International Women's Day Stories: MJ Hynard

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 MJ Hynard, Digital Merchandising Executive.

Hey, I am a Digital Merchandiser at Greene King, previously working on Greene King & Belhaven Urban and Heritage brands alongside Corporate brands. However, I am recently moving over to the Value brands, and working on all things Belhaven, which is super exciting, and I am still responsible for Greene King and Belhaven Corporate/Brand pages.

My day-to-day is the end step of the customer journey, which is the website. I ultimately help with the execution of a campaign: delivering promotions, campaigns or key events onto a website or app. Sometimes it can be super fiddly or technical, but it always keeps me on my toes, learning every day and impressing myself with my ability to execute merchandising at such a large scale.

Outside of my role, I am the Events go-to person with Elizabeth Bromley in Unity, which is an employee inclusion group. We tag-team to create meaningful events and drive that change within Greene King or in our pubs & communities.

I have now worked for Greene King for 1 year and 6 months, and it honestly feels like years (in a good way). I have enjoyed every minute so far!

Before Greene King, I completed my degree in late May 2024 and graduated with a BA Honours in Business Management & Marketing, as well as a Chartered Management Institute Diploma in Management!

I have also worked with various businesses and brands on social media, marketing strategies, branding, content creation, and some project management consultancy projects – pretty cool, right? Before that, I had various other roles unrelated to my current career, including Sous Chef, Barista, Visual Merchandiser, and Automotive Sales & Repairs.

I always had a love for being around people, helping people, standing up for what I believed in and what was right, and being around like-minded people. Here at Greene King, all the ELIG groups are always discussed, and there were so many impactful and meaningful events I wanted to listen in on and attend, but I was still new to the business.

After a period of change, I reached out to Jasveer Banning (Chair of Unity) to check in on her, as I knew she was impacted. After several weeks of checking in on her, she really understood my caring nurture and wanting to make a difference in the workplace, and that is when she put some time into running through Unity and gave me time to process if I wanted to be a part of Unity, and of course, I said yes! I absolutely love working with Jasveer and the wider Unity team; it makes me feel understood, listened to, and truly valued as a member of the room in any of our discussions.

I had always struggled, from a young age, with being different. At school and at home, I noticed I always worked twice as hard as the people around me when it came to processing information. I often would find myself mixing up letters, missing letters out, reading out loud to others, stuttering or getting frustrated that I could not read something correctly.

It would mentally exhaust me as it felt like a constant battle of making mistakes, which others did not make around me. I noticed I like to over-organise myself to reduce the risk of forgetting things, missing deadlines and more, which I did not want people to see. For so long, teachers had to take me out of the class and into 1:1 support. I would be at the bottom of the class in academic subjects, and I would be super quiet or disruptive, but I noticed that in art, textiles, design, business, and food science, I had a passion and excelled in these areas. For so long, I was questioning 'why me' as everyone seemed to be good at everything, just not me. There was countless times I was a loud, straight to the point, clumsy and late person it made me feel for so long I was alone, which was so daunting at school, this went on for all of my time at school and made me loose hope in everything at school, to my teachers had not much faith in my abilities in succeeding, apart from a few (creative teachers).

It was not until university that I struggled even more than ever.... However, the lecturers and professionals were so supportive and sent me for a dyslexia and dyspraxia test. I honestly felt so different at 19 years old, going for this when my parents were pushing me to help from school from the age of six! I remember I had an assessment for four hours, and my concentration was so bad that I honestly thought I would have to come back. Finally, the assessment was finished, and the results were back, and it was confirmed that I did have Dyslexia and Dyspraxia. The diagnosis gave me clarity and made me feel understood for 19 years of my life & I actually can remember crying in relief that I was not overthinking all of this.

Since then, it has helped me understand how to live my life properly, develop strategies and manage challenges, advocate for support, give myself time when I need it and also recognise my unique strengths.

My life now, people may think, is hectic, but I have developed a life I feel happy in, valued and not alone – and this makes me, MJ!

Growing up at school in the 2000s, it always seemed like boys were stereotypically diagnosed with dyslexia or dyspraxia. Women often show these in subtler ways, so their traits can be missed or confused for other neurodivergences.

Women are more likely to mask or overcompensate for their difficulties. They would work harder to memorise information or avoid certain situations to expose those challenges. This can make their struggles less visible to those.

Women often also internalise difficulties, showing perfectionism, self-doubt or anxiety rather than disruptive behaviour, and because of this, they are less likely to trigger assessment or diagnosis.

Yes 100%! The typical stereotypes for dyslexia would be: 'It only affects your performance at school', 'It's just reading letters backwards, or they move all over the paper, 'You can't be intelligent if you have dyslexia'.

However, Dyslexia actually affects working memory, processing speed, and phonological processing. Many women try to compensate for this by having strong verbal skills compared to written, so they may seem more direct and straight to the point in their responses, and work excessively hard compared to others.

Typical stereotypes for dyspraxia would be: 'You're so messy and disorganised', 'They are careless, always make mistakes' or 'You are so clumsy'.

However, dyspraxia, or 'Developmental Coordination Disorder', can affect motor coordination, which in turn affects planning, time management and organisation. These traits are sometimes misinterpreted as personality flaws rather than neurological differences and can never be understood properly. This means that because the stereotypical woman is 'scatterbrained' or 'not practical', it may blend into gender biases rather than being a diagnosable condition.

In terms of helping or hindering, they mostly hinder neurodivergent women because they increase self-blame and shame, which causes anxiety and self-doubt. They create narrow expectations of what these conditions look like, and people do not understand the bigger picture of how it truly affects a woman in their day-to-day life. It also increases the delay for women feeling comfortable to seek assessment and support for these conditions, which can lead onto later life for some.

My Neurodivergence can affect my day-to-day life massively in so many ways.

My main one would be executive functioning, so I will find it hard to start tasks and to prioritise which tasks I need to action, often losing track of time as I get fixated on something and want to finish it before I forget to finish the job. With simple life admin, I often get overwhelmed by and often forget appointments or things in my diary – hence why my life in adulthood is super structured and organised to reduce this. I even have to have 30 different alarms in the morning for different stages of my morning routine!

I struggle regulating my emotions compared to a neurotypical person. I feel emotions intensely, I get scared of rejection, and I often overthink what someone else is thinking or saying, which causes unpredictable anxiety. If my routine or checklist in day-to-day life is disrupted, it makes me frustrated, and then I could spiral off topic and lose focus.

I often find sensory experiences overstimulate me, I would need recovery time after long meetings, discussions or crowded spaces, often I would say 'my social battery has died' Light, noise, textures or smells I am super sensitive too and can often be a distracter for me, hence why I always like to plan where I am going before hand to understand what I will be up against in that day.

And from all of this, I will experience extreme exhaustion and burnout. If this happens for a prolonged period of time, I will struggle to concentrate and get back into a routine and the zone in both work and personal life.

However, the strengths of my neurodivergence would be that I have a deep focus on interests and feel so passionate towards things I am interested in. I am super creative and love coming up with new ideas. I like the why behind things, and I love to understand the strategic side of tasks, too, whereas a neurodivergent person would want to get the task done. I have unique problem-solving approaches and have a vision from different perspectives, and often recognise when things have changed or are out of place. I show so much care and empathy towards others, which sometimes can seem to much, or when I am hyper fixated and driven towards delivering, sometimes people may see that as rude or aggressive in communication, sadly.

The one thing I would love for my team members and other people in the wider business to understand is that being neurodivergent is not a lack of ability; it is a different way of processing things, which is often not understood well enough. We are not struggling because we are incapable; we are struggling because the environments are built around a default way of thinking, organising and communicating.

What we need to understand more of is how to set clearer instructions for those, give us more time to process things, or you may need to explain things more than once. We may struggle to accept sudden changes, but with clear communication, we can build on them with structure. We communicate directly, it may seem like more communication than needed, but we are trying to explain to the best of our abilities and not rudely and time-wasting! We may need written follow-up instructions, to-do lists or guidance, as we sometimes forget or get unorganised.