#30 Through Nicky's Autistic Eyes

Author of Through Autistic Eyes, Nicky Collins spoke at our January Disability Inclusion Networking event. I just had to share it with you all.

Nicky takes time to offer coaching to late diagnosed autistic women, using her lived experience as a late diagnosed autistic to guide and support others.

Nicky is very open about her experiences. Maybe that's the coach in her. She articulates her story telling us about her experiences on both sides of her diagnosis. You hear about other events in her life that would challenge everyone and how she has overcome them.

If you want to hear more from Nicky, her own podcast Autism UnMasked is available on most platforms.

The link to her book on her website is Through Autistic Eyes - Book (theautismcoach.co.uk)

Voiceover for intro and outro by Jennie Eriksen | LinkedIn

Music granted free of charge very kindly by Music: https://www.purple-planet.com . The track is called Hope and Inspire.

Transcript

Scott Whitney: 0:46

Welcome to the All 4 inclusion pod. This week on the podcast. My guest is the author of Through Autistic Eyes Nicky Collins. Now Nicky spoke at January's Disability Inclusion Networking where she shared her story of late diagnosis and realization. On Monday, 20th of February, Nikki has a free course starting for autistic entrepreneurs. But I'll tell you a bit, little bit more about that later. However, before I play, Nikki's talk. I want to talk a little bit about the praise you'll see for last week's guest Lauren who has a condition called Stiff Person Syndrome and is a rare disease advocate. So. Sarah Dawkins said, there's always a message in the symptoms and it's our job in this human form to find and understand it and to heal it. And Jackie Scully said you are inspirational human doing such great work. And y guy. Said this was a fantastic podcast. Well done to Lauren McDermott. Whilst Lia Stoll said, it's so good to hear your voice for me. This is the hardest part. The not knowing until doctors can tell you what it is. We're still going through this with my son, but like you say, The one thing we can do is not give up. Keep looking, thank you for sharing your story. And then over on Twitter. Kirstie Ann Johnson said it's a great podcast. And the symptoms of this seem very similar to F N D and yes, I think that's why there's a lot of conditions where symptoms do overlap. Which sometimes leads to delays in getting diagnosis. So. I also want to, uh, to give a big, big shout out to, uh, to Zak Martin. Uh, Zach and his mum, Marie were on the show before. And hopefully we'll come on again at some time soon. Uh, when there was on before we spoke about their trip to me and MP in London and Zack and Marie trying to get better rights for autistic children. So they feel appreciated in a world that's really made and set up for, uh, for neuro-typical people. And, and so autistic children can reach their potential. So I think that leaves us at a great point to, uh, to bring in the talk from Nicky Collins at January's disability inclusion, networking.

Nicky Collins: 3:19

So, I'm Nicky Collins and I'm The Autism Coach, and I'm the author of Through Autistic Eyes. Is my volume okay, by the way, cause I've changed over to an exterior, microphone. Perfect. So I'm the author of Through Autistic Eyes, you can see here, and it's a collection of stories about late diagnosed autistic women and their journeys through life and it took two years to research, to put the interviews together to write the stories up, and one of those 10 stories is my story. I didn't actually realize that I was autistic, like I am autistic and it didn't go away and when I was 34 with hints and flavors of ADHD thrown in for good measure. So I am spicy, neuro spicy, and it makes for an interesting, interesting life. On the topic of neuro spicy, and I'm sure many of you already know, there is no such thing as being a little bit autistic. You either, or you aren't, functioning labels such as high functioning, low functioning, and having this linear line of you are one end or the other is outdated and it's something that is, we're meant to be moving away from, but it's something that's gonna take a long time to actually properly, fully move away from that. If a high functioning autistic person has had a tough time. They've had a busy time, they've had some stress and overwhelm, and they're no longer able to go and do the basic things like get up, get washed, get dressed. What part of that experience is now high functioning, functioning labels are there simply for the other person. It doesn't, it's nothing about the autistic person, how they experience their autism, which fluctuates on a day-to-day basis. So the idea of high, low functioning autism is very stereotypical and very outdated. Discovering that I'm autistic as an adult was quite a shock. And how could you go for such a long period of your life a big chunk, not knowing something so fundamental about yourself? And I had questions and lots of other people have similar questions and how could I have gone my whole life not knowing that, well, I was autistic? Could my life have been different had I have known earlier? Could my relationships have been different if I'd have known earlier? Now, these are unanswerable questions and I drive myself insane or more crazy if I tried to find the answers to those, to those questions. But what I do know is that my experiences through life and there have been many have shaped the person that I am today, and I wouldn't change anything because it's how I got to where I am now. In my book, the last chapter is about a woman who grew up in a counsel estate, she had no father figure. She actually used to go to cathedrals for quiet time because she knew that was one of the only quiet places in the local area. So she'd go to Worcestershire Cathedral in churches, quiet. No one goes there. She didn't know that she was autistic till she was an adult. Well into her forties. She is one of the top 20 influential women in her sector. She's in cyber. She, what else does she do? She built a million multimillion pound business on the ground up with her husband. She's aself-made millionaire by the time she was in her forties, she got a MBE from the palace. She got a Queen's award for innovation, and there's a whole load of other stuff that she's achieved. Now, these might not be everybody's goals, but success is subjective. What one person's version of success is completely different for another person. Had she have known that she was autistic at a younger age? She feels that with her social background and the way in how she was brought up, she feels that that probably would've held her back. But instead, she embraced what she loved, which was learning books and just learn, learn, learn and being a bit different and she's, she's gone. She's gone up in a world, the medical model is deficit based and that feeds into society, and that feeds into workplace and all other areas of life. What people don't understand, they tend to fear so, they just don't know how to handle things if they don't understand it. My original coaching program was called Unleash Your Autistic Superpowers. I dropped the superpowers because some people absolutely hated it. Some people loved it, some people hated it. So I dropped that and it's now simply called Unleash because you are unleashing yourself upon the world and it works. The truth is that all autistic people have strengths. Whether you choose to call them superpowers or strengths is completely a personal choice. I know that my hyper focus and my ability to organize is fantastic. My ADHD, so I'm from sometimes it likes to throw aspanner in the works and take me on adventures, which is why I need to work less so that I can go on these adventures and do both of these things. But if employers actually focused on the strength that autistic individuals brought to the workplace rather than what reasonable adjust reasonable adjustments and accommodations that they need to put into place, that would actually make the autistic individuals experience of work and the team dynamics a completely different experience altogether. You're gonna get the best out of your employees and autistic, uh, I'm sorry, or businesses are much more likely to retain their autistic talent because there is talent. This is why people do personality tests so that they make sure that they're getting different tick boxes within their organizations. So if you look at my journey, and this is, I'm very healed from the majority of this, so it's been, as I said, an experience and not all those experiences have been good, but they have made me into the strong character that I am today. At the age of 13, I had my first suicide attempt. I was kicked out of the family home on my 16th birthday, so that was a nice birthday gift. But actually what that gifted me was an amazing amount of freedom that the majority of 16 year olds don't tend to get. I've got to explore the world in a very different way. However, I was still expected to go to school, so I was expected to go to school, sit in a classroom, give teachers my utmost respect whilst they had little to no respect for me, and I was the only child in the school who didn't have a family to go home to at the end of the day and that made me even more different. It highlighted me even. Needless to say, I never finished school, didn't finish school, no qualifications. And I then met someone who was 17 years older than me. We had a son together. He's now 16 and delightful. If you've got teenagers, you know that that's, that's all true But before my son came along, I was pulled into the murky world of drugs. Alcohol up, up to that point have been a crutch for me for many, many years. And actually I've just become, I've just celebrated my first year as a non-drinker, so I've been one year thank you and best upgrade ever. Best decision I've, I've saved myself so many hours. No hangovers, no headaches, and the, the cash that you save as well, it was a great choice for many reason. But, alcohol helped me to boost my confidence in social settings. It helped me to mask out the, the harshness of the world, and it helped me to conceal wounds that I wasn't ready to face or I wasn't even aware of. And it was a really interesting journey. And now, however, at the sweet tender age of 16, Alcohol was the least of my problems because I was offered crack cocaine. Fortunately, that was not my path to take, and that that was shut off. That pathway was shut off very, very quickly, and when I originally wrote my story down to share it with people I wrote, Granddad on a piece of paper, I was on my sofa. The doors were closed, the windows were closed, and this breeze rustled around me all spiritually, and it just proved to me that my granddad has been there. After, after his passing from, from this life. And I strongly believed then that it was him who helped me back onto the right path because one morning I stopped and I never touched his stuff again. And with a drug like crack cocaine, that kind of doesn't really happen. So there was something outside guiding me back to the path that I needed to be on. And when I wrote his name down on paper and had that reaction, I was just like, Okay. All right. I've got my answer there. So now here I am. I'm a high school dropout. Yay. Almost had a class A drug addiction, doubl yay! And I'm gonna go and get some work. And I actually signed up at a recruitment agency and I found work within a bank, just like that. Over the years, I worked my way up the corporate ladder within banking and went up to senior management level. So it just goes to show that you CAN do it without a traditional standard education and in that first job, I fell pregnant with my son and I got the last six months of my pregnancy off because they made redundancies and there is no branch to move us to. So I got my pregnancy off. I got to stick my feet up, watch the original Charmed episodes, and just generally chill. I'm actually rewatching Charmed at the moment, not the new one, the old ones. So, vanquishing demons all over the place have you've seen it? And I got a pay rise. I got a loyalty bonus for staying. I got gardening leave. I've just, I was so lucky, so, so lucky with that, one of my managers told me that I should leave before it became obvious that I was pregnant and find another job who was actually the managing director who I was terrified of because he was a person and senior position and power and I was young and naive and like that scared me back then. But he said no stay and it all work out for you. And it did. So when my son came along, those of you who are parents, you will know that becoming a parent changes you. It changes your outlook in life. Everything changes. And for me, one major thing was that I started to question my sexuality. And I reached out for some advice and some guidance, and I was asked one question, and it's one of those few rare questions that you get asked in life that just stick with you. And it was this, what would you rather, would you rather regret something you did or regret something you didn't do? And I thought, well as long as I'm not hurting anybody or putting myself at risk, then I'd much rather do something that I would regret because I wouldn't be left with an unanswerable question of what if. So I came out and I never went back. If we fast forward a few years, I then had the year from Hell, my Nan died, my marriage collapsed. Loads of other things happened, which I'm not gonna go into here cause we've got 15 minutes. I did however move area the following year. Everything was starting to settle down until I had a knock on the front door from the British Transport Police. And they were there to tell me that my dad had put himself on a train tracks the night before and he never got back up from that. So going through these experiences, it has really strengthened me and I've been fortunate enough to have a special interest in personal development way that goes way beyond me knowing that I'm autistic. And what I've done is I've turned that special interest into a business that is well on track to produce its first multiple six figure year in 2023. And when I was in the workplace, however, because my energy was up and down all the time, it wasn't on a level because my hours were set hours because I had to go into a physical place. I had to get there. I had to organize myself and get there each day. I burnt out. I didn't know that I was burnt out. I just felt really miserable and depressed from time to time, and then I'd just snap out of it. But what I now know is that was autistic burnout. And if you haven't heard of beer theory, it's the autistic equivalent of spoon theory. So if you Google Beer Theory, it comes up on the national autistic website and it's very short and it's brilliant way to explain autistic burnout. So I won't go into it now, but go check it out. It's amazing. Absolutely brilliant. It talks about hangovers and yeah, the recovery from that. Everyone's had a drink in the past. Majority of everyone has had a hangover. You give people a wide birth, it's really good. So I think that over the last couple of years with Covid, and everything that happened with that, it taught us, it should have taught us a lot of things. But if it taught us one thing, it is that people can work remotely. How amazing and revelationary is that we can work all over the place and we can do so effectively and efficiently. And things to take into consideration are that people's sleep cycles, they're not thought about. For example, my sleep cycle, I go to sleep one, two o'clock in the morning is ideal for me and getting up around 10 in the morning. Perfect. If you try and get me up out of bed at the butt crack of dawn to get ready to go to the office or to do early morning meetings. I'm just, I'm a zombie. It doesn't work. I'm just, there's, you do not get my best out of me. It's horrible. And I just now know that that doesn't work for me if I try and start work before 11. So I don't have anything in my diary before 11. Great. It's the beauty of being able to block my diary out. When you work, because if you are, if you're a night owl trying to work during the day, it, it just doesn't work. And then, then the writing. So, being my own boss means that I have the luxury of not working set hours. I don't work Fridays. I do some podcast stuff on a Friday, and if I get to two or three appointments, I'm like block the day out for writing. Then I go and throw myself in a lake and cold water swim because I'm nuts, Thanks Gavin. But why is it seen as a luxury to not have set hours? Why can't that be rolled out in work establishments? Because if you are still getting the same results, does it matter? It absolutely doesn't. And these sort of small changes are guaranteed to produce transformative results for organizations of all shapes and forms for their neuro divergent talent and for their neurotypical ones as well. All neurodiversities will benefit from a little bit of flexibility and freedom duvet days. Yes, totally agree with that. There is a country that does. So another thing to finish up before there are any questions is systems. So if there's a clear process within a business that can be written down and created as a step-by-step guide, flipping well do it. Write it down. Autistic people often go through life going, I never got a rule book. I don't know how to be a human. I, I've just felt like an outsider for all of my life. So actually if you can give someone a rule book, a guidebook, a step by step on how to within certain functions, which isn't possible for all businesses because there's too many elements and parts, but it isn't just your neuro divergent staff who are gonna benefit from that. And I'm gonna wrap that up there. Hopefully that gives you some things to think about. So there we have it folks. That's Nicky. What do you think? Personally. I loved hearing Nicky's story and seeing the person she is now. As you've heard, she's had some challenges to get to where she is. She's adapted her life to suit her. And to get the best out of herself. Now, if you look into work with someone, I think it's always important that you, you both resonate and you believe in them. And I know I, I do both with Nicky. So you're probably wondering how do I hear more from Nicky? Well, she's got her own podcast. It's called Autism on Umasked. Which is more than likely available at your normal source for all your podcasts. Her book, which is a collection of stories from late diagnosed autistic woman. It's available on our website and that's a great resource for those. Who've either just been diagnosed or people who are neuro-typical and want to learn and appreciate. Or the what autism is and what Autism isn't. Details to about this are available on her website, which will be in the episode description notes. So that is it for another week. Don't forget to share this episode. With anyone you think you'll be interested in listening to Nicky? Make sure you hit that subscribe button to ensure you're the first to hear. About all our latest episodes. I'll speak to you all next week.