My Dyslexia Journey | Ep 28

On this weeks episode I talk about my journey with Dyslexia, how I was diagnosed and it affects me with my business

Everyone's experience is different and this is just my view point 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello and welcome back. So this week I'm doing the episode that I talked about last time, and I've hinted to on previous episodes, I'm doing the episode all about dyslexia. In particular, my own experiences of kind of being semi-diagnosed with it, how I've built my coping strategies, and actually how it still affects me now, and a lot of people don't realise that it does. Um if you have listened to any of the previous episodes, you will know that I quite often have a brain blank. My brain suddenly goes on a tangent and I lose my thread of the point of what an episode was going to be on. That is some of how the dyslexia affects me. My brain just suddenly switches off. Um, and I'm left to ramble and try and put it back together without any guidance because I deliberately don't script the podcast. Um, for me, it's just not something that I'm comfortable with. Like I can follow a script, absolutely not an issue. Um, but to kind of actually script the podcast episode just wouldn't work for me, particularly because I record them on the hoof. Um like they're planned, but not to the nth degree of what I'm actually gonna say. And that is something that is part of the dyslexia. Like I always struggled with it at school, with writing. Um, if you are watching this and wondering why my eye level keeps changing, I've gone back to using my webcam um to make these look better. And I keep forgetting that I need to look at the webcam, not myself. Um, so I'm gonna have to get myself some googly eyes to sit above the webcam um to get me looking in the right place. So it looks like I'm looking at you. Um so that's gonna take some getting used to. Um, where was I? See, tangent already. Um, yes, school. So, particularly in English, um writing, writing a story, I really struggled. Like I I sit and look at a blank page for a long time. Um, and when I then went to uni, I joked in particular when I went to work. Sorry, my hair's just completely annoying me now. Um joked when I went to work. I worked at Argos and we had the touchscreen computers, and I always joked that I became dyslexic when I went to work because I couldn't spell. Yet spelling growing up in school was something I was always really good at. I was really good at my spelling, membering them, usually 10 out of 10 on spelling, which is quite ironic for a dyslexic, but we're coming on to that. Um, so I always joked that I was dyslexic when I went to work. Um, but actually uni should have picked up on it a bit more because my essay structures were always highlighted as jumbling around a bit, like I'd talk about a point, I'd go on to the next point, and then I'd revert back to a different point that actually made more sense three paragraphs ago, and I wouldn't have noticed. So then when I came to do my teacher training, I mentioned it to them and said, Is this something I need to look at? Is there something more to this than just jumping around with ideas and not being aware of it? In doing the process, we realised that I'm actually borderline dyslexic, dyspraxic, dyscalculus, which is memory, coordination, and patterns, which is hilarious when you think of the career that I've gone into dance, movement, which is all memory, coordination, and patterns. But there's there's levels to it, so in terms of coordination, it's more my Hyundai coordination, so bat the ball took me a little while, it still takes me a little while. Yes, I played cricket for a little bit, very rarely hit the ball, but when I did, it was a six. Um, if you want to stone cricket, you'll know that that's good. Um, but coordination for dancing wasn't a problem, and memory for dancing wasn't a problem, and I think it's because there's a passion, there's a love. My brain loved like I love to dance, so my brain took every possibility to remember that and remember the moves, and my dance teacher growing up would always call me her walking notebook because I'd remember what the moves were when we were doing um choreography patterns, I would be the one that would remember who was where, particularly the people that weren't there at the time of setting the patterns. I would remember. Don't ask me how, I just did. But if it comes to things like historical events, exams, I really struggle with the memory and the pattern. And school definitely should have picked up on that because I didn't get the grades I was predicted. So that's my experience of it. And I didn't f do the full formal diagnosis because by the point that I was doing this, I was 22 and I was like, well, I've built my coping strategies. What's a diagnosis going to give me? So I decided not to, beyond the cost. I just was like, well, it's not gonna it's not gonna teach me anything now. I'm about to step into my career, I've built my coping strategies, it is what it is, but it helps me kind of semi-understand, yeah, you are. And if you are anyone that's on the kind of neurodivergent pathway, you will understand that whole do I go for diagnosis? Um, so some would say I'm self-diagnosed, but I'm not because I did start the process. But how it affects me in terms of business, and I spoke about this on my weekly email that went out today. Is my brain goes on a tangent, I suddenly tune into my brain and realize I don't know what I'm talking about, and I question what I'm actually talking about, and is it beneficial and why am I talking about this? So I have our own little like internal monologue goes on whilst I do these podcasts. Not today, it's quite quiet today. Um, so there's that. I have also realized through talking through so with some of my cheerleaders, and they know who they are, that I can be quite surface level with some of my um descriptions and way that I market my services and don't necessarily go deep enough into the transformations or the different angles that I can talk about through my services. I'm very much this is what it is, here's how you buy it, sign up. And I'm working on the deeper level and thinking of the angles and talking with those cheerleaders and my trusted people that I can go, can I pick your brain on this to get their responses to help me with my ideas? And that's tough. And it's only when someone points out a different angle that I realise how much better that sounds than what I've been putting out. So it's hard. And yes, AI gets a bad rap in terms of writing and everything else. For me, it helps me bounce my ideas and helps me test my gut, test my kind of trust myself, and it's certainly how I moved into the current transition of going more movement-focused, was using it as a sounding board to ask me the questions, to make sure that everything I was doing was my decision. So AI hasn't decided my business. I'm putting that out there. AI has not decided my business, it has just helped me formulate it to a way that makes sense for me to be able to communicate it in a way that makes sense for others when it's not a tangible thing that I'm selling. I am selling confidence and joy and fun and all the magical goodness, which is really hard to describe because I'm not teaching dance classes necessarily. There may be some dance stuff, but I'm going more movement, more everyday, simple, daily habits. The movement session that I did last night was literally: here's some music, we're gonna step tap and allow your body to follow what happens with the music. If you go into a full dance, great. If you stay step tapping, also great. There was zero right or wrong with it, and it was magical to see four people interpreting the same song differently in the same time. It was almost like being at a silent disco. It was that kind of analogy of we're all interpreting this in a different way, we're all listening to the same song at the same time. It's just magical, and the feedback has been incredible. Um so yeah, and that has been a really tricky one to describe because there's not a tangible response. Um so that's how dyslexia in particular is the one that really kind of affects me the most in terms of words. Not the memory, not the memory as such, it's more the words and structures and sentence structures and ways of describing things. Um I have to really think, but like I say, I use my chew leaders to help me kind of word bomb, if you like, different content ideas. So um there's a magical lady that if you're with me on threads, you will know I'm shouting her out all the time in terms of emails, Mrs. Vondy, um, who when I was talking about this movement workshop and was like, right, I'm gonna be using email in particular. We then spoke and she helped me to understand how it goes from an email to threads to the and the different angles to go down. And I was like, oh my god, and how the sales page I'd built, which was really easy to build, was my content. So repurposing. But it's almost that it's that barrier that the dyslexia for me just sees it as one level and not the the multi-layered, the multi-faceted, if that's the right word, and multi-angled ways of seeing and doing. I'm getting better. The more I do, the more I get better in my own ability and what it is that I'm actually selling, it's getting better. So I'm gonna leave you there because it's not really a go and do this thing episode. It was more a little, let's give you an insight into my world, the challenges that I do face, and how I overcome them. And they may help you. And if you are somebody like actually, I really struggle with that too. Journaling helps because it gets you practicing writing your own things, but find your circle of people. You'll probably find that they're similar to you. So I'm gonna love you and leave you, and I'll see you on next week's episode.