Change: Katherine McCord on Embracing Neurodiversity and Celebrating Differences on Earth Day

Transcript

Podcast Katherine McCord.mp3

Welcome to the A World of Difference Podcast.

I'm Lori Adams Brown, and this is a podcast for those who are different and wanna make a difference.

Hello, everyone.

I hope you've been having a great earth day week celebration.

And I know there are many events going on all around the world to celebrate our wonderful, beautiful planet, and to care for her well, and that means all living beings that reside here and live together and coexist So today, we have a wonderful human being, Catherine McCord, who's not gonna be on the show and has all types of different ways that she lives her human life in ways that are just beautiful.

Catherine is a physically and neurodiverse woman herself.

And talks about neurodiversity both in the United States and around the world, and her career has been built on inclusive innovation in people operations and HR tech.

She lives by the motto that different is not a deficit.

And she's gonna talk today about her own journey with neurodiversity, which includes well, she'll give us a definition of that first of all, but it includes OCD, and she also lives with bipolar And she's gonna describe for us what her journey has been like, how inclusion is important both in the workplace, but just in life.

With people we care about and love and also speak directly to any of you out there who do struggle with bipolar.

She's gonna talk about her own experience and how we can support people with bipolar.

She's also married to a man who is on the autism spectrum.

And she's gonna talk about all the parts of him that she loves and why often we have these biases and stereotypes and boxes that we put people in that aren't always helpful, but a lot of things that we would label as different or a disability sometimes get mislabeled or a disorder or an illness can often have sides of it that we don't consider.

And she's gonna talk a little bit about that as well today, because here at the year over the difference podcast, we are all about understanding our differences, becoming aware of them, accepting them, and also knowing how to live together in ways that help each other flourish in this world.

And so in autism awareness, and we also like to call it autism acceptance month, which is a preferred term in our family, we wanna understand a little bit more about how we can be helpful, and isn't that what earth day and being human on this planet together can really be all about when we celebrate those differences and listen to 1 another so.

I'm so happy to introduce to you today, the 1, the only the just outstanding human being Catherine McCord.

Hello, Catherine.

And welcome to the A World of Defense Podcast today on Earth Day.

How are you?

I am fantastic.

And that's such a cool day to get to be your guest.

Thank you.

It is a cool day to get to be your guest.

We love the world.

We love this planet.

We are so grateful for all of the human beings and every living creature that lives on this planet, and today we get a chance to celebrate all of that diversity in its various forms.

I'm just curious, do you do anything special around earth day?

Have you done that in the past?

What do you like about Earth day?

Any of that is on the table?

Oh, I love, and I don't always get to do it on Earth, but sometime right around Earth Day, I always go over to the beach.

I do live in South Florida.

I go over to the beach and I just sit, and it's very early in the morning.

I like to watch the sun come up.

I usually see some shooting stars when I do

this,

and I just sit and breathe and then I take my dog over to 1 of the nature preserves and we just hang out with the trees and the plants and listen to all the sounds and have a grand old time together.

That's how I celebrate.

Mhmm.

I

wanna celebrate like that.

Well, I can share it out.

Florida, and I my dog just passed away, unfortunately, in February, but we're starting to foster soon.

So maybe I'll show up in South Florida.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is.

There's rescue here in California that we've signed up to be foster family for Until we're ready to adopt because our our little 1 that passed away was a rescue from Singapore from when we lived there.

So we're still grieving her little coco.

Then

I'm sorry to hear.

To open our home.

Yeah.

No.

It's tough, and, you know, it's it's although it's normal and part of life, it's still really, really hard.

Deal with that kind of grief, and she was a part of our family, and that unconditional love that dogs can bring you when you walk through all of life's traumas, we were with her way more during co than we had been before with kids in online school for a year and a half.

So,

you know,

she yeah.

She was a she was a part of us and always will be in in so many ways.

Yeah, Earth Day is very special and our family has been for years, and we lived in Sematra.

My 1 who's not college was I think 3 or 4 when we started a tradition of planning a tree on earth day, and then when we moved to Singapore, you weren't allowed to do that, which we thought was strange, but because they they they're the garden city, and they plant all their own they they do a great job on their own, and it's kinda like, we don't want you just planning anywhere.

There we don't feel like you wanna choose from the app.

We have a great a particular aesthetic, you'll just mess it up.

Let us do it.

Thank you.

Yes.

Totally.

Absolutely right.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Well, another thing we're really in this month and we, our family has really become aware many, many years ago because I have 1 of my favorite family members is on the autism spectrum, is autistic, and that sent me years ago on a journey of understanding more about what it's like to be a human being on the autism spectrum, and it's not only helped me be a better human being to just understand and accept and embrace this, but also it's allowed me into the lives of many people who are neurodiverse.

And so I know that you also identify in this way, and I would love for you just to share with our audience what neurodiversity is and what your personal journey has looked like a little bit with it?

Sure.

So I so neurodiversity, first of all, is is a widely encompassing terminology.

So, it was originally coined by a woman with autism in Australia, who is a sociologist named Judy Singer.

But now the term has since evolved to mean any medically visible or diagnosable difference in how the brain processes information and stimuli.

So this can be anything from a traumatic brain injury to something like ADHD, autism, even into the mental health areas such as bipolar, and so on and so forth.

Even my seizure disorder falls under that because it changes how I under neurodiversity because it changes how I process information.

So that's what neurodiversity is.

And 1 of the biggest concepts so this is where Judy Singer really kind of set everything in motion was that her idea was that different is not a deficit.

And she's correct in that.

They've actually since had a lot of cool scientific exploration down that field.

Harvard has done some cool studies actually Hewlett Packard did a really cool program around neurodiversity inclusion and cultivation of talent and found out that those teams were 33 percent more productive than than their counterpart teams.

Wow.

Yeah.

They actually have done some studies to show that autism is part of the reason that humans have evolved positively.

Over the years.

POL Genetics and a few other sources Oh gosh, I can't remember the other 1 right now, but it was a really cool study.

That that studied that.

So the idea is that just because you're different does not mean that you're less than, and there are actually a lot of positive aspects that come with neurodiversity.

And, oh, my journey, right, you asked me that.

So, I love autism so much that I married it.

My

my husband is on the sector, but actually a lot of the things that do endear him to me, it turns out are part of that part of his brain

and

it's fascinating.

It really is and 1 thing that I like to remind people of during autism awareness is that be very careful because there are still a lot of these groups out here that support awareness like it's something to be sad about.

It's like, Oh, come raise money because these poor people, they're so pathetic.

Be very careful because that is not accurate There are some people who have disability that go along with their autism, but autism is not inherently a disability.

In fact, it can be something of a

superpower.

Just look at, I mean, all the people out there that have autism that are highly, highly accomplished.

As for me personally, I have multiple neurodiversities.

The 2 that I discussed the most are obsessive compulsive disorder, which was discovered in me as an early child.

And then also I do have bipolar.

Which is a lot of fun and and can actually be a superpower, so people tend to go like, oh, it's a mental illness, I'm like, yeah, it's a mental health diagnosis.

Be careful calling it an illness because if you see me when I'm manic, I look like super woman.

So -- Yeah.

-- just just kind of just kind of be careful, but the manic stages also have.

They're dangerous with them.

It's just a matter of learning to balance.

So, that's a little bit about my

journey.

Well, thank you.

I really appreciate your vulnerability.

And I know that people all around the world listening are learning so much already just from what you're saying.

We have people in our podcast community that are also would consider themselves neurodiverse of all the even every single thing that you mentioned.

And inclusion has been difficult in some countries, some cultures, some workspaces, and educational spaces more than others.

And so I personally try really hard to be inclusive, but I think part of that process means sitting and deeply listening to people who have all these differences.

That's what our podcast is about.

So -- 100 percent.

-- help us understand yeah.

Help us understand how inclusion is important and what you, especially when it comes to neurodiversity and the things that you just mentioned, would say to us, who want to be more inclusive in this community.

Just to give a little background before I answer your question, that's a

beautiful

question by the way, so thank you.

Is I have been doing work around inclusion under a diversity for, oh, gosh, years now.

I don't even know how many.

And I do speak and teach both nationally and internationally on these topics.

It's something that is very near and dear to me.

And I do own a company that does a lot of work around inclusion.

We do inclusion consulting as well as HR and so on and so forth.

So that's what I do for a living.

So when when I think about this, it's not just the professional element, though it's the personal.

And a lot of people think that I got into it because of my journey, but that's not it at all.

I saw a lot of pain in what I was doing caused necessarily.

And usually, to be fair, very unintentionally by other people, you know, they're not trying to be jerks often, you know, it's just it just accidentally works out that way.

1 of the most detrimental things that I've found over the years that people can require is masking.

And masking simply means that you're asking somebody to behave in a way that's not normal to them but is normal to you.

And people are really bad about that.

Things like requiring eye contact, requiring physical touch, requiring camera on.

Getting upset if somebody wants to do stemming which if you've ever seen a person, you know, doing things like this, maybe rocking, things like that.

There's all different types of stemming.

STEMming can be auditory humming, themselves, that kind of thing.

Also, using fidget toys, sitting on bounce balls instead of chairs.

These things are are ways that people make themselves more comfortable and it actually helps them focus and become more productive, including not looking at you.

We have this weird thing about looking at somebody as a way to to show that you're listening?

Well, for some people, yes, but if you get somebody who is in the neurodiverse community, they may listen better if they're not looking at you directly.

Right.

So it's a lot of realizing that you're normal is not other people's normal.

And just coming to understand that.

So, there's 1 thing, because there's so many different things that people can need from all the different diversity.

Right?

Whether it's people with physical diversity, neurodiversity, cultural diversity, socioeconomic diversity, so on and so forth, there's 1 thing that will always work for you.

And that is to break your ego defense and respond with curiosity.

So, the ego defense is natural.

That's a natural thing that your brain does, that where it needs be right.

So, when it hears something that makes it feel like it's wrong, it throws up defenses as to why it's right.

But that doesn't actually help us in today's society.

That's an old's need.

It's something that we need as children.

It is not something that we need as we progress.

Especially when it comes to our interactions with other humans.

So when somebody tells you, this is what I need and it's contrary to what you're doing or even if they say I need you to stop that.

Instead of responding with ego, take a deep breath and respond and say, tell me more about

that.

And it will work wonders for you whether you're in leadership, whether this is your friend, whether it's

your