Growing up and Living with Dyslexia - an Interview with Lee Tunney-Ware

This is an interview with Lee Tunney Ware from an episode of The Aron O'Dowd Show with host Aron O’Dowd. Lee Tunney-Ware is an entrepreneur and a transformational coach and mentor. He specializes in executive coaching. His business has grown out of his unique experiences growing up with dyslexia in a time when the understanding of this condition was limited and learning to create success from his own very unique experiences.

Hello, welcome to today's episode of Partially Excited. We got Lee Tunney-Ware here. He is an amazing individual. He is an inspiration, works in business, energy healing, and coaching. Hello and welcome to the show Lee, how are you doing today?

I'm very good. How are you doing?

Good. So, you were born into the world and you spent the first eight years discovering who you are and what you are. But give us the background before you figured out that you had dyslexia in some way. What was life like before that?

A while back before my dyslexia, I always found it quite challenging to assess the world, I always felt that I saw it differently. And as I got older I realised I had dyslexia, it became more apparent. So, I thought there was something wrong with me rather than realising that I just saw the world the way I saw the world and that there was nothing wrong with that. So, I would say I had a different perspective. And I still do my best to keep that perspective, even though I'm fifty-four. I like the naiveness, the freedom of a child spirit, where you're experiencing the world and living the world in real time, rather than on the calibration of expectation, whether that makes sense to you?

It does indeed. Tell us about how you found out your dyslexia.

Well, I didn't find out, believe it or not, that I was dyslexic until I was about sixteen. So, I took myself out of school. That might be a strange statement, that I took myself out of school when I was eight and a half years old. And the reason I took myself out of school was not because of my dyslexia. I had an experience in the class one morning; my brother’s partially sighted and possibly perceived the world differently as well. He had some challenges of his own when he was growing up. And even though he's three years older than me, in many ways I became the older brother, because he couldn't see properly. He has five percent sight in one eye and ten percent in the other. And sometimes because of his disability he would be bullied or picked on. Some kids used to think it was funny to run past and push him or slap him. He wouldn't know who it was. In many ways I felt it was my duty really to look out for him. There was an experience I had in the class one day. The teacher came back into the classroom after class and we were in the same class. We were in rural Ireland and the ages went from about seven up to fourteen. When the teacher came back somebody had spilled Fanta Orange on her books on the desk. She asked who it was and my name was put forward and I had left my chair. In those days they gave you the cane and it wasn't the first time I got the cane. I got the cane a few times because I couldn't read properly. I looked like a normal healthy individual so she thought I was just taking the mickey. Anyway, my name was put forward. She called me up to the front of the class and she gave me the cane. I still got a scar on my hand to this day because of it. She said, “Have you learned your lesson now?” I said, “You want to give me one for luck?” She gave me one for luck and then I told my brother that we were leaving. My brother asked where we were going and I said we were going home. The teacher made a few threats but I walked out of the class with my brother. It was about a five to ten minute walk from where we live, the tide had come in and flooded the road and we had to walk through the tide up to our chests to get home. When we got home I was a little bit in the nail. That’s when I started to think of the consequences of my actions. I was only about eight and a half and my brother had just followed me. My mother told me to just wait until my father came home. I waited in apprehension for a few hours, and then my father came home. I was told I was going back to school the next day. I said I wasn't. I was told I was. And I said I wasn't. Finally I said, “As true as I draw breath, I will never step over the threshold of that classroom again, ever.” And I never did.

We had a private teacher for a while. When I still couldn't learn to spell, or read properly, at sixteen, I decided to get a teacher myself. I used to go to the church in town, every Wednesday afternoon, for about two hours for a lady there who taught me. After a few sessions, she realised that I wasn't retaining or wasn't computing the information. She sent me for an assessment, which I had to pay for myself, I think it was 120 pence in those days. I had the assessment and the teacher stopped the assessment and asked me if I could come back on another day. I thought it was just me being stupid. Me and my mum were told they wanted to get somebody from Dublin. About a month later I went back to do the assessment, and my mum joined me. I was told I had an IQ of 176. I didn't know what an IQ was. My mother said, “What does that mean?” This teacher said, “Well, Einstein has an IQ of 166. Your son’s IQs is ten points higher than Einstein.” So when I normally tell a story I say, “I walked in a dunce and walked out a genius.” Because I was the little boy that had to stand in the corner of the class and wear a dunce hat, or was mocked because I couldn't spell.

I was in a meeting this morning. I was at a networking meeting. I'm the treasurer there, and I had to read out somebody's bio, and I read the chap's bio out. His wife's name's Deirdre, and I read his wife's name as Deborah. There were a few laughs in the room, which didn't bother me. The President said, “I don't think the wife will be happy about that.” I realised that I had made a mistake, because I don't read, I remember, sometimes certain words look the same. So, at fifty-four years old, I still can't read very well. I do read in my own style and I think that has given me a different perspective on the world. Because when I read a book, I don't always, probably, get the meaning of the book, I put my own meaning to it. But like, I suppose if you read a novel, and then watch the film, the novel doesn't match the film. That's how I read a book. Because of my dyslexia I have a very unique perspective on the world. What some would call a disability I would call my ability. For some reason, my view of the world doesn't seem to match how everybody else thinks about themselves. I think it was also that I was the younger sibling, but became the eldest sibling. So, in many ways, there was no pecking order for me, I never had to fit in in the class, because I wasn't there long enough. So, I never understood the pecking order. I never lost value because I couldn't spell. I suppose that was the only comparison I made on myself. Once I got past that and got to sixteen, or eighteen, and went out into the world in discos and different things like that, I started to see that this pecking order existed, which I never subscribed to until this day. I don't understand how people can pigeonhole themselves and not say what they want to say or not be themselves because somebody they perceive to be more valuable, more capable is in the room. I don’t know how people can mould themselves based on other people's expectations, opinions or beliefs. So I've never subscribed to that. I never realised until I was probably thirty, forty that it was expected. I felt I never fitted in. It could cause problems. When I said something that would be positive, other people would hear the negative. Or if I asked a question for insight or understanding, they would hear that I was questioning them. But I've noticed even up to recent times, that I now frame it that I'm not questioning you. So whether that answers your question or and I'm not sure it does,

How do you educate yourself to get to where you are?

In many ways. My father realised that obviously, and my mother knew as well, I couldn't learn the conventional way. My dad, in many ways, gave me the tools, in a way that I learned to think and assess and plan and articulate, and wouldn't be told how. I remember being given the history book. He said, “If you want to go to a disco on a Friday night, then you're gonna have ten history questions out of that book.” At the end of the week, if you answer the same questions, then you can go. A few times, the same challenge was given to me probably twenty times. Every time I'd said I couldn't read, or that my brother couldn't read properly, because he couldn't see and that the task was impossible my father said, “That’s fine if that's your decision.” So you give up and then you'd be given the same task. You want to go to the disco Friday, right?. It probably sounds quite hard and it could be perceived that way. It was quite challenging. But I wasn't given the answer. Nor was my brother. My reasoning, or my excuses did not justify that I could not get the information out of the book. That was my decision. My father said, “work it out,” and I worked it out. I asked my grandfather to read the book to me. And then I learned how to get information out of pages that I couldn't read into my head. So that's a strategy I've kept for years.

I bought a dictaphone, I think, when I was about seventeen. I used to get my grandfather to read books onto the dictaphone, so I could listen back. I learned that the problems always had a solution, however impossible they may seem. Also, I'll be given tasks as to whether I could build something. We had a farm and my dad wouldn't tell us what to do. In a sense, he might tell us what jobs we had to do, but he wouldn't tell us how to do it. He would ask us in, I suppose, what they call a coaching style now. What do you think is the quickest way to do it and the best way? We're not cutting corners, best outcome possible. So nowadays, when I do personal development seminars, or transform seminars; whatever excuse or reason people come up with by default, I simply don't accept it. Rather I assume that that's their perception of the world, that's their perception of reality, that's their decision making. If they're happy where they are, then that's fine. If they want to move from A to V in the shortest, quickest possible time, then you can go on and on, step by step by step by step, which is, in my mind, a calibration process. In the school system we’re taught that it takes four years to do this, or it takes three years to do this. It is not the subject they're learning. That's one thing, but it's also the calibration of that learning. That's the school system's way of learning and that calibration style of learning is not congruent with the time it takes to learn. It's congruent with when they want that person in the marketplace for a job. So years ago, you could leave school at fourteen or sixteen. Nowadays you can leave school at eighteen. They want to keep you in school as long as possible. Then you go to college or university. Now if you're a doctor or surgeon or solicitor, let's say that's true. In many ways, I think my opinion would be that the learning styles they have in schools today, cap the load and ability of people and I think it also sets the parameter with the pecking order where they find their place within the class within school, within society. That also capsure people's ability to articulate and to comprehend, because their self value governs their outcome and their ability. And it's very interesting, because when I work with people over time, I can ask them their score and their Leaving Certification, and most times with accuracy, I can tell them where they sat in their class. The child that sits at the back of the class, their marks will be below average, the child that sits in the middle of the class or in that region, their scores will be average, the child that sits at the front of the class, unless they're put there for as disciplined reasons, will be above average. If they're on the left to the right of the class, that can also have some impact. So if you go to the cinema and see how people sit, there's a reason for it. Normally, the reason is, where they're place is within society. It’s the same with the car you drive, the clothes you wear, the foods you eat, the holidays you take. Your goals in life are all congruent, in my opinion, with where you perceive or believe you fit in society. The obstacles that we experience inside, the feelings of starting poor, when you're just exhausted with life, in my mind are a consequence of the linear learning system. Because in many ways, our freedom, our internal freedom, not external freedom, or internal freedom is governed. We overlay this linear process onto our biology, onto a spirit, onto our mind, into our heart and we mould ourselves to fit with this calibration. Then we experienced the rest of our life through it. In many ways, the sense of freedom, that child that is within us, is governed, moulded. It is not real. It's just that what we've learned to do, we've learned to show up in many ways as how people expect us to show up, we value ourselves for a score on a piece of paper and we give up our authority.

You can tell something about a person from the way they sit in the classroom for example. Did you learn that? Or is that just something you could see over time?

You could think it's an observation as in my perception considering I was thought to have a problem with learning the traditional way and therefore I have a problem with learning itself. But I love to learn, any moment I've got, I will learn. I've always been that way. I love learning. So I have no problem with learning, I've no problem with moving forward, as some would call it. But freedom, that individuality, that sense of self should not be lost within the data we learn. The person that learns, should learn congruent with who they are, from their place of self and from their place of freedom. In the early stages, when we learn numbers or the alphabet, then there's a process and a procedure we need to learn for calibration. The taking away of the sense of that natural freedom is influenced by the way we are marked.

Some people value themselves by the mark they got on their Leaving Certificate and perceive that they're more valuable than the person who got them up there. I think it's a very archaic way of valuing a human being. It is only, some might say, my opinion, but I think if we have honour, integrity, sincerity, and we look at it, each human being has the same value, and that's priceless. You can't replicate them, you can't make them, you can't buy them. If it was an artefact, it would be priceless, if it’s unique. We would all show up differently if we're allowed to. But I think in many ways, the way we value ourselves not because we learn but the way we value learning and the way it becomes a passport through life, to the job, the car, the suit, the holiday, the food, the house, the home, that value determines most people's outcome. They choose their goals failing to realise in many ways that they've had an ingrained system process on the inside. Then they want to push against this system that fights inside that desire, that determination, that drive to overcome something that's been taught to them. That's the challenge I have with the linear style of learning. I know it can be overridden very quickly. However, people will debate and argue the point. But in my mind, nothing good will ever come from the bad, or translate that, nothing good will ever come from anything that takes somebody's value away. Recognition, positivity, respect, integrity, honesty, in my mind, are many of the core values that we should have as societies default. If we spoke from a true human perspective, a true value of life, a true value of the individual person, the world will be a much better place.

What was it like growing through each decade being unique in your own way?

Well, we’re all unique. My challenge was I couldn't understand I kept having similar conversations with unique individual people. They all seem to show up very similar. They all seem to have the same answers to the same question. Well, you’ll think if they're unique, and they're free thinking, then logically, there's no way that a hundred people in the room should think the same way and should come up with the same answer. It's not maths, it's not two plus two is four, then everybody will come up with four. But from their own experience of life, when they say well, “I'm stuck.” I ask, “why are you stuck?” They say, “because of this.” I say, “okay, and what are you gonna do about it?” They answer, “well, I've got to learn to do this.” But if you're stuck inside, how do you learn something about you on the outside? If you were stuck in a field in mud in the real world, then I can understand you being stuck. When you tell me you're stuck inside, that's not the real world. That's your world. You’re the god of your world. You're in control of your inside. If you process from freedom, accepting that the external world and the rules and regulations as they are, they are there to serve humanity, to create collaboration, and to create safety. But, when you take them inside and make them your internal rules that govern the factors that govern every breath and every heartbeat, every thought and every emotion, then the sense of freedom and purpose is tarnished. So my unique perspective of the world, possibly for years, is how to make sense of this, to the point that I took myself out of it for about seven years. Apart from getting my haircut and going to the dentist, I never didn't want it, it just became overwhelming. Because I could not have the same conversations over and over again and it'd be the same outcome. I don't read the papers, don't watch the news. If the news were unbiased, and left you to make your own mind up based on the information, then yes, I could see the sense in it. But to allow external information to go in and govern me, that I can’t do. It could be that some may perceive that I'm challenged by authority. But I respect authority, or respect order or respect safety, and just don't respect the valuation of something you can't put a price on. So my unique perspective of the world would be, how do you remove in many ways, the junk or the devaluation, the rubbish in life that's inside many of us to a point that the human being, the soul, the spirit of that person, can show up as their true self, and still have that linear learning, but understand that they are not their learning. They are not their experiences, they are not their emotions, they are not their beliefs or opinions. They are this unique spiritual beam that experiences their experiences, they're the ones that feel the breeze on their face, the breeze on their face is not them, they experienced the breeze. And we sort of calibrate it, and say, “because I failed at that or on this I got a low value from that, that I found very confusing. Nowadays, I've made sense of it. And I've developed in many ways, a process and a procedure of formula to neutralise it and to create that sense of freedom for others.

There's no authenticity in just showing up to please somebody else. But there's no authenticity and showing up to display somebody else either. You should have the freedom to express who you are in a positive, respectful, authentic manner. And if the other person disagrees with you, that's their entitlement. If all humans thought alike, then we would only need one human point of being. If I'm in a room with ten people and nine of us think alike, I find that very uneasy. If I'm in the room with ten people, and they all have a different opinion and agree on some points, not others, I find that normal. My experience is that if you've got ten people in the room, the majority always seem to have the same mindset. Some people will see that mindset to be positive. I prefer to set my mind rather than have my mind set. So my perspective of the world is very unique. That doesn't make me different or worth any more than anybody else. It's just my perspective of the world. I'm happy to be wrong. I'm not married to my opinion. I'm not here to prove myself. I'm not here to debate. I'm here to collaborate and communicate and to serve. If my words are heard in the negative, I can assure you they're meant with the greatest sincerity and to serve everybody who hears them to the highest standard.

Over those seven years, when you kind of went inwards, tell us about how you got out of that funk and back into being your true self.

Good question. The easiest way so I can tell you; it was a long journey, if I'm honest, long struggles with my mates. Why am I different from everybody else and questioning myself? How do you question yourself when you're one entity? And the light bulb moment, I suppose the aha moment, was what I call alignment, because truth to me, externally is a word. It's a word we've agreed on. That means it's a hundred percent. It's nothing other than the truth. The truth to me is something that you would say and would always remain the same from this moment, to the end of the universe. That's the truth to me. There's two types of truths. There's our truth and the truth, universal truth. Universal truth is you breathe you, I breathe for me, the sun will come up tomorrow. There are things that will remain the same all the time, like your life or your existence is here. Beliefs are not truths. How did I get that light bulb moment? It was when I stopped comparing myself to somebody else, when I stopped judging other people and stopped judging myself, when I realised that I cannot question myself, I'm one entity. I can question the data that's in my mind, I can articulate the data or I can reason the data. And thought is like a snowflake, you have thousands and millions of them. Thought means nothing. The reasoning behind your thinking, the articulation of your thinking, that substances of thought inside, where you articulate it, where it has a structure in your mind, where it has a process, and you know, with all certainty that you thought it through, and no human being, no god can ever change what you've thought. That's in mind; in spirit, or heart, or body as in guts, normally we feel it in our guts, we might feel stress in our body, but normally the gut is where we write the information to the biological hard drive. The heart is where we write the information to the emotional hard drive. Normally, around the solar plexus is where we put our spirit energy. So, the spirit has a hard drive, the gut has a hard drive, the heart has a hard drive, and the mind has a hard drive. This is just an external language. I don't really truthfully believe I have a hard drive inside me, of course.

Each drive processes differently. So, for example, a smartphone is not compatible with an iPhone and an Apple tablet will run different apps to say a Microsoft tablet. So, if you looked at it like that the emotional harddrive is, say an iPhone and an old Nokia phone is, let's say the biology, or the mind might be depending on how up to date your mind is. If you're a free thinker, your mind might be running Windows 10. Your gut is obviously the Nokia and your spirit is let’s say the phone charger, that gives energy to all of it. It processes that energy that the charger produces and this processing can have a dimmer switch on it that turns the flow of energy down, or increases it to full charge, fast charge. So, wherever we're writing our information, sometimes we feel it in our gut. That's where we feel it. But what sent the information, was in our mind, was it the way the information was delivered? So many perceive that the words I speak are my message? The words, in my opinion, are only the vessel that carries the message, the envelope that delivers the energy, the essence, the intention. That's why you can say one thing, and it can be interpreted a different way. I'm thinking of a number between one and ten, what is it? You can never guess accurately. So obviously another person does not know what I think and I do not know what another person thinks. I can utilize empathy and I can utilize my nonverbal skills. I can utilize all the information to assess what I think somebody is thinking. But accuracy? I don't know.

So how do you get from what some might say dark to light, from stuck to unstuck? How do you get that sense of free breaths? How do you get your chin up off the floor? How do you move yourself? How do you make sense of life, make sense of mind? How do you have that joy in life? How do you have that passion, that spirit in life? In my opinion, it’s one thing that brings all that together and that's the truth. The truth is not a word, externally it's a word, internally it's pure alignment. No part of your existence, since the dawn of your creation disagrees with it. Every harddrive is running on hundred percent data to align and when it aligns your spirit, your biology, your heart and your mind it’s in complete alignment. Now if you use a lie in the next breath, then it will go out of alignment. So if you say to somebody, “I really enjoyed that,” then what you're actually saying is “my heart felt that I liked it,” it is the right emotion. And if that's a lie, if another part of you is the you might have enjoyed it in your heart, but your mind may have thought they could have done it better then that's judgement. When you express it, you express it with not pure honesty, and the other person's biology, spirit, emotions and mind takes on the data. They take it on what some call subconsciously, it's only because we haven't got a language for the heart. Or for the spirit. We utilize thought words, external words as a language to segments, even for the ninety percent, the unconscious, that is below the surface. That's what we're using every day. When we drive the car, we might know the navigation system, the mind's thinking, but the hands and the feet, do everything you want and brake instantaneously without thought if something jumps out in front of you. The subconscious is fully aware. It just does not understand or compute a logical linear language. You communicate your subconscious, and you're doing it every second, every time you breathe. You can hold your breath, even though it's a biological programme. That means you can communicate to your subconscious. How do you get alignment? You just decide because every part of your existence is the door of creation, one that I accept myself as in whatever's gone before is not me. My experiences are things I've experienced, they are not myself, they are what I have experienced. The universe is not out to get me, life isn't hard. Is it as hard or as easy as I accept it or believe it to be. People aren't bad, they're put. In my mind, if you see the best in people, everybody shows up in a bad way sometimes, I have myself, but that isn't who they are, that's how they've shown up in that moment in that moment of time. To align is not to want to succeed but to find that integrity inside. But to get your integrity, in many ways, you must decide on the purpose and reason for having it. Many people want to be enlightened. For what purpose, for what reason? “Well, I want to be enlightened. What are you going to do once you are enlightened? Well, I don't know, I haven't thought about that.” There's no purpose for enlightenment. What change, what shifts, what difference do you want to make, how do you improve humanity? How are you going to improve the quality of life? How are you going to help feed the children who can't be fed? Bed the people that have no beds? How are you going to change the world for a better place, even if it's only your world, your community?

Look back at yourself and give advice to yourself. What would it be?

Absolutely nothing. I would put me on a steep learning curve. I've no regrets. Where I've been is where I've been, the only time machine I have is inside me. If I look back on my life, I wouldn't change a single thing.

Do people come in and ask for your advice? Or, how do you get them to the stages of where they realize their true selves?

That is a good question. I found that one to one that's quite easy. In a room full of people, maybe forty to sixty people, maybe hundred people, the number isn't the problem, it’s that sometimes when you're working one on one in front of a group, if something comes up, and you're doing stuff in real time, if you hear something in somebody that's restricting them or holding them back, the person you speak to hears you because your words are meant for them. The ones that listen in, the flies on the wall, the eavesdroppers, judge the communication, not the outcome, they judge the communication. So sometimes you have to ask people very honest questions. You're not interested in the answer. The question I speak to the person in front of me is not because I'm interested in the answer. I'm not doing a catalogue of their life; I ask them a question for them to get insight for them to move, for them to shift. If they answer externally, that might give me a little bit more data. Really, all I'm doing is removing the Trojan horse on the hard drive. I'm not interested in the Trojan horse, I'm not interested in their perception of the Trojan horse.

They say, “I think this” and then they give you a reason. “I think this because of this.” That's fine. I ask, “are you happy with that?” The answer is no. So, fair enough, “some what you think isn't serving you? Can we agree on that?” The answer is yes. I ask, “would you like to let go of the thing that's not serving you?” Whether that be mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual? The answer is yes. I say, “So, let's focus there. But I'm not sure I didn't ask for your assessment itself. That's your judgement of yourself in this moment, in the transition process, just focus on the outcome.”

Don't judge yourself in transition. I wouldn't imagine a rose that’s about to fully bloom judges how quick it opens, or how many petals it has, it just opens. When I get to watch sort of bloom it’s not because of me, the facilitator, it's because of them. Don't look for the new car, the new house, the new clothes, don't look for the recognition and the positivity from other people. You align inside. Everything you do, your success, will come from is an inside out process. I help people not to get in their own way. The truth will set you free, so long as you know the difference between the truth, a belief and a thought.

I want to say thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing with us. It's been a blast and a pleasure chatting with you.

Thank you very much Aron.