Pathways to Potential

Pathways to Potential Ep3 - Navigating ADHD and Dyslexia in the Workplace

• Ian Oliver • Season 1 • Episode 3

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Navigating a world not built for your mind can be a challenging journey, especially when managing ADHD and dyslexia in a professional environment. Reflecting on my personal experiences, I share the obstacles I faced with focus, attention, and emotional regulation while striving to meet corporate demands. From struggling to prioritize tasks to impulsive decisions that led to stress, my story sheds light on the often-overlooked difficulties of late diagnosis and the lifelong adaptation required. Yet, through understanding and accommodating my unique needs, I found ways to leverage my strengths, proving that success is achievable even amidst these challenges.

This episode isn't just about challenges—it's a celebration of the incredible strengths that come with ADHD. We explore the power of hyper-focus, the creativity that thrives in lateral thinking, and the entrepreneurial spirit that emerges in dynamic environments. These qualities, although sometimes stifled in traditional settings, can lead to innovative problem-solving and quick adaptability, perfect for fast-paced roles. By addressing misconceptions and highlighting the potential within the ADHD community, this conversation aims to inspire and empower, encouraging listeners to understand and embrace the unique capabilities that come with neurodivergence. Join us as we discuss the path to harnessing these strengths for personal and professional success.

Pathways to Potential: A Podcast for Empowerment and Growth where we look into the challenges faced by individuals navigating mental health struggles and also those facing life after criminal convictions.

Ian:

Hello and welcome to Pathways to Potential, the podcast that delves into the challenges faced by individuals navigating mental health struggles and also those facing life after criminal convictions. Hi everybody and welcome to this episode of Pathways to Potential. I thought this time I'd actually go back a little bit to my story. We've had my story, we've had Phil's story. But just to go back to my story and some of the challenges I've faced, particularly in a work environment, I don't know what it's like for you guys, but for myself with my ADHD, what I've found is that I've had huge issues around sustaining focus, had huge issues around like sustaining focus. I have the attention span of probably a small goldfish. So like 10, 15, 20 minutes is about all I can manage before I have to stand up and walk around and do things and go outside or maybe have a cigarette or a cup of coffee or do something, but then come back and actually sit down and work again. Now, to most people that's fine. They wouldn't necessarily notice the difference. But when you're working, say, in a corporate environment, that can be a bit disconcerting to your fellow work colleagues who just see you literally as working 10, 15 minutes up, walk around five minutes later, 10 minutes later you're back 15, 20 minutes up. Walk around, back up, walk around, back up. You get the idea it just goes around in a perpetual circle.

Ian:

Now, having said that, what I did find with my sort of particular work was that I could do as much as everybody else within the eight hours sphere by looking after my own needs, and my needs were that I needed to get up and move around. As I say, my attention span was very, very small, but I can see why some employees might find this to be a little bit sort of unconstructive to a work environment. The other thing I found was that I got easily distracted and tasks that should have been done almost straight away probably got left. Tasks that were not important probably got pushed to being important, and just this whole organizational and executive functioning got really sort of messed up up. Difficulties with prioritization, as I said, sort of switching tasks halfway through Impulse control oh look, there's a squirrel and that squirrel moment and just really sort of struggling to sit down and to break things like large projects into smaller tasks. Sticking to schedules Now, everything always got delivered on time, but sometimes it could almost be an element of procrastination that you'd put things off to the very last minute that you'd really sort of do things that were not critically important to start with, and then you do the critically important things almost with two minutes left before the project deadline.

Ian:

Also, I found it difficult to keep track of multiple tasks at one particular time. I've never been good at multitasking. Give me one single task to do at one specific time and I will do it. Give me two tasks to do at one specific time and I'll struggle. And I don't know if you guys, if anybody else, has ADHD. That would actually sort of attest to that particular problem. But it's very, very much sort of one of those that yes, it's there, but you need to deal with it. And how do we actually deal with it? Now, at the moment I'm looking sort of more at the negative side of things, I guess, rather than the positive side of things.

Ian:

Another thing I found that it was very impulsive and very difficult sometimes to have emotional regulation. What I mean here is that, yeah, it's sudden interruptions, or you make hasty decisions or you do things on the fly. You think you're doing the right thing, but I've had instances in previous jobs where I've been told I'm not doing the right thing because I've been too impulsive with it. I've not necessarily followed through the whole work process. Again, emotional regulation Sometimes, you know, you can give heightened stress responses. It comes out in the elements of frustration, especially when you're encountering obstacles.

Ian:

And then the other thing that I found is hyper activity and restlessness. As I mentioned before, I only have the attention span of probably a very small goldfish, and so it's very easy to sort of sit there, to move on your chair, to sort of to get up, to stand up, even if you're working at a desk. Try and work standing up from the desk. Then you sit down, then you change your legs. You don't keep eye contact with people. You're looking around the room. An ex-partner of mine called me Hawkeye because not so much I wasn't keeping eye contact with them, I was listening to everything that they were saying, but I kept looking around the room and you'd pick up things. You're still listening and you're understanding everything, but you'd pick up various visual elements around the room.

Ian:

The other thing that you have issues with, or I have issues with, is back-to-back meetings. I can do one meeting but then if I have another meeting straight away, I tend to forget or misplace the memories or the notes for the previous meetings, and I can find that whole situation very, very overwhelming. Again, that's not good within a particular workplace environment, but it's something I needed to work on. Now, as I say, I was late diagnosed with ADHD and so for majority of my working life I didn't understand that this was an issue. I thought it was me. Well, it is me, because I'm the one with the ADHD but I didn't understand that there was an underlying problem, although probably, having said that, ever since I was very, very young, I've understood that I've thought differently, I've acted differently. I have a different emotional responses. I have a different attention spans to everybody else.

Ian:

Like in school, an hour and 10 minutes for a lesson was just way too much. I couldn't take it. I would have to sort of do something to break the monotony. Now, when I was at school, we had this system where you were called an absence monitor. So for every class and every lesson, you had to note down everybody who wasn't in the class, or even if there was a full class, and then you had to take that note to the administration building, and this would happen around about the start of the class'd get five, ten minutes away from the class doing this particular task and then you're expected to pick up in the class when you came back, which I didn't find a problem. But what I found it did give me was it gave me that time and space. So it cut down an hour and a 10 minute lesson to just under one hour. Now I still faced issues in the last 10-15 minutes and it's not particularly advisable to stand up and start moving around the classroom when you're 13, 14, 15. Teachers didn't tend to like that too much, so I was always getting in trouble for not paying attention. Like I was talking to somebody the other day, they were saying that when you used to go around the class and read, they would always try and figure out as to where it was in the book that they were going to have to read, because they didn't have the attention for somebody to get to that particular point. And, of course, when they got to that particular point, it was like oh God, what do I do now? Where am I? And so that was always always a huge issue with me.

Ian:

Again, homework. I used to come home from school and do a few bits and pieces and then it would be oh, Ian, you need to go and do your homework between six and eight in the evening. Now to tell me I need to do homework for two hours was stressful enough, because it was like Ian, you have to sit there for two hours, and the thought of sitting there for two hours actually doing something meant you actually sat there for two hours did nothing because you couldn't focus. It was too much pressure, you were too overwhelmed, there was too much stress, there was too much going on in your own mind to be able to sit and concentrate. If I could have done my homework over the whole evening, or even the whole early morning, or even the next morning at a time that I felt was good for me, I would have been far more productive.

Ian:

Now, the other thing I'd like to throw into the mix there is that I'm dyslexic as well, and so when you can't spell and again we're talking about the UK in the late 70s, early 80s you were considered that you were thick because everybody can spell. If you couldn't spell, it meant you had a serious issue because you weren't learning or you weren't paying attention, or you were just plain stupid. Now I knew I wasn't stupid, because orally I could use some really good words, but I couldn't actually put them down on paper. I couldn't spell them. My father used to say well, just look up the first three letters of the word in the dictionary. Great, I didn't know sometimes what the first three letters were. Is destroy, d-e-s or D-i-s? There, I still can't spell. I don't know if it's I before e or e before I. I know the rules but I can't visualize it. So my initial reaction would be to spell it t-h-i-e-r. Now I don't know if that's correct or not, and my assumption is it's wrong, because my assumption should be that it's T-H-E-I-R. But again, I'm not sure. And so the fact that you can't spell. You're doing a lot of written work. In that particular time, your exams are all written.

Ian:

There was no idea of orals. The only orals you had was in a foreign language, and a foreign language for me was a waste of time, because I couldn't spend in English, let alone being able to spend in a foreign language. And so it was this whole sort of confidence that was going on in my mind and saying Ian, are you actually thick? I don't think I'm thick. Everybody else says you're thick, but there's something going on in there that you're not quite sure about. So it was only when I got diagnosed with ADHD. It was like, wow, this is a whole weight lifted off my shoulders because now I can actually go ahead and I can make accommodations for myself. I know when I'm going to go wrong, I know what my pitfalls are and I know what causes it. Now you could say, or you could argue, that I should have known that in the first place and I should have been able to make my own accommodations and interventions without being able to be diagnosed.

Ian:

But when you're sure that there's something wrong with you, but you're not sure what it is, and you know you're different it's that feeling of shame, that feeling of vulnerability, that feeling of I'm not in control that takes over. That feeling of vulnerability, that feeling of I'm not in control that takes over, and so you don't actually do the things that you want to do or you're supposed to do, because you're too ashamed to admit that there's an issue. You're too ashamed to admit that you can't do these particular things. You're too ashamed to admit that you need to stand up every 15, 20 minutes and walk around and you're expecting other people to make accommodations for you and they're just looking at you going. He's the weird one, but now I have a reason for it. Okay, so in the first part of this we looked probably more at the negative aspects than the positive aspects.

Ian:

But there are strengths that are associated with ADHD. One, I think we're more creative, particularly in our thinking. I think we think in a difficult way. We don't think linearly, we think laterally at least I do. We very much take aspects and look outside of the box. We're looking for different solutions. We don't see things as normal because we don't think normally ourselves. So what we find is it might be easier to connect sort of disparaging ideas, ideas that seem to have no connection whatsoever. Like I was talking to a friend the other day. We were talking about ai and healthcare and using data analytics and looking at what that might mean, and then you start thinking, okay, what if we did this? What if we did that? What if we joined the dots? Here we can tend to come up with novel or different solutions. We're also easy to adapt to things and sometimes, even though we like this idea of stability, because of this frequent movement that we have to do, we can evolve and adapt of different circumstances, I think, far easier than people who don't have ADHD.

Ian:

The other thing is that we can hyper focus specifically on tasks that really interest us. Hyper focus specifically on tasks that really interest us. I know this from my own experience. I can spend hours, and hours and hours, without even moving sometimes, on researching a specific topic that's of huge interest to me and I'll go into so much detail and so much depth about it that I'm really I would understand everything about it. The other thing I find as well is that I don't necessarily need to read everything to understand. Um, now, that might seem a bit counterintuitive if you're reading a research paper, but sometimes by almost skim reading and I find I can skim read very easily I can pick up a huge number of major points. I'll go back and I'll read the whole article, maybe again later and realize that actually I got all the major points out of that. And it's not just happens on one or two specific occasions. This tends to be a constantly revolving scenario that I can go through and I can look at the document and I can read it and I can understand it.

Ian:

And I think that also brings us on to another specific point as well, that when we think of mental illness or neurodivergencies, which obviously ADHD is, is we tend to think of people with a lower capacity, and that's absolute bullshit. No, some of the most intelligent people I've come across have ADHD or have autism and we can actually think a lot quicker and, as I said, a lot more divergently and a lot more creatively than other people. It's just because of we've gone back to the negative sides. Now people see this negative side and maybe having to get up, maybe having to walk around, maybe not concentrating, maybe picking unimportant tasks and doing them first, etc. That you don't realize that actually there's a huge amount of intelligence going on in the particular brain area that you have and you can actually think of these diverse solutions.

Ian:

The other thing is, as I said, we are very adaptable. We can cope with change because we're constantly changing. We're far more, I think, more flexible as well. We're certainly far more resilient and we're a lot more independent. We work in teams, but we're actually as good working on our own as we are working with teams. In fact, teams sometimes frustrate us because people don't work in the same ways that we do, they don't see things in the same way that we do, they don't have the same ideas that we do or they don't see the connections between the ideas we do, and you can find that really, really frustrating. But I think we can develop these sort of robust coping strategies that make us understand who we are and how we can actually deal with things. The other thing in the sort of final bit about the successes, I think is that in a lot of ways people with ADHD are actually far better running their own organization. We're actually really good with this entrepreneurial spirit and drive.

Ian:

Again, because we have issues around time and I mean sitting there for eight hours working during the day is not something that most people with ADHD are going to be able to do, so that doesn't fit into the standard corporate structure. But working for yourself, it means that you pick the hours you choose. It picks the time that you do. I mean I work for myself, I do a lot of work on my own, but I can pick and choose the time. Like yesterday, I was working at two o'clock in the morning. Tonight I mean it's now 10 past 6 in the evening. I've been working since 9 o'clock this morning, on and off, but I've been hugely productive. I'll probably still be working because I have to finish this podcast and put it together until probably 8, 9 o'clock tonight. Now that doesn't mean I'm not going to be working at 4 or 5 o'clock tomorrow morning until probably eight, nine o'clock tonight. Now that doesn't mean I'm not going to be working at four or five o'clock tomorrow morning, but it's my own time and because I can see these ideas and innovations et cetera, it means that I can actually join the dots, I can actually look at the entrepreneurial spirit. Now it doesn't mean I don't get overwhelmed, I do.

Ian:

And the other issue that comes back to this idea of working with teams when you're an entrepreneur you need a team. There's no way you can do everything on your own, but then you have to work and you have to figure out how you're actually going to work within that particular team. The other thing is, I think we're probably a bit more sort of risk takers. We tend to take quicker decisions. We tend to take quicker decisions and we actually look at things with a creative problem solving rather than sort of a more linear attitude, as I sort of said earlier. So I think in a lot of ways there are huge benefits to being ADHD. Not necessarily every employer is going to see that. That's why I mentioned this whole thing about the entrepreneurial side of things, no-transcript.

Ian:

But if you're like me, if you have too much of an office, you feel too claustrophobic and too enclosed, because you actually need the openness to be able to concentrate and to be able to work. You need to be able to have the visual stimuli. It's like for me, looking out of the window, looking at the ceiling, looking at the walls that's all part of what it, what for what it is for me, if I'm stuck in a small office, it's like I have no visual stimuli, I feel constricted and as soon as I feel constricted, I shut down. Uh, the other thing is obviously to do with meetings as well. You know, I mean, we have possibly slightly different social norms. You know, you go in for a meeting, you're expected to sit there for the whole meeting. You're expected to talk when you need to be spoken to or you have a point to say. I think a lot of us probably would tend to jump in.

Ian:

And again, this whole idea of the attention 15, 20 minutes off we go, ian has to stand up and Ian has to walk around, which halfway through somebody else who's part of the meeting is not good because they get distracted, they think you're being impolite and they tend then to rush, or you tend then to get people looking at you thinking what's this idiot doing? But they don't understand my needs and my wants and I have to look after my needs and my wants. That's part of the way it has to be. I can't rely on satisfying other people's needs and wants when they're not going to do me any good, because by the time you've introduced something, you've discussed it, you've gone through it and you ask you a question which is half an hour 45 minutes later. It's like I've forgotten. I have no idea what you're talking about. My brain has switched off minutes ago and it's looking out the window, or it's thinking about Arsenal playing football, or what am I going to have for dinner, or can I go and have a cigarette or whatever. It's definitely not thinking about the meeting.

Ian:

The other thing as well is that I find I get more stimulus from visual stimulation than verbal stimulation, and what I find then is that I need to see things. If people show me how to do something, I'll do it. You give me instructions how to do it, I'm stuffed. Give me a YouTube video, 50-50. But if I can actually stand there and watch somebody do something, then I'll get it. And it's a bit like directions. If I have to drive anywhere, I use first of all probably the first time Google Maps. Second time I don't need anything. I know where I'm going.

Ian:

Now, it's not being arrogant or big-headed, it's just this idea that it's actually ingrained in the memory as to I need to go up the road, turn left, turn right, whatever, but I'll get you there up the road, turn left, turn right, whatever, but I'll get you there. I tend to pick up signposts and I don't mean like signposts, but visual signposts, visual stimuli, because when I'm driving I still have the same problems. I can concentrate for a certain amount of time, but then I'm looking around the window, I'm watching the traffic in front and I have a complete knowledge of what's going on in front, but I can tell you what's going on around me as well. And finally, we probably tend to have slightly ambiguous social cues. We tend to react to certain things in different ways that not as necessary. Is that a good thing? And not necessarily is that a bad thing. But it can be a bit disconcerting when you come out with a completely irrelevant social cue or social norm at the wrong time and the number of times where I will say something that's not necessarily inappropriate but it's inappropriate at that particular time, but thinking that it's a social norm, that's actually good at that specific aspect. Now I've got better at that, a lot better at that. It used to be times in the past where I would just literally come out with something that was completely irrelevant, that might well offend or upset somebody, but that I have seriously worked on and that's got so much so, so much better. So there we go.

Ian:

That's just a brief sort of thing about me and my adhd within the working environment. For me, yes, I have to work on my own. Uh, it's probably the best way for me to go forward. I can work in a team and I can work with other teams. Like I can go out and work as a do freelance basis. That's no problem whatsoever. But to actually work nine till five or nine till five thirty is it tends to be here in ireland in an organization without any accommodations and in interventions in place or without the agreement the employee, employer, sorry can be very, very, very frustrating and probably tends to be the reason as to why I've not necessarily lasted that specific long working for other people's employment, or certainly as long as I have working for myself, for working for myself I tend to have done so much better than working for other people. So, anyway, that's a bit about my journey in adhd, and we'll see you again or look at you again, or whatever in the next podcast. Thanks very much indeed for listening. Take care,

Ian:

So yeah, that's what this podcast is about. It's about mental health issues. It's about helping people who've been through the judicial system or prior to them going through the judicial system. It's looking at ways that we can put things in place or offer advice and help to help people, just purely to help people, and to hopefully have a bit of fun and a bit of joy and a bit of entertainment. And, as we would say here, a bit of fun and a bit of joy and a bit of entertainment and, as we would say here, a bit of good crack along the way. So subscribe to the podcast pathways to potential and if you want to get involved, drop us an email it's ian@ empowerchange. ie and let's see what we can do, because you can't do it on my own. The only way we can do this is together. We'll see you next time.

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Ian Oliver

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