Coaching for Communication Across Neurotypes

Coaching for Communication Across Neurotypes

Neurodivergent clients often have received feedback that they do not communicate well. This may look like an ADHDer who needs to share all of the context, an autistic person who does not read between the lines, or a gifted person who skips steps in their explanations.

In fact, when a group of common neurotypes is put in a room, so-called communication problems disappear, and neurodivergent people are able to communicate well with others who think like them. This exemplifies the double-empathy problem, the idea that neurodivergent people may be speaking a different language, in a way, than others.

Coaches who are not accustomed to neurodivergent thinking may find neurodivergent clients to be “too much” or “all over the place” because of their nonlinear thinking and communication. To coach neurodivergent clients, we must be able to follow their hops and skips in conversation and know when and how to ask clarifying questions that do not force them into linearity.

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

1. Understand the double-empathy problem and how it affects coaching
2. Ask questions to help bridge any double-empathy problem between you and your clients
3. Know when to bring a coaching challenge to your mentor or supervisor or refer to a specialist

Instructors:

Kate Arms, JD, CPCC, PCC

Kate Arms has been a professional coach for over a decade and has been mentoring and teaching coaching since 2016. From the very beginning, her coaching practice focused on coaching creators and innovators, twice-exceptional and profoundly gifted adults, and parents of twice-exceptional kids.

Her coaching work combines deep experience in the psychology of neurodiversity & collective innovation. She offers individual coaching and organizational coaching with a focus on culture-building and designing systems to support adaptive change that sticks.

She has trauma-informed training with specific focuses in improvisational dance and mindfulness practices.

On a personal level, she is highly-sensitive, profoundly gifted, queer, and agender with aphantasia, dyslexia, and traits of autism and ADHD but no formal diagnosis.

She is the parent of twice-exceptional kids (moderately gifted to profoundly gifted and combinations of autistic, ADHDer, written output learning disability, and dyslexia). She learned the hard way that standard parenting advice did not apply. Her book, L.I.F.T.: A Coach Approach to Parenting, reveals what did.

She holds a BA in Theatre and Biopsychology from Cornell University and a JD from Harvard Law School. She is credentialed as an International Coach Federation PCC, a certified ICAgile Expert in Enterprise Coaching, and a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach. She is a graduate of the Co-Active Leadership Program.

Tracy Winter, Ph.D., PCC

Tracy Winter has been a professional coach since 2009 and an ADHD coach mentor and trainer since 2021. Though she has coached executives and leaders, she is most passionate about coaching twice-exceptional people and other neurodivergent folks. She has coached people from 15 to 82 years old, including techies, scientists, attorneys, non-profit leaders, and housewives.

Tracy came to neurodiversity via giftedness, which has been part of her awareness since she was four years old. Her doctoral research focused on the social-emotional development of highly gifted adults. In the midst of her dissertation, she was also diagnosed as ADHD, and began learning about twice-exceptionality and neurodiversity.

Her coaching approach is bespoke for each client but is based in adult development models and an understanding of how neurodivergent brains can manifest differently from the norm and from each other. Because each client has a unique brain, she partners with her clients to co-create unique paths to their unique solutions, moving them from where they are to where they want to be.

Personally, Tracy is highly gifted, an ADHDer, highly sensitive, and experiences characteristics of autism without a formal diagnosis. Her father, sister, nephew, and closest friends all are highly gifted and ADHDers.

Tracy earned a PhD in Human Development, an MA in Human and Organization Systems, and an Evidence-Based Coaching Certificate from Fielding Graduate University. She is credentialed as a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation (ICF). She also trains and mentors new coaches at the International ADHD Coach Training Center and provides leadership development for Tesla and coaching services for The Doerr Institute at Rice University. And she can jumprope tapdance.

Event Venue

Online