If like me you have dyslexia and you have to say out loud
School for Health and Care Radicals in order to type #SHCR because the letters
are like bars of soap in the shower, the tighter you grasp them the further
they go, it’s probably impacted your life from a very early age.
I can still remember being at primary school and being
forced to stay in the head mistresses office for an excruciating length of time
until I read the word “Garden” out loud, that was 52 years ago! And it still
makes me clammy to think about it in writing this.
Having failed the 11+ my self confidence took a massive
knock, having failed to live up to my parent’s expectations. Secondary school
was even worse, back then the more enlightened teachers called it word
blindness, but the majority labelled it as laziness. It was a humiliating and
damaging experience. Perhaps the only positive thing that came from it was I
discovered that I was “a creative” type, and that my artistic side was one area
in which I could excel.
My teens and 20’s were in hindsight a period of self harm,
as I sought to bury my feelings of failure and inadequacy with drugs.
To survive in the world I had to rely on “intelligence” and
a creative approach to life that was not based on reading, education or
conventional learning. I had to find other ways to function and absorb
information about new things. Above all I learned to improvise, to solve
problems with practical skills and common sense and NOT by the book.
To me this is the only way I know how to operate; I am
totally left brained if you like. I also grew to dislike process, that works
for those who are wired that way but for me it often seems to be a replacement
for the intuitive. In fact it often appears to me to stifle free thinking with
its rules and structure.
After 35 years of making it up as I went along as a video
director/producer/lighting cameraman in the corporate world I started getting
involved in the social housing, health and care sectors. This type of work gave
me rewards I had not previously experienced and not knowing what I couldn’t do I
created a visual language for people with learning disabilities as in my view
this was about human skills, communication in its purest sense.
Perhaps arrogantly I felt that it was unlikely that a learning
disability “professional” be it academic or clinical would be likely to have
the skills I felt were important. I also felt my own disability was perhaps for
the first time a gift.
Out of that project came another challenge, to make a
suicide prevention tool for people with learning disabilities. Again all I had
was instinct and a modicum of intelligence to throw at it.
I spent 18 months living with it, refining reflecting and
polishing. It then dawned on my as to why I was dragging my feet, because to go
public to a world of Dr’s Professor’s, LD experts, LD nurses was to be put back
in the head mistresses room, to be back a school, to be back in a world that
was wired so differently.
What I was fearful of was rejection and failure, that my
thinking was off the mark, that I had dared to say I think I know how to do it
better. This is why the self efficacy element in module one really rang bells
for me.
What gave me the confidence and self belief was also the
thing I feared most, stepping up to the plate and being judged.
In taking the risk, being passionate about what I believed
in and sharing what I thought was the right approach with a world, that I had
always felt on the edge of was and is life changing.
I still have to pinch myself when I look at the universally
positive feedback I have received in the last 6 months while it has been out
there in it’s pilot phase.
For me a great deal of what module one has covered is
instinctive, I can’t help but operate that way as my only qualification is the
work that I do. I have always run my own business so the hierarchies I
encounter are always external….How can I possibly influence the NHS to use my
tool from the outside.
In the case of the suicide prevention project and other work
around enhancing communications for patients with learning disabilities the
turning point in terms of my self efficacy was down to a few people who
validated my efforts, and judged me by my thinking not my status or
qualifications.
So for me one of the best ways of bringing about change is
to “enable” those around me by giving them confidence in their dreams and
aspirations as well as having confidence in my own thinking and beliefs.
I think the power of #SHCR is the validation it brings us
all, that we are not alone, what we believe in is right and because of what
motivates us as humans we “know” that our intentions are in the right place,
guided by what is in our hearts.
It is so rewarding to see people who have been hitherto
trapped by toxic cultures, colleagues grasping at power and the myriad of
obstacles that previously seem insurmountable suddenly see a shaft of light, a
new possibility, by allowing their creative minds the space to think out side
the box.
Revisiting the school experience for me is a chance to rewrite
“what is possible” in my terms.
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