[The Colored Pages Book Club is a biweekly show, where two old friends talk about fiction, fantasy and magical realism written by writers from colorful backgrounds. The two hosts, Marci and Ako are both ridiculous and enthusiastic about using their favorite books to talk about their own lives, talk shit and explore bigger social themes. It's essentially your favorite book club plus all of the tomfoolery and shenanigans that one might expect from two long-time friends catching up.]

CORALINE:  Hello and welcome to Episode 124 of the Greater Than Code Podcast. My name is Coraline Ada Ehmke. I'm joined today by my very good friend and wonderful individual, Jessica Kerr.

JESSICA:  Good morning. I'm happy to be here today with Avdi Grimm.

AVDI:  Good morning and I am overjoyed to be here today with Janelle Klein.

JANELLE:  Everyone is very happy today, so I will be happy too and I'm here with Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY:  Thanks and I'm really excited to introduce our guest, Helen Needham. Helen is the founder of MeDecoded, which is an online platform where neurodivergent people can share their stories. Helen is autistic and is an advocate promoting the value of neurodivergent thinking. She's currently a management consultant in financial services and a former and maybe, a current Java developer. Thanks for coming on the show, Helen. We're so happy to have you.

CORALINE:  Yeah, welcome.

HELEN:  Thank you. I’m excited to join you guys and chatting about neurodiversity and seeing where it takes us.

CORALINE:  Helen, we always open the program with the standard, copyrighted, trademarked otherwise famous question -- what is your superpower and how did you develop it?

HELEN:  I've been thinking long and hard about this one and one of my superpowers or the closest I get to a superpower is being able to take abstract information and connect the dots and see things that other people don't see, which comes in very handy in my belt. I've honed that over the years from trying to chase data around investment bank, seeing how it's transformed and how you can use it to bring about new insights and knowledge.

CORALINE:  That sounds like it's really valuable. I can see the value of that as a developer. I'm curious about how that works as a management consultant. Do you have the opportunity to exercise that superpower in your day job today?

HELEN:  Completely. I got called in when banks want to do something different, so it's usually when they need to figure something out. A lot of what I now do is help them to work up their strategies or bring about business change, technological change or organizational change and going hunting for information, whether it's stored in the database or someone's brain and being able to go on a treasure hunt across the organization, pull it together and inform a future strategy of how they can do things better and it comes in pretty handy.

JESSICA:  So you can chase information across technology and people?

HELEN:  To me, they're one of the same. It's just a different way of accessing information and one you like to see through query and the other one, you ask them questions and a lot of what I do is trying to decode people. I meet new people than you spend my time trying to figure out and get information from them and it's a bit like writing a query, working out what are the right questions to extract the information you need and it's one of the same to me.

CORALINE:  To be clear, I once tried asking someone a question as a simple query and that doesn't really work very often, so I don't recommend doing that as a general practice.

HELEN:  Yeah. Probably not asking them for their select statement but being able to translate that into English language but it's still, what can you tell me about the work that you do, tell me about the information you received, where does the information go, what changes do you make to it and these are all very similar types of activities.

JESSICA:  So you're following the information through the business, through the technology and the people in and out?

HELEN:  Yes because sometimes people will send you to go and speak to another person. Sometimes, they will send you to a system, sometimes it's a database or the documents and being able to extract information from each of those different sources and connect it together, it's pretty similar. When you start breaking it down into its component parts, as just people take more work, it's like trying to have some small talk before they give you information and that's the challenge for me.

CORALINE:  People don't have well-defined APIs, either, do they?

HELEN:  Oh, no. No, no, no. What you start finding is that when you start to recognize what motivates them, what they feels are, their aims and their ambitions, you can then start using that as a way to work out how best to interact and so over the years, by decoding people, for me, that's how I connect with people. It's not [inaudible] by the social. It's more by trying to understand who they are and what's best way to ask questions.

JANELLE:  I've been thinking about this idea of decoding people and I'm serious how you develop a mental model of a person's head. You mentioned, kind of thinking about their motivations and the things that they want in trying to extract information. Can you describe kind of an example of one of these mental models that you might have of what's in a person's mind and how that might translate into questions?

HELEN:  It's not perfect. I don't know if I may be able to give away all the secrets in a shortly condensed non-vague but I'll try because I didn't do it as a series of steps. People laugh at me. I have seven years or 10 years of doing my job. It starts with in the first meeting when I get to meet someone: clients or a team person, you have the open questions, so you sit down and you ask them about what do they think success looks like, what are the biggest problems that they think needs to be overcome and the way that people answer that as a very open question, they start to touch on things and that's when you start with working on what motivates them.

As you starts doing that, you then start drilling further into the query and you start asking contextual questions. It's more how and it's a very open questions into more targeted focused questions and to understand more about the context and what they think on the context around them, once you start getting that information, it's then working out which restricts both over. Then when you start to ask information about something else that you need, it's the [inaudible].

For instance, if I'm going to solve the problem around the new business case or bringing about a big change projects, you go in and you say, "Okay," and start with the basic around what is the objective of the program, how do we measure success and then, as they start talking to some people, I might say about we want to rationalize the number of systems that we have. For somebody else, it's much more political because they wanted to be their legacy and how they answer a question, it gives you clue into their driving and motivation and then that helps you to then frame your subsequent questions in a way that allows you to draw further to gets the information that you really need. It's kind of almost based on sequencing of questions.

JANELLE:  I guess what I'm hearing you say is that when you're listening to these answers, to these open-ended questions that what you're listening for is a model of how that particular human is actually motivated and what is the undercurrent of what they really want as opposed to the surface of what they say. Then once you build a mental model of how that human is actually motivated, you can get a better picture of how to be successful, what success really looks like because sometimes those motivations are about leaving a legacy or some kind of undercurrent identity-driven thing is what the person actually wants.

When you're looking at trying to figure out what questions to ask and what to drill into, it sounds like you model it almost like a tree, like I start with these open ended questions and then I want to figure out what areas to drill down into and how to help these people be successful but realizing as humans, they have these other kind of undercurrent motivations and so you're trying to decode what those kind of undercurrent motivations are at the same time. Does that sound right?

HELEN:  That's better articulated than I can say. Yes, that is right. It's also, it's how you phrased your questions, so if you got somebody who is very task-orientated, you focus on task. If you have somebody that's much more about people and talk about other people, then you will start asking more questions around who are the key people you need to go and talk to? What are the key factors that can then make an introduction for women? That helps you to navigate what approach and questioning style is likely to work with them.

JANELLE:  Let's say, two different people that you talk to give you dissonant information. One person tells you one thing and another person tells you another thing. How do you handle that?

HELEN:  That happens all the time. You present two different views and you bring it back because a large part and this is why people are harder to work with than databases because there is that subjected element to it and people will always choose what they want to tell you, either because they have a certain outcome that they want and this is somebody else. A lot of the time, when you are doing hunting for information, that is a big part of trying to work it out.

It took me a long time because when I first started work, I think I probably treated a lot of people like a database. I didn't nearly spend time thinking about the personal motivations and I've got a lot of pushbacks where people said, "You're a bit abrasive." One person nicknamed me [inaudible] because there was just no time that I took to actually consider them as a person and if I couldn't get what I wanted, in terms of the information, I just keep drilling them but I quickly realized that wasn't a very successful strategy because humans aren't databases and they need a little bit more love and attention than a codebase.

CORALINE:  Helen, it strikes me that your approach is very structured and methodical but also requires a great deal of empathy. I think in order to build a model of how someone is communicating, how someone is thinking about a problem, that requires a great deal of empathy. I'm very curious about the intersection of that requirement for empathy with your own experience with being neurodivergent. I know there's a lot of talk about people on the autism spectrum as that intersects with empathy and I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what empathy looks site for a neurodivergent person and I'd be really interested to hear your experience with that.

HELEN:  There has been so much talk about autistic people can't be empathetic and I think there's a lot of debate and research that is actually showing that autistic people can be empathetic and actually in some cases, they can be over empathetic and so a lot of a time, you may react to a situation because the emotion is overwhelming.

I've been reading a book which is actually questioning what is empathy and it talks about hot empathy and cold empathy. I think that overall -- the concept of empathy, what it is, the definition of it -- people are still working through that. In terms of the work that I do in decoding people and breaking down what they say or how they react, I'm always remembering things that have been said in conversations and I can remember snippets from conversation six months ago and then a new piece of information comes in. To me, that's not empathy. That's just remembering and taking cruise from what they've said, how they’ve said it and connecting the dots.

JESSICA:  It's a kind of deduction?

HELEN:  Completely. There's a lot of autistic people, particularly women who spends a lot of time what we call masking, so you don't necessarily see many of the autistic traits and behaviors because they have been taking their cues from people around them and say, in order to fit in with people, you spend a lot of your time and effort, taking clues from people around you and over the years, to be able to succeed in my business which is a very people-centered business, that is how I get by because I can't rely on social charm to form connections, so you have to almost go level below to understand why they're saying the things they do because far often, people don't make sense.

You know, for many years, I really struggled with people saying one thing but they acted on a completely different way and it was only when I started spending a lot more time trying to understand how to connect with them and now, how it's almost a recipe but when I meet with someone as to how I will engage them over time to form a connection. It's honed over time and it's the same with new clients and big change projects because whilst they're all different, I think they're all driven by very similar factors, although on different niches.

CORALINE:  It strikes me that you have to be very deliberate about building an interface between you and the world and maybe, what I'm hearing is that people who are not neurodivergent may find it easier and not have to be very deliberate but as a survival skill, as a coping skill, you have to be very deliberate about that process.

HELEN:  Completely and it's trial by error. Thankfully, the one thing as a management consultant, is I keep moving from project to project and client to clients, so it was a bit [inaudible], you tried out your new strategies, it failed. I guess, fail fast. That's definitely been a personal life lesson and that tends to make it to that three months and then things were going quite so well. The next time, you then add to your set of strategies and you would have kind of people connectivity because I can do the job but quite often, me and people tend to fall out, particularly in the workplace. It is very deliberate action which is why new people, new situations or conflict situations can be so overwhelming because it requires so much more mental energy just for me to get through the day job and just in general, I'm always thinking and going through various scenarios in my mind.

JANELLE:  That's going to be really emotionally difficult to have going through these experiences of feeling like disconnected and an outlier in this context and being able to kind of take that and go, "I am special because of my skills and my way of seeing."

I've had this coping techniques that I've learned to develop of coming up with ways to model things better so I can interact with the world and I can take these experiences and these lessons learned to this new context and try these things but in between that, you have to work through this emotional challenge of failure and learning and kind of accepting what happened in that context and moving forward. Can you talk a little bit about what that experience has been like or kind of overcoming those hurdles and finding your strength in yourself?

HELEN:  I only discovered that when I was diagnosed as autistic two years ago. For much of my life at school, I was quite often ridiculed and bullied for being different. I was a nerd. As I went to university, the language changed. That's when I became geek. Then going into the workplace, I kept thinking I was going to re-invent myself and then, you'd get the comments about being aloof or difficult or abrasive and over about 15 years, I haven't quite realized why.

I think the harder I tried because outside of that environment, people know me as someone who is exceedingly funny, who is passionate, who is loyal. You know, it was a very different me but in the workplace, I could just never going that to be and I always seem to be the person that everyone else went lunch or kind of drinks together but I would never be invited. It would often take me two years in an organization when I made friends with one person who then introduced me to everybody else. It's been a repetitive pattern and a repetitive pattern of falling out with people which is why the strategy has come about and I started to think and believe I was difficult and that I was likeable and that I didn’t belong.

The more I struggle, the more I started to be held back and I became crippled with anxiety and then five years ago, my son was diagnosed as autistic. We've been through a very tough time with him because he was struggling in school and then it was a bit of a lifeboat because the strategies that we were using for him and the things that he was struggling with, I inadvertently started realizing that actually, I can bring more with that into my workplace and that change how I interacted with people. Instead of being confrontational in a working group or in a group meeting, which is just I can't stand with meetings -- that's where a lot of attention comes -- now, I got people to email me before a meeting, particularly with something new.

Discovering that I was autistic is suddenly things made sense and the strategies I brought up just to not be difficult turns out that strategies that people that are autistic tends to use and then you start to accept yourself and you start to realize, "I'm not difficult. I'm different," and actually, all of the self-help books and the life coaching and the therapy and to try and become a social butterfly is just a wasted effort because that's not me.

It's about learning to accept who I am and actually, if you're going to spring new information on me and I come in, expecting you to follow one path and you suddenly veer at 90 degrees, I'm probably not going to respond well but if you send me via email with set reasons why, then I'm more open to discuss. That's now how things have changed for me and realized that the coping strategies that I had to understand people is what makes me really good at my job. The things that prevented from fully bringing that to be, which is social engagements are that source of one of that social with team members in my team, so realizing that actually, I don't need to do it all myself and if I meet someone who's sociable, we now have scheduled social slots and I get somebody else in my team to sort out my team's socializations for me so that we have a way of making that happen.

JANELLE:  That's really great, so you can find people that are good at those particular skills and that you can also interface well with and they can have an understanding of how you work and then at the same process of building mental models of these different people, you can understand how the different capabilities on your team and how you can work together to be successful and to see yourself as this human that is different and by being different, it brings a lot of unique capabilities to the table that others don't necessarily have and that's really special. You contribute something really special.

HELEN:  Completely. I think realizing that we accept that different people specialize in different professions like some people become pre-surgeons, some people become [inaudible] surgeons. They each employ different skills but will you expect everybody to have the same types of social skills? In reality, when you start to realize that actually, social skills is as much of a specialist skill as data analysis and actually, you partner with someone with very good social skills and someone with data analysis skills and between you, you collaborate to achieve something so much greater.

This has now allowed me to manage teams about to 30 people, which I never thought would ever happen and my deputies get an opportunity to be part of conversations with senior clients or as a management consultant, there's a lot of business development, I don't want to do that. I know what needs to be done but I don't want to go and sit in one and dine with client that I don't know but I have a lot of juniors who wants an opportunity to let themselves shine and so I gave them that opportunity and we collaborate to achieve more together than we would do if I was trying to force myself to be the sociable person who gets everybody inside.

JAMEY:  I think a lot of what you just said about understanding yourself is really beautiful and one of the things that was really striking to me was what you said about having these coping strategies that you're kind of already doing and then discovering that these were coping strategies that are artistically used. I think that it's really interesting that you developed some of these same strategies on your own. I guess what my question is what was it like for you when you were first starting to interface with the rest of this community as a whole?

HELEN:  I think there is something very special about finding your tribe, finding people who understand you, who have had similar experiences both external experiences and internal feelings. It was like a big weight off my shoulders because I think that really reinforced my belief on myself. When I first became aware of the neurodiversity and the neurodivergent community, it was through my son and finding that support to him. It's the most supportive community that I think I have ever come across because everybody has struggles, everybody wants to be there to support each other and they were rooting for each other.

As I became more in touch with other people who are neurodivergent and that includes people who are dyslexic, dyspraxic, have ADHD, bipolar, OCD, I started to realize that there was a very common theme and that was so many people have a very negative self-image from having growing up, particularly if they were diagnosed later in life, where they [inaudible] themselves or they're being told they were stupid, lazy, clumsy, weird and they had struggled not knowing why and then they've been diagnosed and realized why they've been struggling for so long and then seeing them transform their personal self-view and for me, finding a community going through that process as we start to understand ourselves better and understand that in order to found our place in the world is not necessary about changing who we are, it's about working with the world around us to say, "What can we do differently to bring out the best in who we already are?"

That has been the most empowering thing for me, particularly when I've been able to help people who are going through that journey now and that's we MeDecoded is. It's a community of people finding themselves, sharing their stories which then encourages other people to own who they are. If they have been struggling with a negative self-image, realizing that actually there are positives and there are people who are succeeding and who understand you.

CORALINE:  I think it's important to bring those stories to a broader audience too. I remember a thing that happened to me recently. I was at our technology summit and a young woman in college, maybe 20 years old. She talked to me about something and I really needed a cigarette. I'm a smoker but I'm also a bipolar and smoking is one of the tools that I have in my school box for mood regulation. I kind of apologized to her and said, "Can we please take this conversation outside so I can have a cigarette?" and I was like, "I'm sorry. I know smoking is bad but this is the reason that I do it or part of the reason I do it," and she lit up. She was like, "Oh, my God. You're bipolar too," and she had not seen a role model. She had no framework for understanding that someone with severe bipolar disorder could have a successful career or could be making their way through life. She hadn't heard the story. She hadn't met anyone like that. That really inspired me to be more open about my own mental health issues. I think creating that sense of belonging and also, creating that sense of this person has succeeded, not just despite their neurodiversion versions but in some ways, because of their neurodiversion, that can be so inspiring to people.

HELEN:  Completely and this part of why I do what I do because I think we need to have a neurodiversity conversation to many people. Why? Because they feel being stigmatized or they don't know they're neurodivergent and when your voice is silenced, people just see the challenges and you may experience that yourselves but the more we talk up, the more that we own who we are and start connect with each other and the more you realized that A, you're not the only one and B, that when you come together to talk about the positive aspects and the strategies that you can utilize to support more challenging parts and bring your ideas together, the more you change things for yourselves and for the world around you.

You know, I start to do it and putting neurodiversity network at the company I work for, so we now actively talk about neurodiversity in the workplace, everywhere from our CEO and head of HR down to our graduate associates and I get so many people coming to me and going, "Oh, my God. I'm dyslexic. It's just amazing to see us having an open conversation."

I had somebody come to me last week and excitedly tell me she has OCD. My mom is bipolar as well and we had conversations where it just changes the whole light of it and there are tough times. We can't ignore the tough times but there are so many other things that are just amazing that we can embrace and tap into by allowing ourselves to be us without the social obstacles that can prevent us from bringing to the world around us.

JESSICA:  The social obstacles like you're not supposed to talk about these things?

HELEN:  Social obstacles... Where do I start? There are a lot. No, sorry, Jessica, it's not that.

JESSICA:  That's the cue that I get to learn something.

HELEN:  Yeah but if we think about it, when you equip people into jobs, it's quite often an interview. That's a test of your social skills. If somebody comes into the office that end up [inaudible], instantly you then assume that they're not trustworthy. If you think about how we conduct business in our day-to-day, a lot of it is quick conversation, quick meetings, we go for team lunches which is social and so, it's how we go about the day-to-day, which has a lot expectations.

For instance, for dyslexics, reading and writing, that is a big part of our job but if we started saying to people, "Actually, it isn't about writing long essays. We can have text-to-speech apps," things stop changing and when I talk about the social obstacles, I think it's the society around us and the expectations of how things should be done is more what I'm referring to.

JESSICA:  Thank you.

AVDI:  I have a bit of a follow up to that. There is a conversation in the industry now about paying more attention, like in interviews particularly -- interviewing candidates -- not just looking at the technical skills, not just looking at that they know the right buzz words and things like that but also paying attention to their EQ, their emotional intelligence and that kind of thing and because we can sort of recognize that, the people and their relationships are the thing that actually makes the team succeed. How do we do that? How do we put more focus on that without accidentally excluding neurodivergent people because they may relate differently or whatnot?

HELEN:  It comes out to what do we mean by EQ and in terms of assessing people from that. Quite often, I find that if you could have an open question and dialogue in an interview where somebody comes forward and says, "Actually, I’m autistic," and you have a conversation that says, "Okay, so what strategies work for you in the workplace? How do you best work?" and a great example that I had is that one of the contributors on MeDecoded talked about she went to a new job with an investment bank, they took time to understand who she was as an individual and I think that when we structure interviews to think about different people's needs and create a safe space in which somebody can say, "I am autistic and this is what works best for me," and you encourage that two-way dialogue without fear of being judged or stigmatized, that changes the conversation. There are ways in which you can do that. Because if you send to somebody who's to say about, you can share some of the questions that you want to discuss in interview ahead of time, so our last [inaudible] for what you want to talk about, you will be much more successful in having that conversation as supposed to just trying to surprise them on the fly, which to me shows the lack of the EQ on the interviewer's part, thinking that everybody is sociable and will respond that way.

JESSICA:  That kind of self-awareness of this is what works for me, this is how I interact with people and this is what I'm really good at and this is what is expensive for me in processing, that's what I want in a coworker. I want to be able to talk openly about how can we collaborate well together. That is a kind EQ.

HELEN:  Yeah and that's why I say different people have different definitions for EQ and what it is and I do think that's where you can talk about who you are and have an open dialogue with your team members about how to work successfully and collaborate and it may not be about I’m always going to understand you but being brave enough to go [inaudible] in these situations, I'm probably not going to be the most collaborative or considerate of your needs and your points of view.

JESSICA:  You ask people if they have a guide, like a manual?

HELEN:  I think everyone should come with a how-to guide.

JESSICA:  Is that what MeDecoded is about?

HELEN:  There were parts of that. Kind of Dummies 101 for Helen Needham. I think everybody should do, it's... You can tell I'm getting more excited about this because I think the world would be so different if everybody, just as you start working, creates a how-to guide. If we take a guess work out of team work, it would be amazing. You can put it on your employee network and you go, "Here's my 10 rules for working with me."

At MeDecoded, you'll actually find my 10 rules in working with me and that's a series that I've had with other people trying to do and what you realize is that the more you do this, the more that you start to share it with each other, the more that it facilitates these types of conversations and actually, a workplace adjustment buzzword is one of the things that is quite often utilized for people who are neurodivergent in the workplace but for me, I don't want it just to be people who are neurodivergent because that's the whole stigma thing. You came with a special. Everybody needs help. Everybody has a different way of working. Everybody has things that works for them or doesn't so if we start writing that down, kind of a help guide, amazing.

CORALINE:  Actually, where I work at Stitch Fix, we do that for new managers. When our new manager is hired, actually one of their take-home assignments for the interview process is actually doing a small side deck about their strengths and weaknesses and their preferences for interpersonal communication. I think it'd be a great idea to brought that to everybody. I love that idea.

JAMEY:  I love it too. I actually do a physical guide for me, not for how to work with me, which is I'm like, "I want to bring this in other areas of my life," but I have a very intense anxiety and I actually do have a physical paper guide that's like, "If I'm having a panic attack --" it's like if you've never been around me and I'm having a panic attack, it could be very scary. I've had people be like, "I'll call an ambulance for you because you're obviously having a medical emergency right now," and so, I literally have like, "These are the things you should not do because they'll make it worse. These are the things that you could do that will not make it worse." I find that really helpful especially in a state where I can't communicate those things. If I only ever thought about that like this is a specific problem I have that I want to educate people about, but I love the idea that this is just what I do in my life that I want to educate people about.

AVDI:  Helen, would you mind sharing just a few points from your guide to give us some examples?

JAMEY:  Please.

HELEN:  One of the things is around being in the moment. If somebody is going to bring a new idea to me, there are some signs to look out for. If I got a deadline the next day, that's not the moment because I'm likely to react quite negatively. What I tend to suggest to people is if it's slightly left out, buy me a coffee and gently break it to me in a coffee and then follow up with further details.

If it's completely kind of new, give me a pre-warning and pre-book at time slots and probably bring me some chocolates, just to change the rules of the meeting. Quite often, if I don't want to be in a workplace, then we need to go outside of the office, if it is considering something new because then, we changed your environment. So picking your moments, choosing the environments are the key things and just learning to judge my anxiety levels because if I'm highly anxious and I do have anxiety quite a lot and it cycles, then come to me in an anxious moment. Probably wait a day when I'm more under control. That's one.

I think the other one is also, allowing me to go through what I called the hurricane process. It's that when I'm in a new situation or I put a new challenge, what I do is I go into fact finding modes and if somebody is asking me to structure and rationalize things and articulate about once in time, I'm not going to be able to. I almost need to go through my hurricane and that could last for week where I just focus on one piece. My husband knows. He calls it the Helen moments because it's almost I could go down a rabbit hole and I forget about the fact that I have kids, that I need to eat, that I need to sleep because I'm so focus and trying to make sense of the chaos. Because if I got something that is unstructured or unsolved, then I have this very strong urge to bring structure to it and until I got that structure, I'm going to be very difficult to have a conversation with and I'm probably going to be more snappy so just give me a wide berth. It's probably one of the other rules/guides.

JAMEY:  That's incredibly self-aware. I wish everyone could be as self-aware of what they need as you are.

HELEN:  Thank you. As I said, the alternative wasn't really an option for me because knowing when to give people your rules is also another skill I've had to learn. What I found with one of my previous team members was that I stood there on Day 1. Within half an hour of meeting them, I was like, "I’m autistic and here are some of my rules," and you can just see them kind of going, "I don't know what to do with this."

There is a lot of having to test and re-calibrate over the years because the fallout for when it goes wrong has been so severe that actually, you become forced. You become self-aware but yeah, I would love to see more people become self-aware and engaging in conversations like this because I think when we start treating people like people, neurodivergent and non-neurodivergent or neurotypicals, we start to realize that everybody like something different. We all struggle with things that we don't quite get. I know there's a lot of people that may struggle with some components. When we start feeling comfortable enough to talk about what we're struggling with, what we need to be successful, I think that really helps us all, so I love to see that.

JAMEY:  I'd like ask more about MeDecoded. We kind of started to get into it but I love to hear about a little bit, what you're trying to accomplish with it and how have you decided to start it.

HELEN:  MeDecoded is quite simply. It's a place where anybody could write a blog and post. It's subject to me reviewing it because at some times, some of the things people want to post up might not be quite relevant or appropriate. I had to date, something about 30 different contributors who are neurodivergent: dyslexic, dyspraxic, hypolexic and bipolar, autistic, have ADHD, where they share their stories or experiences or insights that are relevant to neurodiversity: challenges like based on the workplace, having a [inaudible], their personal experience of life before and after diagnosis and the diagnosis process.

I had somebody who wrote about the challenges of open-plan offices and why that didn’t allow them to be the most productive place. The whole mandates is that I want to bring together a community of neurodivergent people and allies who are given a glimpse to what it is like to be neurodivergent, the things we struggled with, the things that we feel that we're really good at, the changes that we want to see in the world, how better to work with us and to champion companies and organizations that are helping to make this possible, so that we can collectively raise awareness about neurodiversity and get people to understand some of the things that we potentially have had an opportunity to share with the world.

What's being quite interesting and unexpected is the number of people who have come across MeDecoded and then found the strength to share their own story and make sense of their diagnosis. I've had two or three people who went through the diagnosis process and wrote about their experience from MeDecoded which then gave them the courage to open up to their families. That's in essence what it is and I'm always looking for new people to write stories, to share their experiences, to add to the collective knowledge that we have on the site.

CORALINE:  At the end of every episode, we take a moment to reflect on the conversation that we have and maybe, how I think that really rests with us or the things that we want to think about or act on as a result of the conversation. Who would like to go first?

JAMEY:  I could go. I'm really, really excited about this 'how-to guide to work with me' idea. Rarely is my reflection such a clear action. I'm going to go back to my team and talk about how we can work on this on our team. I had mentioned this before we started recording but I had a work off site last week that was kind of difficult. My anxiety was very high during it because everyone at my company is really great. The way that it was planned just triggered my anxiety in a lot of ways like we didn't have enough breaks, we weren't eating food at regular intervals and it was triggering my anxiety.

They didn't give us the schedule until right before and I was like, "I'm going on this thing and I don't know what's going to happen," and then it made me very anxious for things that I think didn't affect other people the way that it did for me and so, when we were talking about this idea of working with each, especially in a remote company which we normally are, I think there's huge value in being able to say like, "These are the things that I need to prioritize," and be able to compare that like, "These are the things that someone else needs to prioritize," and use it as a way to really connect with people in a way that safe and then because of that, probably in a way that's deeper. I'm really excited about that idea. Thank you.

CORALINE:  I’m going to skip reflection because Jamey said everything I wanted to say.

JAMEY:  No!

CORALINE:  That's my takeaway too. I'm not going to say me too.

JESSICA:  That was like, "I'm going to take that away but I'm not going to have to reflect on it because someone else will."

JAMEY:  That's actually a little bit why I was like, "I'll go first."

CORALINE:  Put that in your guide.

JESSICA:  My reflection is that because Helen doesn't have this natural instinct for social interactions that we expect people to have, as she instead makes a deliberate of process out of decoding people and figuring out consciously how to interact with each person individually, this turns out to be more powerful than the instinct in a lot of ways. Because when you're taking deliberate actions instead of instinctive, then you can deliberately learn and improve. It's much harder to grow your instincts to be more accurate than to grow conscious deliberation. Sometimes when the default option isn't an option, we find a better option.

AVDI:  The one thing that I've jotted down was it's not about changing who you are. It's about working with the world while you still are who you are.

JANELLE:  I think it's really easy for me to relate to this experience of feeling different, feeling rejected by the world and having to figure out my own anger, my own center of gravity and feeling proud and excited about being me. The experience of hurricane, of being so obsessed with trying to figure something out, figure out a problem. It's like the story of my life.

The challenges that come with, in my case the obsession with the research problem and being excited by the progress of continually increasing clarity that never really ends, being obsessed with a hurricane such that it becomes harder and harder to engage with the world the more different I become through that process. At the same time, I look at myself and the things I've been able to discover and do and being able to take in that hurricane, being able to process the hurricane to see those connections, I feel like I have a similar gift that you do with being able to taking in all these inputs and find the connections and all the things in a capacity that the vast majority of humans can't necessarily do. To see that as a gift in myself, to see what I bring to the table and to see myself as special, even though I'm different, people will orient around that. There's a huge role thing that we all have to go through in our lives to find our own special gifts, to find our own difference, to own our full selves and even if we feel initially rejected by the world, that doesn't mean that we have to reject ourselves.

your story of your own transformation through that, of owning your own special skills and talents, of owning your ability to take in a hurricane, I think is really, really beautiful and inspiring. Anyone else out that's just struggling with that challenge of orienting around themselves in their own special gifts -- we all have unique special gifts -- I see you as an inspiration to all those people, so thank you for sharing your story.

HELEN:  I think it's probably one last thing that I want to share that is probably is easy enough for me now that my social bridge is not in the room but it's also about the importance of support and understand. You know, I just gone through 90 minutes with my husband sat next to me and he has made it possible for me to find the courage to be me and he's there behind me as I step into what can be a close-scary situation and if I think to the beginning of the podcast and the person that was afraid to open my mouth and where I am now, that wouldn't have happen without his support and backing.

I think of all the scale, it's when we support each other and understand each other for who they are, he embraces me not despite of who I am but because of who I am and really he's behind me to support me and being the very best of me that I can and to hold me up without wanting to be recognized for it. I think for me, the biggest takeaway from today and what's being made possible is that he is my silent hero and I think it will be more silent heroes holding each other up and supporting each other up. Through our moments where we may be bring our best self.

JANELLE:  That's so beautiful.

JAMEY:  Thank you so much for sharing everything that you've shared with us today.

HELEN:  My pleasure. I'm happy to be able to hopefully start a few more neurodiversity conversation amongst your listeners and I look forward to seeing what this sparks next and it's just great to have an opportunity to have conversations like this because I think with more conversations like this, we really can change the world.

JESSICA:  Speaking or conversations like this, if you would donate to our Patreon at any amount at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode, then you'll get an invitation to our Slack channel and the Greater Than Code Slack channel is pretty low value but it's very high quality conversation. We talk about things in tech and things outside of tech with a lot of respect and thoughtfulness and Helen, you will get an invitation as a guest and if you like to join us there, that would be wonderful and we can continue this conversation about neurodiversity.