 Good day everybody and welcome back to the Thomas Hanley YouTube channel or welcome indeed because this video today we're gonna be talking about who exactly is Thomas what is this channel about this is basically an introductory video to everything me and my channel what you can expect by joining subscribing being a part of this community let us get into it without further ado this is going to be a little bit of a taster for who I am as a creator what content you can expect from me my hopes for the community what I personally want to achieve with my online advocacy work and why I'm actually creating content in the first place let's talk a little bit about who I am versus who I am not I am not a qualified doctor or psychologist I am a lived experience educator and writer meaning that please do not take any of my advice about such medical or psychological things without cross-examining it with a professional however this does allow me to have a little bit more creative freedom to integrate my own sort of theories and ideas about autism neurodiversity and mental health without having to stick to such a stringent kind of medical view I guess my whole approach to creating content is chiefly from integrating my own personal experience as an autistic person with mental mental illness like depression anxiety and such into stuff that I've researched stuff that I've learned about I've got a big background of working in both schools working in the social sort of inclusion charity sector as well as a biomedical science graduate from the University of Manchester so I've got pretty much quite a wide array of insights into lots of different topics and I like to combine them all into one video which hopefully gives you a bit of a both a medical kind of psychological view as well as more of an experiential sociopolitical view of autism I also want to highlight the time of voice and I am not an expert I hope that through my videos you don't copy and paste my particular views or think that my views and my experiences and my sort of ideas about autism are completely comprehensive and completely understood and similar to every single other professional or lived experience advocate out there that is definitely not not what I want to do I want to be a contributor I don't want to be a monolith so I very much encourage anybody who watches my stuff my channels listens to my views and opinions to formulate their own and let me know I won't go too much into my personal like personality profile traits my particular sort of political leanings or thoughts about a wide array of different things but I do want to mention that a lot of my views tend to be very moderate so I tend to sit pretty centreline on a lot of things deviating here and there I like to think of myself as a free thinker so I don't particularly have any camp or any sort of side I'm very much a free thinker I very much take things as they are try and process them understand them see if I relate to them or I agree with them and I either take them on board or I dispose of them so I'm not very radical I would say of course that's going to be in my own subjective opinion but I like to take a little bit more of a sensible kind of mature approach to different topics and not be like this very aggressive sort of militant advocacy type of person I'm very much in with the whole neurodiversity perspective and with sort of the whole disability autism communities but I do also see a lot of the opinions and sides of other people perhaps in the medical community with parents and also people in the mainstream people who aren't autistic who don't necessarily have the sociopolitical and psychological understanding of autism so hopefully this can be somewhat of a middle ground for everybody to come here discuss things share their experiences that would be great so what can you expect from my channel I do want to put a big sort of banner at the top of this because the consistently consistency at which I put out content will vary very much depending on how I'm feeling and I'm not just don't just mean in general I mean I have to deal with quite a lot of mental health conditions depression anxiety sometimes to a very severe degree which means that I can't always function so all of this stuff that I'm mentioning here this is my ideal this is what I can do with my time when my mental illness is at a manageable level you can expect monthly 40 autie podcasts before I used to do them weekly and bi-weekly nowadays I'm wanting to pivot a little bit more into doing a lot more YouTube content but that doesn't mean that it's going to be out of the way you have all of this season one season two episodes live on my channel and I will be trying to put out season three episodes with particular individuals that I find particularly interesting hopefully every month or so you can expect weekly presentation videos just like this where I'm talking here and there's a little window here where I'm talking about a specific topic those are becoming out weekly because they do take me quite a while to edit make record all of that kind of stuff right make the presentations so every week mostly you can also expect me to do weekly live reaction streams these are streams about anywhere from two to four hours where I will react to some mainstream of popular autism community content on YouTube give my thoughts on it the whole idea behind this is that I want to try and challenge a lot of the ideas that are out there in the mind mainstream add in my own lived experience perspective and knowledge about autism to hopefully try and illuminate different aspects of autism that people in the mainstream don't understand it's also about trying to bring up people's voices within the community trying to amplify their message a lot more but also to add different aspects that I understand in terms of my knowledge different experiences that I've seen throughout my time as an advocate in the community try and add that in into something that's hopefully going to be quite transformative you can also expect weekly auto time Q&A live streams which I will do both on Instagram and YouTube it's about an hour where you can ask me anything about the content that I'm creating any particular questions that you have about me mental health fitness self-improvement that is a place to do it not always the best with the comments but I do try can also expect some bi-weekly blogs that I put out both on Instagram and YouTube which are pretty much sort of 10 page sort of detailed kind of blogs about a particular autism concept and lots of other sort of image and video related content resources you might have seen some of my reels out there sort of different sections of clips from my presentation videos as well as some of my gym stuff so that's pretty much what I'm doing in terms of content creation and I'm still working on it so it may change up a little bit but that is roughly what you can expect from me now I want to highlight that please skip ahead I do have markers down in the comments and I realize that not everybody wants to hear someone tell me tell them about what they're selling what you want them to buy so skip ahead if you do if you don't want to but I do sell memberships as cheap as I can make them I tried tried to make them as cheap and accessible as I can and with memberships you'll get a little neurodiversity badge that levels up every like month for two months or three months or like year and that will be next to your name meaning that you'll have priority in comments and chats particularly in lives or on videos early video access into some things and also long form stream access so you can see a sort of clips and segments of live streams that I've done in the videos that I create but if you want to watch the entire thing sort of raw and uncut that is in the membership section as I'll talk Thomas sessions which are informal 50 minute chats where you can ask me anything about autism it's not medical advice or professional advice but if you do want to talk to me about something related to autism and you want to get my thoughts on certain things then that is a place to go I also do training and public speaking so if you have a workplace who want to do some diversity and inclusion training I can provide that both online and in person can also do public speaking in events schools anything of that nature send me an email hi at thomashenley.co.uk you can find it in the description if you want me to be a part of that in the future I am working on doing a bit more consultancy with different companies particularly around media and charitable ventures basically using my own sort of lived experience to support someone creating something related to autism I'm also going to be doing some courses on certain things of my own sort of personal development what I would encourage other people to do and some workbooks as well which I am in the midst of creating so what about the community like what am I hoping for with our community there are a lot of communities out there and I think one of one of the issues that I found particularly with autistic communities is that there can be a lot of social dogma a lot of sort of flippant throwing around of slurs and a lot of kind of battling like a kind of phrase that is like militant self-advocacy basically people assuming the worst of intentions and fighting and arguing and such this is not a place for that I don't particularly like that kind of behaviour I think we can all have very sensitively approached mature conversations about certain things without throwing around any of this kind of language it's a personal opinion for my page very moderate not very radical I understand not not the most fun but I would appreciate it if people were to have a little bit more conscious of how their words can impact other people make sure you challenge the opinion and not the person if someone has an opinion particularly and you don't like it perhaps criticise the opinion and not the person who's saying about making assumptions and such this is of course a neurodiverse space now people often get that confused neurodiverse means everybody basically everybody is neurodiverse because neurodiverse is kind of like a categorisation for a group of people if people have different neurodivergencies within that group it's considered to be neurodiverse you don't have to be autistic to be part of this community and if anybody tells that you that you can't be a part of this community because you're not autistic don't listen to them because you are it's not a solely neurodivergent space or like a safe space for neurodivergence I hope it is going to be a safe space for people but it's not like a dedicated space for autistic people I want to try and get this weird out get this education out lived experience education be it two people outside of the community in hopes that we can do some real change in our society and the more people that we can get on board the more support that we can get the better so with this if you are autistic be mindful that there may be some people who come in asking questions or saying things which very much counteract go against or upset kind of the socio-political narrative within the autistic community some people might not use the right language some people might assume the wrong thing some people might understand concepts the wrong way try and approach it with an air of sensitivity and an air of trying to understand what they're trying to say and don't necessarily assume the worst because that is the best way of turning people away from understanding the autistic experience what do I want to do long term through the future I want to educate about autism obviously from my own lived experience blended in from my experiences with other people both online and in person from different sectors of the autism world blending in with what I've personally researched too I don't know if I said that maybe I did I also want to challenge and comment on other online content I feel like there isn't a lot of autism voices in the world to counteract a lot of the misinformation misunderstandings or mischaracterizations of autism in the mainstream spheres so I'm going to try as I'm possible as much as possible to try and counteract a little bit of that add in a bit of the autistic lived experience sort of socio-political element of it and also my understanding of autism through the research I also want to give my own personal experiences and knowledge on videos from other autistic people talking about autism not to be an asshole or not to be like a devil's advocate kind of critiquing person but I think the more that we can do to amplify each other's voices sort of teaches each other learn more about autism look at different perspectives the better we will be as a community online hopefully with this I can bring some different diverse voices together onto the channel to stimulate a bit of conversation I mean even just looking at like some of the comments that I get when I'm doing my reaction live streams it can sometimes be really informative for me to understand different perspectives and views on different autism topics I do hope to offer some new insights and perspectives from my own personal self-development journey this will mean some content which is geared towards understanding and moving past certain negative things that we can experience having new perspectives on certain things understanding things in a in a more wide sort of perspective that is going to be something that I want to do but I also want to add in a little bit of my own personal flash so I will show off my special interests which are bodybuilding you know going to the gym strength fitness um combat sports sometimes a little bit of gaming and my music taste and such so if you see some stuff like that don't be like whoa what is this channel about it's just a little bit of personal flair if you don't like it I understand but this is my channel I think lastly I do want to touch on the reasons as to why I started and why I want to do this online work the thing is I have been creating for a long time both on YouTube and on other social media sites it's only recently that I've taken the decision to take it a lot more seriously to become self-employed not only just do YouTube but to do my training consultancy and my workbooks and such for a long time it has very much been a passion project of mine something very dear and close to my heart but I do really want to focus on it a lot more and if I want to focus it on a lot more I need to make it my job to do more of it the ignition for me doing this awareness work doing this kind of educational content is because I saw a university through doing one of my projects as part of my degree my film and sort of the the matching sort of literature review that I did that there are a lot of aspects to autistic people's lives which are not very good meaning that we do have a lot of negative experiences both personally and with other people and I'm hoping that with the work that I do I can illuminate some of the changes that we could make both in employment in terms of protection in terms of awareness in education and also the quality of mental health support that autistic people get I also want to challenge and change the mainstream I want to grow and amplify the voices of other actually autistic individuals dispel some of the stigmas and stereotypes try and insert more autistic voices autistic opinions autistic people into the mainstream I when we're talking about concepts related to autism neurodiversity etc the main reason for me doing all of this work the reason why I started when I started all those years ago trying to sort with my own sort of passion project is because I had a really difficult life and I have had a lot of things in my life which have been great like objectively but I've had a bad experience of life when it's come to my overall kind of life quality and happiness and such and some of that is due to the experiences that I've had some of which is due to my mental health conditions but I don't want to see other people go through similar things to me and so all the work that I do the things that I put out I try to do because I want to help people or I want to add to the conversation about autism add new perspectives help people change their minds help people see some of the very very clear statistics that are out there on life quality but also to understand them as a result of lack of inclusion and not necessarily due to inherent difficulties that autistic people have like this video because it's probably not going to get pushed out a lot and it's just going to set on my channel but like it and that would help me out a lot and if you do want to join me on my journey of everything autism and learn a bit more about the autistic experience from my perspective go ahead and subscribe and consider becoming a member to support me in my self-employed journey so that's a little bit about what I want to do and if you do want to understand a little bit more about my history in my past why I'm doing all of this stuff just this kind of slide in general why I really want to help people I'd really point you to this video which will tell you all about my experience my life with autism from being a very little small child to a bodybuilding adult as I am today let me know