A mild dyspraxic with work/direction issues.

[griffaliff]

Hi all,

I find myself at a very strange point in my life at the moment, I thought maybe asking others with a shared condition or experience with the condition might be able to give some guidance.

Basically, since I finished university in 2011 I have lacked any sort of direction with regards to work and life really. I find most of the time I feel like I stumble from one week to the next. I got a job working for Apple which was a very good job but I ended up leaving after a year as it was only part time and it was a very long commute. I left that job in September 2012 and since then I have worked a string of rubbish 9-5 office jobs ranging from administration to call centres. More often than not, I have found the employers in that line of work are not particularly understanding when it comes to coming to terms that a member of their staff who comes across as intelligent, which I am, but can't seem to get on with simple tasks. As I am sure some of you will be able to relate to, holding down a job as a dyspraxic person is difficult and frustrating. I know that I should be more than capable of a job that a person with one GCSE can do, but by the same token I find myself just making daft mistakes with no intention of making them thus resulting in either leaving jobs when the pressure gets too high or getting fired.

I have come to the conclusion that I am not kitted out for office work at all, I am a naturally athletic 6ft 5" male who is 25 years of age. I am not built to be hunched in front of a computer 9-5. I have been considering two paths recently, one is taking any old part time job I can lay my hands on and get involved in bee keeping which is something I feel that I would enjoy or join the army. Contrasting I know but I feel I would be suited for the army as I enjoy jobs that are physically demanding. The other option I would prefer to take on as I met a girl recently and after being single for over a year I feel that joining the army would throw all that away. Desicions desicions....

So yeah, just a message I thought I would throw out to the community to see what other peoples experiences have been and what they have done in their lives when they have come to damn difficult times with regards to desicions and getting fired from jobs for continually making silly cock ups.

Thanks all!

S.

[AlleyCat]

I know that I should be more than capable of a job that a person with one GCSE can do, but by the same token I find myself just making daft mistakes with no intention of making them thus resulting in either leaving jobs when the pressure gets too high or getting fired.

This is a very common issue for people with dyspraxia (as well as AD(H)D and dyslexia, for that matter). If you want to understand more about why this is, you might want to read up on executive functions, as it is usually weaknesses in this area which lead to people with dyspraxia not being good at supposedly 'simple' tasks. When the executive functions of the brain are weak, an individual may be very intelligent yet struggle with the skills of planning, organisation and attention etc. Unfortunately for us, it is exactly those skills which a lot of employers expect employees to have- as most employers will not have heard of executive function weaknesses, they just don't understand why someone who is supposed to be bright can cock up tasks that employers think are straightforward. This can then lead them to assume we 'can't be trusted to do anything', something which has actually been said to me by a bullying line manager when she told me I wasn't been kept on in my admin job. What they don't understand is that we could actually excel at higher level tasks, such as coming up with solutions to problems.

Your bee keeping idea seems interesting, so that might be worth pursuing. I'm not sure about the army. The possibility of joining was mentioned a while ago in a discussion on Facebook, with most people saying that they didn't think someone with dyspraxia would do well or that it would even be possible to join. However, Peter Keegan (who is the admin for the Dyspraxia Foundation National Adult Support Group on Facebook) has been in the military, so it might be worth trying to discuss it with him. If you find yourself in another job where an employer just can't understand how you can be so bright yet struggle to perform 'simple tasks' efficiently, you could try sending them a copy of this guide, as it explains fairly well the issues that adults with dyspraxia can have in the workplace:

http://www.dyspraxiafoundation.org.uk/d ... ia_1.0.pdf