I had the enjoyable time of chatting with Stacey Ford from nonPareil https://npusa.org/ about their program to teach autistic individuals the social and hard skills needed for career jobs. We also discussed the more general topic of autistic employment, company run programs, and differences in outcomes between those who were late diagnosed versus those diagnosed early and brought up through a system of special services and accommodations.     We found there was so much to talk about that it became 2 episodes of my podcast podcast.timgoldstein.com W ..read more

I received a message from the contact for of my site regarding a challenge a manager was having with an autistic employee. The initial message follows: "I am a supervisor and have a high functioning employee with "Asperger's". I am going to call her Sue in the message as I cannot use her real name. I cannot divulge that Sue is on the spectrum to my other employees who are constantly complaining about how Sue ignores them, doesn't pic up on social cues, talks "to them" not "with them", etc. Do you have any resources for me as a supervisor to 1) help my other employees accept Sue without my tell ..read more

Judy Singer created the very useful concept of Neurodiversity. While I like and teach the neurodiversity concept I had a problem with the term neurodivergent. I have another post on my blog which gets into the details of why I created the term. In this very short video Dr Ireland explains how the term Neurodistinct is a healthcare innovation. Listen to her explain ..read more

I had the chance to be a guest on the Beyond Tech Skills https://www.beyondtechskills.com podcast by Liron Amitzi and Jim Czuprynski. Interesting and unique podcast as the focus is everything in the tech world, except tech. The full episode releases end of August 2022. As a teaser this post has a short excerpt in video form from the studio camera I had recording even though it was for a podcast. Check out the podcast when it releases. Liron asked me a very interesting question. Growing up and living in Israel until a few years ago gave him an interesting insight  ..read more

Fate works in odd and mysterious ways. For a while I had been frustrated about having no clue about the impact my efforts in the adult autism world was having. Then I got an email which lead to a discussion. The outcome was Learning Tree is letting me build a neurodiversity course bases on my concepts and taking it mainstream into the tech and tech management space. Course Summary on the Learning Tree site The course introduces neurodiversity and recognizes that among the neurodistinct it is not just autism. But the focus of the course is on the stereotypical tech geek ..read more

Jude Morrow shares his experience of being autistic from the lens of his childhood. Amazing insight into the real life experience of being autistic. I've had long conversations with Jude. His ability to tell of his lived experience of autism in a way that is easy to relate to is incredible. While he does clearly explain how you can be a hero to an autistic child, an even bigger message is that being autistic is normal for us, not something to be squashed out of us. If schools, providers, and parents all took the approach Jude recommends we would see a huge reduction in the employmen ..read more

A wonderful guest post by Tas Kronby. Check out their Bio at the end of the post. Trigger Warning: fictional description of a medical appointment, mention of hospitalization, mistreatment by mental professionals, mention of mental health diagnosis terms ie. anxiety, suicidal ideations, depression. Discussion of autism and the lack of awareness in the medical field. Imagine for a moment you walk into a doctors office seeking medical attention for pain in your shoulder. You stand in line, check in, and the nurse takes you back to the exam room. You sit down on the cold examination tabl ..read more

2020 has been a unique and unfortunately challenging year for much of the world. I know we are all dealing with different aspects of the unique events and especially COVID as it seems to be flaring up globally. I have had a little extra challenge from something many would consider the holy grail. The company I was working for was acquired by Google and I am now a Google employee (AKA: Googler). Yes amazing opportunity and a culture of doing not talking. The challenge came from COVID-19. The day we moved to the Google payroll and became Googlers is the same day Google began their proactive effo ..read more

Australian social scientist Judy Singer coined the word "neurodiversity" in her theses paper. It was a great advance in viewing the relationship of an individual with certain traits or group of traits to the to the larger group, the maker of societal norms. Her concept uses terminology which, while appropriate in the academic setting of her work, is hard to approach for the average person, confusing in how the items fits in the whole, does not align with how we speak of other human capability challenges, and uses a word that make groups of people sound bad. Judy's concept has created ..read more

So many terms surrounding autism are confusing to start with. Then different groups try to make the terminology theirs and another definition joins the fray. Because most of the definitions you find are written by people who study autism they are often quite different from a definition of the same thing as seen from the perspective of an autistic person living it. Sort of the difference between knowing the chicken crosses the street and knowing why the chicken crosses the street. To bring the perspective of an adult with Asperger's I created this set of definitions to start with. I have update ..read more