Why Awareness Sessions Are Not Enough To Tackle Bullying At Work

I have been bullied throughout my life. I was bullied more or less continually through my school years, I have been bullied at work multiple times, and I have been bullied in a relationship. Do you know one major thing that all the people that have bullied me had in common?  Not one of them would have agreed that they were bullies if challenged at the time. Most of us, in my experience, could do…

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The Autistic Nightmare of the Corporate Meeting Addiction

Modern corporate life has an addiction problem. I do not use that term lightly – I know how serious, crippling, and devastating addiction can be. But in my career of 33 years and counting I have seen meetings go from an occasional tool that punctuated the day to an all-consuming monster that seems to leave no time to do the work itself. To me, there are two big indicators that there is a problem. Firstly,…

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Why I Am Proud To Be Autistic

When you shuffle a pack of playing cards, you more than likely end up with them in an order that has never been seen before, anywhere, at any time, by anyone. The number of possible combinations of those 52 cards is so astronomically high that each shuffle is very close to being a unique event in history. If that is true for a deck of cards, imagine how many potential variations of human being there…

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Why Are Communication Preferences So Difficult to, Err, Communicate?

I have always found phone calls difficult. I find any type of oral communication hard, whether on the phone, teams, or face to face. There are a whole multitude of reasons for this, but key for me is that I really struggle to take in information that I hear rather than see. I often end up feeling pressured and panicked on a phone call, and will agree to just about anything to bring it to…

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Rants About Things That Blow My Autistic Mind: 1. TV Property Shows

There is an awful lot about the world that I find very confusing. This includes myself and my own thoughts and behaviours. It would almost certainly be easier to list the things that do make sense to me. But I thought it might be helpful to occasionally address particular instances or situations that I find utterly unfathomable. There are different possible outcomes from this. I may find that other autistic people agree with me, and…

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Why Do Some People Want Us All To Be Copies of Them?

There is an old story about an expert cook who was particularly well known for their roast dinners. The meat was always succulent and full of flavour, and their friends and family could not get enough of it. One day, one of the cook’s friends ventured into the kitchen to try and learn the secrets of the delicious meal. They were surprised to see the cook take the piece of meat, season it, and then…

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A Day in My Life as an Autistic Person in an Open Plan Office

Four years ago, I hated working at home. We had only recently been provided with the technology to do so, and I had no suitable work area in my house. While the open plan office I was based at was not ideal, it was broken into many smaller spaces so the noise was bearable. The pandemic, of course, changed everything. When it became apparent that we would be working from home for much longer than…

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How to Deal With Pressure: Bend But Do Not Break

Pressure is not a new invention. The pressures of modern life are undoubtedly different from those faced in the past, but life has never been easy. Even in the days of the hunter gatherer, there was pressure to ensure that you caught or found enough for you and your family to eat, had shelter from the elements,and so on. In the present day, some choose to move off grid to escape a lot of the…

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