When A Hidden Learning Disability Holds You Back

Susan Fitzell, M.Ed., CSP — Sat, 11 Sep 2021 22:06:37 +0000

Strategies to Overcome Insecurities About Learning at Work

Do you see yourself in this person?

Twelve-year-old Joe frustrated his teachers. He had difficulty focusing on his work. He preferred to socialize with the students sitting next to him rather than getting his work done. He paid attention to the teacher for about 10 minutes and then was off gazing into space. He struggled to remember what he’d been taught and more importantly he couldn’t seem to implement what he learned to complete his work or pass tests.

“Joe is intelligent and wants to do a good job, but he just does not apply himself, especially when he’s required to learn information that he thinks is boring,” one of his teachers wrote.

Fast forward to 35-year-old Joe, who is a source of frustration for his boss. Joe has difficulty focusing on his work. He prefers to socialize with his colleagues rather than getting his work done. Continual learning is required in his job to keep up with current regulations and industry specs. When attending a training specifically required to update his skill set, he’s observed staring off into space.

He has the opportunity to use the company’s learning management system as an alternative option, yet he procrastinates and does not complete the modules in a timely way. Even when he does get through the learning modules, he struggles to remember what he’s been taught and, more importantly, he can’t seem to implement what he’s learned to complete his work.

“Joe is intelligent and generally motivated to do a good job. He just doesn’t apply himself when required to upskill,” his boss writes.

Seeing a pattern here?

Adult Joe has many of the same problems he did as a boy. He is aware that he’s struggling at work. His career has just about stalled. He’s struggling with anxiety and depression. And he doesn’t know what to do about it.

Before we go farther, let me mention that Joe is a real person (I’m just not using his real name) who I coached. He was referred to me by his boss — who, like Joe’s teachers in school, saw a bright, hardworking person that balked at completing certain tasks required for career progression.

After talking to Joe and getting a sense of his personal history, his career goals and what he perceived as his failures, I had a suspicion. “Joe, have you ever been evaluated for a learning disability?” I asked him.

After getting assurances from me that his boss would not be told about anything we talked about in the coaching session, Joe admitted that he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia when he was a boy.

As an adult, he thought that he had outgrown his impulsiveness, disorganization, and trouble focusing. “I figured, once I got done with school I would never have to deal with it again. I honestly thought I grew out of it. I mean, I went to college and graduated with a four-year degree. And now I have my dream job. But I just don’t want to do any more learning,” he told me.

The Hidden Disability

Like many adults, Joe has a hidden learning disability. He learned to manage it somewhat during his school years, and was able to keep it unknown to his peers and his bosses. Except when faced with challenges like having to learn new information in a text-heavy LMS curriculum.

A 2006 study found that 4.4 percent of U.S. adults — about 14 million people — have been formally diagnosed with ADHD. Only 10.9 percent of those diagnosed are receiving treatment. And considering how many children are diagnosed with ADHD — 9.4 percent, or 6.1 million, in a 2016 study — the number of adults with ADHD may be far underreported.

Other learning disabilities like dyslexia, dyspraxia, auditory processing disorder, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, language processing disorder, non-verbal learning difficulties, and visual perceptual/visual motor deficit are a lifelong challenge.

Many adults with learning disabilities do their best to hide them. They may choose jobs and careers that are less challenging. Or, they muddle through a job that they thought would be fun and filled with opportunity, hoping no one realizes they are having trouble with some aspects of the job.

The Bright Side

Joe, like many adults with a learning disability, has many positive qualities that outshine the challenges he faces. He’s empathetic to his coworkers, he’s a great team player, and he finds creative solutions to many problems — all of which earn him high scores on his performance review each year.

While adults with learning disabilities have fewer resources available to them than school-age children, there are still ways for Joe to better manage his ADHD and dyslexia.

And recognition of undiagnosed ADHD and other learning disabilities in adults is improving as more attention is paid to the issue.

Joe’s hidden learning disability was stopping him from pursuing key career development opportunities. But it wasn’t too late to take steps to ease his anxiety about learning — in fact, adults of any age can benefit from working with a professional to manage their disability.

Further, Joe’s disability had some protection under ADA requirements. He could inform key people in the company — including HR and his boss — about his challenges and the need for accommodation. I knew that he was nervous about doing so: Not every company handles this well, and many people with disabilities find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to advocate for themselves,while worrying about possible repercussions of revealing their disability.

How companies react to an employee’s disclosure of a disability is a topic I’ll discuss soon.

For Joe, the outcome of our coaching was positive. He had a close relationship with his boss and colleagues and, when he finally approached his boss and revealed his learning disability, the reaction was positive and supportive. HR immediately offered him LMS courses that better accommodated his dyslexia. His boss began looking for resources to help him better manage Joe’s career development. Because the company knew that Joe had experience and valuable interpersonal assets, they were more than willing to help get him past the learning hurdles that had unintentionally been placed in his way.

Sources:

Would you like to reprint this article, or an article like it, in your newsletter or journal?
CLICK HERE to visit the articles page.

Download Neurodiversity in the Workplace! – Free!

Bring Susan Fitzell, M.Ed., CSP
Top Neurodiversity Speaker
To YOUR Organization!

The post When A Hidden Learning Disability Holds You Back appeared first on Susan Fitzell.

About Types of Intelligence

Susan Fitzell, M.Ed., CSP — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 04:15:52 +0000

What are “multiple intelligences”? What does it mean for teachers and teaching if we ask them to take into account their students many individual styles of learning?

There are too many factors involved in learning and too many ways of approaching the question of how learning happens to think that any one theory can answer those questions definitively. But one person whose work has proven really fruitful for me is psychologist Howard Gardner, who has distinguished eight or nine distinct types of intelligence (he’s still adding to his list), each of which benefits from different approaches to learning and communication in the classroom. Gardner’s types have proved tremendously helpful to my own work developing teaching strategies for working with the special needs of all children in the classroom (e.g., Special Needs in the General Classroom: Strategies that Make it Work, 2nd edition. 2010).

The two most familiar types of intelligence–the linguistic learner and the logical-mathematical learner–fit in well with our dominant models of teaching and recognizing achievement. The odds are good that many teachers, themselves, are examples of these types of intelligence.

On the other hand, some of the other intelligence types may be familiar primarily as classroom problems. There are the “bodily kinesthetic” learners who are physically hyper-active and potentially disruptive; the spatial thinkers who are likely to sit and daydream; the musical kids who are continually humming or drumming; the interpersonal learners who may be chatterboxes; the introverted intrapersonal ones who keep to themselves; the naturalists who are more tuned into the world outside the classroom than to what’s on the board or in the book; or the existentialist, who is inclined to ask annoyingly fundamental questions that have no place in the world of the three R’s, questions like “For what purpose are we here?” or “How do we fit into the world?”

As long as classroom instruction is primarily geared to reach only one or two of these different intelligences, a lot of kids will struggle to process the information being offered them and experience a serious disadvantage in achieving success.

Fortunately, though each person may have a dominant style, most of us actually possess some combination of these intelligences and the learning preferences that go with them. A lesson or project geared toward one learning style is not going to be inaccessible or unhelpful to the rest of the classroom. In fact, by including different kinds of lessons for different kinds of intelligences, teachers will be helping all students develop their multiple potentials, while making sure that no one falls behind or gets lost because they don’t learn well from one type of teaching.

This offers great opportunities for the development of new and varied teaching techniques. For each type of intelligence and learning, there is a corresponding new type of teaching.

The post About Types of Intelligence appeared first on Susan Fitzell.