Tucking your weirdness back in
you don’t have to be validated
to be the most perfect version of
yourself so
i see weirdness as an asset and it
really only becomes
a problem for me whenever i try to hide
it
i’m normally asked to come along and
talk about things from a business an
inspirational angle about
creating a product and selling millions
of them around the world
but very rarely does anybody actually
ask about the characteristics behind
that person that make that possible
and in fact sometimes impossible i do
have
quite a lot of weird tendencies and
really this is one of the tip of the
iceberg but
so when i’m in work if somebody hangs
their coat on the back of the chair
that for me is a real problem because it
creates anxiety for me for the whole day
nobody can drink out of my glass and
when i say nobody can drink out of my
glass my initials are text on the bottom
of the glass
and for complete transparency it is the
skankiest glass in the office there’s
nothing
fantastic about my glass when i go to
the hairdressers and they wash my hair
i’m absolutely fine
with the washing part then they do the
conditioner and they start the scalp
massage
but the noise of my hair against my
scalp is like nails going down a
blackboard for me
and it’s a total sensory overload
but what is great is weirdness attracts
weirdness and i had a guy in for an
interview
and it was for a finance role and
finance rules are always really boring i
hate doing finance interviews but
there were three of us on the panel and
we got past all the boring essential
criteria and got to my favorite part
and my favorite part was so what does
steven like to do
and stephen said oh i have sausage dogs
and the minute they’d said it that was
the end of me
and i started to laugh but it wasn’t
normal laughter it was laughter where
when you’re in mass and you’re laughing
and you know that your mom is going to
hit you clip along the ear
and you’re trying so hard not to and
stephen carried on talking
so animated and so excited about the
sausage dogs and the more he got the
worse i got and the other two in the
panel
are giving me the evil eye trying to
shut me up but when stephen left the
interview
and i had spontaneously combusted from
laughing of course
i said i want him on the team i want
them on the team he has got to be on our
team
and the other two were like well we need
to look at the skills here
uh other people might have more skills
and i said
they might have more skills but he has
all the essential criteria
and they said yeah but somebody else
might have more skills and i said we can
teach him other skills we can’t teach
him to be a weirdo
he’s a weirdo like us like he’s weird
like me i want him on the team and i got
him on the team just by the way
but weird doesn’t mean the same thing to
everybody so weird for me
is not a feeling or a sensation
as a matter of fact i don’t even know
that i’m being weird a lot of the time
until other people to see how they are
reacting around me and there would have
been a time in my life
where that would have really troubled me
and i would have thought oh your
weirdness is hanging out you need to
tuck that back in again but
i actually made a conscious effort
not to do that anymore and i decided one
day
i’m just going to be a weirdo because i
am a weirdo there’s no point in trying
not to be
and i felt so empowered for having made
that decision
and it lifted such a huge weight off of
my shoulders
what a lot of people really don’t know
about that on any given day
i have maybe 12 tv screens playing in my
head
and on every screen will be a different
channel and they’re all the same volume
so in order for me to talk to you i have
to have like a notepad and a pen
and i will typically be writing down
something so that i can focus on you
writing down something is very often
about you
and i’m so glad nobody ever asks to see
the things that i’m writing down because
it might be
something like nice nasal hair and i’m
writing down
nice nasal hair because if i don’t write
it down my filter will make me say
something else and it’s going to
manifest to something else
and it’s more likely to be something
like i may ask the question
of do you use a device to tame that or
is that a scissors job
or how do you keep that under control
and as you can imagine that becomes
pretty problematic not only from a
personal
standpoint but also from a professional
standpoint so i went to the doctor and i
explained it all to him and i said so
what is it
and he said oh you’re definitely on a
spectrum their death and your adhd or
asperger’s or something
and i said what are we going to do about
it they said i’ll refer you to the
mental health team
so i didn’t hear anything for the best
part of two years until
i’m standing on tesco’s one day in the
coffee aisle
and there’s a man beside me huge big
furry moustache
i could actually smell the coffee
telling you this and my phone rings
and i answer the phone uh hello this is
the mental health team and grant you
here we’re calling you about your
appointment
but i didn’t hear this on my phone like
a normal person would
i’m hearing it on the tannoy in tesco
and i’m looking really
like apologetically at the man with a
mustache beside me and apologizing to
him
for him hearing my phone call and i have
from my waist to the top of my head i am
putrid red and my response was
uh no thank you very much that won’t be
necessary and i hung up
but the truth of the matter is i
actually didn’t need a diagnosis
what i needed was a coping strategy and
i had already started at that stage
taking
a homeopathic oil remedy that was
working really very very well for me
i’ve got a problem conforming as you can
imagine
and that’s because i’m a creative person
and when you’re creative you don’t think
in straight lines and
boy i am so glad that we’re living in
this world of neurodiversity
and i’ve just discovered and i really
actually only discovered this fairly
recently that
and maybe you know this already a lot of
people have a dial
for their attention span they actually
have a dial
to dial it up and dial it down but i
actually only have two switches
and the first switch is there’s 12 tv
screens and the best of luck to you and
getting my attention
and the second switch is i can hear you
i can hear every breath you take i can
hear your heart beat
but i won’t hear if a bomb goes off
beside me and i won’t hear that because
i have a filtering issue and the
filtering issue is
both filtering in of information and the
filtering out of information so
let’s imagine you sent me an email and
the email is in paragraph form and this
is one of the reasons why i don’t do a
lot of reading
no reading actually audio books instead
when i receive an email in paragraph
form i can’t process the information
because i can’t filter out the fluff
how did i get to where i am and i can’t
even filter out the fluff so i actually
have
to process that information by bullet
pointing everything
and i also in order to retain focus
i’ll have to have something on my hand
as you can see all the time and i don’t
even need to refer to notes but i need
to have something in my hand should it
be a stone or a little bottle or
something in my hand and there’s only
one thing really that exacerbates that
totally out of my control and that one
thing is tiredness
and i’m not talking about tiredness as
in or a bad night’s sleep last night
i am talking about the tiredness that
you get from eight years of persistent
jet lag
trans-atlantic jet lag where i would
have been in america at least
maybe every week between china america
europe i was jet lagged constantly there
was no break from it on a fly and
it makes me totally really badly
intolerant i flew in from
san francisco to belfast an economy
class of course because i’m paying for
it myself
and land under belfast after this
long-haul flight exhausted
highly intolerant as you can imagine and
i’m being driven to a meeting
and i’m getting changed in the car on
the way to the meeting
and i just smell like airplane seat you
know that horrible smell and i’m
feeling sticky and hor it was just
horrible i arrived at the meeting anyhow
sitting in the meeting and as you know
when i
have no filtering capacity at all at
this point
and the lady and man are talking and i
just said
look i’m really sorry i can’t hear what
you’re saying like i can’t even
concentrate because your chair is
squeaking because all i could hear was
and the lady said oh i’m so sorry i am
so sorry
that’s actually not my chair that’s my
wooden leg
and if i wasn’t socially awkward by that
point i would have been socially awkward
afterwards no doubt but the truth is i’m
always socially awkward and
well i can stand in front of a thousand
people and talk i actually
could not sit in a room of a thousand
people and make small talk
that is a skill and it’s a skill that i
just don’t possess unfortunately
but a skill that i do possess and i get
this through weirdness is bravery
and bravery and that i’m not afraid and
i’m not afraid to be laughed that i mean
nobody invents an inflatable seat and
thinks they’re not going to be laughed
at right
but that bravery also gives me
it encourages me to really challenge
myself
and so i went for an interview for
a board position with a public body
now i know nothing about the public
sector as you can imagine
and my very dear friend sinead coached
me for this interview because she knows
everything about
public sector now she can coach me for
an interview but she can’t
coach the granite out of me so i arrived
to the interview
i arrived at the interview and there
were four men and a lady on the panel
and the lady said how are you
and i said i am so excited to be here
like i’ve never actually done
a real proper job interview before like
not what the
panel know like it’s on tv and radio and
stuff but i’ve never done
and i could tell by their reaction that
clearly nobody had arrived that day with
the same energy for the interview
and shinee had taught me of course that
i was being scored on the criteria so
don’t like don’t put me in a competition
scenario here because i have to one
and the the man asked me the question i
answered the question and then i
followed it up with did i give you
everything you needed for that have i
given you everything you needed for that
question because i know that i’m getting
scored on it right
and he said yeah that was fine
and i said fine and he said
yeah fine and i said no i didn’t get out
of my bed this morning to be fine i got
out of my bed this morning to be
excellent
so can you tell me where the gaps are so
that i can help you fill those gaps so
that i can get top marks on this
question
so don’t anybody please take any
interview techniques from me it’s
clearly not my forte
although although shakespeare would say
no one or sorry nothing is either right
or wrong
but thinking makes it so right
shakespeare kelly here would say no one
is
either normal or weird but thinking
makes it so
i think we are in the middle of
we’re in the middle of the emperor’s new
clothes syndrome in this world where
everybody believes they have to be
validated by society fit in well i’m
going to let you into a secret today
and i want you to take note this is this
is a revelation
take time nobody else has a clue what
they’re doing either
everybody’s winging it and if anybody
tells you any differently they are lying
okay what if
what if you didn’t have to be normal if
i didn’t
and what if you didn’t have to be
perfectly fine
what if you didn’t have to fit in what
if you didn’t have to fit in
i would encourage you today to show up
as the most perfect weirdest version of
yourself
embrace your weirdness folks because
weirdness
is an asset