(Long) Stories of Life, Books and Resilience

Hey y’all - long time no talk, loads happened so grab a cuppa so we have a heart-to-heart - (if you subscribe to both newsletters you'll see this in two copies, apologies, but I assure you that it will be back to different (and hopefully less personal and dramatic!) content next week.

Let me remove elephants from the room first: I know you may have read some of the craziness of how our lives momentarily imploded when our life choices, identity and courage of opinion met a 1-out-of-10-do-not-recommend level of a system of law and civil society at large in the UK. It is of course not the first time my life does any such thing and those that have known me for years know I overcame a bunch of other major life challenges but this one in particular nearly floored me. It is not over and it is immensely hard to be battling a custody and financial legal battle in the background whilst putting up a brave face at work but hopefully it’s safe now and we can start putting it all behind us and wondering how to stop others from going through the same things.

Enterprise wise - PeopleNotTech moved its HQ to Europe and Spanish and Malta operations have been created with some amazing new humans who joined us over the past few months, investors and colleagues who are as diverse as us and we can go the distance with. As a company, the move could not have been smarter (why have we remained after Brexit anyhow?!?) or swifter due to how we were already European, remote and global.

As humans, we have a ways to go. Thanks to those who helped, asked and/or empathized. I am genuinely lucky to be surrounded by an amazing team of humans (from our investors to family and employees!) who have helped me, Dave and our kiddos immensely, but I am also going to put my hands up and admit I am processing it actively and publicly as THIS is real life, pretending we are not humans in the background is what got us masses of Human Debt. Here are my processing streams:

Being Autistic - The Neurodivergence piece - this is perhaps the one I had most trouble processing as it has to do with the lived experience of late-or-never diagnosed Autistic and ADHD leaders in business and all its industries. What does being autistic of ADHD (often in secret!) mean for authenticity, what that means for the singular and the common lived experience and why is there any #AutismStigma at work? How do we “old guard” feel to know we had no provision whilst the new wave of Neurodiverse employees are well versed in asking for their adaptations if diagnosed? How prepared are we as a society for there being 1 in potentially every 3 adults that are non-neuro-typical? So I started a podcast called NeuroSpicy@Work www.neurospicyatwork.com and I am exploring all these questions in it with the help of amazing guests who know a lot more about the topic than just my own experience of being AuADHD and that of most of our team. There is SO much that needs exploring there in terms of understanding #MentalHealth versus and in context of #NeuroDiversity and understanding what it means for us in Technology that I am very excited to continue that work and understand what makes structures (be they those of the state or of enterprises) be permeated by lack of EQ and compassion and what we can do to change that fast for our kids;