August 2026: ‘What diving deeper into neurodiversity did for me (and what it might change for you!)’

Your Monthly All Personal Leadership News is here, now with audio, too!
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This month I want to share a book I recently finished reading: The Power of Neurodiversity by Thomas Armstrong. I’ve been passionate about this topic for a while now, so I decided to dive deeper into it.
This particular book has been the most powerful read on it so far. It made me rethink how I design workshops, eLearning, and entire development programs. How I coach. How I interact with people.
It also helped me understand why I learn, work, and interact the way I do.
Here’s one of the lines I starred (and there were so many!):
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
George Bernard Shaw
What ideas does this spark for you?
What it did for me was create more questions that I wanted to turn to you:
1. If you design learning:
How do you design for different brains, not just one, sync or async?
For example, I still think about a session I sat in where the facilitator offered breakout rooms and then said, ‘if you don’t want to join one, that’s okay, stay here if that’s what you need to make sense of the information and think it through’.
I thought this is such a great example of how we can give people choice based on how their brain actually works, not how we assume it works.
2. If you coach:
Have you coached neurodivergent people? Would you even know you have?
Unless someone tells me, I don’t always know. This book made me realize I carry a lot of ADHD traits myself, and it explained a lot about how I learn, work, and function at my best and at my worst.
3. If you lead (formally or not):
Even if you don’t have the authority but you’re leading a project or influencing stakeholders, you’re still leading.
How do you communicate, not just for one brain?
Let’s expand that: how do you collaborate with people whose brain is different than yours? Because basically, that’s everybody.:)
Here’s an example: in a Zoom meeting, we often assume someone isn’t engaged because they’re not saying anything. But a lot of divergent thinkers are actually extremely engaged, profoundly thinking about what’s being discussed, they just need more time to process and come up with a perspective they see as valuable.
The question I keep sitting with: how do you create an environment that gives people the choice to contribute in a way that makes sense to them?Game On: reply below to share your views, ideas, perspectives!
Lead different – Lead for All Brains!


