 I think another thing that we haven't touched on is the stuff around cognitive empathy. Because, you know, Alexa, if I'm here, it's related to us, our emotional state and ability to communicate our emotions and categorize them. Whereas cognitive empathy or indirect communication, being able to look at someone, understand from the tonality, the body language changes, the facial expressions that they're in a certain emotional state, it's an important part of reacting to it appropriately with adaptive empathy. So it helps to understand how most people do this and then why it doesn't work for you and what you need to do instead, if that makes sense. So how most people do this is they start with the base assumption, the other person is just like me, which means if you're crying, it means you feel the same way as you do as I do when I'm crying or it means if you are pacing around the room, it means that you feel the same way as I do when I'm pacing around the room. For most autistic people, that is not a very good starting point. So we need to recognize that we probably need to check our own assumptions on that because it may be quite different. And then once we recognize that, we can start to link up how the person is actually feeling with how I actually feel at another time. So the base emotions are all the same. When you're sad, it feels the same as when I'm sad. Now you might express it differently. And things might make you sad, but we still know what that base emotion is like. So it's like we need to do one extra step with the cognitive empathy to recognize the emotion that the other person is communicating, link that to an emotion that I know what it feels like and then link that to a situation that and an expression that I would use to express that emotion. And then that way, I'm translating from their behavior to something completely different in my behavior that's essentially emotionally equivalent. Making those cognitive links between the two. It's a bit of a mental gymnastics, but it is the way that we can make cognitive empathy work really well. And then once you try it, like that feels like a lot of effort to go through, but once you train it and you do it again and you do it again and you do it again and you do it again and you do it again, it becomes second nature so that I can build up in my brain a database of how most people behave most of the time, which means it's like learning a second language at the, in the beginning, you're learning all this grammar and you're learning all these vocab and you're like, how am I going to remember all of these things? But if you do it enough, our brains, you know, link up the patterns so that they're almost instantaneous, they go from our slow brain to our fast brain and then suddenly we can do them all instantly with the code switching that would otherwise have taken us a long time. So the goal is not to keep doing those mental gymnastics. The goal is to train your fast brain to do it automatically so that it doesn't take you effort in the future. And there's a big difference between those two objectives. I mean, definitely sort of out in, out in the world, you know, with, with friends, coworkers, you know, through podcasting and stuff. I think when I'm mentally quite, I have, I have quite, you know, my mental energy, I feel quite good. I think that those, those are the times where I'm a lot better at picking upon emotional cues like that. I think that the issue for me particularly comes in when I'm feeling comfortable or that I'm around people, that I'm around around a lot. I kind of, I kind of shut my brain off a little bit. And I think sometimes you can get yourself into a bit of a situation where you get paranoid about, oh, are you, are you thinking about this in the right way or are you exaggerating how they might be feeling? Good day, viewers and listeners. Apologies for my very rude introduction to our regularly scheduled broadcast. I just want to remind you that if you have enjoyed the podcast this far, please make sure to rate, subscribe, like, comment and share. All of these actions are pretty much the lifeblood of a small, independent creator like myself. And it will help me get most of my work, more of my work to people who really need it. If you want to stay up to date with my life, get behind the scenes content, check out my daily blogs, head over to Instagram at Thomas Henley UK. You'll find a link to that down in the description, alongside my range of neurodiversity clothing, just like this strong, powerful autistic hoodie that I love so much. And my website, of course, where you can find a contact email to book me for one-to-one orders and coaching, interviews, workplace training and speaking. So thank you very much for listening to this very annoying self-advert. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the show. And I think, you know, to a certain extent, that that's really sort of a useful way of sort of navigating the world from from our perspective. But I also think, especially if you're in a relationship with a neurotypical individual, that they can do a lot of stuff themselves as well. Because, you know, there will be times where you don't pick up on the fact that their tone is just a little bit different than usual, you know, because people vary how they speak and how they look and feel on a daily basis, and it's not always connected to a certain emotion. So, you know, I think it's kind of like meeting them halfway with it, because I think that something that really helps me feel a lot more confident that I understand the situation is that they tell me, you know, I pick up on something that's maybe a bit different. I say, are you OK? And instead of going, yeah, I'm good. They'll say, no, I'm not good. I'm not. I'm not good. Or, you know, they'll say, yeah, I'm good. I'm like, are you sure? That's actually a really fantastic, simple strategy that I teach people in my emotional intelligence course. It's around guessing and just noticing. Like, even if you don't know what the right answer is, you've noticed something is here. So you say, yeah, I noticed something. Is everything OK? And they'll say yes. And you'll say, OK, because the reason I'm asking you is because it doesn't sound like you're OK. And then it might take one or two goes, but you'll eventually they'll eventually help you to figure out what was the thing you notice. Because what you're noticing is there's a mismatch. Someone's saying they're OK, but they're sounding like they're not OK. And it's hard to figure out which one is correct. But that's the hard part that we want to get better at over time. Some people can feel really like someone's lying to them as well. I'm like, you know, if you if you're very sort of hyper. Fixated on direct communication, you don't really go with the indirect stuff. If someone says they're OK, you'll be like, cool. And you just get on with stuff. So it's like, and if they say they're OK, but they're not. You're like, why the hell why the hell do you lie to me about it then? Like so you get the issues around that. Yeah. So even just mentioning it is a really good is a really good strategy. But what I was going to say before, just very quickly, we'll probably have to wrap up. Sure. Sure. Is that. Yeah, it's this kind of stuff works both ways as well. So in my coaching work, I work a lot with partners of autistic people. And a big part of that is helping them to train their brain to recognize when I come up to you and tell you in a calm voice that I'm at about 95 percent of my capacity and I'm going to need to go home pretty soon. Yes, they need to recognize that that means I'm actually at 95 percent of my capacity. Yeah, just because you better do something really quickly because it's really urgent. And I know I'm not really expressing that through my emotions or words or speed of voice or emotional tone or anything at the moment. But that's because I'm trying not to get tip myself over the edge. So they can also help with that with bridging that gap as well. And there's obviously a lot of different sort of gaps and ways of bridging communication between autistic people and neurotypicals. I think it's it's it's also, you know, really important, especially when it comes to mental health settings. No, if some if someone has a patient, they're a psychologist, they're a mental health worker and they're autistic and the mental health worker doesn't really know much about autism. And that person comes up and says, I'm having the worst time. I am just completely depressed all of the time. And the fact that they're not breaking down and sobbing and crying in front of them, they don't really take it seriously. And I think, you know, there can be lots of situations like that, whether it's at school or in the wet place. You know, medical is a good example of people being like sent home from hospital, come back when it's worse, like I wouldn't be in emergency if it wasn't worse. This is like 10 out of 10. What do we what do we do about it? Yeah, yeah.