Rebranding dyslexia and its misconceptions - Bob Dickinson

Rebranding dyslexia and its misconceptions transcript

Kieran McNeill

All right. Good morning. Good afternoon and Good night to anyone listening at night. Welcome to the Scaramanga Podcast, the podcast where we talk and ask questions to industry experts. For today's podcast, we have a very special guest to talk about dyslexia. Bob Dickinson director of installation and refurbishment solutions. Good morning, Bob.

Bob Dickinson

Good morning, Kieran.

Kieran McNeill

Morning. So to introduce yourself, Could you share some information to listeners about yourself and your professional journey? And how has dyslexia influenced that?

Bob Dickinson

Yeah, okay. Currently, I'm director of a family business, IRS Limited which we started in 1995, with my wife.

Prior to that, I actually qualified as a nurse looking after handicapped and disabled children, which I went straight to instead of doing A levels from school, school was a very strange experience, I was fortunate to pass 11 plus and get a scholarship to grammar school when they were still around. But then, for the first four years of school, I was bottom of the class until about the fourth year where I suddenly went to the top of a lot of the subjects. And in those days, we never really understood anything about dyslexia, we were sort of just grouped together as special needs, awkward, difficult, or whatever. Sports was always something I was quite good at. I was always athletic. But I always had the feeling that I knew better than the teacher, which probably why they put me down to being a difficult student. And partly because they'd asked a question or something, and I jumped three or four steps ahead to give the answer that they weren't ready to receive. So that's where we are. That's where we started. I don't know whether I ever understood what dyslexia was, how it affected me, or how I developed strategies for it. It was just, I knew I was clever, and everyone else was stupid.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah, so you knew from quite a young age, that it was a official diagnosis, then?

Bob Dickinson

No, we never had those.

Kieran McNeill

Ah.

Bob Dickinson

It's something that's become more and more in the past 10 - 20 years, really, maybe 25 years, there was always an inkling, I mean, out of all the school that I went to and my last one, there was perhaps only one teacher that understood it. He was the one that actually managed to get me to pass chemistry, biology, subjects like that. Which, prior to him, no one ever really understood, or prepared to put the effort in.

Kieran McNeill

So when did you find out you had it?

Bob Dickinson

You sort of grow to know, it became labelled probably in my 20s, late 20s? "Oh, you're dyslexic?" Okay. Yeah, fine. Maybe I am. But that doesn't give you any solutions that just put a label to something, you know, you're always slightly different to others.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah. As you said, there's no solution to finding. And it's just, you know, that's great. I think that is a great answer. Because obviously, as you said, you know, back then it's very different than now. You know, with the help the resources out there, the way that you can get officially diagnosed quite easily as well nowadays. And I wanted to ask, in your personal words, how would you give off what an explanation of what dyslexia actually is, and how it affects people who have it?

Bob Dickinson

It's difficult because I have three children, all of which are dyslexic in some way or other. One of them, the youngest, barely could write his own name when he was young. And we shortened it to three letters in the end. But he's gone on to do a degree at Loughborough and a master's as well. So again, he was never stupid, but we all have slightly different issues and ways of looking at problems solving problems, and coming up with solutions. And whenever we get in a group, or whenever I get in a group of people, or I see other young people "Ah, he's one of us", there's always something you know, it's the way people behave, move to react, answer a question. They're not working the same way as I'm gonna say normal, I don't mean normal, but the majority of people operating in this country. So for example, from my point of view, if you were to lay out the alphabet and go A, B, C, D, E, F, G, my mind goes A, F, Z, M, P, A, and I will go backwards and forwards and find different patterns. Solving problems in my head, I'll sit there and jump from one to the other and go right the way through. And I remember at school and I turn around to teachers and go, "Have you thought of this?" And they go, "Oh, no, we hadn't" and they'd step back for a while and go, "Oh, you can't do that for this reason, but you can do this." So

Kieran McNeill

It's like solving mental problems, but coming up with a different solution to get to that.

Bob Dickinson

Yeah, absolutely. Or looking at things differently. I'm not very good at being told you can't do something.

Kieran McNeill

There's always a way to do it. Yeah.

Bob Dickinson

There is, you may not like it, but there is always a way out of it. In the job we do at the moment when we're designing and fitting out offices, you have people saying, "Oh, you can't do that for this reason", or "you can't do that for that reason". You go why? Because either we've always done it or because the legislation says this. Well, what about if I do it that way? Oh, yeah, we can do that. Brilliant. So it's just a way of looking at things slightly differently.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah. I mean, personally, for me, I mean, I don't have dyslexia. But when I was growing up in primary school and secondary school, especially during primary school, I remember, there was a point when I was basically sent to the Dyslexic testing centre to be tested for it. And I'd go there with all the other students, and then they'll test me, and then I show no signs of it. So I ended up going back to school. And then the school says, Oh, it must be wrong, sent him back. So I went back there, did another test got him back, and that happened quite a lot. Because they're like, well, he doesn't have dyslexia. But there's something there. And then I think later in high school, it was a diagnosis of dyspraxia. So they were kind of muddled up between the two, a little bit there. But I guess even then, it's like when you're trying to diagnose these kind of things, it's not always the easiest.

Bob Dickinson

I think one of the solutions, particularly with anyone with a disability, well, I'm not gonna call it a disability, anyone that has to operate slightly differently from the norm. My son, when he eventually got diagnosed with everything, they looked at him from a reading and writing point of view, his percentiles were top 5% of the country and bottom 5% of the country. So intelligence-wise, he was top five, reading and writing in bottom five. He's also got an element of dyspraxia. And when he was being diagnosed, he said that you shouldn't be as athletic as you are, he went on to row at Henley and get an England cap. So, you know, sometimes your mind just works to solve problems. And you will do anything to get it. I was fortunate to play a reasonable standard of rugby, and a lot of the guys that I played with were internationals, and many of them were dyslexic. And it's amazing how if you look through the sports, well, how many people are, and it's because I think that you have a problem, you don't accept that that problem is stopping you from doing something, and you come up with different solutions to solve it.

Kieran McNeill

There are a lot of really good role models and ambassadors for I mean, anything nowadays, any kind of disability or learning difficulty, like there's a lot of advocates out there nowadays, probably one of the best things about social media is spreading awareness of some of these things. I know you do a lot of talks around Dyslexia as well. In your opinion, is there any kind of key misconceptions you come across, or there are myths about dyslexia that you think are important to address or squash?

Bob Dickinson

The biggest one still pervades in the education system is that it doesn't exist. It's just people looking for simple excuses for their lazy or awkward children, which is slightly frustrating. Part of the problem is that a lot of the big institutions, medical, educational, law, whatever, you have to go in a certain sequence, you need to do this, tick that box, you need to do this, tick this box, you have to behave like this, you have to behave like that. And that's not what we do. We don't behave like that and there isn't enough empathy or sympathy in certain organisations in this country to accept that, which I think is fundamentally wrong. My daughter, who's a teacher, even now will be told by other teachers, "Why do you admit it?", "You shouldn't tell other people you should keep it quiet." Or she'll go into a classroom and she'll go to the child, "You're dyslexic, right? Don't worry, it's not a problem. Here's how we're gonna solve it." You know, the amount of children that come up to her and said, "Gosh, Miss we never knew."

So they were embarrassed by it, or their parents were embarrassed by it. And in the modern age, it's so frustrating. It shouldn't happen in the work process, you get the same thing as well. It's one of the reasons I stopped working for large organisations and set up my own business. I can't work with mundane, repetitiveness. I need to be able to get off and do something. And it goes back to that same thing. You can't do this. "Why? Why can't I do it?" Why is the biggest question that we should always teach our children, but then we should also teach them to learn to listen to the answer as well. And one of the valuable lessons that came out of sports for me is that failure is not a problem, failure just means that you haven't done it properly on this occasion, try a different way of doing it, and if you look at most very successful sportsmen, they failed on so many occasions, and also "that didn't work, I'll try it this way", "that didn't work, I'll try it this way". And it's the determination to succeed, that allows people to get to the top of their profession, their sport or their subject, not necessarily that they're any brighter than anyone else.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah, I think nowadays, as I mentioned before, there is a lot more good stories about people with dyslexia, just having a normal life being successful, it's not a constraint at all.

Bob Dickinson

No absolutely.

Kieran McNeill

I mean, as a business owner, I can tell here how it might be quite frustrating when people say, Oh, it doesn't exist, or are they using it as an excuse or something when I think I was looking at the other week or the other day, anything around 10% of the global population have it?

Bob Dickinson

Yes.

Kieran McNeill

So you know, and that's a lot of 10%. So to say that it doesn't exist is, a bit delusional from some people?

Bob Dickinson

Well, I think part of the problem is that to acknowledge there's problem, you have to have the mindset that either you're the problem, or you have the inability to resolve that problem, or that you can't acknowledge there is anything you can do about it. So one of the biggest problems I still have now when I'm talking to people, I'm in a conversation with them, I will think of something and look at something four or five stages ahead. They won't see it, completely ignore it. Or I have to just sit there and wait for them to catch up. That becomes very frustrating. Because we don't teach people how to listen.

Kieran McNeill

I'd imagine there's times in conversations where you're thinking so far ahead. And maybe the conversation takes a different kind of turn. So then the thing that you've thought about is kind of not being brought up again, or it's just kind of stuck in your head and you need to get out maybe?

Bob Dickinson

Yes. Also sometimes, and I've always been accused of being "Why are you so dismissive?" "Why are you so rude?" It's not, but that's irrelevant. That's not important. This is the important thing. And you go, well, if this is important to me, and you go, "Okay, fine". Well, when you get to my point, we can have a longer conversation. But I don't mean to be rude. And sometimes you're just being forthright. That's not important to me. I know, it's important to you, and I'll sit here and wait. But this is important to me. And it is striking that balance. So one of the things I have learned in my old age is to be more patient, more understanding. And I think the other thing is most of most of the dyslexic people have been eternally optimistic.

Kieran McNeill

Hmm.

Bob Dickinson

I very rarely meet a miserable dyslexic person.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah, that's good to know. Hopefully, there isn't one out there. Well, there probably is but yeah, that actually leads into the next question quite well, because, obviously, nowadays, there's a lot more official ways to diagnose people, to find out someone has dyslexia. And people will naturally find out, in high school, in primary school, or even earlier than that. For some people, when they're told you have dyslexia, they might get quite upset about it because it's something that obviously doesn't just go away and some people might see it as, not the norm, it's like, you stand out, you have this thing that, not everyone else has, and that can kind of get to people, especially in those kinds of school ages where you're different. And I was wondering, what kind of advice would you give to someone who has kind of recently found out they've got dyslexia or been diagnosed, and maybe they're struggling to come to terms with that?

Bob Dickinson

I suppose there's two ways of looking at it. Firstly, you can continue to struggle with it and listen to what those people that don't have it say to you, that is completely irrelevant. Or you can be optimistic and turn it around and go, Okay, well, I don't agree with this. How am I going to improve myself? There is nothing you are given in this world as a birthright. Most people have to get up and fight for it. And for me, the one thing would always be optimistically, just don't sit there and take it just get up and fight for what you want. That means you might have to work harder, you might have to read the books longer.

As I say, both my son and I have the thing where our short-term memory isn't very good. So, for example, when he went to school, he would not only have to learn every day, what he learned the previous day, but at the end of the term and the beginning of the new term, you have to go back and learn what he'd learned the previous term. So the volume of work you have to take on board, life's not fair. There are plenty people out there that want to leapfrog over you. Because life's about being successful, you just have to take on the chin and go, right? How am I going to change myself, if you believe in yourself, and believe that you have the ability to achieve whatever you want, but also accept that along the way, you're going to have failures and difficulties, then you will achieve what you're able to achieve. But it's not going to be easy.

You need to find something you enjoy doing. My outlet was sports, I've played a lot of rugby, and rugby coaching, and I put a lot back into the community. For me, that's what got me through because I could always go out on the rugby pitch on a Saturday, run around and and engage my enthusiasm. I don't think if I didn't have an outlet, I would have survived, I'd have gotten into trouble I'd have caused trouble or whatever. But you have to find something and no one's necessarily going to give you the answers. There are good teachers out there, there are good role models out there. You just have to go and look for them, they're not going to come to you necessarily if they do, well done. But you do have to go and find it. There are plenty of people like me around where the doors always open, all you have to do is knock on it and then come in and sit down have a coffee, it's not a problem. But it is a question of finding it. It might be you leave school with no exams, you might be better at doing electrical engineering, or you might be better at doing plumbing or carpentry just be the best that you can at that, something will occur. And the career you choose at 16 or 17 may not be the career you choose on your 30s.

Kieran McNeill

I think that's just good generic advice as well. Recently, in the last few years, we've changed our approach as a company where we more focus around accessibility.

Bob Dickinson

Yes.

Kieran McNeill

Caring for accessibility and promoting that cause. And we've spoken to people who are Deaf, Blind or have chronic pain. And they will say the exact same thing about well, you can let it take over your life and be your life or you can actually work around it, and live a pretty good life still, as you said, coming up with solutions actually working around it, working with it as well.

Bob Dickinson

And there are people out there that do care, you just have to be lucky enough to find them. I don't know, there is no solution because dyslexia, for example, comes in many forms. Most of the strategies I've got, I've learned myself, I mean, there's things I do at the moment where I have to learn things. So I have a short term memory issue where if you say something to me now, 30 seconds later, I'll forget it. But I can remember something I did in third form, or when I was five or six. And I can explain something to you, in my current role. We design and fit out commercial space. And I've had people come up to me. "So you did a job for me 15 years ago", and I go right. Okay, what's the trigger? There is a trigger. "Where was that?" "Oh, this was this office?" "Oh, that's the one by the arch?" "Oh, yeah. If you're going through the door, to go up the stairs, you turn to." And I walk through the whole job I did with them. They go how do you remember that? So well, once it goes into my long term memory. It's there and then you say, you know, we had this problem on day two when we did this. But we solve that by doing that. And then you've got this. And if you look up there, you've got this problem. And it's just a question of, you know, using the skill set, you have to suit the life you have.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah, 100%. Something we mentioned as well, you touched on briefly was about support in school. And I know in schools, they do allow for extra time in examinations. I don't know exactly how long it is. I think it's an extra half an hour or so. But how do you think society and even educational systems could better support individuals with dyslexia?

Bob Dickinson

I suppose the difficulty is that in the classroom of 30, or 40, if 10% are different to the rest, and you measure success on the majority, you're never going to solve the problem.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah.

Bob Dickinson

And it's not just a question of it's all well and good having extra time in exam. But you also need the extra learning time. So having 30% or 40% extra, once a year for two hours. Doesn't help if the previous 364 days, you've had no extra time or no extra support?

Kieran McNeill

Yeah.

Bob Dickinson

I think there's different ways that we learn. I know, the question of doing oral exams comes up when people turn around, say, oh, it's easy to do an oral one. You know, you just don't have to write but there are ways you can test people to see whether they know their subject without having to necessarily write it down. And also, I think the way we ask questions is bloody stupid. Sometimes you'll get a multiple choice question, and you'll read it and you'll go, "Well, the first one's wrong, second parts". Why are they trying to trick me up? Do they want me to know the information or are they just trying to be clever about the way they've asked the question?

Kieran McNeill

It's probably quite an older system. And I think a lot of people would admit that the testing system or the exam systems, are probably quite outdated at this point. I mean, many times people do awful in their results, exams, and then they go off and they do amazing.

Bob Dickinson

Yeah, and again, I don't I don't necessarily don't I don't think that we should do away with them. I think I think they're good, because they're again, you know, that thing I said about failure?

What failure does is show that you've done something wrong. If you're strong enough to learn from it the next time you'll do it, right. It's like running a business. You know, in America, they say you're never good enough to run a business unless you've had three fail. You know, so you do learn lessons to move on with. I just think that the amount of input that we put into some people and expect them to suddenly come up with the right answers is not necessarily good enough. I think the way we ask questions, we could perhaps look at that, are we trying to draw information out of people, or just prove that we can write stupid questions? So yeah, I'm not sure. I don't know. I didn't like school. It didn't really suit me. But I love learning. I love understanding, I love knowing things. I just don't think our education system at the moment provides that adequately, to encourage people the ability to look for knowledge and understand how you obtain knowledge. You know, simple things. We're having a conversation.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah. And here you are now, with your own company.

Bob Dickinson

Absolutely. But I think if you one of the things is that, how often do you sit down with a conversation outside and people if you ask the wrong question, or don't use the right word, get annoyed. And you sit there go, no, no, I'm not asking to give you my opinion. What, where, why, how and who? I'm asking. You might change my opinion. We've forgotten the ability to discuss I think, which is, for me, as a dyslexic person. It's fundamental. I'm always testing the bounds of knowledge. Why do you believe that? Why, what's wrong? What about if I did this? I'm not being argumentative or causing a fight. I want to know the answers

Kieran McNeill

You want to learn.

Bob Dickinson

Yeah.

Kieran McNeill

Interested to learn. So where you are today, I wondering if you could share some of the like your personal strategies, but some of the ways that you helped yourself in managing and overcoming any challenges that might have been associated with dyslexia to get where you are today. If it's even hindered you essentially,

Bob Dickinson

No, I wouldn't say it has, others who know me would, I make a lot of notes. Always writing stuff down. And then I'll go back. Oh, yeah, I meant to say this. I meant to say that. No, I don't. I don't think I have, but I'm sure if he spoke to people who know me go. Yeah, this is what he does. And I can't tell you what they are. I just know that the way I am and live works for me at the moment.

Kieran McNeill

Yeah.

Bob Dickinson

As I say, questioning, I create images in my mind, so that I remember stuff. I will ask you what appear stupid questions because sometimes the information you want to give isn't the information I want. You know, listen, I'm sorry if it's a stupid question, but "why are you putting that there?"

"I'm putting that there because Doris needs to sit there." "Why doesn't Doris over there?" "No, we haven't thought of that". So sometimes asking stupid questions, because the information you want to give isn't the information I want. So I suppose that's one strategy and also I got a thick skin. I've never cared what people think about me. I know, I'm a good person. I always know I try and do the best for other people. And if that's not good enough for some people, then I don't want them in my life.

Kieran McNeill

I think that's a fantastic point, just as a closing question, what would you like any of our listeners today to understand or take away from about dyslexia from this conversation?

Bob Dickinson

It has given me a marvellous insight to the way that I've lived my life. It's given me the opportunity to do things that I don't think I could have observed and done, had I not had it. But it's also irrelevant to how you lead your life and what you expect out of it. As I say, giving something a label doesn't solve the problem, you still want to solve the problem. So enjoy yourself, enjoy being who you are, and do the best that you can at every opportunity.

Kieran McNeill

Thank you for that. And if anyone would actually like to get in contact with you, How can they find you?

Bob Dickinson

If they go to info at IRS hyphen, Ltd.co.uk, just send me an email or look us up online and contact me and I'm happy to respond.

Kieran McNeill

Well, thank you for coming in and chatting with me today. Bob. It was a really insightful chat actually. And I've learned quite a lot myself actually about it. And I hope some of the listeners also feel the same way.

Bob Dickinson

Marvellous. Thank you for your time.

Kieran McNeill

Thank you.