it took years. And if I can help, I'm building a resource for people who are going through the same thing I went through, and I haven't learned at all. I'm still going through it. So we're all in this together, but I'm creating a place where people can learn, they can talk to people who have gone through it, who are going through it who are curious, who aren't going through it yet, normal people, neurotypical people who are welcome. But these are, this is, it's a website for professionally neurodivergent. It's called Professionally Neuro Spicy. And it's a community at its heart what I want to build, what I'm building as a community for people who need help navigating their neurodivergence, whatever it is, and their career. How are how are they gonna be successful?

Speaker 2 13:10

So there might even eventually be help for people narrowing down how to choose a career, especially with their specific needs.

Speaker 13:20

Yeah, a hundred percent. This, how do I take my brain and make a job fit into it?

Speaker 2 13:27

So in a way that,

Speaker 13:28

what's the question? I'm trying to help people answer

Speaker 2 13:30

in a way. It's a little bit of career coaching.

Speaker 13:35

I think so. No, that's the goal. I, there's a lot of resources for just general neurodivergent information. But not a lot for how to navigate a career. With Neurodivergence.

Speaker 2 13:49

Yeah.

Speaker 13:49

I, and theres resources for like employers here. I help a neurodivergent people person. We're not a monolith. Right. And there's not much that speaks to the neurodivergent person of how that works.

Speaker 2 14:03

I can even see where you could do like questionnaires and intakes at some point to really help people narrow down.

Speaker 14:12

That's my next goal is to get some professionals in there who can help speak and offer guidance.

Speaker 2 14:17

Very cool. The whole name again of the platform is

Speaker 14:22

Professionally, neuro spicy.com. We're not amateur neuros spicy people. We are professional,

Speaker 2 14:27

neuro spicy.

Speaker 14:28

We get paid to be spicy.

Speaker 2 14:30

Okay. I love that. And you are still working on it, when do you expect it to be up and all of that? And ready?

Speaker 14:40

Signups are available. The forums are open. You can sign in with your Google account. It's there. It's like a very early days. You're, first podcast I've been on. Excited about it. Signups already. The side is open. The disco, we're still growing. I'm. Open and would welcome any feedback. But I want feedback from everyone. What? What do you guys need? What would help

Speaker 2 15:04

you? Yeah, that's great. So you want people to go on there and give you like, this is a great idea. This is what I'd like to see here. This is how I would be able to use it. All of that.

Speaker 15:12

Or just start asking questions,

Speaker 2 15:14

okay.

Speaker 15:15

Whatever, whatever. However people want to engage. I'm here for it.

Speaker 2 15:19

That's wonderful, David. All right, we're gonna put all that in the show notes and and the links there. And we're gonna start these connections and firings and watch it grow. I can't wait. I think this is so needed and I'm so glad you're doing this.

Speaker 15:33

I hope it helps people. I

Speaker 2 15:35

I'm sure it will. Thanks so much for talking with me about all that today.

Speaker 15:40

Thank you. I appreciate it. It's been fun.