Hello, I'm Ruth, and I'm really grateful to be invited to speak today because this is a topic
I'm really passionate about.
My own diagnosis is relatively recent
but it was eight years ago that my
son was diagnosed at three years old
and I really appreciate the fact that as a parent
I came to terms with my perspective on this before
I got my own diagnosis because I really changed
a lot of my own perspective on this. From seeing
it as being all about the challenges
and the things that are difficult. To instead seeing
it as something that's about recognizing a different sort of strength
and having a acceptance of this as being a
mixed blessing rather than just a bad thing.
I approach my kids situation by letting them excel
at what they're really good at instead of only
focusing on the things that they find hard.
It's much harder as an adult not just advocating for yourself
but feeling justified in asking for what you need,
especially when it's different from what
everybody else needs. A couple of years ago
I had a spinal injury. It was a an auto-immune event
and I was actually paralyzed from the waist down
and I went to rehab and I had to learn to walk again,
but for a time I was in a wheelchair
and so it gave me an experience of
having an extremely visible disability.
And it really highlighted to me
how different it is from having a
visible disability to having an invisible disability.
If I for instance catch the train in a wheelchair,
which I did there's a lot of people who notice that you need help
and might move out of your way to give it to you.
But if I catch the train when it's super crowded and I find the crowd stressful.
Nobody else knows that but me.
And I have to either advocate
for myself by telling them if they need to know
or find strategies that work that helped me do that
because it's really up to me to communicate
what I need and ask for the help
because other people simply don't realise when it's an invisible disability,
and I don't necessarily want to tell everyone but I do need some help sometimes.
Although it's officially called a disorder.
I believe that Asperger's
or autism spectrum disorder is a mix of blessings and challenges. In the right environment,
Aspies can really flourish
and can bring a lot of strength a unique perspective a pragmatic logic a
variety of different strengths that maybe aren't the
same as the other people in the team.
And, the key is that they might need particular kind of support
and a lot of that support is actually around other people's
expectations of them. With a good job match
and a supportive and understanding environment
you can see a really amazing outcome from people on the Spectrum in the workplace.
For me personally the sort of support I need might mean more communication
and more reassurance than my colleagues
because I often worry about
whether I'm doing the correct thing. I can get anxious if I feel like I might have misunderstood
what was expected of me.
Sometimes for instance I can get
so caught up in something that was said that I miss the second
part of a verbal explanation about something
because I was mentally working out a really interesting to me logical answer to
something that happened in the first part of the explanation.
When I feel anxious.
this stuff is really heightened. So if I'm in a new job or if I'm with new people,
then this stuff will be worse but when I'm more settled and have been there for a while
I find that this stuff is not
as much so. Some of what helps with
that as well is if I feel comfortable to communicate with my manager
or my colleagues about what I need,
so if that for instance has happened then if I feel comfortable to say I'll hang on
I actually I missed the second part of that
could you could you send me an email with
what we talked about or could you repeat
it or whatever without feeling like I'm being judged or criticized for needing to ask for that?
For me I can work really hard on really complicated problems. When I get really engaged
I can burn through heaps of work really fast.
I feel like I can zoom into really fine detail and zoom out and see a really big picture.
And so sometimes I come up with unique solutions
or unexpected connections, might even notice a potential problem.
I often intuitively might see patterns in the information and fundamentally,
I think a bit differently from a lot of other people.
The way my brain works is a bit different
and that sometimes means I can come up with a different idea
and different solution or a different approach,
but I feel I need encouragement
and support to feel welcomed to contribute to the solution or the problem at hand.
As an adult on the Spectrum we develop coping strategies for everyday life when I was my kids age
there wasn't a lot of awareness
or support out there and it was pretty tough going to school being a bit
odd sometimes it was a bit painful. I have two kids.
I take them to quite a lot of therapy speech, OT, psychologist,
and honestly, I learn heaps at their sessions myself a lot of the time.
Since I think differently from you,
my main strategy is that I try to calculate
what I think you're going to do
because it's probably not
what I would have done but I know that I'm in the minority here
most people do something differently from me
or have a different reaction.
So I take all of my experiences with
you or with people in general
and I try and figure out what is the likelihood of what you might do. To me
it's very much about a probability equation.
This can be pretty tiring. If I know you really will I have a lot of really useful data to work with.
I don't know you at all. Then it can be exhausting and not terribly successful.
So new people are really exhausting for me crowds of people can be pretty tiring.
If you're thinking about all of those people and their behaviors as a mathematical equation,
you can see that that gets quite mentally hard work.
This is one of the reasons why traditional interviews are really hard.
I'm going into a room with three people I don't know.
I'm doing the mental equivalent of trying to juggle three balls with one
hand probability maths equasions with the other hand.
I'm also supposed to make it look completely effortless
because everybody else isn't finding
it as hard as me because we haven't even got to the hard questions or anything.
This is just the chitchat. I'm meeting you at at the start.
I'm already finding it really isn't showing my best.
We can often Aspies be black-and-white thinkers.
Now, I can only tell you about me and the people I am related to or know
well, so I can't pretend to know all Aspies
but it is often the case that people who are Aspies are pretty black and white.
I know I love the comfort of a really clear path to follow.
In my personal life, I had everything mapped out.
I was going to have my kids
and have my career and this and that and that just completely didn't happen.
My kids both turned out to have Asperger's
and my career pretty much didn't happen the way I thought
because I was staying home with them a lot to support them.
Couple of years ago as I mentioned, I had a spinal
injury so that also derailed a lot of my other plans.
I'd almost given up on returning to a career that I actually found fulfilling
and felt like I was successful at doing.
And it was around about this time that I found  Specialisterne
in and I applied for their ad I never expected it to turn out
as amazing as it did. The tailored talent program at Westpac changed my life. Specialisterne
and worked with Westpac to foster the kind of environment where Aspies can flourish.
With the goal of not just enriching ourselves,
but in reaching the company
as a whole. I'm really grateful
and I'm really humbled by the gift that this opportunity gave me
and I'm really excited at the possibility that you guys might do something similar.
Westpac not only had good intentions in creating it
but they put in a lot of time
and effort to make sure that they had the right expertise to make it succeed.
The whole process has had a really long lasting impact on me in ways
I didn't expect giving myself the chance to gain insights about myself my strengths
and how I can contribute to Westpac.
The first step was a big group interview in Kogarah,
and I was very nervous and kind of felt like a fraud like theres people who
deserve this small who were more Asperger's than me,
but I met Vicky and Jason from Specialistern turn who were both really friendly
and approachable and that made me feel a bit less nervous.
The first thing they did was play this game
as a group called two truths
and one Lie and Jason was running it and he tells these three statements.
I think they were about Sport and his dog.
I know nothing about sport
and I was basically baffled by this
but I looked around the room
and realized I was pretty sure I was less baffled than some of the other people so that was great.
It made me feel like I could actually continue in there.
I wasn't alone and struggling
and I wasn't the only one in the spotlight
so I could actually show what I had to offer. The next stage in the process
I went through was a three-week
went for three weeks and there was
about a dozen of us and we worked on a bunch of different tasks both individually
and in groups trying to show some of our capacity
and Vicky ran a lot of that
and helped us to also understand ourselves
and what we had to offer and what sort of support we might need.
We presented at the end of that to a bunch of senior people from the company.
It was really fun. We used Lego robots
for a lot of it and my kids are really jealous
because they were the really really expensive ones that we don't have at home.
And it was fun. One of the things I really learnt from it was by being in a group with other Aspies.
It was a little bit like seeing a mirror
and I could go you know what those guys are really great at that.
Hang on. Maybe I'm really great at that
and that I found that very helpful
because we weren't all the same but we did have a lot of similarities. It also.
helped me recognize the things I take for granted about myself by seeing a group of us together
there's things that I just thought, yeah, that's everybody,
it's help me see those things that can be invisible to me.
And finally, it helped me to have a group of people that we supported each other
and knowing that you're not alone knowing that you have other people to turn to was really helpful.
It doesn't have to be created in the same way
but at Westpac,
I've been there now for nearly two years
or a year and a half and having that
group and there's still a group of us all there that we still communicate.
We have Skype room that we have that we that with each other we have lunches around about every
once a month has been an immense support for me and I think for the others as well.
It also sometimes helps you normalize
or get a different perspective on a problem that you might be having in your workplace.
Has anybody else experienced this is it a big deal
do you have any ideas, you know. Having a group you can share those kind of things
with that might not be your immediate colleagues.
Knowing that you're not the only one who needs certain kind of support.
I like to wear my noise-canceling headphones a lot.
I find noise distracting and stressful not the only one who's like that.
And in fact, that's not just even the other Aspies
I know. There's a lot of people who find that helpful.
It's okay to ask for the support you need and it's okay to need that support.
That was really helpful.
I worked in a couple of different teams while I've been at Westpac.
I'm currently as in a permanent role in the team that I plan to stay in Forever Until.
I die. I work in the Mainframe team on.
At the moment, I'm reading a lot of COBOL programming
and the team is incredibly diverse in a lot of different ways.
There are really wide age gap. There's different genders.
There's people who are very technical
and people who aren't it's probably the most diverse team I've ever been a part of
and I love the work I do because it's really hard but I love things that are hard but achievable,
that's me.
Another key element for me that helps me be successful from my manager
is it's very explicit expectations that she can give
me and quite explicit tasks.
I I love to have a list of
what I'm expected to do in the coming future hard things easy
things big things small things deadlines.
I love it to be all very clear for me.
That makes me really productive. If I'm not clear,
I love that my manager is very welcoming of me asking her to be more clear
and sometimes that's hard
or sometimes that's not possible
but understanding what is possible
or why it's hard to be very explicit helps me too
and understanding how it fits into the bigger picture of where we're going
as a team or as a division.
It really helps me to do a better job of my work.
It makes me anxious if I feel like I might be doing the wrong thing.
And so knowing what the right thing is,
very clearly is really important to me.
Having something to do when I have run out of things to do like self-paced training
or something is also really helpful for me.
I hate having nothing to do. It makes me anxious.
I don't want to feel like I have to wander around or whatever.
I like to know that I have a whole bunch of stuff to work on
and some of it is completely non urgent back burning stuff that you can do if you run out of things
or you're waiting for someone else.
One of my favorite things about the tailored talent program
was that I felt it set up a network of support
for me.
I mentioned that I'm part of a group who were all started together.
Actually the group's grown a bit
as we discovered over Aspies through whatever means we add them to our group we’re very welcoming
and it's been lovely to have that group who are outside my immediate team
and the spread all across the company all of them finding roles
which fit them and some of them honestly doing
so amazing in their team that it's just mind-boggling how this person who's such an
amazing addition who, one of my friends solved this problem
they've been trying to solve for like three years and he's like,
I didn't even think that was thing I just noticed the solution, oh my
god he would he'd only been there like three weeks.
But he was really expert at this
and just had gone for three hundred interviews
and not gotten anywhere because he really struggles with people
he doesn't know. He hates answering the phone.
He likes to work on email
and he only likes hanging out with people he knows
but once he knows you which doesn't take that long.
He's absolutely amazing. But it wasn't just them,
I have a whole network of support.
So everybody in the program was set up with not one
but two mentors I didn't know what to do with mine.
Never had one before so my first mentor session was so what is this thing?
What do we do? And she's like, what do you want?
I don't know. But she was amazing
and when I found stuff confusing with my manager at the
time and I was like is this me is this by manager?
Is this a normal thing? It was so helpful to talk to somebody else
from another department who's an equivalent manager who could tell
me as a manager what my managers perspective might
be and to talk to somebody without feeling anxious
because it's not actually affecting my day-to-day role
because it's not my own manager and when I feel calm I can talk to my own manager.
I have a very very successful relationship with my manager now,
but early on I was knew I was stressed.
I found it super helpful. And as I said,
we actually got two mentors it was really nice. I also have a buddy in
my team who I was paired up with at the start
somebody who's basically my equivalent who I feel like I can turn to
as well as a manager and that whole team
so I really felt very supported in a lot of different ways depending on the question
I had or the challenge I had I felt like I had a choice of people to go to. I guess I just wanted to
say I feel like Westpac was really brave to do this.
I genuinely believe that diversity in the workplace is a good
business decision it it increases productivity
and it makes a really attractive workplace
for the great people or is also picking up these hidden gems that other people are overlooking.
It's good for your team.
Not just good for the person that you're employing and I really hope that you guys
challenge some of your assumptions about things and embrace this diversity,
and I'm around to answer anybody's questions if anyone has any.
Thank you.