Blogs & Insights
Your Autistic Employees Need to Be Allowed to Ask Clarifying Questions
As an autistic person, there are many things that confuse me about neurotypical social norms and expectations. While there are some I’ve come to understand with age and experience, others remain baffling. The one that puzzles me the most is the neurotypical view of...
Moral Injury at Work and Neurodiversity: Are there Additional Risk Factors?
The original understanding of moral injury was developed in the 1990s by a psychiatrist working with military veterans, Jonathan Shay. Moral injury is caused by a threat to one’s morality, such as harming an innocent bystander or destroying civilian livelihoods, as...
Socializing Should Not Determine Autistic Career Advancement
Socializing Should Not Determine Autistic Career Advancement One of the top reasons autistic people struggle in the corporate world is that our focus is different from our neurotypical counterparts in the workplace. When an autistic person goes to work for the first...
Autistic Masking and Veiling
Much has been written about ‘Masking’ the practice of hiding one's autistic identity in order to conform to neurotypical models of social behaviour. The research into the impact of masking on a person concludes that it is harmful and damaging to mental and physical...
Honesty is Authenticity
Somewhere online I read a blog post written by a nonautistic person who claims that when an Autistic child lies people should celebrate, as the child has reached a cognitive milestone—as if lying is inherently human rather than learned behavior. This blogger, who...
Mirroring: Reflecting Behavior
Mirroring is the act of imitating the behavior of another person and is largely nonverbal communication. Mirroring is also largely unconscious, for me at least, though some people consciously mimic behavior. Politicians, for example, go through extensive training to...
Antlers
There is a parent at my son’s school who has been wearing reindeer antlers for the whole of December. It’s not just the school gates either, she wears them everywhere she goes: to the shops, to the post office, to the supermarket. She even wears them in work meetings....
Work motivation, stress, and including autistic employees: One size does not fit all.
“Drive performance.” “Incentivize results.” “Rally the troops.” “Stimulate productivity.” “Spur innovation.” “Motivational interventions.” “Inspirational leadership.” “Activate the team.” Popular managerial motivation rhetoric implies that more “motivation,” more...
Show off or circumstance? Remembering what it is like to be disabled: Neurodiversity in context
Warning, I am going to start this article by showing off! I am a capable person. I make a positive difference in the world. I help people. I do good. I am a published author, nine times over. Nine books, that is, and I have been published in nearly two hundred...
Face Blindness
I don’t recognize people I know, especially when they change their style. If a person who doesn’t wear glasses one day decides to wear a pair, I won’t recognize them. Same with hats and hairstyles, though I often fail to recognize people no matter what. Halloween...