Most people identify dyslexic children and people by their weak points and their shortcomings. Things like being slow readers, bad spellers, struggling with writing, mixing up our words or letters and not comprehending what we read. What if we changed how we looked at people with dyslexia and started finding them based on their strengths? Here is a fun fact for you, the right side of the brain in people with dyslexia is larger! Because the right side of our brain is larger we tend to have a mix of the following strengths: art, athletics, music, empathy, and people skills because we are pretty sensitive. We are often highly intuitive, and have good mechanical skills and good logic. We are problem solvers, and some of us are able to visualize things in 3-D form! We can be extremely curious, and we are super creative. Do you recognize these things in your life? You don’t have to be dyslexic to be good at these things, but we often excel at one or more of these things, even more than most people. I know that I am super creative and I love music in the forms of both playing the piano and listening to music! Dancing is my preferred choice of athleticism, I absolutely adore dancing ❤ and I have been told that my people skills are very strong. 

Here is something else that may interest you, have you ever tried to learn another language? People with dyslexia often have a lot of difficulty with learning a second language as we even struggle to read and spell English. If you can prove that you have dyslexia some colleges will not make you learn a traditional foreign language, instead they will have you learn American Sign Language. ASL works really well with the dyslexic brain because it is hands on and easier for us to grasp. When I learned this, I thought it was fascinating, as I had already been learning ASL and found it so easy to learn!

 People with dyslexia, including myself, have struggles and are not always the best at school unless we hear it or do something hands-on, but we are not less intelligent and we have other strengths that prove our intelligence. We can be good at school though, with the proper teaching and instruction. That sounds like another good topic to write about… Maybe next time! What are your strengths? 

Till the next post,

Johanna