More than one person

The Coronation tomorrow is going to be very much about the two people – the King and Queen Consort – at the centre of proceedings. But an absolutely vast number of other people have been and will be involved. Being a figurehead is all very well, and all nations need one, whether a monarch or a president or something else. But really almost nothing is actually about the figurehead so much as the group as a whole. One person may appear to take credit – by being crowned or just by having their name on a piece of work – but nothing really stands alone. Self-promotion in the professional world means saying “I did this” but for an honest and literal minded autistic it’s almost impossible.

How can I take credit?

Writing about performance reviews I talked about how difficult it can be to talk about your achievements if you’re ruthlessly honest about what’s down to you alone. Selling yourself means saying “I did this” but almost everything in life is down to a team of people not one individual. If you’re an honest and literal minded autistic you quite probably won’t be able to take credit for anything because it wasn’t yours alone.

Selling yourself

Training on selling yourself will probably focus on encouraging you to be authentically yourself but the best version of yourself, to be clear about your strengths, and about what you personally (rather than a team you’re in) have achieved. But if you’re autistic that simple and positive-sounding set of suggestions comes with a bunch of problems.

Can you sell yourself?

Writing about performance reviews seems to have touched a nerve – I’ve had feedback from autistic contacts that the concept of “selling themselves” is completely alien and impossible for them. I dare say if you’re a well-intentioned neurotypical manager (and so many people are!) you’re thinking: “everyone finds selling themselves hard – some interview training should sort that!” And in the case of most people – neurotypical people (specially if they have a number of characteristics of privilege such as male gender, white race, being fully abled) it probably will. But with autistic staff it probably won’t. And that’s a hard truth to get your head round.

What have you achieved? Um… dunno…

I recently did my end of year performance review with my manager who is kind, supportive, and good at working with my autistic brain. I went through the inevitable moment of not having any recall of anything useful I’d done in the year. (This is in spite of the fact that I’d prepared in advance – autistically – and had a lot of notes. My brain is just NOT good at remembering positives about me.) Mercifully my manager didn’t give up when I finally came out with the equivalent of “um… I did some stuff…” But we autistics really can struggle to remember positives and spell them out in any but the most processy of terms.

The dreaded performance review

So – have you done anything useful in the last year? If you’re autistic your first response may be for your mind to go blank. Clearly you haven’t done anything useful at ALL. After a bit of grubbing around in your memory you come up with the fact that you wrote a report on paperclip filing in the Walthamstow or something equally uninspiring. (If you’re an inspirational paperclip filer in Walthamstow – please accept my apologies.) What was the result of your report? Well – some people may have read it, or more likely they deleted it unread. So – in fact – have you made the world a better place in the last year? It doesn’t look like it.