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Access Denied: How to Address the Access to Work Crisis

  "It's not pie! More for other people doesn't mean less for you!" This was the howl of social media's self-declared #neurodivergence, #disability communities in the late twenty-teens and into the twenty-twenties. It sounded almost convincing, a worthy rallying call that everyone who wanted to be On The Right Side of History should immediately get behind. And if you dared  to hesitate to get behind the statement, if you so much as thought  that it maybe didn't sound quite  right - well, you were privileged , you were guilty of ableism , you just wanted disabled people to not exist!  If you were  disabled yourself, and had some reservations about the pie-ness of inclusion, then you were "everything that's wrong with the world!" But - as so often happens - those who were hesitant have been proved right.  It turns out that, as many disabled people with observable, high-impact impairments, who need  workplace accommodations - and, most importantly, w...

2025 - Offerings, Opportunities, and...Optimism?!

  Calm down. We haven't decided for a total 360 on our brand - we're still The Productive Pessimist, still a bit more "storms, spite, sarcasm" than "live, laugh, love"  - it's just that it seems like a good time to remind people that pessimism doesn't mean doom and gloom and moaning about everything - it's simply assuming that things may not go the way you'd like them to, and planning on that assumption, so that, if they don't, you can dust yourself off and carry on anyway.  After all, if they do  go they way you want...there's nothing stopping your onward progress, is there?! You hit a milestone - press on towards the goal! 2025 In a recent meeting, a retiring colleague from the property sector was asked what he imagined he'd see if he had a crystal ball for 2025; his response was "a steady recovery for the commercial sector."   The commercial sector doesn't just mean commercial property rentals, although that is my...
This piece was written by Morgana Ford-McAllister, our Neurodiversity and Gender Inclusion Lead, in response to the Cass Review , in particular the suggestion that children and young people expressing a gender identity distinct from that to be expected from their sex as assigned at birth are actually neurodivergent, most likely on the autism spectrum, and experiencing a neurodivergent 'lack of awareness of self/inability to understand gender.' Morgana is an autistic trans woman. Autistic Lack of Self vs. Gender Identity TW for childhood trauma, denial of agency, discussions of transphobia and so on. As a lived experience trainer with The Productive Pessimist, I read 35 pages of The Cass Review to get an actual feeling for what was being said and the tone being taken. From that point onwards the report seemed to move more into the models it would recommend NHS England initiate for clinic sites and a discussion of statistics, neither of which were particularly relevant to my role...

Working In Acceptance

  At The Productive Pessimist Ltd, we're proud to say that, in all the areas we offer coaching, training, and consultancy , we do so from lived experience. That means when your organisation books autism awareness training with us, that session will be taken by our Neurodiversity Lead, Morgana, who is autistic herself. It means any training course around autism, ADHD, and neurodiversity more widely you book through us will have been developed in consultation with Morgana, as her autism is co-present with ADHD (as is the case for an increasing number of individuals, particularly women and girls.) What does it mean to 'Work In Acceptance?' When we say that we work in acceptance, we don't just mean 'one of the remits The Productive Pessimist holds is the acceptance niche of diversity training.' We mean we work in  acceptance, the same way a professional swimmer works in  water. Acceptance determines what we do, and how we do it. So - what is 'acceptance'? . ...

Lived Experience Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Training

Today is Trans Day of Visibility in the UK. At The Productive Pessimist Ltd, we offer coaching, consultancy, and training from lived experience. That includes lived experience of being on the 'less-likely-to-have-national-newspaper-columns-and-a-huge-fanbase' side of the 'transgender debate.' Both our Founder-Directors - Ash, who leads on business consultancy, and management coaching, and Morgana, who leads on neurodiversity inclusion, support, and training - are trans. Ash is a trans man (assigned female at birth, and raised as a girl) who first expressed a male identity aged 9, and began medical transition aged 21.  He has experienced physical violence and conversion therapy as a result of his gender identity. Morgana is a trans woman (assigned male at birth, and raised as a boy), who, in childhood, persistently experienced a 'wrongness and lack of connection' with gender, and began social transition (identifying and living as a woman) aged 22, and medical tra...

Cheese Graters, Suitcases, and Cover Letters

Hi - my name's Ash, and I'm the co-founder, Director, and lead consultant for The Productive Pessimist. (And, as you can probably tell from my 'Resting-What-Fresh-Hell-Is-This?-Face, the reason why the company is called The Productive Pessimist  in the first place!) Apologies for the face, by the way - I'm not that good-looking at the best of times, and I hate doing selfies! I also don't take very good selfies anyway, owing to significant visual impairment. (I'm registered blind, and losing what sight I have - left eye only, currently around 45% - a bit more rapidly than I'd like.) However, the terrible selfie that starts this blog post sets us up nicely for a segue into the main topic; How the heck do these rules work, anyway?! The 'rules' for succeeding at interviews, in work, when you launch a company, in the first three years of running a company, are basically the equivalent of riding a bike. Except the bike is missing three gears. And the chain...

Productive Pessimism for Neurodiversity

This week (March 18th-24th 2024) is Neurodiversity Celebration Week. As a neurodiverse-led organisation (our Director, co-founder, and lead Trainer, Morgana, has ADHD and autism, both of which were diagnosed in adulthood, but which influenced her experience of childhood and adolescence), The Productive Pessimist are aware that 'celebration' can feel like a very loaded word, both to people who live with a particular condition or experience, and to those who work with them, educate them, and parent them. Social media, in particular, has often centred white-passing female/femme individuals, who are highly verbal, skilled at art, and with strong social skills as "neurodiversity rep", a backlash to society's frequent presentation of socially-inept, emotionally unavailable men, or hyperactive boys, often as the "accepted medical presentation" of neurodiversity. Many people would ask how someone who is non-verbal, someone who lacks awareness of their basic bodi...