International Women's Day Stories: Glen Blackwell

To celebrate International Women's Day and Neurodiversity Celebration Week, both in March, Greene Sky and Ability are sharing the stories and experiences of inspirational neurodiverse women at Greene King. In this edition, we're talking to Glen Blackwell, Senior Integration Manager at Greene King, and a member of Greene Sky. Glen's wife, along with his three daughters, all have different lived experiences of neurodiversity, and we wanted to find out more about how diagnosis journeys differ in childhood and adulthood, why Glen is so passionate about raising awareness of neurodiversity, and his hopes for the future.

Hello! I work in Finance, and I've been at Greene King for the best part of 20 years. I've done a load of different jobs in Finance; some accounts jobs and some system-based roles too. I helped with our accounting package many years ago as part of a project team, as well as with integration projects, and I have a very project-based role now.

I'm doing some work with working capital at the moment, which sounds really boring, but is actually quite interesting. I like the variety. It keeps me interested having different tasks to do all the time. I work a few days in the office and a few days at home, and it's funny–I used to be one of those people who put on a suit, went to work, and felt like I had my head on straight and went there five days a week. After COVID, I quite liked being at home, and then I found it really hard to go back into the office.

I love agile working because you can have the benefits of both. You can be in the office, interact with people, or be at home and get your head down. That for me is great. But it also means I get to spend a lot more time with my family. When COVID came along, I had the opportunity to be at home a lot more, and when I'm at home, I will take the girls to school, or if there's an opportunity, nip out for 10 minutes and pick them up. It's great.

If I'm honest, I was asked to join, and I thought about it for a little while and wasn't sure if it was the right thing for me. But then the thing that really swung it, and the thing that really encouraged me to get involved and stay involved, is that I have three daughters, I have a wife, and I want the world to be equal for them and for other people. And you know, I think that goes for all our ELIGs because the equality thing is really important. But I very much identify with Greene Sky. I would like the female members of my house to grow up in a world where they don't suffer any prejudice or discrimination for just being female. It's no more complicated than that. So, for me, I'd love the world to be a little bit more equal than it used to be.

It is ridiculous in some ways that we even have to have this conversation, or someone has to have this opinion, because we shouldn't have to deal with any level of discrimination, whether it's gender, sex, or ethnicity. I find that annoying. So if I can do something in my small part to make that better, then that's great.

And the fact that Green King lets you do it as well is so good, because actually, plenty of organisations will prioritise work. Here, we are given the bandwidth for support, some financial backing, all the support to do this, and that's magical.

Yes, of course. We have three children who are struggling with the same sort of things. One is formally diagnosed, two are not. My oldest daughter is 14, my youngest daughter is 9, and my middle daughter is 12.

My oldest daughter was diagnosed with ASD about three years ago, and that was a kind of awakening of what neurodivergence is and that we really needed to learn about it. My middle daughter is fairly likely to have ADHD, but more associated with the attention deficit side rather than the hyperactivity side, and I didn't know about the separation of the two sides until we got further down the line. She suffers from concentration issues and related problems.

My youngest daughter is the one that we're struggling with the most at the moment, and she's probably autistic. We've had a couple of attempts at trying to get a diagnosis done, but we've struggled from a school perspective because they've not seen anything concerning, and you have to have documented issues being visible in multiple settings. They have to be visible at home, and visible at school or at work, so if school is not a problem, you're kind of on your own. So that's where we are.

They're all at that kind of interesting age where many people think 'Oh, you know, this is just children's issues', like the social struggles, for example – it's just what children do. That's quite a difficult thing to battle against sometimes because there is an element of that, but when it becomes more pronounced or longer lasting, it's not just that.

For a few years with each of them kind of evolving through that space, it's made my wife and me question our upbringings and some of our parents' behaviours. Looking back, my dad was probably autistic, and therefore, I have probably got those traits to a degree too. My wife's going through a diagnosis for ADHD because she feels that she probably has that, and this has all come about through learning what something is with the children, and then reflecting and thinking, 'Well, actually that thing I've always struggled with, it's probably got a label too'.

For my wife, that's been quite liberating, just in terms of kind of understanding that. It's been quite weird for me, because in some ways you've been living with somebody who has had a mask on for a while, and that the closest person to you in your life hasn't necessarily realised they've had a mask.

She's really grown, and she's done loads of reading, and she's very well educated on neurodivergence and has really supported our girls really well. But she's learned so much that she's been able to kind of self-reflect and think, 'Well, actually, maybe these things are actually present in me, too.’

I think it certainly is from a child's perspective, because neurodiversity looks so differently in males and females and girls and boys present different sorts of symptoms, and you have the issue of masking too. It's not very well understood, but the masking is the biggest problem. Our girls are the type of girls who will go to school, do what they're supposed to do, never kick off, and never be in trouble. They present themselves as model citizens and model students, so people think that there's no problem. So, I think girls really struggle.

Boys tend to mess around and tend to be more disruptive, I think, whereas girls don't. And that makes it really hard for them to be taken seriously, let alone get to the point of diagnosis, I think. We put a referral in for my middle daughter for ADHD, and they came back and said, 'Well, she's not demonstrating any hyperactivity’, and we had to write back and say, 'Well, we're not putting it in for that’. There are like 7 or 8 different criteria, and she ticks 6 of the 7 for the attention deficit piece. That's what we've asked for.

In the professional world, there are a lot of people coming forward saying, 'I think this is what I've got’. So, I can totally understand that services are overwhelmed, but I can accept that they are probably pushing the kind of bar up a little bit to try and deal with that tidal wave. Where I think stereotypes are really tricky is the kind of things that people present, certainly in my experience, with both autism and ADHD, they're very easy to overlook. My oldest daughter is a little socially awkward, and some girls are like that when they're growing up. People will say, 'You know, teenage girls fall out with their friends all the time’. There are stereotypes of teenage behaviour that are rolled around all the time, but also apply to neurodivergent people.

My middle daughter with ADHD is a bit ditsy and a bit forgetful. Again, it's a very easy, lazy stereotype of ADHD. Now, she is those things, but that is not why she's them. Those kinds of stereotypes, the ones where they dumb down a problem to not be a problem, they're the bits that are the most dangerous for me, because then you are not noticing those subtle signs that someone is not really wanting to show to you. And that's where people get ignored and not given the support they need. I think that's where the problem really lies for me.

I think we don't understand neurodivergence. We don't collectively see it properly as a disability, and it's a weird thing over there that we don't really know about. I think we unintentionally discriminate against people, but we don't understand, and we don't even know that a lot of neurodivergences exist. And that's a bit of a problem.

Neurodivergent people have specific needs that people don't understand. But with a bit of conversation and a couple of sensible adaptations, they would be a lot better.

It makes it really difficult to manage a team of people because if you can't have the right level of empathy, and if you can't really get involved in how people are feeling, that's going to cause a problem for the individual.

This is a really interesting subject. So, we do a few things – for the autistic members of our family, they hate change, and they like routines. We have a calendar that says what everyone's doing, and it's really easy to see what's happening. We also sit down on the weekend and talk about what's coming up throughout the week, and we use a meal planner.

If we're going out for the day, we talk about it before, and if we're going somewhere new, we might have a quick look at what it looks like online. We're going to Scotland in the summer, we've got a camper van and are doing a bit of a road trip. So, we've been looking at the websites of the campsites that we might stop at.

My daughter with ADHD struggles with concentration. So, for her, it's about packaging tasks up and not doing too much at once. She's going to high school now, and homework is a big thing. One of us will sit with her while she does her homework, not because she needs the help, but because she needs the honesty of having someone sit next to her. We'll have little breaks and that little dopamine hit of five minutes on the trampoline or a bit of chocolate or whatever it might be.

It's funny, because I find this intensely annoying to do because I want the homework done so we can all do something else, but I totally understand why it's important. So, we have a pattern for her just so that she knows we're going to do stuff, we're going to do it in bite-sized bits, and it's not a big deal.

We have a lot of noise and a lot of music as well, so everyone's got earbuds, and if anyone wants to sit in a corner and listen to something, they go and plug themselves in. I find too much noise jarring, they find silence jarring, so actually, it just gives us the ability to have kind of what everybody wants.

Yes, I think so. We have the desire to help and the appetite to do things to make people's lives better, and I think we're passionate about being open and inclusive and tolerant of everybody.

Going back to my point about masking earlier, I think the difficulty we all have is that it's a lot harder to spot it, to understand it, to feel comfortable dealing with it. I do not doubt that the majority of people would absolutely want to get involved and do the right thing. I don't think they know enough about neurodiversity, so I think there's a lot more we can do with awareness and training – to say to everyone, 'You know, people with these conditions live everywhere, and they are probably sitting next to you, and this is how you can help'.

I approached someone in Ability because we'd had a couple of conversations in the past, and I saw an interview on the Ability Knowledge Hub from that person about their experience with ADHD and the workplace. And for me, to hear some of the things you had struggled with and how you had found a benefit, that was really important. I thought, 'Here's a real person that I know that's going through this', and when you see them, and you're kind of more aware of them, they become more real.

Very honestly, as a parent, I've struggled at times with some of the things my kids do because I think they're ridiculous. And I have to take a step back and think to myself, 'They might be ridiculous to you, but they're not ridiculous to them'. And they're not doing it to annoy you, they're just doing it because that's who they are.

The big lesson for me there is that you need variety in every situation. We already know this around cultural differences, people's background and levels of education, but actually, the variety that neurodivergent people can bring is massive. They can think outside the box and be super creative. And that's something, you know, that's something I don't have.

My oldest daughter is so literal, it's painful, but she's super bright. And, you know, there's nothing wrong with being literal sometimes, because actually, people need that honesty. I think that the variety that you can bring by having people of all backgrounds and all opinions is massive, and we just don't want to overlook people who are neurodivergent because they can bring some real colour to the party and make everything quite a lot of fun. And it's not just about fun, but it's about variety.

I think for me, Give to Gain' is really about that act of saying, 'Well, what can I offer someone that will make their situation better'? You know, where can I take a bit of time, give something, do something, say something that will make a situation better? So, for me, and from a personal perspective, if I can do something this year to try and help other people understand about neurodivergent people and how they feel and how they fit into the world and how they experience the world, then that's great. Because I think that is something that people don't have now, and in some small part, I can help educate some people.

That's a gift they might not necessarily know they need, but they will know they need it after they've received it, if you know what I mean.

I think it's got to be awareness, because we just don't have enough of it. It's easy to see ethnic identities, gender and sexual orientation sometimes, but it's not easy to see this stuff unless you know where to look. And therefore, awareness of neurodiversity gives people the ability to know where to look.