How Overcoming Learning Disabilities Can Boost Your Career

(excerpt from New York Post feature article by David Rottman)

What do these three people have in common:

–The lawyer whose office looks like a cyclone has just hit. Memos and telephone messages are scattered on the floor and under the desk. Files rest precariously on top of the lamps. Most dangerously, contracts perch on the edge of the waste basket. Everyone who sits in his office can’t help wondering if those contracts might just slide in. Although he is bright and well liked, no one views this lawyer as a contender for top management. He is simply too disorganized.

–The woman who dreams of being a social worker, but can’t find the shampoo at the supermarket. She knows where the bread and milk are, but if she wants to buy something special, she often leaves the store without it. “Shampoo?” says the stock boy, “that’s three aisles over, on the right side, on the fifth shelf.” She looks carefully on the left side, on the fifth shelf, and then on the third and fourth and sixth shelves and then in the second aisle and then the fourth aisle and finally she gives up…not just on the shampoo, but also on the idea of driving a car and on her dream of pursuing a career in social work.

–The middle manager who always protests that he has “too much on his plate.” The stress of overwork leaves him exhausted. Today he leaves a team meeting with no clear recollection of what he should do as a result of the long and complicated discussion. Because he is conscientious, he calls up a co-worker after the meeting and asks “Was I supposed to be doing a memo on that new project, or was it you?” His co-worker’s response is kindly (“I believe it was you”), but the middle manager has reinforced his already blemished reputation as a poor listener. His opportunities for career advancement are sabotaged by the fact that everyone thinks he overreacts to pressure and that he is just a bit “slow.”

Without knowing it, each of these three people suffers from career-limiting learning disabilities. All three can be helped to overcome the spatial, motor, visual, and auditory perceptual difficulties that underlie their problems, according to Motke Pomerantz, founder and director of Manhattan’s PerDev Perceptual Development Center.

Perceptual problems can result in difficulties with writing, thinking, verbal expression, organizing, problem solving, math functions, and even creative expression.

“Many times people simply adjust to living with this kind of frustration and lack of enjoyment in their careers,” says Pomerantz. “Frequently these kind of organizational and perceptual difficulties can be improved, and many times eliminated, by working through a process of developmental perceptual therapy.”

The lawyer, for example, has a problem with visual memory. He leaves the files, contracts and papers in view because he is frightened that he won’t be able to find them if they are out of sight. When he began treatment at PerDev, he was unable to reproduce a simple four block design from memory. However he could perform at a high level if the designs were placed in front of him as cues. After undergoing a program designed to retrain his visual memory, he was able to clean up his office and keep it organized on a permanent basis. The sense of triumph at overcoming a lifelong problem was a huge morale booster that reenergized his career.

The would-be social worker has a problem with spatial orientation. As a child, she had difficulty reading. “What does it mean to read? You must look from left to right, then you must go from one line to the next and the next. At the most basic level, that’s spatial orientation and if a child has a problem with it, she will have difficulty not just with reading but with orienting herself in space as a adult,” says Pomerantz.

PerDev treats children as well as adults, and Pomerantz maintains that career-limiting perceptual difficulties can always be traced back to a failure to negotiate so-called “normal” stages of childhood perceptual development. His pioneering method begins by working with a patient’s least developed mode of functioning and then raising it to the next level.

As a result, the would-be social worker had to undergo a process of “educating” her motor and spatial functioning at the level of a five year old. She even had to learn to walk and skip in sequence. After graduating from the PerDev program, she went on to social work school and is now employed in her dream vocation.

As for the middle manager, he has a problem with “auditory-visual synchronization.” When he sits in meetings, he has difficulty processing what goes in through his ears (“John, would you do this one?”) with simultaneous visual information from hand-outs and slides. As a child, he experienced great difficulties in comprehension when the teacher spoke her instructions at the board. “Because he lacks the perceptual ability to synchronize the speed of reading with the different speed of listening, he gets lost,” says Pomerantz. The middle manager’s treatment program focused on connecting visual images to auditory information. For example, he had to learn to form a mental picture of numbers when they were read out to him by a PerDev therapist. The result of completing his treatment program was a profound reduction in stress, and a new level of confidence in his abilities.

“People who don’t realize they have perceptual problems often think they should switch careers,” says Pomerantz. “Very often the problems can be traced to childhood perceptual development, and then there is a good chance that perceptual treatment will bring new potential into the career.”