In this episode of the Leading Below the Surface podcast, host LaTonya Wilkins engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Ryan Mayer, a certified ADHD coach and advocate for neurodiversity. Together, they explore the importance of understanding neurodiversity and its implications in the workplace. Ryan shares his personal experiences with ADHD and how it has shaped his mission to create inclusive environments for neurodivergent individuals. Listeners will gain insights into effective strategies for accommodating diverse cognitive perspectives, debunk common myths surrounding ADHD, and learn the significance of fostering open dialogues in organizational settings. This episode is a must-listen for leaders and individuals seeking to enhance inclusivity and productivity within their teams.
Guest Bio:
Ryan Mayer, a certified ADHD Coach (MBA, ACC, DOBE), is dedicated to empowering adults with ADHD to achieve their full potential. Based in Cleveland, OH, he leverages personal experience and evidence-based techniques to develop tailored strategies for his clients. Specializing in corporate education and training, Coach Ryan aims to revolutionize workplace culture by advocating for neuroinclusion.Through his Conquer Your ADHDTM System, he helps business leaders and busy professionals thrive. Ryan hosts the More than ADHDTM podcast and his work has been featured in Employee Benefit News, Forbes, ADHD Online, and Fast Company. Outside of coaching, he enjoys basketball and non-fiction audiobooks. Ryan lives with his wife Andrea and their three children.
Resources from today’s episode:
– Change Coaches Guide to Create Psychological Safe Conversations Across Differences
– Change Coaches Newsletter
– Leading Below the Surface LinkedIn Newsletter
– Follow Coach Ryan on YouTube
– Follow Coach Ryan on LinkedIn
Transcript:
00:00:00 – LaTonya Wilkins
Are you wanting to close the year out strong? Our Change Coaches’ offerings include everything from retreat facilitation to leadership accelerators. Check out Changecoaches IE for more information or email us at infoangecoachesIO to find out how we can support you and your organization in 2024 and beyond. Welcome to the Leading Below the Surface podcast, where we go beyond the book and explore how to navigate and thrive in today’s changing workplace. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Leading Below the Surface podcast. I’m Latanya Wilkins, your host, and today I have a guest, very special guest.
00:00:51 – LaTonya Wilkins
This guest I met at ICF, which is International Coaching Federation. They have a Midwest conference every two years. And I met Ryan at ICF Midwest. We really clicked. We talked a lot.
00:01:07 – LaTonya Wilkins
We met at a couple different breakouts and sessions and we had a lot of really interesting discussions. One of the sessions we met at was around neurodiversity and so I invited Ryan to talk about this because he is an ADHD coach and so welcome Ryan.
00:01:28 – Ryan Mayer
LaTonya, thanks so much for having me. It’s great to see you again. I know both of us have had crazy schedules since the conference, and I just pulled this up in preparation for our conversation. And for those who might just be listening, this is the program we had from our Midwest conference. And the the title, the theme of it was Flow Boldly.
00:01:49 – Ryan Mayer
And before we hit record, Latania and I were just saying how neither of us is too worried about this because we’re just going to flow naturally in this thing, right?
00:01:56 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yes, yes, flowing. And this is like one of the strengths of theing Below the Surface podcast. It’s all about flowing. Some of you probably listened to our last episode on Improv, but anything you want to add to my intro? What else?
00:02:15 – Ryan Mayer
I am not just saying this because I’m on your podcast, but Latanya had a session around what this podcast is about, Leading under the Surface. And what does that mean? And it was just so impactful for me and the ability that Latanya has to get into the deeper topic with the audience or with her clients. You can just tell that she’s passionate about what she does. And so I knew that that was just the beginning of some exciting conversations we would have. And I wore the shirt to commemorate our first meeting and I was wearing this shirt and I remember I went to a.
00:02:57 – Ryan Mayer
I was staying in an Airbnb like a mile away from the hotel, so I had to hustle to get to her early morning session and my shirt says never Give up. Because for those of us who may identify as neurodivergent, we have to overcome a lot of obstacles every day, both in the workplace and at home. So I always make sure to spread the message to whoever needs to hear it today to just never give up.
00:03:24 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s such a timely message. Not giving up. It’s interesting because this morning I was telling my team, I’m like, yeah, this morning I did a meditation.
00:03:38 – LaTonya Wilkins
It was all about patience. And it’s like not giving up and having patience around. The pace of the universe, which has been kind of my theme is, yeah, the universe has a different pace than sometimes I want to.
00:03:53 – Ryan Mayer
I absolutely love that.
00:03:56 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yeah, yeah. So I’JUST really been thinking about that. So I know you are an ADHD coach, Ray. Is that what you call yourself?
00:04:03 – Ryan Mayer
Yeah, so I call myself a certified ADHD coach. And one of the areas of focus for me especially this year has been focusing more on my neuro inclusion program, which is taking what I’ve done with individuals and groups and bringing that into the workplace to really help to foster more welcoming environments, which I know is something that you’ve worked really hard to create at the organizations you work with and the one that you’re leading. So, yes, I have ADHD myself and I basically describe it as I became the resource that I so desperately needed during my time in the corporate world, but just couldn’t find anywhere. And so the fact that I am wired the same way as many of my clients are, there’s just this deep connection that happens right away because I see them and I tell them, hey, you are creative, you are a beautiful person, regardless of what challenges you may have faced. So it’s just great to be able to provide that space of belonging for them.
00:05:14 – LaTonya Wilkins
So that’s a really good place to start. So re you’re talking about neurodiversity and inclusion and how those two go hand in hand. So let’s first talk about neurodiversity and what it is, because I think a lot of folks listening, they might have a high level knowledge. I know I was at that level, kind of a novice. I still don’t consider myself real advanced.
00:05:37 – LaTonya Wilkins
I would probably say intermediate. But we do have some people that are brand new to this. So let’s first talk about what is neurodiversity. I say neurodiversity. I know it’s a.
00:05:48 – LaTonya Wilkins
There’s also the word neurodivergence, which makes.
00:05:50 – Ryan Mayer
Me feel like that’s separate and it is. That’s exactly where I was going to go with this. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to bring some awareness because that’s really what I see one of my main roles as. I know that you talk a lot about leading beneath the surface and what my sort of tagline is, I want to help, especially business leaders. To start, I’m using air quotes, seeing the invisible.
00:06:17 – Ryan Mayer
And what I mean by that is seeing the invisible potential that might not be apparent right away in people who are neurodivergent. So let’s talk about the difference. Every group of people, no matter how big or what part of the world you’re in, that is neurodiversity. Because what it means is that everybody. No two brains, I’m using four fingers.
00:06:41 – Ryan Mayer
No two brains are exactly the same. So that brings diversity of thought. And obviously up until just the last couple of years, diversity was always looked at from what’s your identification of gender or sexual orientation or what’s your race or all these different areas for diversity. But people are thinking of that from the outside. This is more inside.
00:07:09 – Ryan Mayer
How is your brain wired? So if you picture a bell curve, most of the people that are in, you know, the middle of the curve, that’s what would be referred to as a neurotypical group of people. So they are wired in a very similar way, but still different from each other. But out on the edges, that’s where those of us who would identify as neurodivergent are, because we are clinically divergent from the majority of people out there. So an individual person can be neurodivergent, but it is groups of people who are neurodiverse. Okay, does that make sense?
00:07:49 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yeah, it’s kind of like diversity versus diverse candidate ca.
00:07:53 – Ryan Mayer
Because there’s no.
00:07:54 – LaTonya Wilkins
There’s no such thing as a diverse candidate. And it’s like being called that as like an insult. Cause it’s not. It’s like you have a diversity in the pool. So when I hear the word neurodivergence, I feel like it’s othering.
00:08:09 – LaTonya Wilkins
What do you think?
00:08:11 – Ryan Mayer
I think it depends on the audience and the. Not the educational level, but the level of understanding that they might have around the topic. Because I take a lot of pride in identifying as neurodivergent. And yes, it is othering in some ways. I’ve never heard that term, but I really like it.
00:08:31 – Ryan Mayer
I bring something very unique to the table, and I know that. And there’s a phrase or a word that gets thrown around a lot in the neurodiversity space. And specifically People that may have ADHD or autism about having a quote unquote superpower. I do not like that at all because that makes it seem like it’s only a positive. But I would say that those of us with a neurodivergent condition, we have exceptional gifts, but we have very unique challenges.
00:09:08 – LaTonya Wilkins
Exceptional gifts, but unique challenges. I love that as a sound bite for this. That is like the essence of everything we’re talking about. Yeah. Because the world’made.
00:09:20 – LaTonya Wilkins
Isn’t the world made for neurotypical people?
00:09:22 – Ryan Mayer
Correct. So imagine you as a listener or a viewer right now. Imagine growing up in a world that you just knew the whole time. You never really felt like you fit in. There was just something different, something unlike most of the people around you.
00:09:39 – Ryan Mayer
And that no matter how hard you tried doing something the way everyone else was doing it, you just couldn’t get yourself to do that. And that’s essentially how I felt, that I am living in a world that’s not built for me.
00:09:55 – LaTonya Wilkins
So let’s unpack this a bit. So when did you know you were first different and how.
00:10:04 – Ryan Mayer
So what’s interesting, and this will be a good kind of high level thing to talk about first, even just the label that those of us with our brain wiring have adhd, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. So it already seems like there’s something wrong with us because it’s disorder. And then it makes it seem as though we don’t have attention to give. But that’s so inaccurate because it’s not that we have a deficit in attention, we just have variability in our attention where a neurotypical person. So like I’m going to say an average normal person.
00:10:50 – Ryan Mayer
And normal is another triggering word for people. But people who are neurotypical can call upon their attention at will and they can say, okay, this might not be my favorite thing to do, but because it’s a priority to my company or someone needs me to do this, I’m going to do it. For someone like me who is neurodivergent. When I go to do that task that I’m not really interested in or not really good at, it’s almost like going to try to start your car and the spark plug isn’t working. Like you just hear like the engine likeinginginging like it’s turning over.
00:11:27 – Ryan Mayer
It won’t go. So it’s not that we don’t want to do the thing or even that we don’t know how or that it’s important we know all those things. It’s just that there is a biophysical, biochemical impediment that stops us from doing the thing. So where this came into my life is throughout grade school. I did really, really well.
00:11:51 – Ryan Mayer
And a lot of times that had to do with my mom when I was growing up, would read my textbooks to me, and we didn’t think much of it. It was just. That was kind of our routine. Our ritual is we would sit down and mom would read. I would listen just like it was story time.
00:12:06 – Ryan Mayer
And I could see everything in my mind. But then later on, when it was time for me to start reading, obviously I knew how to read, but to start studying myself, there just was this absorption and retention issue. So I also have dyscalcula, which is a challenge with numbers. And so when I could understand, when I could see how the thing worked, that was okay. But then when you got to a certain.
00:12:35 – Ryan Mayer
Like, the algebra and, like, junior high and high school, the wheels really started falling off for me. So it was really weird because I’d always done really well. And then all of a sudden, it seemed like almost overnight, it was like, oh, man, I can’t. I don’t know how to do this. And where I noticed it the most was I was in math class in high school.
00:12:57 – Ryan Mayer
And it was like, no matter how much I studied, no matter you, like, how hard I was working, I was almost always the last person to finish the exam. And not that I have to be first or anything, but it just seemed really strange. I, like, I think I shouldn’t know this material. I just feel like I. This is not normal.
00:13:18 – Ryan Mayer
So we looked into it, and sure enough, as the doctor, the psychiatrist, was reading through the description of adhd, it sounded awfully familiar. And it was like hearing an autobiography being read about me. But it was actually a big sense of relief because it helped me to accept the fact that it wasn’t something I was doing wrong. Okay. So it’s like, if this is just how you are, it’s like, you know, you’re wearing glasses, which are very fashionable.
00:13:53 – Ryan Mayer
Are they also prescription glasses?
00:13:56 – LaTonya Wilkins
Of course I would not. Yeah.
00:13:58 – Ryan Mayer
So I just don’t want to assume, because sometimes I’m like, you wear glasses, and they’re like, oh, these are actually just for. Yeah, but if someone wears glasses or contacts, imagine you being told your whole life, like, just squint harder. Everyone else can see. Just look at the board and squint harder and look harder, and you’ll see it. It’s like, no, it just doesn’t work that way.
00:14:18 – Ryan Mayer
So realizing that that’s how it was for me, for my brain, it was like, oh, so there’s that sense of relief for me. So that’s, that’s how it first came about. And then from there I was able to start getting accommodations put in place. And in schools, in a school setting, most high schools and colleges will have support structures in place. It was once I got into the working world where it’s a total roll of the dice if you’re going to get the support you need or not.
00:14:52 – LaTonya Wilkins
So would you. Thank you for sharing all that. Would you say that. So I know it took you longer, it was a little harder. Would you say that you.
00:15:03 – LaTonya Wilkins
Your grades were affected and like a very traditional system, or would you say you just needed, you simply needed accommodations?
00:15:12 – Ryan Mayer
So when we got into certain categories of math and sciences, it would be like, imagine writing something in your mind’s notebook, if you will, and then you go to the test and you’re in your mind, you open the notebook and the pages are blank. It’s like, wait a minute. No, no, no. I just wrote these in my mind last night. They should definitely be here.
00:15:36 – Ryan Mayer
But for certain topics that my brain decides, oh, I’m not really interested in this. It just can’t hold on to those concepts. So, yes, I needed more time, but there was absolutely a, an impact to my GPA and things like that too.
00:15:54 – LaTonya Wilkins
Okay, and so what helped you? What helps you? What kind of accommodations did you need specifically that would help you in this way that might help other people as well?
00:16:06 – Ryan Mayer
Sure. I’ll never forget this experience in college. It was almost like something out of a movie when you’re in that kind of stadium style seating, like a lecture hall, and there’s like over 100 people taking the exam while everyone else was hard at work doing their accounting, which was one of my arch nemesis subjects. All I could hear was people chomping on their gum or tapping their foot or clicking their pen. And it’s not that I wanted to hear those.
00:16:45 – Ryan Mayer
It’s just that those of us with adhd, we just have a heightened awareness even when we don’t want to. So, like, I remember being a recent grad and I was in my apartment and my roommate had hung a clock, like, in the hallway, and I could hear the ticking in my room, so I had to take the battery out of the clock. It’s that kind of thing. So the accommodations I got. Because after, during that time, I had what I assume would be like a, like a panic attack, basically where I had to go to the bathroom putting cold Water on my face, like hey, everything’s fine.
00:17:21 – Ryan Mayer
You’re going to do this. And so I got the accommodations of being able to have a distraction, reduced environment so I could go to the testing center where there’s not a lot of visual or auditory distractions. I get to wear earplugs and then I would get time and a half to take the exam. And so that’s something that I qualify for and it’s not going to hurt anybody else or anything. So that really helped a great deal.
00:17:53 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yeah, I didn’t even know. I think we talked about this at ICF Midwest that the over sensitivity to noise and activity is something that happens when you are neurodivergent. And you know, I’m curious becausee I know you said you knew you were different from a young age. I could say that for other reasons. But did you get made fun of?
00:18:21 – LaTonya Wilkins
The kids underestimate you what you feel like?
00:18:24 – Ryan Mayer
Not really because a lot of like even while these challenges were happening throughout high school, college and even into the working world. On the flip side, as I said a little bit earlier, we had exceptional gifts. We had these strengths that would outshine any of our weaknesses. So for example, like when you and I got on to the episode here today, I’m not nervous at all to come on and have. It’s just a conversation.
00:18:55 – Ryan Mayer
Just like when I present in front of hundreds or thousands of people, I’m not really nervous. Whereas other people obviously have a lot of stage fright or they really shut down in front of large groups. I was the student government president and head of the spirit and rally committee in high school. So I was up in front of our entire school on the microphone getting everybody cheering. I’m like calling the sections out, tossing candy into the stands and stuff.
00:19:26 – Ryan Mayer
So no, they weren’t making fun of me because some people admired the fact and they didn’t know that I. My challenge is about not being able to do well in math courses or whatever. And I never let it hold me back or make an excuse because that’s one thing that I think is important for people to know when it comes to accommodations that we as neurodivergent folks are still. We still expect ourselves to be held to the same exact standards as far as results and output. And that’s when I do my neuro inclusion training for corporate leaders.
00:20:05 – Ryan Mayer
I’m helping them to see it’s not that they get that a neurodivergent employee gets special treatment. It’s just helping the employee to be able to show up as Their best self. There’s a concept known as masking, where it’s essentially, you said, growing up in a world that wasn’t really made for me. So when I’m in those situations where I know this is not a strength I’m having to expend a lot of energy trying to maintain this Persona, this image, this facade, essentially, when that’s not the best use, just like, why don’t you just put me in a better spot so that I can just be who I am so I can help add value. And I’m thinking in college, like the best job I ever had in my entire life, hands down, was when I was a campus tour guide in college.
00:20:59 – Ryan Mayer
So I loved that because I could internalize the script. I knew I had to cover certain bullet points, but I could put my own personal spin on it with stories and talking about experiences and whatnot. And there were times where parents would come up to me afterwards and say, hey, Ryan, do you have any plans after graduation? And I would literally get job offers from people because my skill set is valuable. So I just know that don’t there’s things I don’t do well and things that I excel at. So.
00:21:37 – LaTonya Wilkins
You obviously have a lot of self awareness and you’re a coach and then you do this work professionally for a living. And so one of the things I think we all struggle with, like, we don’t have the knowledge that you have. And one of the questions that I asked you and some other folks at ICF Midwest I’d love to pose for my listeners so they can hear it as well, please. But so let’s say you meet someone and they tell you they have ADHD and they’re a colleague or maybe there’s someone that is a friend, what are some tactics we can use in order to maximize that relationship? Because I shared with you, with me, I was struggling because I didn’t know that that person had adhd. And they revealed that to me later.
00:22:31 – LaTonya Wilkins
But then I didn’t know what to do with it. So what can we do to help people?
00:22:38 – Ryan Mayer
Well, I know that there’s a phrase out there I heard recently that I applies to a lot of situations, but it also applies to someone who may be neurodivergent, which is when you met one person with adhd, you’ve met one person with adhd. In other words, my best advice to anyone who’s listening or watching or tuning into this, if you do have someone in your life or you find out someone, whether they’re on your team or a friend or whatever has. And obviously I can speak to ADHD specifically, but you can just ask them, like, hey, thanks for sharing that with me. Is there anything I can do to make sure that, whether it’s friendship or in the workplace, like, what can I do to help you be your best and show up as your authentic self? And I would have loved to have been asked that by leaders or managers, because I would have said, as I had to request later, with formal accommodation requests, hey, I’m a very distractible person. So it’s not good for me to be sitting where I am, which is in an open office environment right alongside the main walkway.
00:23:52 – Ryan Mayer
I worked at a tech company, so it was like an open office. And then people were walking back and forth. Anybody who went to, like, go to the cafeterio, go to the bathroom, just leave the sales area where I was, would walk past me. And then when they walked towards me, just instinctively you kind of look up. And about an arm’s length away from me was the printer for the entire floor.
00:24:17 – Ryan Mayer
So all like 200. Some people, anytime they printed something, it was right by me. So what I would have loved if someone asked me that, because I would have said, can you just put me over there on the outskirts, facing away from everyone? And then I’ll be able to focus a lot better. So it’s just little things like that, or if you’re trying to have a conversation with someone, maybe the environment that you’re in might be a little bit overstimulating, whether it’s the lighting or the background noise. So I hope that that helps.
00:24:48 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yeah, it’s almost like asking them how you could best support in those situations because you’re not a monolith. I think that’s one of the things you’re saying. It’s not a monolithic thing. So asking the person, and may even maybe not being afraid of that as well, would you say? Because I think some people are. They get a little timiduse, they don’tnna be rude.
00:25:16 – LaTonya Wilkins
Sure. But what are your thoughts on that?
00:25:19 – Ryan Mayer
And this also is right up against this other topic of you mentioned, to kind of set up this scenario that the person shares with you that they have ADHD because of the atmosphere that’s out there and the stigma that still exists and persists around. I’ll just say specifically adhd. But other people who are on the neurodivergent spectrum, sometimes people may not be comfortable just openly disclosing that they have that. But. So if it’s someone who does openly disclose and say hey, I’m sorry, I have ADHD and this might be hard for me or whatever.
00:26:01 – Ryan Mayer
Well, then they’ve sort of given you, in this case, the person they’re talking to, the green light that. Okay, we’re talking about it now. So if they say, you know, I have adhe. Okay. Hey, thanks so much for being willing to share that.
00:26:16 – Ryan Mayer
Um, is there anything I can do to make this better for you? Is there anything in here that’s too distracting or anything? Stuff like that?
00:26:25 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yeah, that’s. That’s excellent. Like the asking about specifically distractions.
00:26:30 – Ryan Mayer
Yeah.
00:26:31 – LaTonya Wilkins
Are things that, that might trigger the person I know.
00:26:33 – Ryan Mayer
For example. Oh, sorry, U just. No, go ahead. Like when my wife and I go out to dinner or if we’re going out with friends, if we’re going to a place where there’s going to be tvs, for example, I am very intentional about sitting with my backs to the television because I just have radical acceptance of myself, as you alluded to, with just having self acceptance and self awareness that I will not be able to be fully present with the person that I really would like to be present with if there’s a TV anywhere in my purview. So I really try to sit in a spot where I don’t see anything else except the people I’m with so that I can, you know, be with them and be fully present.
00:27:25 – Ryan Mayer
So my wife has. Obviously we’ve been together now, we’ve been married for 11 years. And she does a great job of like being just watching out for me in that way. Be like, hey, Ryan, do you wanna sit over here? And even if we’re not like broadcasting to everyone, why, that’s just little things like that that can make a big difference.
00:27:44 – LaTonya Wilkins
Great.
00:27:45 – Ryan Mayer
Yeah.
00:27:46 – LaTonya Wilkins
So what common mistakes do people make around accommodating neurodiverse people?
00:27:55 – Ryan Mayer
I’m really glad you asked this question because if I were to ask you. Okay, Latania, when you think of adhd, like, what comes to your mind?
00:28:05 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yeah, I mean, like I said, I know people that have shared with me that they have adhd. So I think one of them was. Look at you, Coach Ryan. I think one of them. I know you’re trying.
00:28:22 – LaTonya Wilkins
You think you’re sneaky, but you’re not.
00:28:25 – Ryan Mayer
No, I’m not being sneaky. I’m asking that question. No, I’m just asking because inna. I’m gauging how inna answer your question.
00:28:34 – LaTonya Wilkins
Right, right.
00:28:34 – Ryan Mayer
I wanna see where you’re ate.
00:28:36 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yeah. So in this person, it’s a good question. Cause and with the people that I know that have adhd, what I’ve experienced is we never get everything done. We have a 30 minute meeting and we end up talking about a topic for a very long time. I think the focus, like my focus is different from the other person’again.
00:29:05 – LaTonya Wilkins
It depends on if it’s coaching, fine. But if it’s like a project meeting or something, you only have so much time and so yeah, it’s hard to keep things within the lanes that I would like sometimes. Those are a couple of examples.
00:29:23 – Ryan Mayer
No, that’s great.
00:29:24 – LaTonya Wilkins
Really easily distracted. Those are things.
00:29:27 – Ryan Mayer
And now I see why you were laughing because you went in a much different direction than I was thinking. Because what I was going to say when I asked people like, hey, what do you think of. And sort of the stereotypical example is a grade school boy who can’t sit still in class. Like that’s sort of what I meant is that’s like the poster child for adhd. Well, one of the biggest misunderstandings, which is now having a really big ripple effect which I will explain is that many times young women got completely overlooked growing up because there is.
00:30:05 – Ryan Mayer
So there used to be two different forms and this is in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Right now they’re on the fifth edition and it’s been a really long time since they’ve updated it. But anyway it used to be some people might relate because they’ve heard ADD and adhd. So they think of ADHD as like that boy who can’t sit still. And ADD previously was very much like that person who’s more like their, a dreamr, they’re inattentive, they can’t really pay attention, they’re spacey.
00:30:38 – Ryan Mayer
But in the DSM 5 they brought these two together. So now the inattentive, the primarily in attentive presentation as well as the primarily hyperactive presentation are both under the umbrella of adhd. So ADHD is kind of like the overarching term. But my point here is that women who they, they may have been very talented but they weren’t squirming in their seats or disturbing class. If they had challenges, people would say to them, and this is a very again stereotypical thing, how could you have adhd?
00:31:19 – Ryan Mayer
You’re so smart. It’s like what? That doesn’t make sense. And oh no, you can’t have adhd, you’re a girl, you’re a woman. And it’s like, no, it actually affects equal parts, equal split of male and female. The problem is most or I not the problem, but the challenge is that most females would fall into more of the primarily inattentive type of adhd, which means that the hyperactivity component is happening in their mind.
00:31:51 – Ryan Mayer
In other words, when they’re in a conversation with someone, they’re off somewhere else. They’re not really able to fully be present or focused. Whereas for me, the manifestation of it for me is, this is why I love being a coach. Because when I’m talking with someone, they are my world. They get 100% of my attention.
00:32:08 – Ryan Mayer
And so the misunderstanding is that women got overlooked, and now, as a result, as they’re growing up, they get misdiagnosed with anxiety, depression, generalized anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, sometimes when it was actually inattentive, adhd. But most people didn’t realize that women can also have adhd. So now there’s this entire group of women.
00:32:36 – LaTonya Wilkins
So. Interesting.
00:32:37 – Ryan Mayer
Yeah. And it’s wild because when I first heard it, I thought, well, that seems like kind of a big generalization. But the vast majority of women, whether they’re clients or friends or just contacts of mine who I know who have adhd, they were most likely diagnosed later in life. And where these symptoms start to show up. Like, they probably found coping mechanisms throughout life.
00:33:04 – Ryan Mayer
But then when they have a big transition, like you get married, or you get a new job, or a baby comes along, or you’re moving, or you have a wedding, or you. There’s a global pandemic, hypothetically, all of a sudden, it’s like, wow, I can’t handle this for some reason. This is strange. And so all these women are starting to figure out, oh, my gosh, I have adhd. So that’s.
00:33:25 – Ryan Mayer
I would say, out of everything, we’ve already covered two of the biggest misconceptions. One is that if you have adhd, you can’t pay attention, which is not true. We just have situational and things need to be new, novel, interesting, or something we enjoy and that women can’t have adhd. Those are the two, I would say.
00:33:48 – LaTonya Wilkins
I didn’t realize this was so gendered because it’s interesting, because Another interesting story. So one of my friends, her husband just got diagnosed with asd. And then we started having a conversation about women and asd, or people that identify as women. And yeah, I guess that women just’t. Or people that identify as women aren’t diagnosed, which I never even thought about that.
00:34:26 – LaTonya Wilkins
That’s something that is pretty prevalent.
00:34:31 – Ryan Mayer
It is. And then as a result, so many people are out there. And that’s part of the drive behind my mission of helping to Change the way the world sees those of us with invisible disabilities. Because so many people are just getting missed. And that’s why during the pandemic when everyone was sort of forced to be at home, that’s when things blew up for me in a good way.
00:34:57 – Ryan Mayer
On social media. I had been about a year earlier been let go from another corporate job because I couldn’t do the administrative follow through component that was part of the job. So I started saying, you know what, I am done trying to pretend to be someone I’m not. I’m going to start sharing my story on social media. I went from zero followers and this specifically was on TikTok at the time, zero followers to 330,000 followers in 60 days.
00:35:32 – LaTonya Wilkins
Oh wow.
00:35:33 – Ryan Mayer
Where just a few videos go viral and whatever. But it was like, I feel it was the perfect storm where this was a mess. It’s much less about Coach Ryan is the reason. I think it was because this was a time when people were ready to hear the message and they were seeing going oh my gosh, that looks a lot like my life. I would get a lot of like stop watching me or like do you have a surveillance camera in my house?
00:35:59 – Ryan Mayer
Because this is exactly what it’s like, those kind of things. So that’s when I started getting out there to spread the word more. And even this next week I’m going to the International ADHD conference which happens every year. And it’s just really gratifying, I guess to just to see that there is this growing awareness around it.
00:36:28 – LaTonya Wilkins
Such an interesting conversation folks, but we do have limited time so I do wanna kind of get into our final question, which I think you ll have a lot to say about this, especially after you just talked about the conference that you’re going to. But I know you also do training, you help a lot of folks. I follow you on LinkedIn. I know you have things there, we’re connected there. So what tips do you have around leading across neurodiversity and what are some of the things that you might share with companies that you’d be willing to share with the leading below the surface audience today?
00:37:04 – Ryan Mayer
Absolutely. And I’m an open book because I want to put as much out there as I can and certainly happy to take a deeper dive with anyone who wants to have a conversation. But after running my coaching business for like three and a half, four years, at the time I was reaching a lot of people, but from a business perspective, I needed to figure out how to be able to keep this as a sustainable enterprise. For me. And so it sort of dawned on me, okay, I was going from trying to help the individual or the group to help themselves so then they could go into the workplace and advocate.
00:37:49 – Ryan Mayer
And it was actually a mentor of mine who said, why don’t you just go pitch to the companies? You are very polished, professional’t you? And you’ve experienced it in the workplace. That’s what you’re most passionate about. Go talk to the leaders to educate them. And they already have money for this kind of stuff. So it was like, oh, this light bulb went off, right?
00:38:11 – Ryan Mayer
So now I have this neuro inclusion program where I can go in and help them to understand there are people on your team that are so close. Like Tony Robbins calls it a 2 millimeter shift. If we can just make some slight adjustments that you could unlock a superstar of an employee. One story that comes to my mind is that at one of the large organizations I worked for, again gets back to my strengths, that I love being up in front of an audience. So part of my job was to go out to the various departments in this health system I was in and do presentations to the new employees, talk about benefits and things like that.
00:38:58 – Ryan Mayer
Well, I saw some of my other colleagues doing it and I was like, no wonder no one likes these. It was a sleeper. It was so boring. So then other departments would request that I come out to do the presentation. Can you please send Ryan?
00:39:12 – Ryan Mayer
Because the other ones are really boring. So I went to some of my other colleagues who I knew didn’t like presenting, and I said, hey, I’ll tell you what, I’ll take all of the departments that you are required to go speak to and I’ll do all the presentations for you if you just do some of my administrative stuff like in the CRM system. And I remember my colleague was like, are you serious? You would do that? I m like, yeah. She’s like, that’s too easy. Yeah, let’s go.
00:39:40 – Ryan Mayer
So we’d started doing this. People were loving it. And then my colleague was happy because for her, she could do all of the work I couldn’t do in a fraction of the time I could. But then, dun, dun, dun. I got called into the executive director’s office and he says, what’s this I hear about you taking over all of the presentations for your colleague?
00:40:01 – Ryan Mayer
And I said, well, yeah, this is a concept known as job carving, where you essentially trade different pieces of the daily duties to get better results for the organization. So we were utilizing both of our strengths instead of both of us being Forced to do things we’re only average or below average at. And he just shook his head. And I remember how much shame I had when he’s like, look, Ryan, that’s a very creative idea, but please go back and do your job the way we told you to do it and let us come up with the solutions. Okay.
00:40:38 – Ryan Mayer
Or something to that effect. So what I do is help to go out there and raise the awareness around. If you could just help to provide a better environment for your employees. Like, hey, what can we do to be better for you? Because there is a real bottom line impact on the cost of turnover, the cost of backfilling those positions, the recruiters who have to repeatedly try to do that when. What if you could just have an area where people could work quietly or work remotely or have flexible start and leaving times.
00:41:15 – Ryan Mayer
Like, why does it have to be 9 to 5? Someone created that one day. Well, what if it was 10 to 6? And that would allow the person to do what they need to do to get on to work on time instead of having them get disciplined and then eventually let go because of attendance issues. So that’s just one little tiny example, but just helping to make what I call sensible shifts in the organizational structure. And it all comes down to that conversation that you might have with a friend who discloses to you, what can I do to help you to be more effective, to be the best you to show up at work as your whole self. Because I think companies are surprised to realize how simple it actually is.
00:42:05 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yeah, yeah, that’s an excellent example around the job carving and how organizations can be so rigid when something that small could be just the accommodation. It doesn’t hurt anybody. It’s just, yeah, as a leader, you just won’t be able to control everything, but it doesn’t hurt anyone. And it’s not diminishing performance or anything like that, or affecting performance in any way.
00:42:28 – Ryan Mayer
That’s the part that was blowing my mind too. It was enhancing performance.
00:42:31 – LaTonya Wilkins
Right.
00:42:31 – Ryan Mayer
Because instead of having to follow up with Ryan to be like, hey, don’t forget to update all your files in the CRM, or having to listen to another department complain about how boring the benefits presentation was, everything was going better. So that’s the thing is like, we’re going for results because results get respect.
00:42:50 – LaTonya Wilkins
Right? Yeah. This was. So, folks, I’m sure you learned a lot today. I know I did. And I expanded even my knowledge around this, even though I’m reading a couple books around neurodiversity right now.
00:43:02 – LaTonya Wilkins
But where could people Find you Ryan. And I HEAR you’re on TikTok. I didn’t know that. I actually just got ono. I have to be careful on TikTok.
00:43:13 – LaTonya Wilkins
You can really take your time and so you just get real absorbed in it. But I’ve started.
00:43:20 – Ryan Mayer
It’s a slippery slope.
00:43:22 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yeah, I at least started putting some feelers out there to decide do more.
00:43:26 – Ryan Mayer
I understand. And my quick little snippet on that is for the amount of content I put out. I quickly realized that I needed to do it selectively. So now I have a team that helps to distribute the content so that I don’t get sucked into that slippery, slippery slope of doom scrolling. So I realized with my wife’s help when she said, hi, your family’s over here.
00:43:56 – Ryan Mayer
I’m like, right. So anyway, thank you so much again for having me on. This was as fun as I knew it would be. But people can find me on my website, which is ryanmeercoaching.com.
00:44:09 – Ryan Mayer
and that’s M a Y E R. And then I would say I would direct him m actually more towards my YouTube, which is Ryan Mayer coaching on YouTube. And you can find me on Instagram @adhd coach Ryan Mayer. But yes, I’m pretty much on all the platforms and would love to just keep the conversation going with people around. The value not only of supporting other humans, but also for your business to learn more.
00:44:41 – Ryan Mayer
And my three steps in this neuro inclusion program, again I’m an open book, is educate, equip and empower. So educate the top leadership so they know what it is. Kind the stuff we talked about today. Equip midline managers of how to have conversations like the one we talked about and then empower the frontline employees of how to advocate for themselves. Even if they are not comfortable disclosing, they can simply say something like I do my best work when dot dot, dot.
00:45:13 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yes. So Ryan, before we close, I know you have a special gift you want to give the audience.
00:45:20 – Ryan Mayer
Oh my gosh, I almost forgot. Thank you for reminding me. So a huge change in my whole business. Like the whole goal here is to help more people more often. And one of the biggest barriers, which I’m sure you’ve run into, latanya is price point sometimes.
00:45:36 – Ryan Mayer
And the most heartbreaking thing for me was having great conversations, connecting with people on a deep level. And then they would hear how much my one on one or group coaching costs and they go, oh, I can’t afford that. A company approached me that could take my coaching and put it into an AI offering. So I want to offer free seven day premium trial for all of the lead below the surface fans out there. So we’ll have a discount code in the show notes for you.
00:46:06 – Ryan Mayer
But it’s everything from my coaching, even my voice, which is like, kind of crazy. I’m all packaged in there so you can check it out and have 24. 7 access to my coaching.
00:46:17 – LaTonya Wilkins
Great, thanks. We’ll also put that in the show notes, folks.
00:46:20 – Ryan Mayer
Cool, thanks.
00:46:21 – LaTonya Wilkins
Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Ryan. And we’ll also put all of this. He’s got some dance moves. I see.
00:46:28 – LaTonya Wilkins
I don’t know. Now I feel like we need some music here to close out, but we’run out of time, folks. But yeah. So we’ll also put those links in the show notes. So thank you folks and we’ll see you next time.