Adversity as Privilege, with Amy Grey

Amy Gray, Tom Hitchcock, how are you? Very good, thank you Tom. Absolute pleasure to meet you. Pleasure to actually meet you as well. I know we’ve been, we know of each other, okay? We’re in similar circles. We post and pillage on LinkedIn. We’ve got similar friends. We do similar things. We’ve had a conversation, but we haven’t met. Well, it’s a pleasure. Please excuse my hideous background there Tom. It is chaos back here You know chaos is one of my most favorite English words And I think it’s I have to lean into it because I tend to cause chaos

And but no no it’s good I think it’s better than the pixelated backgrounds anyway It’s real and that’s what these all about anyway So that’s perfectly fine And I also need to apologize to yourself actually because just as I clicked record to get started You had a really important pertinent question which is clearly gonna make or break this episode And I didn’t give you a chance to say it so um, sorry about that. That’s fine Shall I um, shall I ask it now? It’s up to you what the question is I suppose it is up to that if it’s sensitive if it’s vulnerable not at all it was just in regards to what direction you wanted to go because Amy Gray wears a few hats okay but I think you’re gonna unpick this one nicely so yeah you never know no pressure the so as per the other episode it’s kind of nice that I can talk about this openly because I usually talk about it’s offline is it’s always unscripted okay so nine times out of ten I’d say I do an episode I don’t know anything about a person who funds me so when I do react it’s genuinely if I’m bored I’m bored if I’m interested I’m interested you know but it keeps it keeps it real I know authenticity is a word that gets thrown around about quite a bit but I’ve tried to defend that because people know when something’s scripted and it’s a gender driven and I’ve got products, I’ve got a picture, I’m gonna get this out of my face. And it’s, that doesn’t appeal to me, you know.

Now I think we’re people first, product second. Yes. At the end of the day. And these are great opportunities because we all get sick of it, don’t we? We all get sick of being defined by the products we sell, the company we work for, or by the ripple that that product create. So what a great opportunity. All this sit here is little old Amy Gray then. Yeah, old Amy Gray and I’m Mr Purple here. You know what? The amount of people that know me just as Mr Purple and don’t know my name is because I really should update this but so bit, so bit. Anyhow, okay so I’m well aware, I’m gonna dig deep into it and I’m well aware of the spaces that you know what you do and I’m well aware that a lot of people already know this as well. So I don’t really want to focus that really. I want to start to get a little bit more about who Amy was prior. A little bit more about your why and maybe some things that people may not know. Okay. That’s what I think would interest me initially. So maybe let’s go back to actually I could ask one question. I know so I’m mad on here. I didn’t mean to. When Amy was much younger, the young child, Amy, what was the first thing you wanted to be when you grew up?

I didn’t have a traditional upbringing by any stretch of the imagination. It was an upbringing that wasn’t necessarily that peaceful, but I’m going to tell you something that was created for me in that time and that I’ve carried through, that I live by and that everything I’ve done is in line with and that’s the concept of pain to promise.

Everything I’ve done. So the companies I’ve built, the books I’ve written, all come from that place of how do I turn this thing right? That’s been a challenge, that’s probably a challenge for other people. How do I actually turn this thing into something beautiful? So that’s probably pretty defining of the young version of Amy. Okay, all right. And do you remember what you wanted to be if you gave yourself a label, which you want to be a space woman, did you want to be a train driver, a chef? I wanted to be a farmer because I’ve, I actually just wanted to grow all my own food. I was like, well, I can make that bread. I’m going to do this myself. Out of my ideas and that kind of stuck with me as an ethos into later life. But did you have a role that you aspired to initially?

Yeah, I’m a writer my entire life. I’ve always wanted to be sort of like that translator and not like of languages, but of the unspoken, you know, like to listen for the things that aren’t said and to pull them out and make them beautiful with words.

And some, yeah, very much about who I am and what I enjoy to do. So, testing your grade master here, how old do you think you were when you started to think that way? Oh, probably about nine years old, probably about nine. And I started to view the world a little bit differently. And I started to see that perhaps some of the things that are most important to us are the things that maybe we don’t always say. And I started to see like,

it’s those conversations right, the kind that can be hard to have are sort of the ones that change us and you know the ones that change us are the ones that don’t live in those easy or polished lines, they’re the ones that can kind of live in the words that we avoid and the conversations that we kind of bury ourselves under the concept of being just fine. I know that’s heavy but I started to sort of see the world a little bit like that. I had a stutter myself, so I didn’t have the greatest language. And I came from probably a poor place. So I suffered a little bit of bullying myself, but being not necessarily having the greatest ability to express how I felt due to a stutter and I was also selectively mute. For a lot of years I started to kind of see the world a little bit differently. Okay, all right, I can resonate to this because there’s instances in my youth that some people could be moan. And I’ve got an inclination, this might be the case for yourself too, is when I look back or people question, I make me think about it or reflect on these less than ideal set of circumstances. I actually am quite grateful for them.

Well it has given me sort of a good calibrated view of the world. Yes. It’s set me up the right way so I’m not entitled and I have an effort equals reward blah blah blah blah blah nothing just comes to you but it’s set up my my perception so that I was ready for what the world’s gonna follow at me if you like. So with that in mind I was always grateful of the crappier times if you like.

Is it fair to assume you’ve got that same perspective of your past? Yeah, yeah 150%. It’s really in those hard times that you know I think I’ve had a lot of things sort of go on, right? I wasn’t necessarily prepared to be 24 and have a young child, a baby with complex and profound disabilities. I wasn’t necessarily prepared for that. I wasn’t expecting that. I wasn’t skilled enough for that. And then, you know, an interesting thing happened recently. My son, 21, was involved in a head-on collision and has suffered some significant injuries as a result. And what I have been able to teach him is that adversity is privilege. And had I not had adversity of my youth, and that’s one reason why, you know, I’ve written some books I have, there’s various different hats that Amy Gray wears, and some of those hats are books that I’ve written about concepts like Kimo Oseko Troll. It’s really heavy. Had I not had those experiences, I think being sort of cast into raising a young person with disabilities, because let’s be totally honest, right? The industry is not necessarily set up for these families. It’s really tough. Families like mine do it really tough. Had I not had those early experiences, I might not have been able to manage.

So 150% I feel nothing but absolute gratitude. So yeah, my presumption was correct, which is nice to hear. And it says a lot about yourself. And I think it’s interesting you use the word, the key word, being a privilege to experience adversity. And that’s quite an interesting take because the worst case scenario is, well perhaps it isn’t actually a privilege, just play devil’s advocate. But by dressing it up as such means you’re in the best possible place You can be as a result of that. Yeah adversity anyway, so it’s almost like even if it wasn’t to be true It’s probably the most Pragmatic lie to tell yourself. Yeah, probably is true, but but it’s but the outlook is something that’s self-serving

Yeah, yeah, 100% I mean it’s either that it’s either we have that concept of turning pain into promise or it dies with you. And this is the thing like, and I have a really interesting conversation. So, you know, there’s a side to Amy Gray and you got us black belt. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. We all know that there’s this other side. Okay. And I’m a, I’m a writer and I’ve written books about heavy concepts, but also books for our youth as well. So toxic love, trauma bonds, coercive control. And I got invited to speak at an event.

And I just, I had a really brief chat and I was talking about this drive that I’ve had, you know, my whole life, and that’s that pain to promise. It’s actually like, if you were to cut my chest open, it is tattooed on my heart. And there was psychologists and various people within the community who work within, in that mental health space. she had said to me, oh gosh, Amy, do you think that this is, you know, that very controversial sixth stage of grief, which they say that people get stuck in these cycles of trying to recycle, in order to help other people? And I thought to myself, well, no, actually not. I think there’s actually people out there that see the genuine value. And it is an absolute privilege. Let’s just say that God or whatever we want to believe gave me the privilege of being in situations that were greater than my ability to deal with at the time and I had to dig deep. And then he also gave me the ability to turn it into language. And that language at the end of the day, like storytelling, right, just for the record, it’s not just writing, it’s trajectory tracing, isn’t it? And it’s trajectory changing for some people. I think it’s like gives people like me the opportunity to sketch a path back and to say, you know, maybe it wasn’t ruined, maybe it was being rerouted and that there is an absolute privilege. That’s very much about Amy Gray.

And I think you’re absolutely right there. And it’s also probably part of the reason why I sort of salivated doing these episodes because the story that you’re sharing with us and thank you for that, someone somewhere in the world will hear that just in the right time. Yes. And it will have an impact to just change their trajectory or 1% and completely different outcome. We don’t need to know that person. We don’t ever need to hear that from a person. Don’t even need to get a thank you. None of that, but we know it’s happening. And it happened more than one person. It happened as long as the internet exists. Yeah, you know, because it’s a big, timeless, difficult in all things to term. And that really gets me going.

And I think that’s also partly why you’re here as well. Yeah, yeah, look, I think we’re all, we’ve all got this intention. And I’ve just been lucky enough to kind of be someone that I can make a career out of it, right? But for someone like me, these books that I’ve written, say this side of Amy Gray, let’s just say the one on coercive control because this is life changing trajectory smashing kind of worlds that people find themselves in, right? That book, for example, details the entrance wound that is coercive control.

And it’s, and it’s rour and it’s honest and it’s, and it’s bloody even and it sort of marks the moment, right, that the truth breaks the skin. And then we can kind of show the reader where the bullet comes from and how it was loaded and why we didn’t see it coming. And it’s just that, you know, within that is the secret that people kind of sometimes we forget is that the collapse is the compass. So it’s just an absolute pleasure to have those conversations where we can just say that again and people hear that again and they go, Oh gosh, well, well this challenge, perhaps there might be some good that comes out of it. And I think we all need to hear it because we’re all often in various places of dealing with situations that are greater than we’ve got the skill set too, and we feel sometimes alone and it can be really hard. So I like these conversations, Tom. Love it. So that’s where essentially where skill sets are required, you don’t just get skills, you acquire it by circumnavigating troubled seas if you like.

When you’re talking about coercive control, so you’re talking about the bulletin if you like. What’s your thoughts on that being generational? Pass down from parent, grandparent, grandparent, great grandparent. Such a hectic issue. At the end of the day, I speak as a child survivor. So the book I wrote was a child survivor. I’m not an expert. I don’t have a clipboard. I don’t have any letters after my name except WTF, right? But I guess it’s a pattern of behaviour and patterns of behaviour are absorbed through the skin and through the eyes and through the ears and through the whole body. whole body. So is it a generational thing? I would say it must, it must, it has to be. And that’s, you know, the concepts coming out now about people talking about generational cycle breakers. It’s just such a beautiful thing, but it’s some, I imagine, you know, profoundly hard and profoundly lonesome and the path from the only thing you’ve known to get into the other side, you know, finding the promise in the pain is a pretty big one.

Yeah, I’m glad you sort of validated that in a space of opinion at least because something I’ve been aware of recently, we’ve all got our flaws and things we don’t like about ourselves in the deep sense. But if we trace it back, the similarities to where it has come from. Yeah. Obviously, I’ve got a 11 year old son now. Now, and he and something comes to the surface. And there’s no reason for that to be at the surface because nothing’s happened for that creation. But I can see that whatever was in me is passed on to him. Yeah. Yeah. the circuit breaker turn or break in the chain or whatever, I think it’s brilliant and it is our responsibility where it goes back seven generations. We have the opportunity now to fix that and that’s really the the goal being passed down to future generations.

Yeah, I mean that’s my only goal is to take pain and turn it into promise and I’ve chosen to be able to do that with language and it’s it’s opening up these conversations that I’ve done in those books but also my goal was to be able to do it in a way that was going to be able to reach inside you and relate to you. So I didn’t think there needed to be more books out there that are written for people who probably work in the field. It needs to be written to arts and for arts, the people actually out there living it every day. So that’s what I really tried to do. It was pretty raw. What I detailed in that book was the concept of what it actually is and how it played out and what it looked like to a child. But also, like, how did that, like, let’s just be raw and real. How did it affect me as an adult? And I really kind of had to stand there and say open part. These are the effects. And this is real. And this This is what I did to unpick them and if that helps you great, if not, it might lead you somewhere else too.

I think that’s all we can actually do. I was told by psychologists that, you know, this type of language and these type of conversations and these type of books from survivors from these situations are a little bit hard to come by because of the effects and perhaps children raised the way I was raised. Perhaps they struggle a little more with drugs and alcohol and destructive relationships and mental health problems. And I thought, well, do you know what these books are for them then? The ones that struggle to get out, the ones that had the language taken away from them. These are books, these are for them then. Yeah, okay. I’ll fit down mate says and I do like the acknowledgement that they’re not particularly forthcoming that genre or at least with candor anyway.

I’m going to put the books on the shelf momentarily at least. Okay. Please do share them when we go live with this. People with nowhere to get it and what they look like and what have you. How has this experience going back to young Amy nine years old sliding you want to write you want to communicate you want to tell stories and articulate everything that you just talked about there and things that happen a little bit later in life has continued. It’s been a thing. How has that affected what you do today. In regards to Andy AS Black Belt you mean. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I guess it gave me the capacity to speak up number one. But like for me in regards to NDIS Black Belt, why I’m there is because ultimately like I was in the gap, right?

So I was young and I was trying to hold down work in a system that wasn’t designed for families like mine. There was no pause button. There was no sick leave for carers. I still had to raise my son and pay a mortgage and show up as a human being. And like for me, that’s why I built NDIS Black Belt. How did going through coercive control help me? In some ways, Tom, it didn’t because coercive control tells you that, you know, the thoughts that you have and the ideas you have and the reality you see with your eyes and ears is actually not reality. coercive control twists reality. It’s some sick and then you’ve got to pick your way out of it. So in some ways it’s kind of made it harder because I really to do what I do and I stand up in front of big groups of people, I must really believe in myself and coercive control and what I went through as a young girl, especially having a speech impairment, that was really hard.

It follows me. So I’ll stand up on stage and get ready to speak and then this history does follow me. So it in some ways kind of makes it a little bit harder. Okay. And tell us more about your black belts because I’m a purple belt, by the way. Indu Ditsu? No, no, no, just in Mr. Purple. Oh yeah, of course. Kind of captured jokes, but failed abysmally.

But there’s gonna be people, so we’ve got an audience that’s worldwide. Some don’t know what the NDIS is for starters. Yeah, of course, yeah. Some in Australia won’t know you, so not have an association to. So give your business a bit of a plug whilst we’re here. NDIS Black Belt approaches the gap between participants and families and the disability service industry. And that’s what I was saying before. My work is because I was in that gap. And so I got lucky enough to work professionally within the industry. I’m a nurse by trade. I’ve sort of worked out in the community. And I also had complex and profound disability in my own home. So I was really trying to live in it, this within that gap.

So NDIS Black Belt shines a light on that gap. And we built products to support providers to move past that. It was really just because families like mine were slipping through the cracks and it’s got a lot to do with the concepts of culture. So we’ve sort of come in and we’ve built workshops that we go into organisations. We only do them face to face. We don’t do online stuff with support staff. So we go in, we work with staff. We have really great outcomes at the end of the day because staff want to belong to something bigger. So we start to build the culture within organisations. And we’ve got various other sort of products that we put in place for NDIS service providers, but what they are in essence are a translation of like my lived experience, right?

Again, pain to promise. And I built it into something that organizations and their staff can actually use. Okay. Very much. Okay, so it sounds to me, which I do like is just like your books, they’re a micro-specialism. Okay. Yeah. I doubt you have too much competition doing the same thing, if any. Maybe some do something similar. Okay. But that also talks to your books and that specific lived experience, which is really good because it makes you re-engineered these experiences and doing a lot of good for a lot of people which to keep it for yourself. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I got lucky enough just to be able to pick it up and to run with it at the end of the day because I think, you know, it was the weight.

It was the weight of being raised like that and the amount of pressure that I needed to do something with that. And then it was the weight, wasn’t it, of having a child with complex and profound disabilities and trying to navigate that system which is profoundly difficult, right? And it was the weight of trying to do that. That was impossible that I got to a place where I thought, oh gosh, well, I’m going to change this little old me is going to change this. And I’m not sure if you know Ian Coker. Ian, yep. Yeah, Ian Coker put it best. He’s got the same haircut as me. He certainly does. Yeah, he put it best early on. I remember sitting with him, I’d met Ian and his lovely wife Anna, and we were sitting in a pub in Bondi overlooking the beach.

and he looked at me in the eye and he said, Amy, right, do you sort of understand the scale of what you’re talking about? Like the enormity of it? Because I’m very much, I named the company Disability Culture Crew Australia because I had one intention and that was to shift the culture within the industry. That’s what I wanted to do. And I remember kind of going, oh gosh, well I do. And I sort of shrugged my shoulders and said, you know, as something that I live by, well, if I’ve seen that, I must acknowledge it. And in a lot of ways, like he has been right. This has been enormous, enormously difficult. But I think it’s necessary because if we can bridge that gap, we don’t just improve services, we improve lives. And that was really that where the professional side was born, right, it was born again from scar tissue, the industry, my daughter’s needs very much when my teacher.

Yeah, fantastic. And Ian’s good for that. He’s quite reflective. He’s got his own lived experience too. He gives back. He’s a good person to bathe in, that’s for sure. Yeah, yeah. Great conversation, Lest. And he could sort of see through what I was trying to do. And it was really awesome. And I’ll never forget that moment Because it was like, yeah, this is hard. Yeah, this is hard, but good things are worth it. Like always hard. The best things are always hard.

So I’m gonna just pull you back. We’re wrapping up a bit now, but I was gonna pull you back to when you’re 24, okay? And you had the shock of a lifetime, if you like, and lots of self-doubts, that various alien emotions coming in. Knowing what you know now, if you could whisper in your ear as that 24 year old, knowing it’s you, what advice would you give yourself? Do you know what number one? Nobody’s ever asked that question. I don’t know that I would give any. I like where I am now and I only came, I only got to where I am now because I didn’t know what I didn’t know and I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So I just, I certainly wouldn’t know what to say to that young lady except she’s going to really make good with this and I wouldn’t want to get in the way of that.

Yeah, okay. Good answer. At least we’ve proven that this is unscripted. I ask questions a bit, but I can’t answer. That’s good. Okay. What plans do you have for the future, Amy? Is there anything there which you want to hold yourself accountable for? Say, I’ve got another book coming out. Got a product here. I’m going to go climb Everest. What’s on your agenda that you’re happy to share?

Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to continue to make an enormous impact within the disability service industry within Australia. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to continue to flip conversations on their head. It’s working so far. And I really want to be part of when people look back and they say, you know, So how did the service industry get so attuned to its customer base? I’d like people to say, or Amy Gray was part of that.

So that one. And yeah, I’ve always got books out coming out. I’ve got 14. I’m sure there’s another 10 to come. But they just pop out, you know, as they do. Yeah. So that’s what I’d like to hold myself accountable to. Good. Okay. I think it’s a good accountability. I think that’s got some good, sincere, moral ambition to it. Okay. Anybody listening to this? Your story resonates with them and more on do some business with you. Essentially, I just want to reach out. What would be the best route for them to make contact with you? I think we’ve got social media platforms on everything. And I think it’s just under Amy Gray. And I think you can just Google Amy Gray and if you put NDIS there, I should pop up.

And there’ll be any lots of means of accessing us and the work we do. Too easy. All right, well, that brings us to a close now. I’m sure we can continue talking, but I think it’s nicely rounded there. So on that basis, I’d like to thank you for your time. It’s been enjoyable. And I hope to meet you in person soon. Yeah you too.