One out of 10 folks worldwide have dyslexia, in accordance with the British Dyslexia Association. Matt Bird is a type of folks.
Yet Bird is the founding father of PublishU and a coach to folks making an attempt to jumpstart their careers as authors. This could seem unusual to most individuals. How can a person who suffers with dyslexia change into a pacesetter within the self-publishing business in Europe?
The church advisor and social entrepreneur sees it otherwise. Dyslexia, for him, is a power.
Bird realized he had dyslexia whereas in his twenties, across the time he found his Christian religion. He had been coping with dyslexia his entire life as a scholar in Great Britain’s public college system.
“I left school believing I was stupid because that’s what most of my teachers told me.”
“I struggled in school a lot, so much so they put me in remedial English classes and told me I couldn’t do computer studies because my grasp of the English language wasn’t good enough,” he recalled. “I left school believing I was stupid because that’s what most of my teachers told me. However, in my twenties, I heard a word for the first time, and the word was ‘dyslexia.’ I’d never heard the word before. I didn’t know what it meant. I soon discovered that dyslexia doesn’t make you any less intelligent than anybody else. I just process information differently.”
Matt Bird
When he understood that, the sunshine change got here on for Bird. It was round this time he additionally got here to imagine God is actual, starting his journey into Christianity and ministry.
“I began to believe in God. I thought, well, the fact that God loved me was quite significant. But there was something more significant than God’s love for me. It was actually not that God just loved me, but he liked me,” he defined.
“I mean, receiving love, you feel a bit like a charity case sometimes. Well, God loves everybody, so you’re nothing special. But God doesn’t just love us. He likes us. He likes who he has made us. He likes who he’s created us to be. That was revolutionary for me. I thought, actually, I don’t need to try and be anybody else or anything else. I can just be me, and that enabled me to hold my head high, look people in the eyes. And that was the beginning of a long journey that helped me overcome the belief that I was stupid. People with dyslexia struggle with self-esteem, self-worth, self-belief. So, I began my journey of just finding who God had made me to be.”
That journey right this moment contains serving to others — together with his circle of relatives in London.
“I’ve got three children, and my daughter has dyslexia,” he mentioned. “I’m disappointed to say the school didn’t offer her much additional support. I’m discouraged that in a generation since I’ve been in school that much hasn’t changed. I have the greatest respect for schoolteachers in the classroom, especially those like my French English teacher, who went out of his way to encourage and support a kid who was struggling like me. Our education system throughout the world needs to get their act together.”
Bird, who sees himself as an activist, believes academic techniques have an incorrect understanding of intelligence. For many, “intelligence is measured by your skill to learn, memorize and regurgitate in an essay or an examination. That isn’t the one approach to measure whether or not you’re good or not.
“It is ignorant and unjust that the education system is allowed to perpetuate itself as it is. I’m passionate about this as an activist. We need proper reform. So actually, diverse learning styles and the diversity in which children are wired can be embraced and they can be included in an educational journey that points them in the right direction.”
One of the problems Bird has with the British academic system is the idea that one dimension suits all in the case of studying: “My daughter goes to a clothing store where one size fits all and that doesn’t seem to work when it comes to clothes, and it shouldn’t work with our educational system.”
He’s additionally pissed off by the best way some folks discuss dyslexia.
“It’s commonly acceptable to call dyslexia a learning disability. I find that offensive. Yeah, because I’m a very able person and so are other people who are dyslexic. And then it’s also called a learning disorder. And a learning difficulty. I mean, get real, I have no problem learning. I’ve realized later on in life that I’m actually quite smart.”
He’s realized to flip the script and see the upside to how he was made.
“Dyslexia wasn’t a divine slip up, a divine error, but dyslexia was part of my divine design.”
“I don’t suffer with dyslexia,” he mentioned. “I benefit from dyslexia. Dyslexia is not my disadvantage. It’s my advantage. It’s not my curse. It’s my blessing. Dyslexia wasn’t a divine slip up, a divine error, but dyslexia was part of my divine design. It was part of who God made me to be. I’ve learned to embrace dyslexia and to lean into it.”
That he does with ardour.
“I don’t know many individuals who’ve written 20 books. But you understand, I take a look at it and I feel, ‘Have I really done that?’ What I’ve completed is I’ve developed methods for overcoming the impediment I face, which is that I feel pictorially moderately than in phrases.
“I’ve developed a novel step-by-step methodology for serving to folks, for serving to initially, for serving to myself overcome my dyslexia and be capable to write books. Many folks requested for my assist. So, a few years in the past, I believed, that is loopy. I’m overwhelmed by folks asking me for assist with their books. And it’s not even my job.
“I started a course. So now I coach more than 100 people a year to overcome their own obstacles and their own barriers, whatever it is. Sometimes, occasionally, it’s dyslexia. But everybody comes to write a book with their own internal barrier they have to overcome. I’ve written a program that enables people to overcome that barrier and follow a step-by-step journey to writing a book.”
Bird believes he has been placed proper the place he’s by God, to assist and coach and produce a constructive focus to what folks with dyslexia.
“The most necessary factor is to like them unconditionally and like who they’re. Just observe God’s instance. The neatest thing the church can do is to like folks. We want to like, settle for and like folks for who they’re. And that’s the factor that folks and mates and colleagues and the church can do for folks with dyslexia.
“The second most important thing they can do is to actually encourage them in believing dyslexia is their God-given gift and their superpower. It’s to their advantage, not to their disadvantage. It’s a blessing, not a curse. It’s a benefit.”
