Labels can have some benefits, but they can also be limiting.
Transcription:
Hi, I’m JoyGenea, international neurodiversity coach, and this week the thing that I am talking about is… I’ve got a visual! Ready? It’s not about money, it is about dumping out the bucket, this is my way of showing you, of labels, so all of these pennies represent the labels that can get put on a different thinker, you know what I’m saying. That’s my favorite part, anyways, this week I want to talk about those darn labels, valuable in the science world, valuable when we are in school, when we need medications if we want to try those. Labels have a place.
Labels do not define who we are, and by define I mean represent only who we can be, all that we can be, and I come across this often in this environment, we’ve been labeled. A particular label has been applied and we’re walking around with that label and trying to live within that label sometimes, and we can carry it around sometimes even as a badge, ‘I am THIS!’ You are a multitude of things and one thing I’ve also noticed is, we might in the neurodiversity umbrella, or I’ll say bucket, there are actually multiple multiple things that fall within that, things like OCD– most people didn’t realize that, bipolar disorder actually falls under that now. Autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and all the friends associated with that, they actually all fall under that, there are a couple of minor ones that are newer to the bucket, I can’t remember them off the top of my head, being honest, I would highly recommend you check out my blog about it. It’s in there in detail, but that is my point. The bucket continues to expand, who fits under the bucket continues to grow and here is what’s really important, I have learned over all of these years that typically if you’re a different thinker, there is a little bit of a variety of those labels that I just shared, and when I dump out the bucket and we just start to talk about behaviors and traits and things that you need to engage in life better, things get a whole lot easier and we can just look at a particular behavior. We can look at a particular trait and say ‘okay what about this might we be able to adapt with? What about this can we shift? How much control over this do we have? Where does anxiety play into this?’ We can look at it so differently and create and build new options and ideas around it. Not all of them, but a lot of them.
That is the gift of growth and coaching and working with somebody that knows and understands that, so I highly recommend that you get to know and familiarize yourself with all of the traits and behaviors that fall under that neurodiversity bucket because more than likely you might have a little bit of a variety of categories because that’s kind of how we tend to work and when you know that you can then accommodate and adapt, easier, faster, because now you have language that applies to the world that is using language and science to interpret. So, I’m JoyGenea, this has been long but I think it’s been worth it. Thanks for hanging out with me and I look forward to talking to you again. Bye now.