Life Changing

My name is Mark Alexander,
I grew up in a small southwest Queensland town with a population that always seems to sit around 3,000. From memory, very early primary school was okay and It was not until around Year 4 or 5 that the difficulties started to come to light.

My year 7 teacher was the first person to see it and she was also the last. One day she asked me, “When you look at a page in a book, what do you see?” I remember looking at her, confused and she gently repeated, “Just tell me what you see.”

“I see rivers,” I replied. The black words seem to melt into puddles and all I see are the gaps between the sentences and paragraphs like rivers. That was it, nothing more was ever said.

Maths was extremely difficult and foreign for me and my mother always argued with my teachers that I should have been in the higher-level English class but I was always placed in the lower level. Her argument was simple, he reads beautifully, he can pronounce the big words and knows what they mean. The teachers agreed, but their answer was always the same: “Yes, he can read the words and read beautifully, but Mark is not comprehending what he is reading.”

By the time I was 29, I was working for Queensland Rail, ambitious, but I held myself back, I could appear confident, but that confidence could disappear quickly because I would recall all the embarrassing moments from school and how stupid and dumb I had felt. My thinking was simple: do not stand out; do not put a target on yourself. It’s is funny how I was often perceived as confident, while internally I was constantly criticising myself.

That is the part of this that nobody sees or fully understands. No expert or parent can truly understand how deeply internalised it becomes or how harsh you become on yourself, because you do not want to be different. Being good at something brings praise. Not being good at something, especially academics, brings ridicule, as most adults know, school can be a harsh place and kids can be brutal.

One day at work, during a general conversation, a colleague told me about his nephew, who was attending the Allison Lawson Clinic in New South Wales for dyslexia treatment. I asked him a million questions about the clinic and his nephew’s symptoms and they sounded very similar to mine.

I immediately made inquiries and booked in, I took two weeks’ holiday, borrowed a caravan from a mate, packed up my then partner – now my wife – and we travelled from Toowoomba in Queensland to Moss Vale. (That trip is a great story for another time).

The two weeks I spent with Allison were great. She reminded me of my great grandmother, who I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time with. Allison was direct but she went about everything lovingly and made it clear what was expected.

Life went on and I didn’t dwell too much on the treatment, but things started to change, my comprehension improved, my confidence grew and I wanted to attend as much training as I was allowed. Eventually I interviewed for and was successful in a supervisor’s role leading a very large team with a $2.3 million payroll and $4.2 million worth of machinery, from there, I have not looked back.

My career has taken me all over Australia and New Zealand as a supervisor, superintendent and funnily enough a trainer and assessor. I am now 54 and we have been running our own business for the last two years or so, we run a small rail company, provide training and consulting as well as starting our own Registered Training Organisation.

Training people I find is easy, because I know how I felt when I was being taught, so I know how to treat people and help them. When I see people struggling, I tell them my story, I tell them about the Allison Lawson Clinic and what it did for me.

I have absolutely no doubt that Allison’s treatment changed my life forever and I have never stopped telling people about my experience and what it did for my life.