'Dyslexia helped me look outside the box. It's a massive part of where I am today'

IT GOT TO the stage where I just wanted to give up. The frustration was driving me mad because I couldn’t understand why I had to spend way more time doing my homework than everyone else.

Why were my friends and my brother able to complete all their homework in an hour where I was still stuck in front of my books for hours more?

I didn’t know at the time that I was dyslexic. I was eight or nine when I started to see that I was different to my friends, but I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me.

The older I was getting the worse it became. I started to doubt myself and my abilities to the point where I had convinced myself that I was stupid!

My parents knew since I was young that I had a different way of learning and, after receiving no help from teachers, they decided to bring me to a specialist – that’s when I learned of my learning disability.

It was a relief to gain an understanding of what was going on, but at the same time it was difficult in school as my teachers felt the right thing to do was to dumb everything down for me in front of my friends.

There were times when my teachers would purposely skip me in class when it came to reciting anything back to them as they knew I could never repeat anything back word for word. I didn’t want anyone to know that I was dyslexic, but this definitely didn’t help my cover. My friends just assumed that I was always in trouble instead!

I was fortunate that, in school, my best friend Sarah also suffered from dyslexia. It was always valuable to have a moan with someone who understood what it felt like as it could be a lonely place.

My biggest fear was not knowing whether I would make it to university. I didn’t know what I wanted to study, but I had to get in as I had a feeling that university was where I would find myself.

I felt that my teachers threw in the towel, and their only answer to my challenge was to do all pass subjects, which I definitely didn’t want as I knew I could do honors. I worked out that being dyslexic doesn’t mean I can’t learn – it just means I learn differently.

I got into university and today this remains one of my proudest achievements as so many people wrote it off for me. I learned over time that being dyslexic was actually a gift.

Outside the box

I’m naturally an extremely impatient person, which meant that I didn’t want to sit down for hours reading something that I didn’t understand. I had to find a way to learn that suited me.

I challenged myself all the time to find a way to learn constantly and to me that way was learning from people: absorbing their knowledge, listening to their stories and talking out exam questions to make them more life-like scenarios - rather than book-case scenarios.

Dyslexia gave me the ability to look outside the box and in many ways I believe that a massive part of where I am today has been down to thinking differently. And knowing, and more importantly understanding, that sometimes unexpected bumps can occur along the way to your destination.

Many great leaders speak openly about their dyslexia and a definite trend is that many dyslexic people see things differently. This happens to me on a daily basis.

Now, nine times out of 10 the ideas and ways I come up with of doing things are probably crazy. But there is one idea that actually may work because it’s not the traditional route.

Jayne Ronayne is the co-founder and CEO of KonnectAgain.

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