Episode 347-Building A World For Every Mind-Why Organizations Win When They Embrace Cognitive Diversity with Robert Annis

What if the biggest barrier to inclusion isn’t awareness, but the way our systems are built? We sit down with Robert Annis, a London-based founder of NEURO, to unpack how the “alignment trap”—cultures that prize sameness over substance—quietly locks out cognitive diversity and throttles innovation. Instead of chasing badges and box-ticking, Robert lays out a practical path where inclusion becomes a strategic engine for better problem solving, collaboration, and growth.

We explore why designing “for everyone” often defaults to the median, and how designing “for anybody” opens doors for real people with real differences. Robert shares vivid examples—from misplaced braille signage to performance reviews that reward conformity—showing how small oversights create big barriers. He explains NEURO’s accreditation model that ties recognition to verifiable investment in leadership, governance, recruiting, policies, and performance management. We also dig into Resonance, a tool that helps individuals map challenges to supports and gives organizations a shared language to act—with clarity rather than guesswork.

Robert’s personal journey brings the stakes home. Diagnosed later in life with autism and ADHD, along with face blindness and severely deficient autobiographical memory, he describes the daily friction of misread cues and expectations. The lesson is not “more hardware”; it’s deeper understanding. When teams know how different minds perceive, communicate, and process, they build trust and psychological safety—the soil where learning and innovation grow. Along the way, we spotlight curiosity as a cultural superpower, the practical role of labels in granting access, and the ripple effects of unconditional support in families, schools, and workplaces.

If you’re a leader tired of tokenism, a parent seeking clarity, or a builder who wants real outcomes, this conversation offers a roadmap. Learn how to move beyond awareness into accountable inclusion that attracts talent, lifts performance, and proves it with evidence. Ready to turn difference into your competitive edge? Listen now, subscribe, and leave a review to share what change you’re making first.

Transcript

Global Hello & Framing The Conversation

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Welcome to the SJ Child Show. Today we are having a wonderful guest from across the seas. I love to speak to people globally. It's so interesting to get an you know other people's perspectives to see what's happening on another part of the world because even though we're all so far apart, we're all connected by this conversation we're going to be having. And I just love that. So, Robert, it's so nice to have you here today. And I really thank you for sharing your time with us. And I know this conversation is just going to be fascinating. And my listeners are going to really have a lot of to take away from this. So without further ado, please introduce yourself and let us know a little bit more about yourself and what brought you here.

Why Systems Exclude By Default

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Thanks, Sarah. Uh, yes, all the way across the bond, as it were, from Mary Old England here, I am in London. So, yes, hello, everybody. Loving to be here. Yeah, it's exciting to be here just to talk about what we're doing with Neuro and some of my who I am and what brought me on this path. I uh profoundly neurodivergent, I guess probably the polite way to put it. We started a charity that is there to distinctly change the conversation. Our experience has not been as positive as we'd like, and I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who would have had the same problem. And so we are trying to change that conversation, change that dialogue, and reframe how exactly organizations, governments, institutions in general, and then just individuals view the differences that are known to us all, but are just natural variations of our brain. Uh, the impact it has on each of us and all of us as a society.

SPEAKER_03 1:54

Yeah. And you know, I think that when the conversation is brought to kind of a stage, if you will, where it's normalized. And we talk about how, you know, we're all born with this innate sense of uniqueness, and somehow that gets lost in developmental and whatever age that you should be just like the rest of the people around you. You were okay when you were born, and you were different than everyone else, and the best, most unique baby ever. But then what happens? How do we lose? How does the society decide to just kind of drop that part of it and decide everybody needs to fit into this box?

The Limits Of Simplification & Communication

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Yeah, it's it's it's a fascinating part of society. It's it's partly psychological, partly sociological. Our psychology is built around, as we'd expect, animalian thinking, right? And so we are very familiar with the concepts of belonging and we relate it to our safety, and so we see difference as bad. So there's a lot of focus in our minds on alignment of doing things to fit in. In the world of neurodiversity, we see that as things like masking, right? But it also means that when people are different, we do tend to struggle with that, we tend to potentially fear it and exclude it. And so I think people who are different, whilst they may on an individual basis have some acceptance one-to-one, when we look at systemically, systems are designed with a neurotypical focus, and so we tend to unintentionally, I think, cut people out. I had a fascinating discussion yesterday with a visually impaired gentleman, and we were talking about the difficult difficulties with different signs on a wall, with some being braille. And he was saying he was in a hospital, and somebody put all the braille signs at the hospital, sort of head height, and he was saying, I don't understand because it was a child, they wouldn't have a chance of being able to read it, right? And I relayed, well, yeah, I had seen one that was by a fire exit. So you can imagine a blind person in a fire situation feeling every wall all the way down the corridor in hope of finding one that says fire exit. And I think it's it's I think it's things like that. We we are not yet thinking or comprehending how to build society or expectations for a wider variety of people, and that is a problem we're all sort of facing and trying to comprehend.

SPEAKER_03 4:40

Oh, it feels so big. Where do where do we start? What does it look like when it ends? Does it end? I don't think it does, I think it just keeps going and keeps building and growing and accommodating. And it it's just so it's happening every single day with millions of people around the world, yet our systems are still relying on hundred-year-old programming, and it just makes no sense to me how they could see that it's not a successful, you know, exchange of information or you know, access to things. And I just I love that you guys are working on this and making it, you know, a priority for society because they need it needs to be, it needs to be built for all, not just added on for the few that you know it it's it's crazy to me.

Reframing Inclusion As A Systemic Win

SPEAKER_00 5:48

Yeah, it's I think it's difficult if we think about building something for all, because there'll always be another category, another type, another something. And so I think we need to think more about just building it for anybody, anyone, right? And I think that's one of the key things that we need to recognize. But you're absolutely right in mentioning about a lot of the things that we think or the systems we have are a hundred years older older. Probably the the most difficult, most challenging one of those is is ourselves, our brains, right? The most complex thing to ever exist: 86 to 100 billion neurons, five to ten trillion connections, the synaptic between them, and they're constantly changing due to neuroplasticity. And so we are very complex, so we try and comprehend the world around us. The only way we can do that is by simplifying it. We have we have speech, which is a pretty poor way to communicate 86 billion neurons of thought, right? And so when we communicate with each other, we we simplify things down, right? We say things like love, right, to mean an entire lifelong human connection, right? The word doesn't come close to what it could mean, for example. We do that with a lot of the models that we use, so we do oversimplify things, but I do think because the brain has the ability to take that very great complexity and bring it down to that simpler level for communication purposes, that is one big benefit to us. And Sarah, you were saying about how do we make that big change? How do we shift society? It's so complex, and you're absolutely right. But I like to think of it as way to simplify it is society tends to see by focusing on alignment, by saying, if we're all in the same path, it's all together, it will work, right? If you do something bad, you're breaking the law or something like that. So that's why you should all stay in this in this in this line. The problem is we also do that with sort of system design and things like that. So it does take a need to turn around and say, well, yes, that is the current alignment. We might need to change things. And I think it's very much the role of Neuro to make a difference here. But it's not about standing up and saying, hey, something's wrong. If you do that in a system, you tend to get rejected by the system because you're not aligning, so you're seen as being a problem, right? It's about reframing it and saying, well, we have alignment at the moment, but that alignment is causing problems. There are some parts of that alignment that are reducing our productivity, that are causing pain points, friction points, if you like. And you might look at an individual who is autistic or has ADHD, etc., and they're explaining it's a friction point. Now we can help them for more and ethical reasons, or we can help them because that friction point is costing money, it's reducing productivity, it's causing lots of different issues. And if we look at it that way, if we reframe it away from that moralistic and more onto a more systemic, there's a problem here, and we can resolve it, and it will help everyone surrounding them. Then I think it's a better way to approach that, that systemic view.

What NEURO Is And How It Works

SPEAKER_03 9:03

I agree. I I do agree with that. I love that approach on that. Tell us a little bit more about Neuro, like what its kind of what are its bones and like what its, you know, acts. How do people access what they need to through that?

Accreditation Over Awareness

SPEAKER_00 9:22

Yeah. So NERO is a charity that is being registered in the UK, but it's not, we have no respect for borders whatsoever. We are intending to work all over the place. Uh, my career has been all over the world. Indeed, I've spent 12 years in the USA. And so I know that very well. My wife is the co-founder, and she is American, so there's a there's a strong connection to the US. But it's I mean, my my job is taking me all over the world, so it's certainly not a UK or US only focus. But neurocharity.org is the website. Feel free to go and have a look at it. We're on all the social medias and so on. But what neuro is trying to achieve is, I think, pretty unique. We did, we didn't set out to invent something, we set out to find other people who were doing what we what we wanted, what we needed, and and frankly, couldn't find it. No disrespect meant to anyone out there and just couldn't find it. So, what neuro does is take the idea of reframing neurodivergence as being a problem to be solved or to be allowed for reasonable allowances and those kinds of things, reasonable accommodations, and shifting it round to the world needs difference, right? Difference of thought is what gives us abilities. If everyone thought exactly the same, we would have no new ideas, we would not innovate. If we look at all the great innovators in history, they all thought differently. This diversity of thought or cognitive diversity is actually essential. And due to the alignment that I mentioned earlier, what I call the alignment trap, organizations tend to focus on that alignment and see it as a critical part of their systemic view of the world. You'll see many companies say, these are our values, this is our culture, right? What they mean, this is our alignment, this is our path, right? What I would argue is that actually organizations need more diversity, particularly cognitive diversity, in order to be able to innovate, to collaborate, to be competitive, to problem solve. And so neuro exists to reframe that, to help organizations see the benefit of these things. The reason for that is it's very hard to sit down with someone who controls the uh the purse strings like a CEO or a CIO or something and have a moral and ethical argument. Uh no disrespect meant to them, but their focus is more capitalist and they're more focused on making money. So coming at it from a different angle and saying, well, actually, greater diversity of thought will actually lead to greater profit is going to be a much more meanable argument. And so with that lens, we then can go into organizations and help them truly change. I don't mean just tokenistically, I mean really shift the focus, right? Moving neurodivergency, neurodiversity concepts into strategy, right? If you recognize that somebody who is autistic could bring in completely different ideas, then you might put in some of the strategic outcome for the future of I want an autistic person to be on the board of our company in five years' time, right? That kind of dynamic drive. That's the kind of thing that Neuro offers. So we have built an accreditation structure that is focused purely upon investment. Okay, so organizations have to show they've made changes internally to achieve that standard, right? We have partnered with universities, we're partnering with schools. So we're changing the focus within the different education areas to help them understand better what they can do in these areas. This is not really about awareness. I think we're probably past the awareness point. This is more about how do you build environments that they can be supportive, that they can be successful, they can flourish in. Right. We've built an inclusion model called resonance. Resonance is staggering. I don't think anyone's done anything like it. It helps individuals recognize what's available to them. Uh, one of the biggest gaps is if you have ADHD or autism or dyspraxia or dyslexia, you don't know what you need. Yeah. And you don't know what's out there, you don't know what the options are. So when someone says to you, oh, you are dyspraxic, what can we do to help? I I don't know. I don't have a menu, right?

SPEAKER_03 13:51

I give you the information exactly.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

But organizations go to individuals and expect them to know. So resonance actually helps people comprehend their situation, which most people don't know, right? You know, what am I struggling with? What's affecting me, what's impacting me. And then out of that, they get to see, okay, these are the options of what sort of things I could look at to help myself, and then allow that to be communicated to their organization. So it's a step change in how we approach that. So that's a massive change. So what we've built effectively, and all this was for the website, so I should just stop rabbiting on, but it's on the website, and it we built an ecosystem, I guess is the best way to put it, to completely and utterly shift the conversation around how we see and experience and interact with neurodiversity. Because, as I said, others aren't doing it in the way that I would want to see it happening. Here in the UK, there's an organization, lovely organization, wonderful. Not a bad word to say about them, but they started in 1962. That's what 64 years ago, and their focus is on autism, and they are a charity, and as of today, their latest focus is they're doing a sponsored run, and they're looking for volunteers to raise money for autism awareness. Now, if you've been going for 64 years and your focus is still on autism awareness, I'm sorry, that that's just too slow for me. I feel we need to make better impact than that. Yeah. So that's why we exist and what we're trying to achieve.

SPEAKER_03 15:33

No, and I love what you said earlier about, and I think we had talked about this in a previous conversation, that idea of kind of like checks and balances, that you don't just get a check sign on your name saying we're inclusive, that you actually show, you show that you have made changes in your corporation, in your organization. You show that it is not just verbiage that you've added to your website to look flashy, but that you're actually making changes within your personnel, within your employed or volunteered positions to show that you are it it's really important.

Safety, Environments, And Level Playing Fields

SPEAKER_00 16:20

It seems obvious, doesn't it? I mean, it does seem like why am I having to fight for this, right? But yeah, the all the organizations we looked at were very much more of the mindset of, oh, do you want to support neurodiversity? Yeah, give us 500 bucks, we'll give you a badge that says you support neurodiversity, you can pop it on your website, all done, congratulations. And so that's sort of raising awareness. That's good, because you get a company that puts that badge on their website, so they're showing that, hey, this is important, but it is a little tokenistic, it's sort of virtue signaling, dare I say. And yeah, what we do is turn around and say, we can give you a diagnostic, we can come back with the results of that and tell you where the sort of strengths and opportunities are in your organization. So, out of the five domains that we look at, which are sort of leadership, governance, things like that, policies, procedures, those kind of things, out of those five, two of them really strong, you're good on those. These three, though, there's some opportunities here, things you can do. You need to update those policies and procedures, you need to revamp your performance management scheme, or update the way that you're doing recruiting, whatever it may be. And so they then get that list. If they then go and do work to change, to invest, right? They're making a better organization. We're not telling them bad things, the whole thing to make them a better company. Then they can come back and with that evidence, what we call the evidence pack, that can then gain them the accreditation, the neural standard. And the point here is it makes the neural standard worthwhile. Like it's it's not just transactional, it's actually something that if an organization gets to, they can turn around and go, we are truly investing in this. And that then becomes this fantastic attraction element. Because companies can go out there when they're looking for talent and go, we've actually invested in this and we've got this award to prove it. And there isn't really anything like that yet. So we're hoping with this we can really start to change the game because I love to imagine the idea of an 18-year-old looking at universities or schools in the US, right, or colleges or whatever we call them, and looking at I know three of them, and one of them on their website has the neural logo and the fact they're accredited. And so the 18-year-old and the parents would look at that and go, you should probably look at going to that one because they've invested in this, and that changes it completely from being, oh, we support neurodivergent people just for ethical or moral reasons, to this is a strategic win for the organization, and it makes it a positive experience for the individual as well. I mean, that's everyone wins.

SPEAKER_03 19:05

Win-win, exactly. That's exactly what I was gonna say. And when you are that individual, that is what you're looking for. When you are an individual like us, when you are a neurodivergent individual, you want safety, you want somewhere that they're going to not only listen, they're going to listen with compassion and and care and be willing to hear what your skills are, and then also hear what your accommodations might be needed, and and take those things across the board and give you the right type of environment, which is the most important part of any type of learning, whether you are an infant, toddler, elementary school age, high school age, college age, adult. If you are not in the right environment for learning, if someone has not created that environment for you, if you are not creating that environment for yourself or for others, then that's where you need to start. It's because it's all about that. It's all about that environment and and intentions, of course.

Robert’s Late Diagnosis Journey

SPEAKER_00 20:17

Yeah, and and let's not forget, it it's obviously we're talking about neurodivergence right now, but that's only because of the imbalance in society, right? Everybody wants safety, security, the right environment, the right opportunities. All we're talking about is trying to build a level playing field. Yeah, right. That that that that's all this is, but yeah, everyone wants those things, right? Everyone wants to have a successful career and have a good life and feel safe and secure in what they're doing.

unknown 20:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 20:44

Now, to the level of what you're comfortable talking about, it let's go back and talk about kind of your personal journey and how this became so important and such a passion for you. Tell us about the kind of maybe growing up in any struggles before you received the information or got the diagnosis and then what changed from that point on?

Memory, Face Blindness, And Misread Signals

SPEAKER_00 21:10

Gosh. So I'm I'm obviously old, as you can tell by the lack of hair and all the wrinkles and all that kind of stuff. And I was not diagnosed until about a year ago, I think it is now. And so at that time I was clinically diagnosed autistic and ADHD. Any of you've gone through or know of it, I did the RADS R test, which has uh through autism, uh, which has a zero to 240 ranking and anything over, I think, 65, you can be autistic. And I was given a score of 204. So quite quite far up there. And my wife, who helped me through all of it, was looking at herself and went, Well, this seems very familiar. And she then got tested and was diagnosed as well. Well, uh, which explains why we work as a couple, I suspect. Um but my my my life had always been quite difficult, and I didn't know why. I just mainly thought I was a very broken individual that just really struggled with life. I couldn't comprehend why for everyone else so many things were easy. Conversations, emotions, relationships, having friends, holding down a job, all those kinds of things were beyond me, I guess is the best way to put it. And so it's been quite the journey. And indeed, the autism and the ADHD are actually at the end of the journey. The other big realization moment happened at lockdown. So during lockdown, ridiculous story, but my wife and I were watching TV, so it's you know 2020, 2021, time around there. And we were watching, it was a police show, you know, like a CSI or Lord Order or whatever it was, something like that. And there's that moment where the crime's been committed, the police arrive and they're talking to the victim, and they say, Can you come down to the police station so you can talk to the sketch artist and and you know draw the criminal? And I I was getting frustrated at this point, and I I turned to my wife and I said something on the lines of this is ridiculous. I hate how they always have these bits in the show, this sort of ridiculous trope they write in, just this lazy writing. And my wife said, What are you talking about? And we got into this a long, long discussion, and I was sort of saying things like, but you can't remember faces. So obviously, this isn't true, they just make it up because it makes the story work. And my wife's saying, What do you mean you can't remember face? And we go to this back and forth, back and forth, and so that's how we found out about process magnosia, and that's face blindness. I love that, I love that actually. Yeah, so I got on this. And I had no idea who stereo was, yeah, and yet we've spoken before, but I had no clue. I on this, and all I knew I was recording a podcast. That's literally 100% of all the information I had. Because along with the face blindness, not being able to remember what people look like, I also have a very strong episodic dementia, which means I I can't remember experiences. So my experiential memory is is is very much lacking. There's two types of memory in the human brain: episodic and semantic. Semantic is facts and figures of what happened on this date in this year kind of thing. So 1215, the Magna Carta was signed, or something like that. Now, my semantic memory is brilliant, but my episodic memory, the experiences in my life are terrible. Another term for this is S D A M, which is severely deficient autobiographical memory, because mine is yeah, severely lacking. So I don't remember what Sarah and I have talked about. I don't remember what we did yesterday. I remember I had a meeting this morning with potential climate. I don't remember any of it. Um and so when we realized that, that was a huge eye-opening moment for me because I never understood why life was so hard, why everyone else would go into a meeting or be able to have friends or whatever it might be. Because none of those things were ever options to me. I couldn't understand why no one would be a friend with me. And so my entire life has been sort of sort of just a lesson in rejection, which has which has created a huge amount of depression and anxiety, which resulted in psychosis, sort of a lot of cutting and and stuff like that. So yeah, I knew life was always hard, but it wasn't until the last five or six years that I've understood why, right? And so I think it's really interesting that there is a young generation now in school that is hopefully there's a better diagnosis now, people being seen earlier, being diagnosed earlier, right? But there's the older people like me who haven't been through that, right? And so they may or may not be able to find that out. And so it's it's interesting as we're building your own, meeting more people and hearing more stories and learning people's lives, just how much there is. Another one that I have that is fascinating is alexithemia, which is uh lack of ability to comprehend emotions very well. I cannot tell people's emotions at all, so I can't tell if I'm making someone happy or making someone mad. Um, and so this is a huge problem. I had a sales meeting recently, I thought it went brilliantly. They turned around and said, We don't want to work with you. But apparently, I got too excited about the prospect of working with them. I don't often get happy. So my brain overreacted to that moment and it made them feel uncomfortable. And I think an important lesson to take away from that is that neurodivergent people don't need headphones, we need understanding that we're different, yeah, we need more comprehension that during our interactions we don't see the same world that you see, we don't experience the same things, and so sometimes it's just not possible for me, some of you, to react in a way or interact in a way that people expect or not, and I think that's not something we talk about very much. We talk mainly about what aid the neurodivergent person in that conversation or interaction or whatever, what they need from a point of view sort of hardware or software, or you know, something like that. In other words, you're broken. What do we need to do to make you seem neurotypical, as opposed to what if you're neurotypical, you you also need to comprehend who I am as well. And I think that's a really important part of it.

Beyond Headphones: Seeking Understanding

SPEAKER_03 28:27

I agree, and you know, I have a hard time uh having conversations where people have, and you know, like kind of like you said, no offense to anyone, but people that have you know lack of awareness, or I have hyper, I'm hyper aware, and so I, you know, seeing all the birds and the clouds and the colors and the hearing your voice and putting the conversation together, and all of this is all happening at once, and it's not overwhelming me. But it also is hard in conversations with people who are limited in their ideas that and maybe it's a typical thinker that things can be different when you run to get against that person who says, I don't I don't agree that we should put labels on people. I don't agree with that. Okay, well, we do it in public so that we mark a handicapped spot so that we know that that person has an available parking spot for them. Do we just erase those things and people just uh come up with ideas on their own? Like it doesn't make any sense to me. So those are conversations that are really hard to have sometimes. And it's conversations like these that we can get into these people's minds to hopefully build their curiosity. I think curiosity is one of the most important things and that we can really our you know, society can thrive off of it if we can stay curious. We can find all sorts of ideas and solutions, information and measurements and things, but you fall short when you go out into society oftentimes and can't find those conversations to be had. It's hard, it's hard to be neurodivergent in many areas of the world and of society and of life, you know, and it something you had said earlier, it kind of just I a thought popped into my mind in that right now. I have a you know, uh impressionable 14-year-old. And one thing I am making sure that I let her know in every way, all the time, everything you're going through is a human experience that another human, five other humans, 12 other humans, 5,000 million, whatever, somebody else is having this experience, has had this experience. Like the experiences themselves may not be as unique as the person. So that just to say that you're not the only one going through this, that somebody else also may be going through this, and it's you know, podcasts and and movies and videos and things, books that we can find, these stories to help us feel like we're not alone in this scary, neurodiverse world that we're now being able to see that is becoming more apparent and more you know uh visible for everyone.

Curiosity, Labels, And Public Access

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Yeah, I'd I I've been a little surprised at how many people want to talk because they want to share their experience or ask questions, but to the point where we've actually turned around on the website and said, Yes, we we do we do do mentoring, it's okay. Because it's either individuals wanting help themselves, or often someone who's a professional now, sort of an adult and they're going through diagnosis or they're trying to understand it and they need to talk about it, or a parent who's going, my kid's going through this help, what's it like, or how do we know what do I say to them? And it's completely understandable. And when the world is unintentionally, but is built for a certain way of thinking, then there's a lot of questions, either from an individual who's going through it, saying, Well, what do I do? How do I view myself now? Do I come out? Do I unmask, right? Or do I keep on masking? Do I what do I want to do in society? Or is it just certain situations where I reveal, right? What is revealing? I don't even know who that side of me is yet, right? Or there's a parent or a relative, a friend, or partner, or somebody of somebody's neurodivergent, and they're going, Well, I'm not neurodivergent. I don't know what they're going through. What do I say? What do I not say? You know, and so it's that there's lots of variables. And certainly one of the things that sticks with me, which is relevant to just what you were saying, then so about your about your 14-year-old, is that people around the world are going through something similar to what you're going through. So that should be comforting to know that you're not the only person to ever gone through this and they've survived it, and they are thriving, and you will thrive too. Yeah, however, that doesn't take away from the fact that this is your unique experience. You've not been through this before. So it's going to feel uncomfortable and new, and you rightfully should have a lot of questions, and you're going to make a lot of mistakes.

SPEAKER_02 33:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

We call that learning, and you're just learning about yourself.

SPEAKER_03 33:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

That's a perfectly healthy and natural process to go through for all of your life.

SPEAKER_03 33:56

And isn't it so nice? I hope that our you know next generation of parents can embrace that idea that they can really want to understand, want to build a relationship, want to, you know, coexist in a way that is healthy and constantly learning about one another. And in that, you're also helping them learn about themselves and about how to interact with people in the world. And you know, every even in every household, everyone is so vastly different in their needs, in their desires, and but one thing always comes back, and that is the environment. Are you providing love? Are you providing and you know, this is probably a little bit off topic, but in my case, I really think that like I've seen over my lifetime the example of unconditional love versus conditional love, and how differently that can affect a human being and their you know, understanding of themselves or their value and their worth of themselves and things. And so I really just challenge people to to test those those boundaries of unconditionalness and where are you at on that scale? Like, how how do you see yourself in in putting conditions on on people and others, on yourself and how unhealthy that can be? So I don't know where that came from, but it is.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Yeah, I mean, it's obviously something that you feel strongly about, but it's important to you. And it's I think as I said earlier on, it's a fascinating thing that you've got those 86 billion eurons coming up with ideas, and you're trying to form those into an extremely basic communication method that we call speech, right? The English language is more limited than we might like it to be. So, yeah, it's it's difficult to sometimes get your thoughts out. And I find that kind of fascinating. It suggests that there's a lot of latent potential in there. But yes, I think there's certainly something to be said for uh current parenting models being much more supportive and open than previous ones. We don't have children, so I can't speak too much to that, and I wouldn't wish to step too far in that direction.

Mentoring, Masking, And Identity Choices

SPEAKER_03 36:29

But you have been a son, so there you can kind of speak on what that what well yes.

SPEAKER_00 36:35

I mean experience. Yeah, that didn't go so well, but yeah, that's one of those interesting ones. Yeah, shouldn't you tell your family about your neurodivergence? Right, that's one of those good questions. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 36:51

Yeah, right. I love that. I love that. This has been such a wonderful conversation with you today, and I'm really excited about the possibilities and just the measured success of Nero and seeing how organizations, you know, grasp on and really start to develop their own success within their organizations to better accommodate the world, the people that they want to work for them, the products that they want to offer, the services they want to offer, you know, make sure that we're doing it in a way that is just acceptable for everyone, accessible for everyone. I think that that's so important. And so glad that you started this journey and have created something so large and scalable to be able to see the changes.

SPEAKER_00 37:46

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, that that's been a big part of it. Is we we wanted it to be scalable. We want it to be something that could grow. So we have built within it the delivery partner scheme, which is the idea that with some training we can accredit people to deliver the neuro training and so on, so that they can go out there and spread the word and help that social change occur. But also, having been self-employed nearly all of my career, because no one employed me, recognizing other people like that out there who are neurodivergent and having to go down the self-employment path. And with us creating this commercial delivery partner program, it means that hopefully we can help not just the social change aspect, but also some individuals making money, having a life they actually deserve to have, right? So, yeah, that that is very much part of it. So, yeah, we're very excited about the potential of what that program can do and who it can help. So, yeah, we'll we'll keep on going and keep on keep on fighting forwards. We've got some amazing partners. We're already working with the University of Melbourne in Australia, University of Westminster in London, University of Manchester. We have been in talks with the College Autism Network, which is mostly in the US, but is around the world. We're working with schools in London, as in sort of secondary schools. We got a charity of the year award late last year. So yeah, we're making progress, but yeah, we certainly do some more support. So go and have a look at the website. We are launching a new version of the website in the next month or two. So come back and look at it again soon, and it will be even better.

SPEAKER_03 39:29

And for those of you who are listening, neurocharity.org, you can go there to find more information. Um, and Robert, if you have any information or questions for him, rather, please feel free to reach out. Is there social media? You said you're on social media as well.

Parenting, Love, And Conditions

SPEAKER_00 39:45

Yes, yep, yeah, and they're all on the website. We're on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, I think TikTok as well. Um but yeah, I mean, LinkedIn is probably the one I use the most because of all but do reach out and you know connect with on LinkedIn if you've got questions. You know, happy to help. If you're interested in the uh commercial degree partner, reach out if you are interested in being a client. If you want help getting your organization accredited, again, reach out. We can change the world together, and that is very much what we want to try and achieve.

SPEAKER_03 40:21

Oh, I love that. Absolutely. I'm all about changing the world, and you know, we gotta have the right partnerships to do that, so can't do it on our own. And more people we have kind of on our side, the easier it will be overall. So thank you so much. I loved having this conversation with you today and excited to see what happens in the future with Neuro and catch up with you and you know, see what's happening on your side of the world there.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

I look forward to it. Thanks, Sam.

SPEAKER_03 40:51

Thank you so much.