MK Umbrella Project

Hello. This is a bit different. I've been lucky enough to speak in all sorts of places, but not a shopping centre!  So yeah, I'm Bekka Prideaux. I'm a dyslexic thinker. I work, as you've heard, as a leadership development and change management consultant. I mentor businesses. I work with leaders. I'm the co-director of a women's networking group, the Bee's Knees in Leighton, Buzzard, nice to see some of you here. I'm also a director of Spectrum Community Arts. They're here too; they provide performing arts workshops for people with disabilities and additional needs. If you want to know more about them, they have a stand over towards the door. Do go and say hello. I'll be there later. I've done some time on local radio, and this year, I was recognised as one of the 100 most inspiring businesswomen in the UK by Small Business Britain, and that's just work!  Outside of work. I love theatre. I've been a director and a stage manager. I'm a keen crafter. That was harder to say than I expected. I love to crochet and make cards. I love going to the theatre. I drink a lot of coffee. As you may have noticed today, I am a dog mum, and I have lots of wonderful friends and family who I enjoy spending time with too.

But what's that got to do with why I'm here today? Well, as I say, I'm a dyslexic thinker, and I want to share with you how that impacts my day and how it's impacted my clients, and then go on and share some things that you can do to make the world easier for the Dyslexics around you. 

Now, we look just like normal people. So you may not realise that you know Dyslexics, but one in 10 people are dyslexic. So I'd be really surprised if you don't know some dyslexics. 

I'm going to talk a little bit about what happened to me in school and my career and how that went, and then, as I say, session, put my teeth in and then share some things that hopefully will make working with dyslexics a bit better. 

So if you don't know what dyslexia is, it's a and I've got this written down, it's a genetic and physical difference in the way our brains work, which means the way we learn and the way we process information is different, and that can be good, and it can also be challenging, because we operate in a world that isn't designed for the way our brains work. 

Neurodivergence impacts a lot of people, and about 50% of people with neurodivergent conditions are dyslexic. So there are a lot of us hiding out there in the world trying to get by, particularly in education. It's really hard for Dyslexics to fit in, and it must be really hard for teachers to figure out how to do things differently, because if you want to know if a child can read, you ask them to read you something. Now, one of the things that Dyslexics find really, really hard is reading out loud. I still can't do it, and I'm right at the other end of my career from the school, so I'm not sure how teachers are meant to do that differently. 

It gets a little bit better when you get into reading comprehension, but then that gets marked on how good you are at spelling and how good you are under pressure and time with these things, again, things that Dyslexics typically are very bad at. 

So my school report was always full of things like, Bekka seems to get this, but she does really badly. So you get what they call a spiky profile, where you seem okay, but actually, you can't pass any of the exams, and that can be a little bit challenging later on in your career. 

It's a bit like if you think about fish, if you measure a fish by how good it is at riding a bicycle, it's going to do really badly. And likewise, if you look at the bicycle and you say, how good are you at swimming, it's going to do really badly. But a bicycle is really good at getting you from A to B, and A fish is a brilliant swimmer. So it's about, how can we measure people by what they're good at? 

I would add that not all dyslexics are the same. We all struggle slightly differently, but there are some themes, and those are the things I'm going to be sharing with you today. 

So, to tell you my story a little bit. I've alluded to the fact that school was not great. It's not brilliant. Age nine or 10, being told you are a failure and you are going to be a failure, to have your parents be told it. And you know, you tend to believe schools because they're supposed to know about this stuff. Now, I would say that it's come a long way since I was in school, but I still hear about this happening for people, and I understand why I still struggle to read quickly. It takes me a long time. 

And in our school, in our junior school, there was this little blue round badge that you had to earn. Everybody wanted this little blue round badge, and you got it for knowing your times tables. Now, I was the last in my year to get it, and everybody the year below got it, and the year below that got it before me. I think they gave it to me out of sympathy, because they're like, just, just have a blue badge. You've been back, and you've done this so many times. You must know them by now, and I'm okay at maths, just not my times tables and being able to do them by rote.

Now, I was educated such a long time ago, the 11 plus was still a thing for deciding which school you were going to go to. And my school did a reading piece, a writing piece and a maths piece, and I do okay at the maths and for the mocks, they decided to try us with an IQ test rather than the written test, and all of a sudden I came top of the class. And so the school decided that the test was the wrong one for the school, because everybody else was failing, and there was no way I could have come top. So again, that kind of systematic reinforcement that what you do is different and we don't like it because it doesn't work for our system. 

And, you know, I wouldn't wish my school friends to have done badly in exams, but it would be nice to do okay in a few but all they taught me that fundamentally, everybody has abilities, and everybody has more potential than we see early, early on, and it's about finding out what we're great at and really leaning into that. 

And that's something that still impacts the work I do. It impacts the volunteering I do, and all those things. And I love it when somebody suddenly realises they can do something they didn't think they could. And it gets really, really exciting. 

So Junior School, particularly, was tough. I think kind of some of these campaigns that are out there at the moment around, let's screen everybody and figure out how we can help them differently sound brilliant, because I wouldn't want anybody else to experience what I did.For secondary school. I went to a totally different school, new set of teachers, new set of people, and confounded everybody because I was in the top set for everything, including English. But I also had to take remedial classes because my spelling is what I like to call creative. Everybody else calls it just wrong. 

So, you know, from an exam perspective, that really wasn't going to help, but it gave me the chance to experiment and to adapt. I'm also what my mother used to call stubborn, I like to call determined, so I was not going to come bottom of everything. So that taught me that actually just keeping going and working hard really pays off in the long term. So that resilience that we need in the ever changing world that we have, particularly the world of work is something that as Dyslexics, we quite often have to figure out early, and we have to figure out how to be really curious and try different things. And yeah, there was a spoiler alerting there curious choice is my business, and that's because I do think it's a fundamental skill that we can all build and benefit from. 

I think I also learned about being really persistent and just keeping going. And yeah, there was a lot of bullying, because you're different and you're not doing the things other kids are doing. I got labelled a swot because it took me forever to do my homework, and I'd spend a lot of time in the library just trying to keep up because it was quiet in there. I got my O levels. that's how old I am. They were GCSEs to anybody who's a bit younger. I got my A levels, and I went on to university.

And while I was there, I came across books like Tony Buzan’s Mind Mapping book, and I started learning about how to learn. And actually that revolutionized the world for me. I was able to take those methodologies, tweak them, change them, and find ways to study more effectively. I still use things like mind maps to know what I'm talking about, not always to the pleasure of the people who have to work with me say, Well, what have you drawn on that big whiteboard in your office? Well, it makes sense to me. 

And actually, while I was at university, I was diagnosed as dyslexic. I was actually studying speech therapy, and I'm sat in a lecture. The lecturer, this is in year five, so I've been there quite a long time. But then she said, so would you like to tell the class which kind of dyslexic you are? And apparently, I went very quiet. She moved on very swiftly, because they'd assumed I'd known, because they'd been able to sit in every piece of written work I'd ever given in. They'd been able to see it on my assessment day. But hey, it was news. And actually, I think kind of being diagnosed was helpful in that it gave me a name for these things that had left me feeling very isolated, had left me knowing I was different, but not why and why certain things were really, really hard, so I was able to start understanding myself better, and therefore how to work more effectively. 

What was also interesting at the time is it was very much seen as a disability and something you did not tell people. So when I went into the world of work, it was, don't tell anybody. You'll never get a job. They'll never want to work with you.

So I didn't tell anybody until about four years ago, five years ago, and then a few people got to find out, and then a few more. So that's a good 30 years of career where I just didn't tell people, and I just did stuff and hoped for the best. So I remember as a 30 year old having somebody have to check my emails because they didn't want me making spelling and grammar mistakes, which is quite embarrassing at that age. But there are wonderful tools out there these days that help us. 

So when I left, as I say, it was, don't tell anybody about the dyslexia, I went to work for a small manufacturing company. And if you've ever put the bits that hold flat pack furniture together, the weird-shaped, bits of plastic and metal, those things that really annoy you, we used to design and manufacture those because, yeah, there's a lot of engineering in it. And what I didn't used to know about how to make flat pack furniture, you didn't need to know. And I didn't know there was that much to know about how screw threads are configured. It's a thing. 

As a dyslexic, I got very curious about all these things, because I can get nice and nerdy about them, and we talk about them, and a lot of the guys in the manufacturing unit loved to talk. So for me, that was a great way to take on information. And because it was a rapidly growing company, I got to try all sorts of different jobs, which was fantastic in terms of figuring out what I was good at and what I wasn't. And I got to do some amazing things, like I ran a manufacturing unit for six months to cover a sickness leave, and actually figured out that if you ask a lot of questions, which, as a dyslexic, I did because it was easier than reading stuff. People think differently, and that's where I started to get interested in coaching and developing other people's potential. 

Again, it also meant I got to do some really interesting projects that for me were really, really obvious. One of the things Dyslexics are good at is pulling together different bits of information and seeing patterns and things that other people can't see. Now, if you think back to that flat pack furniture, a lot of the fittings you need to one of one shape and one of another, and they go together, and that's your joint. Well, when I was working with manufacturing, they changed all the box sizes that you bought. One of these things in one and a half 1000s, and one of them in 2000s now it doesn't take much math in my mind to figure out, how do you buy one for one? Well, the answer was, the poor guys in the warehouse had to unpack every box and repack it for every order. So, really, really wasteful. So after I'd finished in manufacturing, they let me loose in the warehouse, and we changed that and we saved the warehouse. The guys didn't like me because they didn't get as much overtime, but we saved more money than the company made profit that year by just changing that one thing that to me was really obvious, but to everybody else was really weird. So that was the first time that actually it occurred to me that the way my brain worked might be really useful in business. 

Now, when I left that company, I went to work for Cadbury Schweppes, so I'm loving all the purple that we're seeing here today. It makes me feel very at home. I worked there for eight or nine years, and was working at a very, very senior level, working with the main board of Cadbury Schweppes, working with two of the main divisions of Cadbury Schweppes, doing all sorts of fantastic projects. 

One of the ones they got me involved in is I got involved in designing the chocolate development strategy for the next 10 years. Hello, that got some smiles. All the science behind the chocolate still. Don't ask me to explain any of that. That wasn't what I did. We had some really clever boffins who did that. What I bought to it was getting them to think differently and to see the links in what different people were doing, and what could we learn from our chewing gum division that we could apply in chocolate? Answer was not much at that time, so don't worry, it's not chewing gum in your chocolate yet, but they may have solved that one by now, and finding different ways of manufacturing the products. 

And then when Cadbury sold Schweppes, I decided that actually, I'd work with myself, because working within an organisation as a dyslexic is quite hard, because there are lots of rules and regulations and reading and processes you have to follow that I didn't find very easy. So I thought, well, I'm going to do business my way from here on out and see how that goes. 15 years later, I'm still doing that. So the answer is, it worked. 

So what I thought I'd do is tell you about the typical strengths of Dyslexics and the kind of things that they can bring to an organisation. So yeah, I'm going to focus on work a little bit, because that's my world of dyslexia. And this is based on some work by a wonderful organisation called Made by Dyslexia, absolutely worth checking out. 

And what was fascinating to me is that when the World Economic Forum published a report two years ago about the skills we need for the future, it kind of matched this list. They used different words. But as we move on in the world of work and work continues to evolve, these things are going to become more and more important. Anybody can do these things, but there are clusters of strengths around dyslexia. 

So visualising, being able to see concepts, coming up with ideas, making things and inventing things are typically dyslexic skills, what they call imagining. So original work, putting new spin on old ideas, interpreting things, innovating and imagining the possibilities, again, things that dyslexia could quite good at exploring. 

So this is where my friend, curiosity comes in, wanting to find out more and see how things are put together, finding new ways of doing things, and then we come up with reasoning. So putting some logic behind that, so things start to make sense, understanding problems, spotting patterns in things that other people haven't spotted. So GCHQ, the people who do all the intelligence monitoring, they specifically look for Dyslexics and people with ADHD, because they spot the patterns in the data that people just don't get otherwise, and things that even AI can't spot they're dyslexic or somebody with ADHD or autism is more likely to find. So we have a use for that as well. 

We're quite good at simplifying things and making it easier for other people to make decisions, even though we're not very good at decisions ourselves, and we're good at connecting and making really complex things sound relatively simple. 

Those are all things that I find myself doing with my clients most days. So I've given you a few examples along the way of how that's impacted my career, but also with Cadbury, things like looking at, how do they recruit people and how do they bring people in, I missed a trick looking back on it because I didn't work out how to make it more dyslexic friendly. Should have, should have spotted that. One didn't think about that, but it's something that most organisations can now do. But I was able to take what was an eight-week process when I got my job there and deliver it in one day. By tweaking how we did things, made it much quicker for everybody. Meant that good people didn't go off the market because they'd found other jobs during this really long, boring process. 

I ran various global programs. I changed how we did projects at Cadbury Schweppes so we could get people aligned with them and actually deliver more as the business. I ran a global coaching program, which was my favourite thing. So I taught something like 1000 people how to coach as line managers, and got to coach some amazing people. We were very lucky with that. I've talked about how I changed the configuration of boxes in the furniture componentry company. There are lots of other stories, but I'm under confidentiality agreements with my clients, so I can't tell you, but I work with the kind of people who have products in your home, and we've been able to do things that make everybody's lives easier. And for me, that's quite rewarding in itself. There's been a lot around getting teams to work better together and understand themselves and each other. And my client feedback still makes me laugh. I get regularly things like, Oh, she bought some brilliant thinking, and everything's much better. I really wish you could spell properly. I'm just like, I'll take that, whatever you got the point of the work. And you know what? Somebody else can sort the spelling for me, and Grammarly is just the most amazing thing. If I pick the right word to try and spell. 

So the other thing I thought I'd share with you is my day to day life and how dyslexia impacts that, because you're going to be seeing that all around you in your world. So I talked a little while ago about reading and how I'm really slow at it. I love books. If you catch me on zoom from home, you'll see a whole bookcase of books behind me. Yes, they're color coded because it makes it easier for me to find them, because I can't read the titles, but I'll be able to tell you the color of the book, even if I can't tell you who wrote it or what it was called. But we need more time if we're going to read so if somebody sends you something five minutes before a meeting, I'm in full on panic mode if I need to have read it. So you develop tactics like, just remind me the key points from that I can't read it quickly enough to keep up. But people don't seem to mind doing that. 

But it gets a bit more interesting when you get to things like road signs. Now, if you're trying to go somewhere new, even when you've got the sat nav telling you what to do, you kind of need to be able to read the road signs, and you probably need to be able to read quickly. Yeah, not great. I've ended up in some really interesting places because I've got it wrong. And apparently, one time I thought I was going to the national turnip show because I've misread the word triumph show, London Underground, another one. I love the fact that their station signs are very visual. You know that circle with the word through the middle? Yeah, the word's always in capital letters. There's a dyslexic that's not very good. So I navigate the tube by colour. So I have to work out before I leave what colour train line I want to follow. Then I can follow the signs of the underground station even in the rush hour, because don't ask me to tell what that word says quickly. When I've got people pushing me and I'm under pressure, I just need to know what colour I'm looking for, and then I need to know how many stops before I get off.

So that kind of thing can really help airport boards. I haven't flown for a long time, but you know those things that flick over and tell you where you have to go, they're all in capital letters. There's a dyslexic reading capital letters is hard. Now, I recognise the logo of the coffee shop behind you. I'm a coffee drinker, but their writing is always in capitals. Midsummer place, it's in capitals, oh, and it's got a square letter. If I didn't know what it said, that would be really, really hard. Having simple, clear fonts makes a really big difference. I love all these beautiful fonts. Just don't make me read them. They look pretty. No idea what they say, and that's going to be the same for a lot of dyslexics. We need what they call Sans Serif fonts. 

Shopping. Now we're in a shopping centre, who doesn't love to go shopping. I can't tell you the number of times I've gone home with food items that aren't what I thought they were, because the packaging had changed, or I thought it was out of stock, because the packaging was different. A long time ago now they changed the colour of crisp packets, and it used to be cheese and onion, it was in blue, and now it's salt and vinegar, and I went home with the wrong flavour crisps so often, because I shop by colour. It's even worse. Now I do my shopping online, because you don't get such a big picture to get it wrong with. So we get some interesting food in my house. 

If you meet somebody and you want to write down their name and their phone number, if you meet a dyslexic, please don't be offended if they ask you to type it into their phone and they ask you to put the number in it's because we can't copy accurately. My teachers in school used to be infuriated that, and I still can't spell the word Valley, because my lovely history teacher would make me copy it off the board. She'd write it five times. I'd have to write it 10 times. She'd get 10 variations used to drive her up the wall at me, and I had no idea where I'd gone wrong. 

My next door neighbour is called Claire. I tried to put in my phone Claire next door. She's still Claire next Dior, because, you know, the word, looked about right. She didn't seem to mind. 

Thinking about computers, you know, when it asks you to copy those letters and it's obscured them slightly. No idea what they are because the outline is all wrong, so I can't read them, and that's going to be the same for most dyslexics. So I usually take four or five attempts and end up guessing and hoping for the best, or just going to a different website, and I know they're there to help me, and we've talked about fancy fonts. 

So to sum up, because I think I've just about got time, things that Dyslexics around you typically struggle with and that you can help them with. We've talked about reading. Give people the time they need to read. We struggle to get our thoughts onto paper. So our handwriting is often bad. Our spelling, as I say, is creative. Our grammar, yeah, good luck. Punctuation. No idea. But there are things that we can do to help ourselves, and that, if other people do it, can really help. So not giving us big blocks of text, bullet pointing things, keeping it short sweet, maybe not full sentences. 

Don't expect us to do mental math. Give us a piece of scrap paper to write it on. We'll be fine. Don't expect us to learn things by rote. 

So I know a lot of Dyslexics love acting. I love the theatre. Don't make me learn a script that's just not happening. I probably know it by the end of a production run. But don't make me sit and learn it and then put me under pressure. 

We can be quite easily distracted. That's why I've had cards for this. So I stay vaguely on point moving to them, and it can be very hard for people to follow our thinking. We tend to jump around different subjects a lot, which, if you're dyslexic, you don't realise that the other person is doing it. But if you're talking to somebody who isn't neurodivergent, they're quite often knew you were talking about that. No How did you get over there? So we have to learn to explain our I explain our thinking. It'sa but like when you do maths in school, and they say, show you're working. As a dyslexic thinker, I have to remember to do that verbally. 

So dyslexia comes with challenges, but it comes with strengths as well. And if we can learn to recognise our strengths the same as anybody in the population, if we start doing things that we're naturally good at, building on those, and doing more of the things we can and we can make a difference. It's gonna be a lot more fun, and we're gonna have a bigger impact. As I say, I'm here with on the Spectrum. Stand for at least another hour or so. So if you've got questions, come find me. It would be lovely to talk with you, unless anybody's got any very quick questions now, because I've got like, two minutes.

So the book I was talking about was mind mapping. It's Tony Buzan. B U Z A N, I think don't quote me on that bit. My copy is blue with a yellow streak across the top. Not that that that will help you, because you're not looking at my book! But the  the mind mapping book was great. The other book that's really good is called Made by dyslexia, and it's by Katie gigs or Griggs, not sure. Again, the words look the same.  That's a white book with dots on the front.

So yeah, that's dyslexia and how it's impacted me. Thank you so much for listening.