Neurodivergent Teams with Nathan Whitbread
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Welcome to Through the Line, the Agency Squared podcast with me, Andy Bargeri. In today's episode, I'm talking with Nathan Whipbread, also known as the Neurodivergent Coach. Nathan joins me to explore the important topic of diversity with a particular focus on neurodiversity.

What does it mean to build a team with people that think differently, that tackle and overcome challenges in a different way? Nathan explores some of the topics to consider around recruitment, retention, making reasonable adjustments, but also embedding diversity or neurodiversity into the way we're thinking.

and considering the opportunities that arise from a neurodivergent approach, like greater innovation, doing things differently. I hope you enjoy the show.

Nathan, good morning. How are you doing today, sir? Really well, thanks, Andy. Thanks so much for inviting me to come and join you. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. I have been looking forward to it as well. And I've got to know you a bit because we're both members of DRIVE, the networking organisation. And your specialist subject is an area that I don't think too many people are really talking about, which is

working with neuro neurodiversity or understanding how to work with that within the workplace yeah i mean there is quite a lot of conversation going on i'd say but it's kind of i think it sits in very specific areas if that makes sense and i don't think it's yeah so i think you're right you're right in the edi community it's kind of rife but then it's kind of broader than that it's not always being talked about as much okay and i think there's something there about it

quite often being seen as a problem to be solved instead of an opportunity to be embraced, shall we say. Yeah, I think you're right there. A problem to be solved, definitely. So tell me a bit about how you got to developing this expertise. What's your background that led you to being an expert in this space? Well, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say I was...

An expert's a grand word. I'd say I was, I guess, a lifelong learner on it because every time I meet someone new, it kind of throws me a bit and that's great because it really challenges me to think about what I'm doing with it. But in terms of my own personal journey, I had a pretty normal upbringing. I went to a normal school and did all the normal things and

completely failed my A-levels. And then when I did a foundation year that got me into university. And there was something going on there all the way through about you're kind of smart in one sense, but you really do completely fail and flop out at certain points in your life. And what's going on?

And that all came to a head actually about the age of 35 when I decided to retrain. So I'd been involved in sort of business development and pre-sales activity for various organizations. And when we moved to Cambridge, actually, where we're based now, I got a job in a quite interesting startup and got really interested in the marketing side of things. I thought, you know what, I'll just go off to the CIM and do some qualifications. It'll all be fine.

They then talked to me about, well, if you're going to do that, you need to do these closed book kind of essay exams. And I thought, I've spent my whole life avoiding this stuff. So I talked to the person that knows me far better than I know myself, which is my wonderful wife, Sophie. And she said, well, do you do realize you do think a bit differently? Maybe you should actually go and get this investigated. Like I had mentioned to you a few years before several times. So I went off and got a diagnosis and, and,

a really interesting thing happened the guy did all the tests on me and he said yeah basically you're not thick but there is clearly a disparity between the person who talks to me now and the person I see written down a huge disparity and that's kind of called the spiky profile so that was kind of the beginning of my journey in terms of working out about dyslexia and that's that's kind of the diagnosis I've got and I've also got traits of other things and then from there I sort of

At that point, that started the journey of getting support. And to cut a long story short, the people that kind of provided that support asked me if I'd like to come and work for them. It was very fortunate because I'd just finished a contract, decided actually that would be an interesting thing to do. And that took me on a journey, really, of going from doing what was actually technology training through to much more coaching. And the reason for that, Andy, is that I realized that this is all about processes.

This is all about people's processes and tools are useful, but processes are gold dust. And if you hold, because your processes are your own, you can slot in the important things as they come and go because technology changes, but we need to own our own processes and treat it like a project. And that way we can be, I think we can be our most effective selves at work.

Got you. Okay. So really understand by processes, do you mean understanding the way in which you do things and how you get things done basically? So you had this diagnosis, quite a late diagnosis, would you say of dyslexia and other things? And that's kind of shaped your career direction since then. And I guess dyslexia fits within that bracket of neurodivergence, doesn't it? Yes. The idea that...

We do things differently and that's okay. You know, we don't all have to be the same and having that diversity of thinking and thought can be quite powerful when you're building a team. So is neurodiversity all about dyslexia or are there other things that sit within that?

Yes, it's probably worth picking up some of the terminology, first of all. So when we talk about neurodiversity, we mean that has got its roots in autism. So there's a woman called Judy Singer, an Australian academic who sort of coined the phrase, and she was talking about autism particularly. Since then, the phrase has sort of broadened out to now really mean everybody. So we all think differently, yeah, to a certain or lesser extent based on who we are.

Our intersectionality, which just basically means all the components that make up who we are, you know, gender, race, social economic background, education, work experience, all that sort of thing kind of comes into it. Now within neurodiversity, you've then got neurodivergent traits or neurodivergent diagnosis. And that's people that would have a diagnosis or have traits of a diagnosis. Right.

And all the difference is that one is actually diagnosed by someone who is qualified to diagnose. Another person may have a screening or have noticed in themselves that there's things going on that kind of fit with that. And that's okay. But that's what we would describe as neurodivergent traits or neurodivergent thinking. Now, if you want to talk about a group of people who are –

neurodivergent you would then use the term neurodiverse so you'd say a neurodiverse team or as whereas neurodivergency individual just sort of get and i know the language is really tricky because it does move a lot so within that neurodivergent umbrella you've got things like dyspraxia dyslexia adhd the autistic spectrum um dyscalculia there's lots of different stuff yeah and some of that stuff is from birth so i we've had it our whole lives

Other stuff is acquired. So we've got migraine, PTSD. Actually, I mean, there's an argument, even the process of going through the menopause potentially can influence your thinking. So that potentially could put you in that neurodivergent capacity. But be aware that there's lots of things can influence this. And quite often, the things that are acquired can look very much like the things that have been lifelong. So another one is FASD, which is basically...

where a parent has been drinking during the process of having a baby, and that can impact certain things about thinking styles as well as other presentations. So it's quite broad. It covers an awful lot of bases then, as you say, it's quite broad. Do you think that, as our understanding around...

what neurodivergences is growing that we're picking up more of these traits and people are recognizing different things or do you think um so in other words it looks like there's a lot more going on what has always been this way we just haven't realized there's just so much diversity in the way people think and behave and act

I mean, my gut feel, and this is not scientifically correct, but I think my gut feel is that it's always been there. I think one of the key components of why it's not always been obvious is because of what I would use the term of masking, i.e. people not being themselves and having, particularly around the autistic spectrum, having learnt behaviours to mask social situations and stuff like that and how to behave.

So we learn to cope, especially if we've been in the workplace for a period of time. We learn the social rules, but we treat them like a set of rules as opposed to necessarily something that's a bit more interactive and that we're comfortable with. So I would argue this has been in our population for a while. I would also say that lockdown particularly has been almost like a flushing out point because so much changed so quickly that

that that can be, for people that have neurodivergent traits, quite often they will have what's called coping strategies or this project of doing life. That was turned on its head pretty much overnight and things were different. So that's one flush point. But I think a lot of people coped with that and they kind of went into, this is an emergency, we're just going to deal with life.

Then as we've come back to work, it's now changed again. And as the pressures come off, suddenly the penny's dropping about actually things are different. Things that were okay are no longer okay. And that starts to ask the questions. That's interesting. So let's bring this into thinking about the workplace then because...

You know, the industry that I'm in is marketing, as you know, and marketing as a sector has a very broad base of appeal to lots of different people. So typically, most of marketing, I think, appeals to people

a variety of different people. So when we're building effective teams, whether it's an in-house marketing team or whether it's in an agency environment, we do tend to want to have diversity and different ways of approaching things. But that doesn't actually always happen in reality. And it's easy enough to find, you know, plenty of agencies that are entirely staffed by white women or white men, for example. And then we're talking about

obviously we're talking about neurodiversity here rather than other aspects of diversity, but why is it important then that we, we want to think about these different traits, these different types of people when we're building teams? Well, I think if you took it purely from a commercial point of view, I think this is about innovation actually, because from the, the, the large number of people I've worked with and, and my understanding of the area is,

People who have neurodivergent traits think differently. It's that idea when you paint a picture, someone will paint a picture and look at it. And if we're all used to looking at it and standing and looking at it from the front, we'll all just see the front of it. But the neurodivergent traits are likely to make you want to wander around it and look at it from the underside and the backside and go, well, actually, what's that picture all about? And what's the story it's telling? And that's the essence of what these traits are really about, I think, for lots of people. They approach life differently.

That has huge benefits, especially when you're talking about the creative industries, because it means you're not just doing what everyone else is doing. And I think that's so important in a marketing environment as well, is to find that innovative way of...

connecting with an audience. And if you can look at that challenge from a different perspective, it might enable you to find a different solution. And we've talked in the past on the show about the need for marketeers to find influences from outside of their immediate space. You know, go out of the workplace, go to a museum, go to a library, go and see a show,

just go and watch people in Leicester Square, for example, and get some inspiration from that. And I guess what you're saying there is someone that's neurodivergent would do that just as a, that's the normal way of doing things for them. Absolutely. And the other thing to not never underrate is the fact they'll have a network.

of individuals that they're connected to. So actually you get an amplification of that thinking potentially. As long as that person feels confident, safe and respected within their environment, they'll be able to operate like that.

But what you can't do is just expect someone to come in to an environment that isn't what we would describe as neuro-inclusive. It doesn't allow them to operate at their most effective and just perform like that. You've got to work it out in terms of what they need to be their most effective. And that's around what you're asking them to do, looking at the role, looking at the processes you've got within your organization.

And working out what the essential bits are and what are the bits that are actually negotiable. And that's where the team play comes in. That's really important. So I guess where you'll get to with that then is, is we're talking about making adjustments that enable people that have different traits to work within the team environment and, and to, for them to perform at their best. Yeah.

Is that right? Yeah. What sort of, what would that look like? You know, how, how do you make an environment suitable for somebody that is, I don't know, let's just choose dyslexia for ease. But of course there are lots of other things. I wouldn't, I wouldn't start with a label. I'd start with a person. I know that's not easy when you're talking about someone hypothetically, but, and the reason why I say that is because every,

so with these neurodivergent conditions co-occurrence is the rule rather than the exception so that means if you've got something you like to say and that's because of the way it's diagnosed and the fact we're all these wonderfully complex people and some scientists have looked at some bits of it or some medical but actually you see this kind of this this broader kind of co-occurrence going on so actually we deal with individuals yeah

And I think it always starts with asking them what's helpful for them. And a lot of the time, for example, with dyslexic traits, and I can talk from my own personal experience, structuring clarity is really helpful. So if we're having a meeting, as we've done today, knowing why we're here, what's expected, and what I need to bring, I know why I'm here, what I'm doing, and how I can actually be useful. Whereas if I don't know that, I feel lost and sometimes thinking I'm a spare part

Should I even be present? And then you don't get the value you need. And I just feel disenfranchised. So, which I know is really simple, but,

but those sorts of interactions make a huge difference. And I would argue that sort of stuff is often quite useful across our organizations. I was just thinking that in terms of running an effective meeting, you know, an agenda where everyone knows what they're there for is quite important, whatever your background is, you know? Yeah. But it doesn't always happen, does it? Yeah. It doesn't always happen. That's for sure. Yeah.

And there's good reasons why, but it's kind of the stopping and thinking and going, well, actually, what do I need to make this work? Just thinking about the actual, I mean, things like, you know, expense processes, stuff like that, actually, how do they work? Because processes are often put in place for really good reasons. I think that's valid. But we have to keep reviewing the why. Why are we doing that? Does it still serve the purpose? And ultimately, does it solve the problem that we put it in place to solve? Yeah.

And it's that kind of idea of a project. We've got to continuously improve and evolve. And that kind of answer that says that's the way things have always been done around here just doesn't wash. Because unless the way things are done around here helps the organization be more effective and helps the individuals that are in it be more effective, then that's not a good thing, I'd argue.

Yeah, I agree. I think that that's the way things are done around here is a bit of an outdated concept, isn't it? If you look at most organizations these days, they're always looking for ways to improve anyway. Otherwise, if you don't improve, you get left behind, don't you? So that makes sense. And obviously that innovation, that driving up innovation is a really key aspect.

a motivator for an organization to want to build a diverse team. What are the advantages? What else has brought to the team by having different points of view? Well, I think it's that when you get to the creative piece as well, it's actually just working things out differently and thinking about your creative process as well in terms of how that's going to work. That can be quite different because you

There's that adage, isn't it? If we just do what everyone else does, we'll just end up with the same thing and we won't be able to stand out. I mean, I'm thinking specifically about the creative and marketing industries. So having those individuals come together, you don't just get the benefit of their individual inputs, but you get the benefit of their collaboration, that we piece, and that could go anywhere, which is hugely powerful, I think, from what I've seen.

Let's assume then that we're happy. We've built the case here. We want a neurodivergent team. We want to address this within our organization. How do we go about attracting, hiring, and retaining that kind of talent? Well, the first thing I'd say is you have to be explicit, I think, that it's okay to apply from different backgrounds. I think that's really, really important because one of the things that I've noticed is with

lots of individuals in new adventurates that don't tend to have nice straight career paths. They tend to be very wiggly for all sorts of reasons, especially if they're working this stuff out in themselves. But making it explicit that it's okay to not be okay at any point during the recruitment process is probably quite a key piece in terms of not creating that idea of what your organization is that isn't true and

and set expectations wrongly, if that makes sense. It does make sense. Yeah. And I was just thinking back about that. Did you say wiggly or squiggly? I think you said squiggly career path. Squiggly or wiggly. It's the way it works for me, to be honest. But if from a recruiter's perspective, you're looking at a candidate and they have quite a squiggly, all over the place background, that's probably setting off some alarm bells, isn't it? Rather than going, oh, now here's an interesting opportunity. It's probably more like, whoa, here's a challenging prospect.

You know, so that's something just to bear in mind, I think, is, you know, you might be looking at candidates and it's causing more concern than it is appealing by looking at that sort of background. Yeah. So there is risk here. And I think that risk has to be, you have to sort that out with partnership in terms of partnering with the individual you choose to hire. But there's also something as well about whether you're looking at their track record on paper or whether you're able to do something that looks more like,

a practical sort of, not test, but demonstration of what they can do. Yes. Okay. Because that's going to, I think,

Especially when you're talking about agencies, ultimately your agency will have its uniqueness to it. So understanding what you need and how you are wanting to operate and then putting that into a task format can be really helpful because then you get a feel for how that person's going to work. Now, I know that's a much bigger investment in terms of the recruitment process, but from what I've seen in my own experiences, that's not an unwise investment if we can get the right people involved.

Because if we get hiring right and we get the right people that really support where we want to go, that can pay back many times over because they'll, especially when we come down the recruitment process in terms of making adjustments to the organisation if necessary to help not only that person fit in, but also help the rest of the organisation be more effective. I suspect, and the evidence suggests, you'll have much more sticky people in terms of they will stay with you and they will buy into the culture and

and they will buy into the ultimate purpose of the organization. Now, I know that is a big thing, and that's quite daunting for some people to think about, but it really depends on do you want...

Do you want the kind of, you know, the hire and go and move on? Or do you want people to stay and invest and be part of what you're doing and grow it with you for the longer term? That's a big challenge in marketing because marketeers, the tenure tends to be a couple of years, then they move on to find a new challenge, which has all sorts of difficult ramifications for the industry. But for me,

agencies or marketing teams, you know, I think ultimately what you're looking for is someone to stick around, you know, five, 10 years is much better than someone that bounces around every two years. And I think that that kind of squiggly career path paints a picture of someone that's not going to be around for a very long time. So maybe when, in terms of that,

recruitment process what we're really looking at here is ditching the old-fashioned cv covering letter interview and just setting a challenge you know we're looking for someone that can solve this puzzle we're looking for someone to create an advert to sell stripy shirts i'm just referencing they like bletchley i mean i read this most amazing bit on bletchley park just thinking about and when they did the recruitment there they had all these people get into a room and they said right do this test but there was a ticker tape going the whole time in morse code saying

if you understand this coming, you can have the job. Really? Oh yeah. And the guy just got up and got it and walked in, got the job and they just went, right, you can all go the rest of you. That's incredible. I haven't heard that story. Yeah. There must be a marketing equivalent of that somewhere. Yeah. But it's just that kind of idea. I mean, not that it's a trap, but it's about saying, actually, we want you to come and be present. Yes. And also, you know, if you get the, I mean, I'm just sort of thinking about it more broadly. If you get this right, especially in your sphere, um,

What you're also doing is help people create a portfolio. Yeah. Because actually if they solve it, but they don't make the cut for what you want, they've created another piece of material that's useful for them to take to the next place and say, look what I did. Yeah, that's a nice idea. And it was great. So you're adding value. And it's just this whole idea, because I mean, I don't know about you, but the hiring process can quite often be a huge amount of investment that goes nowhere apart from that one or two potential hires. But actually, could this actually be a process that enriches people as well on their journey?

That requires a bit of a mindset change, I think, for most people hiring talent. We're enabling them to create a piece of work or something here they can use to build their portfolio almost as they go along, while at the same time trying to enable different people to apply and be successful in joining a team. I'm not saying it's easy, Andy, but I do think the benefits, like everything in life, the things that we care about investing well,

pay dividends yeah yeah and there's lots of you know there's huge amounts of examples of that isn't there in terms of our lives we you know we can go for the quick and easy and i think we've all looked back and gone yeah that was quick and easy but an half pain for the long term

You know, I'm just thinking as well in terms of trying to find that talent. You know, you can't just advertise a marketing role autistic wanted. You know, you need to create opportunities for people to identify. And I would encourage you not to because I don't think that's helpful. What's much more helpful is saying that we're inclusive, but we'd really like you to be able to do X, Y, and Z. But there are specialist recruiters out there. So there's a group called NeuroPool, for example, who specialize in neurodivergent, neurodiversity recruitment.

And I think some of the big players are getting involved because one of the other problems with recruitment particularly has been psychometric testing, because although it's become sort of in some industries like the gold standard for wanting people to do that.

I think it disproportionately negatively impacts people that think differently sometimes because the psychometrics are based around more neurotypical thinking styles. You can obviously also learn how to pass them potentially, and certainly that was my experience. So I think just...

it comes back to the, why are we doing it? Are we doing it because actually it gives us some data that helps us choose people that were going to be much more suitable working organizations, or is it, are we just doing it because everyone else is doing it? And that's the question we have to keep asking ourselves, which I know is a tricky question.

especially when we're in that kind of keeping up with the Joneses kind of mentality in our industry. Well, I mean, you keep mentioning the data suggests that, you know, these divergent teams, diverse teams, actually there's a significant benefit to the business. So I think if you're looking for a data-led decision, then look for that data. Look for evidence of where there's value in following this kind of process. And I'm sure there are brands. Maybe you can say which sort of brands do you see that have got their –

a house in order when it comes to this uh recruitment in this sector or recruitment and retention and i suppose looking at not sure anyone's got it fully sorted i'd say because but they're people making good steps in the right direction so microsoft have done quite a lot of work around the whole especially the onboarding piece so they've got some really good videos on their website around things to consider more broadly around diversity so stuff like

actually how to think about how to make that interview process work well. You've also seen other brands like GCHQ and I think EY are doing actively recruiting for certain traits actually, which I'm kind of 50-50 on because I think it's more important to recruit for the attributes you want than a label because you

as we've talked about already, neurodivergent traits present differently in different people. So those labels aren't necessarily helpful. They're lenses to look through, not labels to be worn because what you're looking for is the complete package of what the person is.

um so yeah so i think there's there's a there's a trickiness in in navigating it but there are huge steps being made forward a lot of it's also dependent on the managers when you get to the actual coalface because again i think we've all been through recruitment cycles where it's been absolutely brilliant going through assessment center everything's absolutely fantastic but then when you actually get to the role

you find out that the relationship doesn't quite work because of the expectations. And that's not always the manager's fault, but it's just the way it's been set up because they maybe haven't been involved early enough in the recruitment process. So it's thinking about where that person's going to end up. Where's that person actually going to? Misalignment between the recruitment process and the reality of the role actually is, you know, you can set the process up for recruitment to really match a diverse audience. But at the end of the day, that person's going to be doing a role that's the same as everybody else in that space.

Absolutely, absolutely. I think that's back to those kind of reasonable adjustments. How do we make this role actually suit people that have different ways of looking at the same puzzle? Absolutely. And on that note, when you look at these kind of idea of reasonable adjustments, there's two broad ways of looking at it. You've got this kind of idea of the medical model, which is where you're fixing the person. I will give you stuff, Andy. We'll train you. We'll...

coach you and you'll somehow morphosize and be much more what we want you to be. And then you've kind of got the, the kind of social idea that actually saying, well, actually maybe it's the structure. Maybe it's the culture that kind of actually disables you. And that's where we think about processes, how things are done, um,

We'd already talked there about how we run meetings. How do we do stuff within our organisation so it doesn't disable people? And thinking about removing the stuff we don't need to do and doing more of the stuff that we really do need to do. Because for me, this all really builds this idea that we need to amplify strengths and help people manage the things they find tricky. Yeah, and that's the best way to get the best out of anybody is let them play to their strengths and accommodate where there are weaknesses. And we all have weaknesses. And

you know, shape that craft, that job or that opportunity accordingly. It's quite a smart way of looking at it, isn't it? It's interesting what you were saying there about companies that have kind of got this switched on a bit was, I think it's a Microsoft, uh,

GCHQ, which is the kind of UK spy agency or monitoring listening agency. And the other one was EY, which is a large kind of management and accountancy. There are small organisations that are doing some... So like in Cambridge, I've been working with a housing association that are making huge positive steps. I think the key thing is the working it out though. Yeah. Because...

It's not cookie cutter in many ways. Yes, there are some overall kind of useful guidelines to think about, but we need to have conversations and work out within our organization. Yeah. Because this idea that we just kind of sort of bring something in and it somehow sorts everything out, I think is not helpful a lot of the time. We have to think about how it's going to work in our context because we're the experts in our own organizations, right?

So we need to work out how do we bring this stuff in and make it work in our organization so that we own it and we're not just thinking about it as another sort of initiative or another one. We've been through that, and that's not useful. This stuff has to be embedded into the way we think about what we're doing. And that actually brings me on to something else that I've been working on with a friend of mine, Kelly Dubry, and that's around actually –

When we think about the whole inclusion piece, how do we make sure as organizations that we're not just doing the bare minimum, but actually we're using it as a competitive advantage? How do you do that? How do you turn it into... So obviously we've talked about enabling innovation and creativity earlier on. That can in itself create competitive advantage. Is that what you're talking about here or are there other elements? Well, it's that as well, but it's also the attraction of talent. So...

If we're going to turn it to a competitive advantage, it's actually making sure we're really clear about what we're doing and why we're doing it, having the stories to tell, which I guess is all about the marketing piece. What are the stories we're able to tell about our organisation, our relationship with our clients?

that reflect that inclusion and not in a pat way, but in a way that says actually, and we were able to provide this because of this, because these people can do this, because we can collaborate like this, because we've thought about this, this is our advantage. And then it becomes the very tool to kind of,

get our organisations out there and help people understand why we're great places to work with. And I think a lot of what you're saying always makes me think back to, you know, companies have got used to the idea of,

making adjustments, making accommodations for different things, you know, let's typically perhaps more physical attributes, you know, making a premises accessible, for example, this is no different, but it's just looking at it rather than it being a physical challenge. It's something else, isn't it? It's a, a mind, a mental health challenge, isn't it? Or is it with the wrong terminology? Isn't it actually Nathan, to be fair? Yeah, I guess, yeah,

There is definitely some sort of mental things going on, but sometimes some physical things going on as well. I think the challenge is because it's not visible, if you're not aware, then those things can be construed as other things. So I was working with someone yesterday, you know, who was describing how she felt perceived as lazy, awkward, inattentive. And actually, when we looked at, when we started to do some work, you know, it's actually the laziness was about overwhelm.

The inattentiveness was about actually what we were talking about in meetings just there, the fact she just could not engage because it just wasn't clear why she was there, what her contribution was supposed to be. And the fact that she gets really angry actually when that's happening and doesn't know how to express that well, so just chooses to say nothing. Yeah.

but she's got one of those faces you're saying to me or actually everyone can tell I'm really angry I'm just not saying anything that's really tricky but how do you make that okay to actually just voice your concern and say you know imagine if we're having a meeting say Andy I'm really uncomfortable because I'm really not clear what I'm doing and it's really pitting me off you know and actually you to be able to say okay I recognise that maybe we need to stop here and come back you know whatever it might be but

but making that okay to have that dialogue and people not to feel, I can't talk to you because of the power dynamic or whatever's going on in the organization. I think that's just good management, isn't it as well to give people the ability to actually say, hang on a second, Nathan, um,

This podcast is going in a terrible direction. I think we should end. No, sorry, that's not what I mean. But no, good management enables people to communicate in that way, doesn't it? And if you see someone sat in a meeting room with their really bad resting bitch face, you know, and it's okay to recognize that they probably aren't comfortable in that environment, you know, perhaps they shouldn't be there at the next meeting or perhaps they get their bit done earlier and then they leave and then they crack on with their day and they feel like they've achieved something.

Yeah, and I think being proactive about that is just really, really important. And, you know, this is not rocket science. It's about asking people and having conversations with people. I think that's the key thing. Yeah, makes sense. Where should people go to if they want to find some data, some evidence that says this is the reason why you should be thinking about neurodivergence in your life?

your people policies is there is there someone that's done some excellent research in this area yeah so professor amanda kirby's written a brilliant book called neurodiversity at work with a guy called theo smith who's actually he's sort of a recruitment person but they're talking about all the stuff to consider and think about and also the data around there's a lot of data in there in terms around the opportunity which i think is really helpful yeah it's also just a really good starting point as you start to explore and think about it more

excellent another one for my ever-growing reading list of fantastic books people keep recommending to me yeah and i think there's a challenge there isn't there there is a challenge there i mean yeah the other thing as well is i'd say is we you know ultimately this is about people yeah yeah uh you know it's good to know this stuff it's really helpful but it's ultimately about people and we have to ask people what's useful and not be afraid of that

And not be afraid to notice either. You know, it might be like you were saying, Andy, I'm noticing you're not really very comfortable at the moment. What do we need to do to sort that out? Or is it nothing to do with us? But actually not being afraid to notice. You don't have to diagnose.

in terms of work you know sort of saying i can see you've got mental health problem whatever it might go don't diagnose just ask and just be genuinely interested in what's going on and working out what we need to do to move stuff forwards yeah and and actually in in the sector that i spend most of my time which is marketing it's generally all about people anyway whether we're trying to understand them so we can sell them more stuff or understand them so we can build a great team whatever it's that should come as kind of second nature for those that work in

in this kind of marketing design communication space. Well, my only observation would be about is from working in that, that with the health sector, a lot, I have noticed that people that spend all day caring for people are pretty, find it really hard to care for their own teams.

Is that right? Okay. Yeah. Because, and I don't know if that's about they're cared out. And obviously we all know that the health service is under huge pressures, but I think there's something there. And I just wonder if that's sometimes true in other industries as well. If we spend our whole life doing something outwards, we don't always do it inwards when we're looking at our own organizations. That's worth thinking about.

Thank you for coming on the show, Nathan. That's really interesting. I've learned some stuff. I've got a good book recommendation. You've made me think a little bit, which is always nice.

Where should people go to find out more about you if they want to get in touch and get your assistance on how to build this into their thinking? What's the best way to find you? Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn or you can, I've got, you know, come to the website, which is the neurodivergentcoach.co.uk. Yeah, and if you want to have a conversation, I'm really more than up for that because I think this is about working it out.

And sometimes a couple of conversations is what you need to get started. And it's a process, but don't feel you've got to get it all sorted day one. But any movement is a positive thing in this area, I think. I get a sense that you're on a bit of a mission here to make a difference, Nathan, as opposed to just setting up a business to make a load of money. You actually really want to improve life in this space. Yeah, I think, yeah, I do. Because I think coming back to that opportunity thing, I just think,

Wouldn't it be horrendous if we look back on our lives and said, actually, we missed all these opportunities because we just didn't think about this enough? It certainly would. Nathan, thanks so much for coming on the show. I've really enjoyed chatting with you. Perfect. Thanks, Andy.