Everybody I hope you’re going super well, I’m Stephen Martin, I’m one of the founders of the Remarkable Minds. Now I want to do just a very quick video.
I got a question in one of our groups about finding a career as a right-brain thinker. If you have dyslexia, if you have ADHD, what’s it going to look like and we’re going to be running a four-part workshop series coming up soon that’s going to help answer some of these questions. But I want to dig into this one, give you a bit of a taste of what to expect.
So the question was, how do you shift into a career that is more focused on your dyslexic or ADHD strengths rather than kind of just go with the flow and get stuck in what you’ve always done? Now, there’s kind of three parts to it, in my opinion, that you have to think about. Now, the first is why are you where you are?
And you might go… ‘Err, what?’, but the first question I would ask is: Why are you where you are? How did you get there? Was it by accident? Was it by intention? Err, it’s, it’s morning here, so a cup of coffee… Err, you know was it, was it by actual intention that you’re you’ve gotten into the career you’re in?
I remember when I was younger, I got stuck in the insurance and banking industry, had no idea what I wanted to do. I personally didn’t want to study at that time and I just wanted to get my, my head in the game and try some stuff, see what I like, see what I didn’t like. And what I found out, over time, is it wasn’t really for me.
Administration, pushing paper, I kind of got there out of luck and the ability to technically blag or talk my way through it, I managed to survive long enough, which was you know, it was nice, it paid the bills, but it wasn’t fulfilling, definitely didn’t work to my strengths and I didn’t feel like I was giving back enough.
So, so it wasn’t really working for me. But what I did learn by looking back at the intention of, of of it all and realizing I kind of got there through just kind of a series of events, you know, cause and effect, I knew that it was the wrong place for me. But I also looked at it and said, ‘Where did I shine?’.
Because there is no career out there that you’re in right now that there aren’t parts that you do shine in, or you do enjoy. Whether it’s the human interaction. Maybe it’s a special creative project you’ve been able to deliver in your organization, or some help you’ve given someone else.
Maybe you’re great at explaining something that’s complex and making it easy, which is quite a common benefit which sometimes seems mad that we’re bad communicators, but because we’re visual communicators some of us are fantastic with metaphors and helping to bring things that are hardened up here and bring it down to a level that’s really really useful.
So that’s one thing. Work out where you are and how you got there. You know, sometimes you look back and you go, ‘Wow, how did I get here?’. And it’s usually a lot of the time not by intentions.
That would be the first thing I’d recommend. The second is looking really deep inside about what you enjoy and what transferable skills you’ve gained. And what I mean by a transferable skill is something that you may have used in a role that you don’t really enjoy, but it could be valuable to another organization.
So, a transferable skill maybe the ability to see systems that are in the business that are failing that you could actually improve upon. You know, maybe you’re brilliant at going, ‘Hey, I don’t understand why three people are pressing this one button.
I can probably find a solution that can automate that for a business’. You know, you might, you might say, ‘Hey I can I see that very clearly and very quickly and I’m very good at hunting down a solution’. So that could be a transferable skill if you were to go into something like online automation or if you were to go into engineering you might be able to see things others can’t. So it’s really important to actually look at where you are.
And you know what you can do and I’ll grab it, I’ll grab it for you here, is you know, you can create these kind of graphs about what you’re actually creating in your life and start drawing it out on a pad.
I’ve gotten really, I’ve really enjoying using pads at the moment and just drawing things out to get really clear on what I want and what I’m doing. So it’s something you could start to do is what transferable skills do you have and that you enjoy, not just transferable skills you hate, you know, I have a skill of hitting a nail with a hammer but it’s not something I enjoy and I’m probably not that great at if I’m honest but it’s like it’s something I could do, but it’s not what I would call a transferable skill.
It’s something more that you’re good at. So like for example, I could always speak really well in front of an audience, I enjoy helping people and making impact which is a real common thing, and I also can see flows and processes and explain them to someone who can’t see it as well as being able to kind of move people pass challenges by looking at things from a different perspective.
So that’s what’s led me into doing more coaching. It’s what’s led me into the web design industry because I have an eye for design and I can bring a lot of information that’s not connected together, which is a skill you may have or it’s very common for dyslexia and ADHD to be able to do that.
So you kind of want to look at what some of these skills are and we will dig deeper into this in the Workshops. The third thing to do is to actually decide what you want to do in the future. You know, what could it look like and start to start to imagine.
And this can be a scary part, a lot of people put this off because it’s quite overwhelming sometimes. But what could it look like, you know, we sometimes sit there and visualize, we visualize ourselves with an amazing house and a car and all this materialistic stuff. But what do you want your life to look like, you know in your dream vision. There was a great guy who called it visualizing your perfect average day. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but it was, it was a fantastic idea of how can you visualize your perfect average day in the future?
What do you want that to be? What could it be? So for example, you don’t want a perfect day, I’m sitting on a yacht. You know, I’ve got, you know, I’m living the life, the champagne. You know, that’s not, it’s not a real motivating vision because there’s not much reality to it. It’s not a day everyone lives every day.
We are probably last about six months and you’d be gone because you’ve eaten all the caviar and you’d be in a terrible place. But a perfect average day might look like you know, I enjoy waking up in the morning early.
I’m a morning person. I wake up at 6 a.m. I really want to do a workout, you know that helps seemed to me I go for a run for an hour, just as an example or you might have some stuff like that. You know for me personally, I see myself waking up and I’ve got three meetings booked in my calendar, two coaching sessions and one to help people with their websites, which is something else I do and enjoy. And then I also have in my, in my vision, I’ve got time set aside to be creative.
Couple of hours works not aligned, where I can just sit in a beanbag turn some music on I’ve got no pressure, but I can just create and for me being able to create without barriers is something I value more than anything. So when I start to put this average day together, I can start to actually apply it into my life.
What does that look like from work? It means I’m most likely self-employed, or I’ve got to find a business that has the same values and same same goals as I do. So I find that really really important, and a really valuable tool visualizing your perfect average day.
So I hope this has been valuable. This is the first video we’ve been for the Remarkable Minds. So, I hope you enjoy it and keep an eye out for the workshop we’ll be releasing. This will be a practice Workshop run by myself and Vanessa to get us out there and to help people who are in employment.
You could be at the lower end the higher-end anyone who’s working with dyslexia ADHD. We’re going to go into some really interesting topics to help you succeed. I hope this video has been valuable, have an epic wrist of your day.
