In this episode, I am joined by Boundary Spanner Melissa Vining. In a multi-faceted conversation, Melissa and I talk about many topics of shared interest aka our significantly overlapping Venn diagrams. The conversation weaves its way through music, teaching, storytelling using a golden thread to support your message, career coaching, neurodivergence and motherhood, and our mutual past as people who grew up in Minnesota and moved away.

We explore some of the unique contradictory qualities of AuDHDers who have both an autism and ADHD diagnosis and the challenges of neurodivergent job seekers. Melissa delighted me by offering a challenge to one of my rapidish fire question about using metaphors.

Promised Show Notes Materials (take a drink):

• CliftonStrengths Assessment
• Sara’s episode on Melissa’s podcast, Job Search for High-Performing Misfits
• Sara's Find Your Golden Thread offer
• The Neurodivergent Woman Podcast
• CSCCE Series on Gardening as a Metaphor for Community Management
• Range: Why Generalists Thrive in a Specialized World by David Epstein (misspoken during the podcast)
• Neurodiversity in the Workplace: website and podcast/YouTube
• The Anxious Achiever podcast with Morra Aarons-Mele
• Dialect Quiz (warning, this inaccurately guessed where I’m from, but it does mention the bubbler)
• Find Your Local American Job Center

Follow Melissa on Social Media:

LinkedIn | YouTube

A few things Melissa and I discuss:

• 2:45 Being outside-the-box
• 4:02 Music and teaching (and “flutist” vs “flautist”)
• 7: 18 CliftonStrengths
• 10:27 Finding your golden thread
• 11:40 Renaissance People thrive in innovative spaces
• 13:28 Goal focused vs process focused environments and the issue with school systems
• 15:31 Overlap between Renaissance People and “neurospicy” folks
• 16:20 Changes in ADHD and autism diagnoses
• 20:53 Neurodivergence and the job search
• 22:16 Misfits finding their place
• 26:11 Explaining your complexity with stories and a golden thread
• 32:20 Using caution around AI and telling your story during your job search
• 34:57 Improv Game
• 37:06 Rapidish Fire Questions

Quotes from the Episode:

• "Where a lot of people tend to approach things as, ‘oh, this is how we've always done it’. Or maybe even if they don't explicitly say that, they're thinking of, ‘how can we build off of what we have?’ What I tend to do is just want to level the thing and just start from the ground up, and I find that when I approach problems or projects in that way, I tend to get a lot better results." (Melissa)
• "I think as a boundary spanner or Renaissance Person, you end up taking pieces of each thing and kind of incorporating it into everything that you do, which has definitely been the case for me." (Melissa)
• "So if we were to draw a Venn diagram of your interests and my interests, the amount of overlap would be amazing. Like your background, your experience, when I went on your podcast (which we will also link to in the show notes, take a drink) I was like, this is like... this is my sister from another mister!" (Sara)
• "The other thing that's so interesting that I think happens so often is that when you're AuDHD, you have autism and ADHD, those things kind of cover each other up or compensate for each other in different ways. Which also ties into your idea about being kind of a contradiction because they're kind of contradictory neurotypes essentially." (Melissa)
• "People always are like, how is it that I can remember a song I learned when I was six, but I can't remember my password? And it's like, well, you know, learning things through music does something different in your brain." (Sara)
• "When I first started talking about my career path and the fact that I had more than 20 jobs before I was 30 years old. I was so freaked out to go tell everyone about it on my webinars, but then I got such a positive reaction because people could relate to it. And they were like, OK, she understands me." (Melissa)

Calling all Renaissance People!

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This podcast is hosted and edited by Sara Kobilka.

Theme music is by Brian Skellenger

Podcast distribution support provided by K.O. Myers of Particular Media