No Mindreading

I did a course a little while ago created by Hayley Honeyman, an ADHD coach who has that unsettling North American positive intensity (I used to have a Canadian girlfriend and let me tell you: Canadians love it when you refer to them as 'North Americans') but she brings together ideas and practices that either I've not heard or seen before, or is able to express it in a way I've not heard or seen before.

One challenge this course had, to help with unmasking, is to try and go a day without apologising (a challenge enough in itself) or mindreading. For those unaware, 'mindreading' is a term used to refer to jumping to conclusions (usually negative ones) about your interlocutor's thoughts or feelings. (This is something that a lot of different people do but I think is particularly common for neurodivergent people.)

This is a surprsingly difficult thing to do, because once you set yourself that task you can realise how much you're doing it and it can feel a bit overwhelming! I also realised that some problems I've had at work are highly related—my aversion to asking for help is to do with mindreading both in terms of external judgement but also in terms of being clear on expectations—I jump to conclusions in terms of others' expectations about who should be doing something, what the deadline is, how much work is required etc and unnecessarily stress myself out. Spending a day trying not to mindread made me realise how tangled that can get.

A principle that I've found really useful if I've ever been feeling a bit disempowered or just not very "with it" at work is that taking action always helps. I think this is true generally but true also in this specific case as action can serve to force you out of mindreading: it can get you from "I think this is meant to be done by me, or this other person" to either doing it myself or passing it on. Finding little levers like that can be tremendously useful.