Neurodivergent Journeys: Two Siblings, One Teacher

Introducing Tim: profoundly deaf, ADHD, and joining the team

Danielle: Good morning, everyone. This is Danielle with ND OutLoud, and today I have a different face with me than any of you have seen before. But this is a face I know well, because it’s my baby brother. Yes, he looks older than me. Hair dye is amazing. He is my baby brother, he is profoundly deaf, he is also ADHD, and he is one of the new coaches here at ND OutLoud. We’re doing something very different from what exists out there. For those who don’t know, we’ve hired a bunch of new coaches, and we offer coaching for everyone, every age, who is neurodivergent, and for their parents, families, spouses, whoever in the extended family. And this is something Tim and I never thought of until about a month ago, when Tim said, why aren’t we doing things together?

Tim: Yep. First of all, I just want to speak to the fact that I can sign, but signing and talking at the same time is two different languages at the same time, so I’m not going to do that going forward. You’re going to hear my deaf voice, but I want to emphasize that I can sign.

Realizing you have ADHD in your 40s

Tim: I think it’s a combination of timing and a few things. Danielle, I think you’d probably agree that when an adult enters their 40s, they come to realize a lot of things that affected them their whole life, and they start putting things into words, having a better sense of self-understanding. The last few years have been that for me. I’ve also faced quite a few challenges in the last few years that brought me to this place of: huh, I have ADHD. And it’s a good thing for me to know that, because I can cope with it, I can come up with strategies, and I can talk to other people who have also struggled with it and learn from some of the things they’ve done to help them get things done, or just with day-to-day existence.

And one of the other key things, and we’ll talk more about this as the conversation goes on: I’m profoundly deaf. I’m completely deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other. You and I grew up in the same house, and we went through an incredibly amazing mainstreamed deaf and hard of hearing program, which we’re probably going to talk about quite a bit. In the last couple of years I’ve come to a place of really accepting my deaf identity. I’ve been given the privilege of living in both worlds for so long because of our incredible upbringing in that program. So really understanding myself as a deaf individual, and as someone who also has ADHD, which is a fairly recent revelation, I’ve come to this place of: wait a minute, I wonder how many other people in this world are struggling when you have the deaf aspect correlated with the ADHD aspect.

Danielle: And the funny thing is, he knows I’m an ADHD coach. I’ve been doing this for years. I’m very vocal about the fact that I’m AuDHD, autistic and ADHD combined, and my family knows this. This was not a revelation to him at all. Well, we haven’t known my whole life, because it wasn’t a thing until my 20s, but still, there was this disconnection. And honestly, it’s because of trauma. We as a family have a lot of trauma in how we were raised.

The family history: where the ADHD came from

Danielle: We were raised by an incredibly neurodivergent mother who had some very serious mental health issues, and that affected all of us a lot. And a very ADHD father, because we all know where we got the ADHD from: our grandmother and our father. Back then, and our dad is almost 70 now, don’t kill me Dad, I’m bad with math, that was not something they diagnosed or dealt with. They just found jobs that worked better for them. Our dad is an incredibly active human, and our grandmother was mowing the lawn into her 80s, doing everybody’s laundry she could get her hands on, walking, all of these things. So we come by the ADHD very honestly. And then we had the trauma of childhood, being raised by a very unstable mother with a lot of mental health issues, and that caused a lot of not communicating well as a family.

Tim: I completely agree. I want to say, though, as part of the journey I’ve been on, I acknowledge that, specifically when it comes to our mother and the mental health issues and the lack of stability. Where I am now, further in life, I don’t judge her for it. But I think it’s safe to acknowledge that it was a very big piece of what we faced. Same with our dad, seeing some of those signs that were just a normal part of our childhood. And then our grandmother, who was our saving grace, collectively. One of the things I find interesting, and I’ve been talking to other people about this: all four of us were in the same home, in various phases, but all four of us have a completely different experience of that upbringing.

Danielle: Oh yeah, absolutely. Part of that is age. There’s a four-year difference between myself and Tim, then a few years to the next one. There are seven and nine years between me and the youngest. We all had very different experiences, and then you add each of our own neurodivergent brains. All of us are neurodivergent. If you’re one of the other siblings watching: you’re neurodivergent too. Melissa knows this, and Adam. We all are.

But I will say one thing, going back to our mother: our mother, our dad, and our grandmother, who was a huge part of our lives, made sure all of us had the things we needed to be successful in life. I remember something Tim doesn’t. Tim was born, and we knew from birth that he was deaf. There were fights with doctors. I’m old enough to remember the fights with doctors to get him into a program, because the assumption then, in the early ’80s, was that deafness was a crippling disability. My mother was determined it was not going to be. Very determined.

An extremely rural school district that happened to have a deaf program

Danielle: And then we had this amazing opportunity. The school district we were in was extremely rural. When I say extremely rural: it was a 45-minute bus ride to school every day. Middle of nowhere. Our whole school district, kindergarten through high school, had 800 children. My graduating class had 35 of us. And this amazing little school district had a deaf program.

Tim: Yeah. It’s interesting, because Mom and Dad built the dream home on a dirt road across from a cornfield. My background here is Idaho now, and Idaho is a lot of rural places, and when I explain to people that I also grew up in a rural area, they’re like, wow, New York has rural areas like that? Yes, it does. The stars aligned: they just happened to buy a piece of property and build a house in a district that had a deaf program. All of the deaf students in our entire county went to this one school. There were kids bused in from almost an hour and a half away.

And it was run by an incredible, incredible lady who I love. I get goosebumps just mentioning her: Mrs. Donovan. Mickey Donovan. And here I am at 44, still calling her Mrs. Donovan. That’s her name, that’s always going to be her name. She’s a feisty little Irish lady who literally dedicated her life to helping deaf and hard of hearing students and making sure they had the best of both worlds. Integration of English and ASL was a very big part of the program. The fact that this existed at a little central school in rural upstate New York is just incredible. When I talk to people about it, they light up. It’s like, wow.

And I learned an interesting thing about the ASL sign for mainstreaming. Technically, we were mainstreamed in a deaf and hard of hearing program within a hearing school, and there are two different signs for it: mainstreamed where you have multiple fingers coming together, meaning you’re with deaf peers, and mainstreamed where you are one singular deaf child in a hearing school with services. I had peers, other deaf students who were part of that experience, and that is really key. I will forever appreciate that.

Danielle’s misdiagnosis, and the teacher who caught it

Danielle: So, I’m not deaf. I’m not hard of hearing, never have been. However. I went to a private school for kindergarten and first grade, and it was unfortunately a very bad private school that believed in corporal punishment. I couldn’t read, I did not speak very well, I couldn’t do any of the work in their program, and I was just considered lazy. I got punished constantly. I got spanked in school constantly because I wasn’t doing the schoolwork. News flash: I couldn’t do the schoolwork.

Then, when Tim started school, I got put in the public school, and in the beginning of second grade I got a label. I remember sitting in the school psychologist’s office, and I remember her name, I’m not going to say it, and I remember them telling Mom and Dad that I was mentally deficient, that I would never amount to anything and never be smart.

Tim: You know, when you and I talked a little bit this week, I had forgotten about that piece until you brought it up, and then it all came back, remembering how that was mentioned several times throughout our childhood. And the fact that you went from there, a hearing child, to being put into a deaf and hard of hearing program…

Danielle: Mrs. Donovan is my lifesaver, and I’m in the process of writing a book about it. So let me tell the story. My best friend in school was one of the children in the deaf program. Her name was Becky. One day I was going to go home with Becky for her birthday party, and I was sitting in the back of the room, because the deaf program kids went home later on after-school buses. I think I was in fourth grade, maybe third. I’m sitting there while Becky works with her interpreter on homework, and Mrs. Donovan, who I knew well because Tim was in the program and we did family days, this woman would say hi to me in the hall, she was amazing, she says, “Why aren’t you doing your homework?” Because I was sitting there fidgeting with something, probably ripping something apart, I’m ADHD. And Becky turns around and says, “She doesn’t have homework. She doesn’t have books.”

You want to piss off an amazing special ed teacher? Point out that they aren’t even trying to teach a child. By Monday, and this was in April, by Monday I was in the deaf program at school.

Tim: It’s so unique. She was someone where every child of hers was her child. She had her own personal children, but every one of her students was her child too. And I will say, and some people watching this may be jealous, she will always say there was just something about the Blonsky kids. We were her favorites. She probably says that to everybody, but we were absolutely her favorites.

Danielle: This woman changed my life. She and the audiologist who worked with Tim and with Melissa, our younger sister, who is hearing impaired, realized I had auditory processing disorder. So they got me hearing aids tuned very low, so that in the classroom, back when we had those big units and the teacher wore a microphone, I could tune out the class noise and tune into the teacher. And I will tell you, by the time I hit junior high, I was in AP classes, except for math. I will never be good at math, we gave up on that a long time ago. But I was working at AP level all the way through high school because of Mrs. Donovan. I have two master’s degrees. I had been written off completely. And I will tell you, it’s not because I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps. It’s because of Mrs. Donovan.

I don’t know if she would have known about autism or what autism looked like, because that was never mentioned to me, not even once. ADHD was, quite a few times, but not autism. I did not get diagnosed until my son got diagnosed, 25 years ago now, when I was filling out the form for him going, oh, this is me. Oh my gosh, this is me. Then I got tested myself. I’m actually more significantly autistic than my son. I was nonverbal enough as a child to be considered fairly severely autistic. But obviously, in the ’70s and ’80s, they didn’t diagnose girls with autism unless you were completely nonverbal, sitting in a corner, unable to communicate. I was disruptive. My ADHD, for those who don’t know, wins way more than my autism does most of the time.

But this teacher is the reason that Tim, you speak on stages as a profoundly deaf man.

Tim: Yeah. She… I don’t think she gave me the confidence, but she really uncovered it, because nobody can give you that. I find myself to be a very odd deaf individual, in that you would think someone like me would be timid and wouldn’t want to be on stage speaking in front of people, but it’s the thing I love the most. I love connecting with people, I love talking to people, I love sharing my story. It really started with her and the foundational element she built. And I’m not the only one from that program who came out that way.

Danielle: And this woman, now retired for years and years, every one of our children knows Mrs. Donovan. She’s been to weddings. She goes to family parties. When else does that happen? And it’s other families as well: Becky’s family, she knows her boys. She built an amazing, supportive community for us that has been part of our whole lives. And not only her, but all the interpreters who were part of that program. A shout out to them: Sandy, Pamela, Miss Palmer.

Tim: I just talked to one of them a couple of weeks ago, a random conversation. Really incredible. We could spend an hour talking about this.

Music therapy, peanuts and raisins, and the tools that stuck for life

Danielle: Do you remember the music teacher we had? Wendy. She’s been a missionary for years, she left our program to be a missionary. But she was a music teacher in an elementary school with no funding, let me tell you, and she created music therapy for us. For me, that opened up so many worlds. I play flute, I took private lessons for years, I sing, I took private voice lessons, I’m a musical theater kid. All of that because of that woman, and because Mrs. Donovan built it into the program for us. Every morning we started the day exercising our voices with her, loosening everything up. It was for all of you even more than me, though I needed it too because I had some speech issues. I still use those things every day now, and I use them with my clients.

You have no idea how many things Mrs. Donovan did with us, when we were misbehaving and overwhelmed and frustrated, that I now use with my clients. Here’s one, and one of my clients reminded me of this the other day: she has a coffee can full of peanuts and raisins on her desk, and that’s what she uses to calm herself down and keep herself fed throughout the day. I mentioned to her once that you really need protein and some good sugars throughout the day, eaten often. Those long stretches between breakfast and lunch are not good for an active brain. For those who don’t remember: in school, Mrs. Donovan would get peanuts and raisins and mix them in a big metal coffee can, and we had it in the room to snack on all day.

Tim: You’re mentioning this, and this is the first time I’ve remembered it since I was five, six, seven years old. To this day, every couple of weeks, I get a big bag of peanuts and a big bag of raisins and mix them up as my snack. Now I know why. It’s a therapeutic coping thing. It’s comfort.

Danielle: It’s comfort food for us. It’s huge. When I’m upset, frustrated, overwhelmed, I have peanuts and raisins. And I get a paper towel to eat them on, because that’s all we had in school. My husband is like, “Get a bowl or a plate,” and I’m like, no. Go away.

Tim: Wow. Thank you for mentioning that. I have goosebumps.

Danielle: All of those concepts, and Mrs. Donovan, if you ever see this, I would love to hear whether these were things you were taught to do or things you intuitively knew to do with us, because I use these concepts with every single adult and child client we have, and there’s a lot of science behind them now. They are a huge part of how I focus. If I’m having a hard time focusing: peanuts and raisins on a paper towel on my desk. And the voice warmups, the big stretches, reaching up and bending down and letting it out, I’ve worked that into one of the core things I teach every client for decreasing overwhelm and increasing focus. I use it constantly.

What Tim does now: disability employment and workforce consulting

Danielle: So Tim, what do you do now? What is the consulting work you do?

Tim: I’m in consulting work, and I’m sure Danielle will share my website. I come from over 25 years of experience in the nonprofit world in disability employment. I’ve managed and been part of programs that have helped individuals with disabilities get into gainful employment. I worked in workforce development for over a decade, managing workforce programs for all varieties of individuals across demographics, and that experience brought me to Boise, Idaho, which is what my background here is, the mountains.

Eventually I got to the place where I wanted to do consulting, taking the combination of experience I have to help for-profit employers and nonprofits find sustainable talent in today’s job market, which is an incredibly difficult thing to do no matter what type of employer you are. I’m also an adjunct professor at Boise State University, famous for the bright blue football field. And one of the main hats I’ve been wearing lately: I partnered with a company called Translate Live, which does instant translation of over 200 languages and dialects in real time, including ASL. I’ve been working to get that platform integrated into workforce sectors throughout the United States, and that’s been really successful, a really fun project. My day-to-day existence is completely different every day. I’m just randomly on a podcast on a Friday morning.

And what brought me to this place of deaf people with ADHD: Danielle, you talked about how in second grade you were labeled, “there’s something wrong with this person, let’s just put a label on them.” When I started making inquiries within my own little deaf community here in Boise, I found individuals who are deaf plus have some other combination of things, and it all gets written off as “oh, they’re just deaf, it’s part of their deafness.” That was a really moving thing to realize. There are many people within my own community, and well beyond it, where, if you have ADHD and you’re also deaf, there are ways to cope with those things. Here are some tools a deaf individual can use to get to the next step and be in a place where they’re happy in life. I’m really excited to see what we can do to put the word out to the deaf community. And this is not really about making money. My whole career has been about making an impact in some way. We’re at the very beginning of this exploration, and I’m excited to see where it goes.

What ND OutLoud offers, from free community to corporate consulting

Danielle: For those of you being introduced to our world through Tim: we are called ND OutLoud, Neurodivergent OutLoud. We teach neurodivergent individuals, from children all the way up. I think our oldest client is 87, who just learned about their ADHD. We help in every area of life: business coaches, life coaches, relationship coaches. We also have a consulting side where we do business intelligence work, labor market intelligence, which is where we brought Tim in, and a workplace invisible disability experience survey that one of my team members built, to help figure out what’s going on across your entire labor force, from office to manufacturing, and to create better supports and accommodations for everyone in your company, regardless of diagnosis. We can come in as coaches to support and train your managers and leadership team, and work with your individual employees, whether that’s ADHD, bipolar disorder, being profoundly deaf, wellness goals, and help them build better systems for themselves so they are more efficient, productive employees. Top to bottom: figuring out what your company needs, supporting a more diverse workforce, and training and supporting that workforce from day one or day 5,000.

We’re starting to go into companies with this, talking to some very large corporations, and partnering with some new apps and brain mapping companies. One app we’re partnered with helps calm anxiety and build new pathways in your brain, about four or five minutes of games a day on your phone, and it’s really good if you’re overwhelmed and frustrated by work and life. I’m also working with a group of college students developing an AI-based ADHD task helper, to help you initiate and get tasks done.

And we have a mission here that no one is left behind. We have a free option, our online community, the kind of community Tim and I grew up with and will always be part of, because it is so important for us as neurodivergent adults with neurodivergent kids to have community. That is absolutely free and available to you. Then we have a low-cost group coaching program, group coaching four days a week, support to take action. Because ADHDers are extremely smart, extremely high achieving, but we don’t have the support systems. One of our coaches calls it scaffolding: we need scaffolding around us to access that intelligence and optimize it. We talk about being ADHD upgraded, and that’s what our group academy is about: helping you create the systems you need so your ADHD is not as overwhelming day-to-day. Then we have one-on-one coaching, and chat-based coaching, texting only, which makes it really easy, especially if you’re profoundly deaf or just don’t have time to meet one-to-one. Adding Tim to our team lets us support the hearing impaired and profoundly deaf community in a way I never even thought of until two weeks ago. It blows my mind that we can offer that now. And we also work with parents and kids, and I do business coaching, because I work with a lot of ADHD entrepreneurs, and I own other businesses outside of coaching myself. We try to keep the cost as low as we possibly can, and we do accept HSA and FSA, because as coaches we aren’t covered by insurance, but if funds you’re already contributing at work can help cover it, we want to make it as accessible as possible.

Tim: I apologize that my dog is drinking water in the background. I can’t really follow up on all of that, because that was a lot of information in one little snippet, but this is why I think it’s a match made in heaven. There are a lot of facets of my career that integrate into this, like creating a culture of disclosure within a company, helping individuals with disabilities be comfortable enough to thrive and be more successful.

The labor shortage math: why inclusion is now a business necessity

Tim: The key point I want to make: we’re in a labor shortage in the United States, and worldwide. Something like 1.4 million Baby Boomers are retiring every year between now and 2030, and then they’re gone. The next generational cohort had 61 million people in it, so 61 million people are tasked with replacing 72 million. And the generations after that have very low labor participation. Employers are in a place where they cannot find people.

Danielle: I want to point out something my dipstick brother here, and yes, I’m calling him the dipstick brother, just did: he totally skipped the Gen X people. We’re in our 40s and 50s now, getting close to retirement ourselves, and we’ve not had a chance to elevate into some of those top levels because the Boomers are still around. So not only are the Boomers retiring, I’ve got maybe 15 to 20 years left to work. I’m the tail end of Gen X, there’s only one more year after me. We have a lot of people getting ready to retire, and corporations are still running on Boomer-based ethics, processes, and mindsets. It’s not working. It’s not going to work for Gen X to want to invest and move up, and then you’ve got the Millennials questioning everything.

Tim: I’m Gen X too, on the other end of it. And there’s another piece that lands like a bomb when I bring it up: China. Because of the one-child policy in the ’80s, China has a labor shortage that is worse than our labor shortage. Which means American companies have an opportunity to restore manufacturing in the United States and build up business that way, because China is not going to be able to do it. But many companies are still stuck in the old mindset. The key is this: whatever investment a company makes in this kind of program is going to be much less than the amount of money they save by building a labor force that is inclusive and accepting.

Danielle: Even in what I do as a one-on-one coach, I work with people in corporate. I took one client I’ve been working with for about nine months from being an unproductive member of her team, on performance improvement plans all the time, close to losing her job, to just taking over her boss’s position when her boss retired. In nine months we turned her from an ineffective employee into one of the best, who closed five and a half million dollars in sales in less than three months. That was with supporting her once a week for 30 minutes. Those are the kinds of things companies need to be investing in: their employees. They need to move people up internally, and they can’t do that without the right systems and diversity systems in place. And I know a lot of people are sick of hearing that word, but let me tell you: if you don’t have diversity pieces in place, you are going to lose your business. End of story.

Tim: Yep. You’re going to be left behind.

Danielle: A lot of leaders are talking about their legacies right now, and I laugh when I’m sitting in conferences: your legacy is that nobody wants to work for you. That’s the legacy you’re leaving behind right now, because you are not managing people effectively. And pay? Pay and salary are only this much of it. Inclusion and support are the keys. I have a Gen Z child, and that is what he and his wife look for when they’re looking at jobs: better support systems, better work-life balance, better life care as part of their packages.

Tim: I’m excited to be a part of this and to see what impact we can make.

Danielle: If you’re looking for us, you can find us everywhere at ND OutLoud: podcasts, YouTube, TikTok, all of it. You’ll see Tim with us more and more. If you need anything, if you have questions, if you need support, please let us know. DM us, DM Tim, DM me. We have something for everyone, from free community all the way to full corporate consulting and support. We are here to change the world. I’m not here to be a millionaire, and I really don’t care about that, ask my poor husband. I’m really blessed to be able to do this, and we want to invest in the community more than anything else. So let us know how we can help. Have an amazing day, everyone.