Guest Interview with Ross Heatley

How would you describe yourself both personally and professionally?

I think intense might be an appropriate description! I'm someone who bursts with passion at times, once you get me talking about something I care about, it's difficult for me to stop! I tend to gravitate towards social justice issues, i remember i once left my entire team i worked with on an away trip because the owner of the restaraunt we had planned to visit had views I disagreed with! So i wandered around Birmingham and found a place to eat by myself! That sort of unwllingness to budge can be totally endearing or very frustrating, depending on how you view it. But that's me in a nutshell, someone who has his views on what is right and will strive to stick to them!

ID: A white man with short trimmed beard, wearing a white t-shirt and sitting, smiling.

What inspired you to focus your career on supporting neurodivergent individuals and advancing cultural practices within organizations?

Optional follow-up: Was there a moment when you realized that traditional workplaces weren’t designed to support all ways of thinking?

I realised that I was Neurodivergent after i had started to struggle in work, unfortunately the support i needed just didn't exist. Being a Twice Exceptional guy (Gifted and Autism + ADHD) the support structures just weren't built with people like me in mind. So i started about fixing that, along the way i realised the support i was building was something that could scale beyond just neurodivergent users, it could cover culturally displaced individuals also. This expansion grew to the point where I realised that i was building for the so called edge cases of society. The people who fell through the gaps in the nets. As a HR advisor by trade, i was aware of impending changes to the law which would give workers rights from day 1 of employment, so having a tool that could effectively support people like me, would not only benefit the users, but the companies they work for. 

Why did you choose the name Project Fluency for your business? It’s intriguing, what does it represent to you? 

It wasn't always PF, I originally started out as "Neurodivergent Autonomy Solutions" or NAS for short, I do love a good nickname. Unfortunately i got some feedback that this was a terrible name for a company and was forced to scrap it and go back to the drawing board! As i mentioned earlier, my original idea of supporting solely ND users had expanded, at that time i realised that i was making something that would help people find their voice in the workplace, too often, we mask or contort ourselves as others may not understand our experiences, this can sometimes lead to the message being lost in translation. So i wanted to provide something that allowed people to become fluent, in advocacy. I tried all sorts of combinations for the name before landing on Project Fleuncy, it was originally meant to be a placeholder, hence the project part of the name, but it grew legs and the identity started to form around it. Now i couldn't imagine it being called anything else! It feels like it's breathed a new lease of life into the mission, because this isn't just a business, it's a movement. A Project. 

What’s something about your work or personal journey that people often misunderstand or overlook, but that’s essential to who you are? - I think that intensity I mentioned earlier really, being a gifted person, i'm just naturally more intense than a lot of other people. Some people unfortunately tend to mistake it for anxiety or stress, but the truth is i just feel deeper than most. My baseline is 11 out of 10 and when you combine that with the contrasting flavours of both Autism and ADHD and you get a wonderful concoction that nobody really understands. Sometimes i don't get myself! But that's been part of the journey, coming to terms with the fact that i won't always make sense, sometimes i will completely contradict myself and that is okay! It does mean that i can be quite hard to get a read of, which has led to me overexplaining myself a lot, which then in turn is mistaken for anxiety. My openness and oversharing stemmed from that constant experience of being misunderstood, but once again i would just rather people have the "full context" so they know what to expect, because i can quite easily talk about some intense traumatic experiences, it does send people for a loop! Always fun.

If you could share one personal tip or piece of advice with others, what would it be? 

I love a good Matrix reference, one bit of advice i've found recently, that I am striving to live life by, is not to feel forced to take either the red or the blue pill, the extreme choices of waking up to the horrific realities of the world, or living in ignorance, but to find the purple pill. Or the Purple Path as i've started calling it. So much of life is binary choice, we seem to have forgotten that there is another way. Being 2E, I am by nature of existence a walking contradiction, gifted and disabled, autistic and ADHD, they're both deemed to be "opposites" but if i disregard my ADHD to look after my Autistic side, the ADHD comes back with a vengence. For me, living life in balance is about finding the purple path, it's not living in one or the other, balance isn't about never swaying to one side, but about how we return to the centre. I've had to learn this to survive, but I think people can find this applies to life in general. If we can learn to not be so "all or nothing" we can maybe find a happy medium in life, the purple path.

Connect with Ross:

• Full name: Ross Heatley

• Business name: Project Fluency 

• On the web: www.projectfluency.co.uk

• Your preferred pronouns (optional): he/him