 Everybody, welcome, welcome to Brain Club. I'm Mel Hauser, I use she, they pronouns and I'm Executive Director here at Albrightens Belong. I'm glad you're here. Share screen. Today we will be discussing health and belonging at work and hearing from some community panelists about how they create a culture where this happens as part of our community conversation about everyday brain life, including the everyday experiences where many brains don't get what they need. And the workplace is a common context for many people's brains to not be getting what they need. If you're new to Brain Club, what Brain Club is, it's our very intentionally created education space for the broader community to provide education about neurodiversity and related topics of inclusion. This is, again, an education space. It's not for medical advice or mental health advice. It's also not a support group. We have programs that do those things, but this one's not those. This is an education program. It's a place where the collective view of the world here by culture is that of, we all have different brains and bodies and there's not one correct type of brain or body. And it's really important to us that we affirm all aspects of identity and we ensure that all people feel safe and welcome when they're here with us, when you are here with us. And so our collective access needs being able to cue safety to a broad audience is really important here. Because our goal is to create a space where people can collectively learn and unlearn things that no longer serve us. And it's a place where we want everyone to feel safe and experience something different from the outside world. So the structure here is that we have a lot of, like really, really, and you'll see this in a second as we get rolling, but we'll have the majority of our time today will be that of a pre-recorded community panel. So these are folks who did their interviews ahead of time and that'll be the main event. And with the chat box going along the way that you're welcome to use, but the main event being our community panel today. And then we'll have some time for discussion to follow. All forms of participation are okay here as many of you have figured out, you can have your video on or off. And even if it's on, we don't expect anything of you. We certainly don't need you to like sit still or look at the camera or anything. So feel free to walk and move and fidget and stim and eat and take breaks and participate. However, you are comfortable participating, including observation as a completely valid a form of participation, but we also do wanna create space for everyone to share their ideas. As I said, the chat box will be going. That is a great place to communicate during the prerecorded panel. That'll be the only way to communicate during the prerecorded panel, but then once the discussion opens up, you're welcome to communicate with mouth words or in the chat. As I said, the chat's kind of like running in parallel to what's happening on like the main stage, if you will. I may read out selections, but depending on how many comments there are, then we just wanna create space that during our limited discussion time to just create space for everyone who wants to share their ideas, create space for them to do so. Last bit of access. Close captioning is enabled. You just have to toggle it on if you'd like to use it. So depending on your version of Zoom, you might see the live transfer closed captioning icon. If not, look for the more dot, dot, dot and choose show subtitles. And you can do the same and choose hide subtitles if you wanna turn them off. That's my visual support to open the chat box. So if anybody's using it, I'll see it now. Okay. So we are continuing our theme of November, health and belonging. And especially if you're new to our community, for us healthcare is more than medical care. So all of our programs cluster into all of these buckets, which we think are all part of healthcare, medical care, social connection, education, employment. And so that's where today's conversation comes from. And speaking of, did you know this could be healthcare? Hugely great news. The, did you know this could be healthcare campaign is well underway? For those of you who haven't heard of this before, we have this incredible opportunity thanks to a matching gift from an ABB supporter with every dollar raised before the end of the year has double the impact. And this is how we are able to continue to provide all of our community programs at no cost. Okay. So the main event. What we know is that autistic adults are two and a half to eight times more likely to be unemployed or underemployed. 75% of ADHD-ers experience employment-related challenges. And we know that employment and health are connected in both directions. So unemployment increases the probability of developing a chronic health condition by 83%. So that's why, you know, for us, employment is part of health. The thing is though, not everyone has a workplace environment where their needs are met. And so when we identify workplaces who are creating workplace environments for people with all types of brains to get their needs met and thrive, we like to bright spot those businesses because that is not to be taken for granted at all. And so for the past year and a half, AllBrain's Belong has run a neural-inclusive employer bright spotting program where Vermonters can nominate their employers who are, you know, doing a good job, doing a good job creating environments for people with all types of brains. And so I'm very excited to announce the fall 2023 neural-inclusive employer bright spots. Darn Tough Vermont, Michelle, great question. So yes, this is a Vermont program. So Darn Tough Vermont, Encore Renewable Energy, Eternity, Oak Maple Finance and VSECU Division of New England Federal Credit Union. So congratulations to all of our fall 23 bright spots. And today we are asynchronously joined by three of our award winners, Becky Walsh, Founder of Oak Maple Finance, Kevin Stefani, Senior Talent Acquisition Recruiter at Darn Tough Vermont and Blake Sturkey, Co-CEO of Encore Renewable Energy. All right, David, take it away. Maybe we can begin with, can you tell us about Oak Maple and the work that you do? Sure, Oak Maple was founded in the fall of 2022 to fill a need that we've seen in the community for part-centered financial planning, for people who might not fit in the traditional investment management firm or financial planning firm for whatever reason, whether their assets aren't the levels that traditional firms require or because they're just looking for something maybe a little softer touch, a little bit more customized, a little bit less scary to deal with. So we founded my colleague, Chris, and I founded Oak Maple in 2022 to create that experience for people. So in addition to all that, you've been recognized as an employer who is particularly skillful with working with employees who think, learn and or communicate differently than the so-called typical brain, even though that's of course not a thing. So like, I don't know, what are scores that you do live? Well, first is recognizing the tremendous gift that all of us have to bring and the so-called typical brain has its own brain rules for what those gifts might look like, but I look at it, not surprisingly, a little bit differently. I do self-identify as having some neurodiversity myself and I'm seeking to create just the environment where I want to work. You create a superior product that you stand behind. That's also, it sounds like that's your philosophy of building a workplace culture. You create a superior workplace culture that people want to come to. Yeah, the world loves our socks. We have doubled in size in employees in the last four years. We have doubled our revenue and we've doubled our manufacturing capacity. What was it like to learn that you were nominated as a neuroinclusive employer? I will say it was a little shocking and pretty exciting at the same time. Saw a TED talk a couple of years ago and it was a guy with rampant ADD and his battle cry was respect cognitive diversity. And I was like, that's my champ right there. That's my guy. My name is Blake Sturkey. I'm a board member at Allbrains Belong, Vermont. My day job, however, is the co-CEO of Encore Renewable Energy. Encore is a mission-focused B-core. Our business is within the field of clean energy. So we build large-scale solar and storage projects, but that is really sort of a vehicle in our minds towards using business as a force for positive societal change. And as a result, things like neurodiversity are super interesting to us and fit really well within the way we think about workforce development, community engagement, things of that nature. I don't think it's frankly specific to neurodiversity. If you're inclusive is the new word these days. If you're able to look beyond what separates people, which to me is what inclusivity is, then it doesn't matter if it's diversity of skin color or diversity of thought patterns. It's all or diversity of socioeconomic status or position within a company, right? Or resume or background or education or any number of things that you can be more or less inclusive with. That's really, I think the mindset that it takes. And that doesn't happen easily. And I think it comes from the top down in any organization if it's gonna be genuine and pervasive and sort of effective. Even as someone who is already for a long time been mindful that diverse teams perform better and you've had this mindset of inclusion and belonging, you neurodiversity was still new as far as a lens for inclusive employment. And I wonder, since attending a neurodiversity training, how has your lens as a leader shifted, if at all? Yeah, so that observation I think is worth from my point of view, expanding on just briefly. And that is, so we have had a diversity equity inclusion effort for a number of years at Encore. For a number of reasons. One is we think that it's the right thing to do. So as to provide equal opportunities for people sort of really across the spectrum to find how, in any way, right? Whether it's gender identity, ethnicity, socioeconomic background. And in addition, and this is the thing that makes focusing on DEI type stuff so easy is that, in fact, diverse organizations perform better. So not only is it an opportunity to do the right thing, but by doing the right thing, you build businesses for organizations that perform better. My guess is that there are a lot of organizations that are thinking about diversity, equity, inclusion and doing really good work in this regard, but maybe perhaps not including neurodiversity into that effort. Until we as an organization started to build a relationship with all brains belong, which I think probably goes back 18 months or so at this point, at least the leadership team and our DEI committee was not focused. And I think largely not aware of the spectrum across which different people's brains operate or how they were. And so the idea of neurodiversity, training neurodiversity inclusion intentionally, sort of being intentional about it was not on our radar screen. In really any way, it just wasn't. So when we became aware of this training, it was immediately something that we were super interested because it fit really well with the other types, sort of somewhat related types of training. And I put them into the category of, certainly you might bucket it differently, but around sort of emotional intelligence and sort of awareness of how the place that others come from and respecting and understanding and not assuming that everyone operates or works or has the same background and experiences and certain people have different privileges than others. And so just expanding the lens or the aperture of the lens as it relates to this was super interesting and really beneficial. I mean, as an old salesman, I would tell you, I've been on a bunch of national sales teams for products and for different companies. And the most successful sales teams I've seen have always been the most diverse all from different places and backgrounds and ages and everything else. And then there's like research on that that diverse teams perform better. Just that's a thing. It's cool, but until you live it and see it, I don't think it makes sense to a lot of people. It's still sort of this novel, oh, that's in the news. That's not in my life kind of idea, right? The way a lot of things are these days, right? Oh, global warming is not in my face. So I don't have to worry about it or that's not real because it doesn't happen to me kind of stuff. I have found that the neurodiverse folks that I work with are really, really, really good at the things that they're really, really, really good at. And why would I not want someone who's that good at a specific task if maybe they have a couple other things that they're less good at? And so it's getting to know the strengths of every team member and playing to those strengths makes our whole team stronger than if we had just assumed that everyone was pretty good at everything. And we expected everybody to do everything pretty well. So it's really about recognizing the strengths that each individual brings. I love that because I think that in a neuro-normative world, right, there's like you fit the person to the position as opposed to like what you're really talking about is radical, right? Of like actually morphing someone's employment experience around their own strengths. And it begins with having a curiosity about what the strengths are. And what I find is that those of us who are used to navigating a neuro-normative world, we have a lot of self-awareness. We have a lot of adaptability. We're quite resilient, we're quite persistent. We're great self-advocates. And I can't think of a better collection of traits to head into a more rapidly changing world than resilience and persistence and adaptability and advocacy and self-awareness. And so it's really exciting to be able to create an environment where we are just attracting people with those specific traits. You know, it's interesting, I think that a lot of folks who've been recognized for this program, we've been doing this for about a year now, when we ask like, you know, what do you do to be neuro-inclusive? They almost always start out by saying something like what you said, which was really just our respect for cognitive diversity. Like if you have a lens of seeing the world that we all have different brains that do things differently, your practices, your policies, your routines, they're all gonna come from that view of the world. Yeah, I noticed that in your email and I can't imagine it any other way, right? So part of the magic, I'm not gonna lie, to be 100% transparent is we needed people. So the more the need, the greater the demand and the lower the supply, I am just more inclusive by nature, frankly. I have four kids, the first three of them are adopted and they're all multi-culturally adopted and it's just sort of the world. I grew up in Metro New York and the world's just kind of a melting pot where I came from. And you know, I think we did need people, right? So I was able to more readily convince folks, hey, you need to give this person a shot, right? So it's not like I'm just giving everybody willy-nilly job, right? They gotta present reasonably well on paper or at least be able to apply somehow and they need to be able to have some kind of conversation with me where I can look at what transferable skills are. So that to me is the second challenge outside of your core beliefs. It's really hard, not everybody does it well, like distill down what really, what do you need to do this job, right? Manufacturing, really? To me, it's fundamental building blocks comes down to attention to detail over a highly, highly repetitive process. So where else can I find that? Somebody who's been in a fast food or a line cook situation, right? Deals with that stuff all the time. Somebody that is like, you know, I look at there's some folks that come out of national life once in a while, they're just like reviewing ad nauseam, compliance-driven paperwork. Did the agent sign? Did the homeowner sign? Did the underwriter sign? Are all those dates in line in the right way? And like just doing that same thing and people that work in mail rooms, there's so many repetitive processes in our day that you can have attention to detail. People that make beds in hotels, right? Well, they could make 100 beds a day, right? There's a certain like visual inspection, quality control and attention to detail that all that requires that a lot of people don't realize that they have, right? A dishwasher and a restaurant, right? Anyways, so I would say really distill down what does it take to do that job at its fundamental levels and where, how can you ask people, right? And tease it out of them. Sometimes I gotta put myself in other people's shoes. So I think sort of empathy is sort of the overriding theme I've been talking about. So how can I imagine, all right, I know what it's like to be a person who works in a restaurant because I've eaten at a restaurant, but tell me what don't I know? What happens in the kitchen that I don't see? What do you deal with, right? Are you dealing with substituting things? Are you dealing with, of course, what happens when the plate doesn't look right? Do you go back to the chef, right? Like there's so many different ways to ask, you gotta ask the right questions, right? I can ask my kids when they come home from school, how was your day? And I'll get the good answer, right? If I ask them, who'd you sit next to on the bus? I'll get a story. So ask the right questions, get people to tell you their stories. And when you know the core fundamentals you're looking for, you look for those fundamentals and those stories. And that's, I think that the true way you can be more inclusive and remove bias and all those things that tend to get in the way of really good people that you're overlooking or missing out on. I imagine because for many people that quick building of reports energetic, right? So like the energy that you're giving off is fundamentally, I think connected to the way you see the world. And I think like nervous system to nervous system that co-regulation thing just like probably happens more quickly for you than other people. Maybe, maybe. Again, I think it comes down to some core beliefs too, right? And I think on some level the world hasn't figured out how to measure or whatever the heck quantify it but we are energetic beings, like you said. Absolutely. And if you can't measure it, but you can feel it, I think it's there. You know, like energetically you end up queuing safety. If you don't, if you don't actually get there your energy does not necessarily queue safety to people with all types of brands. But like if it begins from a place of like, well, I know as a corporate leader that diverse teams perform better. And now you've told me that there's this aspect of diversity that my DEI efforts don't cover. Like, okay, now I'm open, I'm listening. Okay, if you are someone who's like, well, in my team, I have this situation where like my teams don't get along and like there's a lot of conflict and like I'm forced to have to solve this conflict. And you're telling me that understanding the ways in which brains work are what plays a role in interpersonal communication. Like, okay, now I'm open. So it's like whatever gets you in the door to then be able to learn more and to learn from your employees, right? Like, so you learn from the people you're serving and you know, whether you're gonna like adapt to certain like, you know, buzzwords like servant leadership or like whatever, but it's really about how do you understand the needs of your people? What do you think about that? I'm thinking about the idea of queuing safety and how many businesses out there are really excited about that idea. What the training did was to give us an understanding of how different individuals whose minds, their brains work differently, you know, access and process and interpret information in different ways. And that the fact that someone doesn't necessarily do those things in the same way that you do or work in the same way that you do doesn't mean that they're not as capable because that's like the natural place to go, which is, well, why can't they do? Why can't they do that? Why can't they do that faster? Why does it take them so long that I wouldn't do it that way? You know, rather an awareness of that creates the opportunity to sort of embrace or at least strive to embrace differences. And so reconsider, you know, how people may want to receive information, receive information best, process information best so as to give them opportunities to excel as individuals and then contribute like in the most impactful, beneficial way to the team. And that can mean, I think what we've become aware is it might mean that people are given opportunities to express themselves around, you know, I'd rather do phone calls versus Zooms or I process information better when I don't have to give an immediate response and I have time to digest and to think or I really need my calendar to be managed in one way or another. And if we can allow them to do that, first of all, create an environment where people feel comfortable expressing that. And then once they do, and I think we were there already, but once they do think about can we make adjustments so as to allow people to optimize their performance, optimize their personal and professional development. I want to work at a place where there's not the eight to five brain rule norm of serving our clients while we are responsive to clients during typical business hours, we are not required to fit our work in those companies. So one of my colleagues wakes up at six a.m. and finishes the day by about two. Another one wakes up at 10 and might finish by six. Or we also allow for shortened work weeks that allow people to balance their self-care needs with the work that they're doing. So it might be that their work day is 10 to six. A few days a week rather than a full week. So we recognize that flexibility allows for everybody's best work if they're aware of what structure they need for themselves. Have you had the experience, because there's a lot of people who don't, right? So like one of my patients says, and I quote all the time, because I think it's just genius, like I don't know what my access needs are. I just know they're not being met. Do you either, the folks who you work with or work for your clients, like just like do you, what do you think about that? The idea of like people, if you really kind of think about even employers, you're like, I wanna do the thing but I don't know about this thing and they don't know about this thing. So anyway, what do you think about that? It would be hard for me to train my approach to someone else, so an employer who doesn't know about the thing, but it's very similar to the way I approach clients. There's a lot of curiosity. There's a lot of questions. There's a lot of holding up a mirror. This is what I'm seeing. Does that resonate with you? Hey, let's try this. There's a lot of experimenting. There's, and it's, we're also striving to make it very safe for us all to fall on our face. And so I wanna try this. I don't know how it's gonna work. Well, the only way we're gonna know how it's gonna work is if we try it. So let's try it. So trying to make it really, trying to create that safety to stumble so that we find what those access needs are. Like splitting the different buckets that I spend my time in the employment space. So as an employer, I do what you just said. I think as a doctor, I do what you just said. When I'm doing trainings for employers, it's like a completely different part of my brain. The idea of like zooming way out to be like, okay, I'm gonna describe the overarching structure that I think in those other buckets I'm actually using to think about the ways in which all brains differ. And so when you think about what you're gonna try and it really comes from needing that overarching framework because people don't think about this or maybe they think about inclusion but they don't think about these aspects of inclusion even though like early talking about a ton of people whose brains work differently than the like default. And I think also we're talking about universal design because there are some people whose brains don't work the same as the default most of the time but then there's every single human who goes through human experiences that can cause them to have days or weeks or months where their brain doesn't fit the norm. Whether that's because they have health issues or because they're caring for someone or because they're particularly attuned to how hard the world is right now. And so if we're incorporating principles of universal design into how we design our work experience how we design our client experience seeing what are the barriers to alleviating some of the weight of being a human in this world. We look at what those barriers are and then we see, all right, what can we do differently? I love that. We know that universal design that is using flexible multiple different ways to do the thing that benefits everybody. We have a 90 day probationary period like any employer, right, before benefits and all that kind of fun stuff kicks in. So by two or three months, you pretty much know if that person's gonna work out and they pretty much know if they really like it here. So yeah, I think a lot of that stuff, I will say I am well supported as a recruiter. I've had a great mentor and I continue to have another great mentor. I have an amazing team of HR professionals around me that continue to help guide and course correct and I'm well resourced, right? The company is doing well. So when they need people and they see the success, I've hired over 500 people in three years into this company, right? Not all of them are still here, but I will tell you, we look at what we call our rolling 12. How many people have we hired in the last 12 months that are still with us? Cause that's usually the higher turnover number. Probably about half the company has been here for like five years or 15 years or more. Our three master technicians have a combined over 80 years experience with us, right? 10 year. And so our rolling 12 was more like we were hanging on to about 60% of the people we hired in the beginning of the year and now that number is up over 84. There are certain roles that require certain types of interactions and if that, you know, and so not every reign will fit perfectly with a given role or an environment or a setting or a set of conditions, in which case then an awareness around these matters then can take you to a place of saying, well, is there an opportunity elsewhere in the organization to create a good match? So we weren't thinking about any of that stuff and so we're now thinking about all of it since the last training when you joined us virtually at Hula, we have found a larger space inside of Hula. This is that co-working space up on Lake Champlain in Burlington that we're gonna move into and it's going to be probably five times as large and it'll provide us enough space to allow us to grow for several years. And while like not incredibly innovative, we did give some consideration to the fact that different people, different types of people like to work in different environments. So whereas our current space is just an open floor, floor plan type of arrangement, we're going to have open space for people that like that. We're gonna have a lot of small offices for people who don't work well with a lot of background noise. We'll have conference rooms of course and like phone booths and stuff. But yeah, we think it's gonna be really effective. We're psyched about it. There is no great way that if you don't have any power and privilege and you are told to sit in an open space, there's like no way to get your needs met. It's so meaningful to me to hear you describe what you internalized from that training and what you took away from that because that would be like, that's exactly what I would have hoped that would be the downstream impact of the concepts that came up in that introductory training. So it's just amazing that you've taken it and run with it. I think because you already have this lens of wanting people to feel like they could belong to a team where they could get their best work done. This may have been like, the specific concepts may have been new, but like you were the, as you said, it was widening the aperture of the lens, not like, I don't think it was completely changing the lens, you have the lens already. I have the belief that everybody deserves a second chance, right? I work with a number of parole officers and they're counterparts that run sort of counseling programs for people that were incarcerated. And is that, why did, how did those people end up where they did, right? I doubt it was because they were neuro-inclusively involved in their community or their employer or whatever. Good people make bad choices all the time. And not all of us pay the same price for that. So just give people the benefit of the doubt, at least give them the time of day. I was starting to think to myself like the typical adage, well, that's harder when you get bigger. But is it really? Is maybe, maybe, but you have more resources generally. You have more resources, right? So I'm not sure if it's harder. It's just more effort. And so then the question is like, is the effort worth it? Because that's what I think they're saying is, implicitly or explicitly, the effort's not worth it. It's not worth it. We're gonna give them the space and they're gonna do their jobs. And the thing that's really short-sighted is, like, and then they're gonna leave and then you're gonna have to hire new people, right? And then you're gonna train them and they're gonna leave and then you're gonna, right? Like it- Yes, this is exactly what goes on. Like when you think about how much revenue is lost from like having to onboard new people and like go through this whole thing where if you just figure out how to meet people's needs, they would probably stay and like, I don't know, do their work. It would actually cost, potentially cost money to like reconfigure the architecture and design of your office space, but it's actually free to let your employees work from home where they can control their sensory environment on their own space. Like that's, it's just, there's a, like this is how we do it because this is the only way to have a team where it's like, you've been demonstrating that you have a team that is mostly remote. You get together, you know, throughout the year, right? Like you have a team that has built team culture remotely. Like that's, people don't know that can be done. I don't know what it is. You know, it's just easier to be like, well, I can better know what my employees are doing. Well, really? Like you really can? Like, are you gonna be like sitting over their shoulder? Like, no, you can't. Or like, well, we've got all this space. We better use it or culture, like culture, like forcing people to commute is gonna like strengthen you, right? Like, what do you, what? Right, that's just the assumption that gets made and gets propagated without really, without necessarily zooming out to ask like, why are we doing this? And do we need to do it this way? Do you have any advice for an employer who hasn't even really ever thought about this? And like, it just seems so super out there that you would build a workforce culture where people with all brains can get their needs met and thrive? Yeah, I would say, you know, it's like so much of life, right? It's really hard to look in that mirror and look at what core values or core beliefs aren't serving you well. But focusing on things that are going well, both individually within the organization and regionally within our state and globally, that is such a critical part of making the change happen that we want to see because if we focus on what's going poorly or focus on what's going wrong, we're gonna run out of spoons and we're gonna run out of the ability to make that change happen. So I applaud you for focusing on what's going well in this program. Well, you know, thank you for that because I think, I mean, while we started doing this and so you're part of the third cohort of neuroinquisitive employment bright spots, you know, it's the, it's human nature, right? That when someone tells you that you're doing it wrong, there's that involuntary automatic limbic response. So like that's not how you change systems. And it's like whether you're gonna think about, you know, systems improvement or like even like, you know, marketing, if there's all these aspects of like, you just do the thing that you're, you know, you're really proud of, you create something really cool and you push forward with it. And like, this is the same thing. And so, you know, by identifying these, and you know, it's the other, the other reason we chose to do it this way is that you really want to model for people practical ways to actually do the thing because it's one thing to come in like academically and be like, the literature says that neuro inclusive employment involves flexibility. You're like all universal, all the things. But like, you know, let's just kind of show people it can be done. It doesn't actually, because the thing is the other thing I'll mention is that, and you know, every single person that I've interviewed for the past year and a half in this program, literally everyone began their story by saying, talking about their view of the world. It's actually, and you did it too. And you know, you talked about, you know, the idea of like everybody having strength. And you know, just like, you know, anyway, that, it appears at least in the, you know, 15 or so employers who've been recognized in this program, it appears that like the fundamental thing that people have in common is their view of the world. If you were to ask yourself as a member of an organization, thinking about DEI matters, you know, do you know folks whose brains work differently? And who might benefit from, you know, being provided an opportunity to engage with the world, engage with information work in a manner that was the best fit for them. So for example, you know, do you have a family member or a child or a partner that, you know, has ADHD or is somewhere on the spectrum or, you know, just processes information in one way or another who maybe needed a different approach to teaching and learning. And whether or not you would A, want more organizations and employers to approach them in a manner that allowed for them to succeed. And whether or not you think your organization would do better, you know, perform better if you provided that opportunity to those people, right? Because presumably you know how talented they are. So I think if the answer to those things are, yeah, I would like there to be more opportunity for people. And I'd like to see my organization be part of that change. Then you should, you know, consider doing what we did and, you know, learning more about this. And this is an advertisement for all brains belong necessarily, but they're really good at this stuff. So that would be one place to start. Where does their curiosity take them to learn more about the world and how we're a couple different and how diversity actually creates strength? What's their path to get there? And there's probably some pretty easy way for them if they're just looking around and being curious. And I think that the panel is amazing. Let me share some themes that stood out to me about the conversations. And then I'd love to hear what stood out for you. So I think we heard a lot from our three panelists about their view of the world, the idea that viewing their employees through a strength-based lens, questioning assumptions, you know, we don't need to do the same thing the way we've always done it or the way that, you know, dominant culture says it should be done. We heard several, I think probably all of our panelists talking about the idea of finding a goodness of fit, a match between an employee's strengths, interests, and what the organization needs, what's required for this position, and providing some flexibility that once those core requirements are met, everything else is flexible. And of course, the idea that universal design offering multiple different options to do the thing benefits everyone. So with that, I would love to hear from you about what stood out to respond to the question in the chat or the comment that turned into a question in the chat, just the idea that to the extent to which someone's view of the world is initially learned, you know, as young children. And, you know, my comment to that is that I think, you know, at Brain Club, we talk a lot about ableism, of course, but internalized ableism that many of us as adults are working really hard to unlearn. And what I meant by my comment in the chat connected to someone else observing that view of the world comes from parents or the people raising a person. My comment was that often internalized ableism is experienced without even knowing your neurodivergent. And so it's the idea that like your view of the world, you don't know where it comes from, it just is. And it's pervasive in everything you see and interact with and do in your life. Sorry, I said Michelle, but didn't unmute myself to do it. In fact, I muted then said Michelle and then was like, what just happened? Oh, it's the sequencing, it's my dyspraxia. It's like, you gotta do the thing in the particular order. It doesn't happen the way you're expecting. Oh, so were you calling on me or were you just- It was, I was calling on your hand being up, I'm sorry. Oh, okay, I was confused. I really loved the idea that the recruiter was really, as he was interviewing people, was thinking about the ways in which a job might be modified. To fit the skill set of the person. And I was thinking, wouldn't that be wonderful if that happened all the time? But that means that whoever is doing the interviewing is empowered to make those kinds of decisions. And how many times is there going to be a situation in which the person doing the interviewing is able to tweak the position themselves or is able to go back to people and advocate for that individual? What I see is that a lot of people in business aren't empowered to make those decisions because the decision-making guidelines haven't been pushed down or they don't feel that they could advocate or take that suggestion to anybody else. So I think that's oftentimes why even if they wanted to, those nice impulses might go nowhere. So I think there's a certain amount of we have to help interviewers and people in the interview process feel more empowered. I think actual hiring managers might have some power but other interviewers may not. Thank you, Michelle. I'm gonna call on Erin first and then I'll circle back around and share my thoughts on that. Hi Erin, go for it. I just think it's wild listening to everybody talk and realizing how not only like has the internal ableism happened in my personal life, in my industry, I'm an exercise physiologist. So I'm in the fitness industry and we are not good at this at all. And our job is to get people moving and we don't create a safe space for the most part to do that. And it breaks my heart. So this has just been so enlightening. I have a question with this training and these trainings, does it cover when different people have conflicting access needs? Because that's something like I'm over here like how in the world could I do this while also, while not fawning, I don't know if that's a term that, you know, and not trying to please everybody with my high sensitivity and empathy. So I was just curious as if that is something like there are tools for how to not, for how to manage that skillfully, yeah. So we, you know, and again, like all brains belong is not the only organization in the universe who provides training on these matters. I can only tell you how I do it when I do trainings about this. So first off is like the big umbrella of like, we all have different brains here, some of the common ways in which brains different. So this is about a neuro inclusion. It's not about like something extra or special that you do for special people. It's like, this is how you create environments where people with all types of brains get to show up and normalize that we talk about access needs and normalize that, you know, part of the neuro inclusive space is that we acknowledge conflicting access. You know, on the premise of that we all have different brains and different brains have different needs, what that will therefore always mean inevitably is that we'll have conflicting access needs. And so now here's a framework on how we negotiate and navigate conflicting access needs. And kind of depending on some people want to like, I mean, sometimes I do like workshops, we do breakout groups and we like work through, you know, it's like real life situations of conflicting access. It depends on like, you know, if it's like a one hour one should learn we don't get to necessarily workshop people's individual situations, but, you know, on a more, apart from that we usually can pull that off because it's real. It's totally real. And so, you know, it's conflicting access needs between supervisor and supervisee, between peer colleagues, between, you know, for those who are like client facing. There's also like conflicting access needs between the organization and the individual, you know, but the framework of conflicting access needs, I think is tremendously helpful. That's a way of understanding like what's going on and making this be like this zoomed out commentary on like this is how, this is what happens when people interact with other people. It's inevitable. There's a, just I'll read Laura's comment and then I'm gonna, then I'm reminding myself to circle back around and talk about interviewing and hiring decisions. So Laura says, I appreciate the genuine effort it felt like they were all making to make their workplaces better. Authenticity goes so far for inclusion. Yeah, I could not agree more. And I think that back to Michelle's comment, I mean, it's really about, I think like zooming way out. It's about, I think rethinking like power structures and this balance of like who makes decisions uninformed by what. And also zooming out and like thinking about integration within an organization like even as a really small organization with a staff of six people, we still have to work really hard to integrate our medical side with our community and education side because like integration is really important. Otherwise you have what I think Michelle what you're describing made me think of just like fragmentation and siloing even within an organization and I think that happens all the time. And that makes it really hard for people to get their needs met when their needs can't be met by a fragment their needs have to be met by the integrated whole. And so with that, I really appreciate you all being here and being part of tonight's Brain Club. Next week, we will be zooming out and talking about the big picture of health and belonging and in particular how we hear it all brains belong are trying to integrate medical care into social connection employment support community education into this like holistic whole of trying to make the world better for people of all types of brains. So next week we'll be about how health is more than health care. So we look forward to seeing you then have a good week everybody. Bye.