Neurodiversity Coaching
Muhammad Ali
Neurodiversity coaching helps you develop strategies that will make lighter work of life and work
If managing a heavy workload and juggling both work and personal responsibilities is stressful and challenging for any leader, manager or business owner, it’s a whole other thing when you add ADHD or another neurodivergence into the mix.
Your brain may have been well designed for strategic, big-picture thinking.
You may have great verbal dexterity, be brilliant at building relationships and have the ability to understand and synthesize complex issues and come up with creative solutions to the most challenging of problems.
In fact, whether you’re aware of them or not, you probably have natural leadership qualities that others would give their eye-teeth to have (and spend years developing without it ever feeling as natural as it does to you).
But when you struggle with things that others find so straightforward, especially when colleagues don’t “get it”, you can end up working extra-long hours just to keep up, and feeling a whole bag of shame, disappointment and frustration at yourself.Not to mention feeling exhausted, stressed and totally out of control.
The kinds of things I’m talking about include:
Getting yourself and your stuff to places on time
Keeping track of conversations in meetings and being able to input to those meetings in the way you want to
Being able to produce reports and documentation in a timely way
Just getting on with the task you’d intended to do today
Meeting deadlines without having to work all night at the last minute
Navigating work relationships and boundaries without sending your anxiety soaring to the rafters
If you want to make lighter work of your success at work, working WITH your neurodiversity rather than trying to fight it, I’d love to help!
How Coaching Can Help
Neurodiversity coaching is predominantly designed to help you develop strategies (I like to think of them as enabling strategies, rather than coping strategies – which is how they’re most commonly referred to), that make doing the difficult things easier.
As well as helping you understand your particular neurodiversity better, and ensuring you’re aware of and able to use the neurodiverse strengths you have to your best advantage, the kinds of areas we might work on together are:
- Organisation – whether that’s organising yourself, your time or your stuff (or any combination of those!)
- Time management – dealing with the impact of time blindness, disorganisation, forgetfulness or difficulties with prioritisation
- Overcoming procrastination so you can get things started and get more done
- Maintaining concentration and focus, and avoiding distraction
- Managing and avoiding overwhelm, stress and burnout
- Producing written work more effectively – whether that’s presentations, reports or other documentation
- Improving challenges with communication
- Developing positive routines or habits
- Improving sleep and the ability to switch off and relax
The aim of neurodiversity coaching is not to get you working like someone neurotypical (which is neither possible nor going to be much fun!). It is to get you working at your neurodiverse best, doing things your way, with your unique thinking style. Together, we’ll find the strategies that work best for your brain, so that you can achieve the same outcomes as those you admire… even if you achieve them in a different way.
There’s more about how neurodiversity coaching works in this article.
Being dyspraxic, I have lived experience of being a neurodiverse leader.
I’ve experienced the bewilderment and frustration of colleagues who loved my ability to make inspiring presentations, come up with creative solutions and understand the complexities of really challenging business problems, yet couldn’t get to meetings on time and had almost always forgotten my pen or my notes when I did get there.
I’ve felt the fatigue of working long hours because complete time blindness meant I constantly over-committed myself and underestimated how long things would take.
And the frustration of taking longer to do things than others seemed to – things like the length of time taken to write a presentation that seems so straightforward to deliver in my head, but which I know will become a rambling mess on the day if it’s not well prepared – and never mind the difficulty of nailing down the order of information and exactly what needs to go on the accompanying slides, when I know I won’t be able to stick to any kind of script!
Since 2017 I have coached well over a hundred individuals with a range of neurodiverse conditions (including ADHD, dyslexia, ASD and acquired neurodiversities as a result of chronic pain conditions and brain injuries), supporting them to develop strategies that make lighter work of succeeding at work – and in life.
My neurodiverse clients have included C-Suite execs, doctors, managers, lawyers, accountants, school teachers and university professors… and everything in between.
Neurodiversity coaching can support you to develop enabling strategies that enhance your work, your life or both, and is suitable whether you’ve been diagnosed with a particular condition or not. I always take you as you are and work with your individual strengths and challenges, whatever they may be, to help you live and work at your best.
I work with both individuals and organisations, and some clients have had their coaching funded by Access to Work – I can help you work out whether this might be relevant or possible for you and potentially help you navigate the process, if you’d like to talk that through.
