SPEAKERS
Susan Fitzell, Neurodiversity Speaker and Host of The Bounceback Leadership Show, Brian Wagner, A Radical Vision
Note: This show transcript has been cleaned up so that people who want to read the transcript will understand the text outside the video. It’s also been edited to clarify nuances and create a more readable document. Consequently, the timing of the video does not match this text. Scroll to the bottom of the page for the YouTube link.
Brian Wagner
Good morning and welcome back to the Bounceback Leadership Show, where we talk about how important it is to bounce back through your setbacks. But you can’t just bounce back automatically. You have to know how to do that. So, we have the seven points that we cover. I’m going to be working with you on Thursday; I hope again this week to work through those issues. Those issues, those seven steps in order to bounce back from your setback. We have a great guest coming on next week. I’m going to tell you about that at the end. But without any further ado, I want to make sure we get to our guest today. Our guest today is… you’re going to love her… she is phenomenal. She’s done such a great job of neurodiverse neuro neurodiversity, and she’s going to tell us how to say that word in a little bit, but she’s also going to tell us what it means. Without any further ado, I want to bring our guest today, Ms. Susan Fitzell out.
Susan Fitzell
Hi there. Hi Brian, how are you?
Brian Wagner
I’m great. How are you?
Susan Fitzell
I’m good.
Brian Wagner
Well, good. Thank you so much for being on this morning.
Susan Fitzell
I’m honored to be invited. Thank you.
Brian Wagner
You’re awesome. So Susan, tell me, what is your first recollection of a known setback to bounce back from?
Susan Fitzell
Well, probably the first setback that comes to mind when it comes to my business is; it was in the late 90s, Just before I decided to go full-time, actually right after I decided to go full-time to start my own business and become a CEO and become a professional speaker. Prior to that, I had a full-time job, and I was doing what I was doing part-time, so it was a little risk-free.
So, I resigned from my job. I had signed on with a seminar company. I was so confident it was all going to go well. My very first audition audience was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As I walked in, I saw it was a big hotel. As I walked into the audience, I realized for the audience; the room was jam-packed. They were bringing in more chairs and more chairs and more tables. I remember thinking, oh my gosh, nobody’s going to have room to move in this place. There must have been 250 or more teachers and educators in this room.
And so I, this is the first time I had ever spoken before an audience of over 30 people. So I get up and get to the front of the audience. I set all my props up, and there was no PowerPoint back then. At least I didn’t have it. We were using overhead projectors. These plastic sheets that you have to write on or add pictures are ready-made. I started my presentation, and during the opening story, which sets the tone for the whole thing, a teacher stood up and shouted, “Can you do something about that buzz in the lights? It’s driving me wild!” And I’m like, I’m brand new at this. It’s the middle of my story, and I say, “Okay, well, if we can wait for a couple of minutes, as soon as I have a logical breaking point, I’ll get someone to fix them.”
“Well, it’s bothering me! [she said].” She sat down.
And then, I started to continue with my story, and some teachers were talking and chatting in the background. There are 250 people in the room, and there are people still trying to get in. It was just not the environment [that] you want to start a presentation.
Brian Wagner [Laughs]
Susan Fitzell
Oh, that isn’t even the end of it.
Then the projector broke. So here I am, not even into the first hour of the presentation, and I have to call tech support about the projector because it broke, and the hotel provided that [the projector]. So, we recovered from that, and then we had a break, and at our break, some teachers came up to me [and asked,] “Can you tell so and so behind me to stop talking?” And “Can you tell someone to do this and, and they’re talking, and I can’t hear you!” It was just wild! I’m thinking, “Oh my goodness!” As this is happening, I’m escalating and trying not to. I could feel my anxiety increasing. then, I tried to [carefully] say something to the audience about, “There are people who can’t hear…Yada yada.”
Then it was lunch. We had lunch. I came back. This was just before the holidays, just before Christmas. As I’m walking into this room again to finish the day, I see a full high school band coming into that room [correction], the room right next to me! Like a full-blown high school band! And the walls – those divider walls – are so thin. You can hear their dishes. They were having a luncheon meeting, and you could hear their dishes clattering!
And people started complaining, “I can’t hear because of these dishes clattering on the side.”
Next, I’m trying to tell another story and give some strategies, and the band starts going off! Singing, “Allelujah! Allelujah!”
This was a horror show!
But what I realized then at that point; I was flustered.
I learned something so important because of that horrible, horrible, horrible experience.
Of course, with a seminar company, your evaluations are everything. They were horrible. People complained about everything! And scored me very low. I was just devastated because you had to have a certain level of score to get pushed through and to be able to go to the next level and become a “real speaker.”
Well, it was just a disaster, and that night, I started with tears streaming down my face… started changing up those overhead slides trying to wipe them off and put new things on them and address some things that [participants didn’t like]. I had to read every one of those 250 evaluations! It was horrific.
Oh! And then and then, I also come from Holyoke, Massachusetts. in Holyoke, Massachusetts, we have i-deers. We don’t have ideas. We have i-deers. Some people wrote on the evaluation, “Where is she from? Doesn’t she know [how to say idea]? Somebody else put a paper on my desk that says what do you call a blind deer in the woods? “A no eye dear” It was like a… Yeah, a blind joke on the table. It was just wild.
So, I realized after that – I was so devastated, and I was very fortunate.
All of us who worked for this company had a coach and a developer. The next day, my scores were way better [they were] in the range of where they needed to be. He said, “Susan, nobody goes from these very low scores one day to very high scores the next day. We just had a really bad situation.”
And so, I had to get another audition. So it took me a year to get that audition, and he convinced the boss to give me that other chance [he knew that] everything that could go wrong went wrong.
Well, that year, I had to do some serious deep thinking. I mean, I was… I had developed stage fright.
Here I was – I had just quit a secure full-time teaching job to do this for a living …to try to make a difference in the world.
And I had stage fright.
And I was going to be a professional speaker and trainer, and Keynoter. So how the heck do I get back on that stage? And that was the setback. It was a major – and it could have been life-changing in some ways for the good. It could have gone the bad way, but it was a life-changing setback.
Brian Wagner
Wow. If you want to hear more, stay right there. Susan, you have got so many stories to tell.
Susan Fitzell
There are a few in my life. I’ve been around for a while.
Brian Wagner
I love it. Yeah, so late 90s, Huh.
Susan Fitzell
That was the late 90s. That was when I first started with my own company full-time to do what I’m doing today. Still live on it.
Brian Wagner
Wow. What was the setback? What did you go through? Obviously, you had a setback you made a comeback. How do you make that comeback? That bounce back?
Susan Fitzell
Fortunately, I had a year to work on everything and overcome stage fright. I had a year because it took another year to get me scheduled to do another one of these presentations because they were four days and four presentations where you did two days, one in two cities, and then two weeks later you did two days in another two cities. To get all that worked out, it took another year. So, during that time, I went to therapy, I went to counseling, I said to my counselor I just quit my full-time secure job to become a speaker, and I just had this horrible thing happen, and I’ve got to get on stage, and I’m afraid.
I was so afraid.
I went to counseling, went to therapy, and I started to look within myself. I didn’t understand the reasons and the difference in my brain wiring then – that I do now. However, when I look back at it and look back at this, I realize that my own neurodivergence had a big piece in how I was not able to cope with what happened that day. Because in my world, I have to have things a certain way. I’m a little OCD, maybe. I’m ADHD, so all that stuff going on around me rattled me in the audience. When you’re ADHD, you’ve got all these things going on. It’s so difficult. I didn’t understand how my own brain wiring had impacted me [back] then. I just knew I had to get over this.
Then, of course, all these setbacks and childhood stuff bubble up when you’re in trauma. So, the counseling helped me get over the crisis and helped me look within myself. Also, my coach helped me by coaching me and telling me what I could do, what I could say, and how I could frame things differently.
Then I had another colleague who had been a speaker in the military for years who helped me go through the presentation and helped me critique it and say, “Okay, you don’t need this slide. You can do this differently.”
What I learned from that was when you get flustered as a speaker, and this is a lesson I’ve never forgotten, and it’s only happened to me twice – There was one other time when I was quite seasoned that it happened again – But when you get flustered as a speaker, everything’s lost. The minute you lose your composure, even if you’re trying to fake it, even if you’re trying to hide it, the audience knows. When the audience knows, it’s over. It’s over. I had to figure out why I got so flustered. Part of it was [that] I was not good at being flexible or going with the flow.
So, when you talk about what my topic today is, I’ve been working with neurodiversity or neurodivergence my entire career. Although up until recently, it was all with schools, and I’m still doing work with schools. I’m still in schools. I was in a school district working with them and [coaching] in classrooms just two weeks ago, every day. I was in classrooms observing students and teachers and working with them. In schools, we might call [neurodivergence] autism, dyslexia, and ADHD. We might say that they are learning disabilities. I never liked that term. I always prefer to say they were learning differences. I’ve been doing [this work] my entire career. I realized five years ago when talking to CEOs on flights that I was taking or people that I was meeting through networking, that those kids graduate high school and maybe even go to college, and then they go to the workforce. The business leaders and managers are [asking], “What do we do with this person? I was having these conversations and giving them strategies on the plane. So now, I’m doing both. I’m still working with schools, and I’m also supporting any of the associations or corporations who are now looking at focusing on neuro differences in brain-wiring in their companies, or even in their onboarding, or to access this whole other pool of people that aren’t being employed because they don’t interview well. They don’t take online tests well, and so on and so forth. So, neurodiversity. That’s how you say it.
Brian Wagner
What does it mean?
Susan Fitzell
Well, there is controversy over this language. So, I’m using what is now the latest language. Originally anyone neurodiverse, when that term was coined 20 years ago, anyone neurodiverse was autistic. So that was an autistic person. There’s even controversy there because some people will say, “I’m not a person with autism,” which is what we say in schools, we say, ‘a child with autism’. In the adult world, It’s, “I’m an autistic person.” Even then, some people don’t like that. It’s so new. It’s just so new.
So, originally, it was that neurodiverse was autistic. Now, neurodiversity is an umbrella term. It’s including people who are born with different brain-wiring: those are people born with dyslexia, born with ADHD, born with autism, born with dyspraxia, born with Tourette’s, all those things. Now the definition has expanded. There are even some others – I’m not going to list them all – but there are some other brain differences that are being included under this umbrella.
Most of the people who are already working, who are neurodivergent, [which] is the word I prefer to use, they’re often hiding. They’re masking who they are, which I did for years and didn’t even realize that. I just thought when I couldn’t read people well, which was another thing that I realized when I had that [presentation]fiasco. I didn’t read the audience. I didn’t read them well. I didn’t know how. I’ve always had trouble reading people.
Sometimes, when I look at all the traits of people in the autism spectrum, [I think that] I’m flirting with edges there because there’s a lot of things that I have in common with people in the spectrum. One of them is not being able to read people. Also, not understanding jokes, certain jokes, especially sarcasm and innuendos. All those things, like having somebody leave on my table, “What’s blind deer called in the woods? A no eye deer.” that kind of thing. I didn’t know if it was a funny thing or if that was an insult. I couldn’t tell.
Brian Wagner
You know, I didn’t know what the answer was!
Susan Fitzell
No idea. Blind in the woods. I can’t even remember the joke, right? I’m just really bad at jokes.
Neurodiversity means – well, now, the language is – if you’re neurodivergent, you were born with your brain wired differently. Neurodiversity is when you have people who are considered normal, whatever normal is, your average person, your average Joe or Jane. That person is neurotypical because they did well in school. They’re the average person or the bright person, but they don’t have dyslexia. They don’t have autism. They don’t have ADHD. There are people without those [brain-wiring] differences.
Then you have the people who are [differently wired]. So when you have both, you have the neurodivergent, the people whose brains are wired differently, and you have the neurotypical, the people who don’t have differently wired brains – today – that’s called neurodiversity. There may be places where you’ll look up an article, and it’ll be framed a little differently because we’re at this place in the field of neurodiversity, where the language is evolving and changing. It can be confusing for some people.
Brian Wagner
Interesting. Yeah, I didn’t know that. So, I know you also have a relative who is somewhere on the spectrum or how do I say that?
Susan Fitzell
In the spectrum. Not only is she on the autistic spectrum, but she also has an intellectual disability. Yeah, intellectually disabled, they’re called ID kids. There are labels for everything, right? I guess labels help people to know what to do to help others. But there’s a downside to labels too. She has an intellectual disability, and in 2012, I got involved with her life. She’s a half-sister from another family. My dad had another family, and both her parents were gone. I felt that I couldn’t just leave her to have her life ruled by people who didn’t know her, didn’t love her, and didn’t care about her. She had a lawyer who was nice, but he was the person who saw her once a year. He was the one who would make life-and-death decisions for her. I couldn’t abide that. It just wasn’t going to be okay with me.
I fought for two years to be her co-guardian. Then I became a full guardian about three and a half years in. That has been an incredible journey; learning about her and realizing that I didn’t know at first that she had autistic behaviors and that she was, in many ways, very autistic. She hadn’t been labeled that way; she’d been labeled with other diagnoses. Then when a doctor pointed that out to me, I went, “Oh my goodness! She recommended multi-sensory therapy for autistic people. I hadn’t even thought about her autism-like behaviors. It was a doctor providing her with vision therapy that said she presented as autistic.
I also learned so much from her. I got into a relationship with her because I knew her as a child, but I was already a grown woman when she was born. I live two and a half hours away, so I’d only see her on holidays and just for short visits. I didn’t really know her when I took this on to be her guardian, and I wanted to help her. I’ve got to say; there are so many things she’s taught me and even things like, here’s an example. That happens with a lot of people with autism and children with autism. They do something called stimming and stimming. Her stimming would look like they should get excited and giggling, or she would have animal noises come out. When I first started working with her, I would discourage that behavior. I’d say, “Don’t do that. People don’t do that. Look around you. Nobody else is doing that.”
Now, I’ve learned how stimming behavior calms people in the spectrum and that it’s an important part of who they are. I would never have known that. I feel bad.
There have been setbacks with her, two major ones. Because I’m dealing with the government, government agencies, and agencies caring for her, not everything goes smoothly. We had a crisis in 2020 that lasted through the fall of 2021. After several minor crises, we had a huge one. Learning about her, how she operated, and what she needed also taught me so much about neurodivergence and autism. It taught me what people would do [to get their needs met]. She’s learned to mask. She’s known to create a whole drama around herself to get what she wants because that’s what she’s had to do to learn how to survive.
A lot of times, people who have differently wired brains will do that. I realize I did, too, in my own way, with the things that I tried to hide – certain things. I’m dyslexic. Until several years ago, I wouldn’t have told anybody I thought it was just a slow reader. I wouldn’t have told anybody how I managed to get through my books. But once audiobooks became a thing, and once I started to be able to write my books by talking my books with speech-to-text, I did all of that. Then I started realizing it’s okay to be different. It’s okay. Then I started teaching others how to do it.
Brian Wagner
Wow. Yeah, that is incredible. I love that so much. You have done such a great job with your sister. You’ve done such a great job yourself. How have you been able to do that since the late 90s to 2022? How have you been able to do that consistently, well enough to provide for your family and do all that?
Susan Fitzell
I look back, and I believe finding people in my tribe was critical. Two big things came to a head in the last two years because of the latest crisis with my sister. In the early years, it was finding people who supported me. It’s very important not to listen to the naysayers. If you have people that are putting you down or telling you that you should be doing things in a different way, it’s important that you have a very tight close group of people who know you well, who understand what your goals are, who believe in you and are there for you. I had that with my family. I have a business manager who’s been with me for almost 24 years now. He is always there rooting for me, too. I had a few other really close friends who believed in what I was doing and clients who believed in me. So, I think one of the things that many of us need to do when we’re trying to be entrepreneurs or speakers or doing something where we’re putting ourselves out there because when we put ourselves out there to say things that are different, that other people may not agree with, we need to have a solid network. Because what happens to me, and not everybody does this, but I know a lot that do, you get the one negative evaluation. You get one horrible review. You get the one person that tears you apart, and you let that take precedence over all the other positive things you hear.
I know so many speakers that get one negative evaluation, and they’ll cry all night. I mean, that’s what you think about. You don’t think about the 200 that were wonderful. We think about the one that was terrible.
One of the things I had to learn is to rely on my support network and find strategies to not worry about the negativity that might be out there. That was hard because there are a lot of us who want that approval and who aren’t as confident as we look to others; those things can cut us deeply. I had to learn how to put that aside. I had a [supportive] network, and then it all came to a head in the last two years. I had to hire a lawyer to get my sister into housing because she was kicked out of her adult care home. She was literally packed in a car and driven to a respite center because that person didn’t want her anymore. It was craziness.
I had to get a lawyer and had to deal with their lawyers, writing negative things, their lawyers saying all this stuff and blaming me, and blah blah blah. I got an even tighter, closer network of friends who, because of COVID, we were meeting twice a week on Zoom and lifting each other up, supporting each other, helping each other [and] reframing things in the positive.
I started doing a lot of reading. I sometimes think when we go through setbacks, we can do two things: We can let it beat us down, curl up in a corner in a fetal position, figuratively or really, and let it kill us, which could have happened to me. I was emotionally almost at that point where I was that curled-up person in a fetal position in the corner mentally, not physically. I was that distraught over what was happening with my sister and trying to find her a home. But then, I chose instead to say, “I can’t do this. It’s impacting my business. It’s impacting my life. It’s impacting my family. I can’t do this anymore.”
I started to grow. I started to get books. I started to listen to podcasts. I started to read books. I didn’t get a counselor. It was COVID. I ended up having this network of friends that were just like-minded. One of the other big things that happened was [that] I took a workshop with a woman, Michelle Villalobos. One of her big things was aligning with your values. I realized I had people in my life, and I was working with some customers that weren’t aligned with my values and were actually toxic to me. I let them go, and that was so hard. But I had the support from those around me to make those decisions again. When I had doubts, they’d lift me up. I really feel that’s critical when you’re coming back from a setback. I know the story of you and the letter your daughter wrote you, and I imagine that is the same thing for what you’ve had to deal with and how you get through things.
Brian Wagner
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s paramount for me, being able to identify with somebody that is there to help me and know that they love me, and even though they sometimes give me harsh news, it’s part of life and part of getting better. So, I can’t believe that we’re already at the end of our time together. This half-hour has gone by so fast.
Susan Fitzell
I talk a lot, and I guess that’s another one. I don’t know when to shut up sometimes.
Brian Wagner
You would want to come back. Absolutely. Yes. I’d love to. Yeah. So, Susan, if you would leave us with, what is one thing you want to leave us with?
Susan Fitzell
I think, if anything, one of the most important things that has gotten me through the pandemic and all the setbacks I’ve had in my life is to look for the silver linings. I mean, some people say positivity. I have to find the good in a situation. I have to figure out what is something positive that can come out of this that I can learn from, grow from, be better about, and be better because of. I feel that when we have setbacks, all of us, I mean anyone listening to this, no matter how bad the setback is, if we can find the silver lining, it may take us some time to get over the trauma, but find the silver lining, and then look at how we can benefit, how we can help others, how we can use it to grow as a human being, that’s what’s going to make our life a rewarding and meaningful life and help us get through those rough spots.
Brian Wagner
Awesome. Great. Thank you so much for being on today. I look forward to having you back on. Um, I’m just very much indebted to you for being on, and this has been great. So well, thank you. Yeah. Well, if you don’t mind, go into the green room for me and hang out there. I’ll be right back.
Susan Fitzell
All righty. Thank you. Great.
Brian Wagner
Thank you. Wow, what a great interview. What a great session with Susan Fitzell. I’m looking forward to having her back on. I think it’s going to be phenomenal to get to change and grow with her and have all of you grow with her as well. So, just if there’s anything else that I can do to help you I want to make sure that I do that. Just remember that I’m here now, we do have a great show. Coming up next week.