“Unfortunately, the education system in the West is built a little bit like a conveyor belt, like a mass production thing where we fire a shotgun of ideas at people and hope something grabs.”
Brebner’s career success, particularly as a public speaker, is staggering given how tumultuous his early years were.
While he had tics from around the age of seven, it was during early puberty that his Tourette’s really “went ballistic”, with a head twitch, involuntary noises, antisocial behaviour and compulsive throat clearing making him the target of bullies and ignorant teachers.
“In the early days, I was a real mess. When you’re shaking and twitching and yelling and barking like a dog, it’s hard to get a date, you know?” he told Cowan.
“A few teachers would put me up in front of the class because they thought I was doing it for attention or trying to just be silly. So it was very hard because I didn’t know what was wrong and nobody else knew what was wrong with me.”
Brebner developed an intense fear of people and anything that involved public exposure, and dropped out of school at 15. He spent two years in and out of a psychiatric unit before being enrolled in the New Zealand Rehabilitation League, a workshop for young people with disabilities.
It was here that he met a kindly retired aircraft engineer who taught Brebner how to work with metal, and it was this experience that helped him start to grow his confidence.
“One day he was showing me how to weld something, and then he said he had to go and asked me to finish it, which was like Obi-Wan Kenobi handing over a lightsabre to a young Jedi. I actually finished it well, and it was the first thing I ever finished.
“That was the change of mentality. Someone had come along and switched my mind around.”
As Brebner’s confidence in himself grew, over the following years he would go on to work many public-facing jobs, including in retail management, church youth ministry, the trades, and public speaking.
His philosophy now is simple: if you can’t hide something, make a feature of it.
“I have friends who have Tourette’s who have become reclusive because they’re worried about what people think. And then some of us are maniacs; we get out there, we just get through life,” he said.
“In different ways in our world, we’re starting to celebrate our differences. No brain in the world is the same as another, and the reality is that if I’m the same as somebody else, I’ve got nothing to offer anybody.
“It’s my difference I can offer people, not my sameness… and it’s our difference that really helps us grow.”
It’s these learnings he’s taken into his speaking and career coaching jobs. His modus operandi is to ask the people he’s working with to consider what they like doing when no one is telling them what to do.
“I ask, what turns your brain on? And then I look for the transferable skills for what they could do for a job.
“I tell them to analyse something they’re good at and think about how they learned that thing. What was the method? Because that could be a clue to how they learn overall.”
Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7.30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.
