Dyslexia and motivation: 4 ways to beat slump season this year!

The version of ourselves who stood under the fireworks on New Year’s Eve and vowed to work smarter and achieve our career goals this year? Yeah, we don’t know them anymore.

(A surprising amount of you don’t, either. Although 1 in 5 of us makes a New Year’s resolution to improve our career, it’s also ranked as one of the resolutions most likely to be abandoned).

April is the beginning of slump season in the corporate world, and January’s motivation has thoroughly worn off. Q1’s goals have become Q2’s deliverables, and all of a sudden it’s Tuesday morning and you’re sitting at your laptop wondering about selling your house and starting a van life Instagram.  You used to enjoy work— so what’s happened?

Dyslexia can make working motivation quite complicated.

It’s normal for motivation to wax and wane, but dyslexia can make low periods feel lower. It’s about cognitive load: if you’re exhausted after reading an email, how can you feel ready to smash a new project out of the park? It can easily get to a stage where we develop a bare-minimum mindset, ensuring that work is passable but abandoning hopes of excelling, creating new relationships, or progressing. But it can go the other way, too.

Many folks who have dyslexia experience impostor syndrome at work, and this can manifest as an excess of motivation to prove themselves. These intense expectations and long hours aren’t easy to sustain, and can lead to stress, burnout and disengagement, especially if we feel that those efforts have gone unnoticed or we lack the motivation to finish them.

So what can we do to find a middle way where we don’t lose sight of our goals or put our mental health at risk?

4 ways to work happier and beat the slump this year!

1.  Small steps are just as important as huge leaps. 🪜

Little wins are wins too, and all too often we don’t celebrate them enough. You may not have made manager this year like you planned, but you did implement a new system, make a big sale and developed better work-life balance… and that’s worth a party! Motivation is easier to maintain when we give ourselves milestones along the way, and celebrate them for the achievements they are.

2. Be honest in your reviews and one-to-ones. 📝

Opening up might be scary, but you can’t be fired for saying you’re lacking a little mental oomph. Starting these conversations can open the door to diversifying your role, increasing your compensation (which let’s face it, can be very motivating), as well as interrogating if your reasonable adjustments and reading support are working as hard as you need them to.

3. Tackle the background noise! 🔊

Are there annoying, reading-heavy tasks you’ve been putting off for months? Requesting isolated time to tackle them can be a solid way of feeling more in control, worrying less, and being able to dedicate your innovative and creative thinking to big projects. It’s easier to give things 100% when we don’t have dozens of small, stressful jobs buzzing away in our mental background.

4. Is it just time to get going? ⌚

When you’ve got dyslexia it's sometimes easy to feel that you should be ‘grateful for having a job at all’ or that you somehow fluked into it, but nothing could be further from the truth: that’s just our old pal impostor syndrome rearing its ugly head again. In actuality, your skills are real, your happiness is important, and if you think you might find Mondays easier elsewhere then it’s time to polish up your CV.

How have you found staying motivated this year— are you ready for annual leave, sleepily riding out the slump, or are you still switched on and raring to go?

Let us know how you really feel about work in the comments below…