At the tail end of last year, I received an unusual message on LinkedIn. Paraphrased, it said "Hi - we've been connected on here for a while. Would you like to be interviewed for a podcast about technical leadership?" I'm normally terrible at self-promotion and a friend had recently been giving me a hard time about this, so after checking it wasn't random spam we arranged a chat.
This started something unexpected. I met Katelin Lovell, and after a really nice conversation she asked me about my writing on neurodiversity. As anyone who has read this blog for a while knows, I am quite passionate about normalising discussion of mental health and (since diagnosis) neurodiversity. She suggested that how I have dealt with autism and ADHD in the context of leadership would be a good topic for an interview.
It has taken a while, but that interview was recently posted on LinkedIn and the video can be found on YouTube.
I'm quite pleased with the outcome. I think we cover some important topics and hopefully it will give some insight into something that people find very hard to explain. "My brain works differently" is a really difficult thing to say, and living outside the societally expected norm creates many challenges.
We chose this topic for this interview in the hope of helping people understand a bit more. That might be a manager trying to better understand someone who is neurodivergent (or just people in general), someone who is neurodivergent and curious about the experiences of others, or someone wondering whether they might be themselves.
As I said, I find myself in a position to make use of my own experiences and limited platform to speak on this subject. I am not a clinical expert, but I can talk about my own experiences and I think it is important to help educate and normalise something that affects a significant slice of the population.
While Katelin was great, doing this interview was difficult. To speak clearly about my experiences, I have to dissect my inner thoughts, and that is both raw and exposing. One of the big fears that keeps people quiet about mental health and neurodiversity is social stigma and suddenly being labelled as "the person who can't cope". It is quite possible some people will see me differently.
That said, I've had some lovely comments and feedback since it went live. Way back when I first wrote about depression, I was told how comforting it was to have senior leaders open up about their struggles and I've held that comment close ever since - I see it as one of the responsibilities of being a senior leader in my industry.
Anyway, this post isn't to rehash the interview contents (go listen to it!) - just to mark that it went out and why I did it.
I want to thank Katelin for being great throughout the process, and for setting it up in the first place. We talked a bit about doing some follow-ups and answering questions, so maybe we'll do more if there is an appetite for it.
I do want to speak more on this subject, so if you're looking for someone to talk about neurodiversity and leadership, do reach out.
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