Twenty Years as a Neurodiversity Specialist

What I wish I had said sooner

A neurodiversity specialist reflects on two decades supporting neurodivergent people at work and what she discovered about herself along the way.

I started working in neurodiversity when I was twenty-three. I did not know that then, of course. I just knew I had found the work that made sense to me. Over the next two decades I would train thousands of HR professionals, lead hiring programmes across Europe, secure over a million pounds in employment funding, and spend fifteen years coaching neurodivergent individuals from their first job to senior leadership.

What I did not know until I was thirty-five, sitting in a pandemic with a newborn and completely unravelling, was that I was neurodivergent myself.

I have spent a long time thinking about what that means. About what it felt like to be the expert in the room on a subject I was living without knowing it. And about what twenty years on both sides of this conversation has taught me.

Here is what I wish I could go back and say, to the employees who sat across from me, and to the employers I tried to help.

What I wish neurodivergent employees knew about support at work

You are not the problem

I have supported hundreds of neurodivergent adults who came to me believing something was fundamentally broken in them. They had failed to keep up. Failed to stay organised. Failed to perform in ways that felt effortless for everyone else. They had tried every system, every planner, every productivity method. And when those things did not work, they concluded the fault was theirs.

It is not. The systems were not designed for your brain. The workplaces were not designed for your brain. Even most of the coaching out there was not designed for your brain.

But here is what I also know: understanding that does not automatically fix things. Knowing you are neurodivergent, whether you have a formal diagnosis or not, is just the beginning. The work that comes after is the part that actually changes things.

Your workplace performance does not exist in isolation

Every single client I have ever worked with who was struggling at work was also struggling somewhere else. Their sleep was broken. Their home environment was overwhelming. Their relationships were strained. Their sense of identity had taken a battering.

And yet the ADHD coaching or support they had received, if they had received any, focused entirely on work. On time management. On communication skills. On how to sit in a meeting without their leg bouncing.

Work strategies only stick when the whole person is understood first. I have seen this again and again. You cannot build a scaffolding for someone's professional life when the foundations underneath it are cracked. This is the thing I wish I had said more clearly, more often, earlier in my career.

You do not need a diagnosis to deserve support

Formal diagnosis in this country is slow, expensive, and often inaccessible. I understand the weight of not having a piece of paper that confirms what you have always known about yourself.

But the absence of a diagnosis does not mean the absence of need. If you are struggling, at work, at home, in relationships, in your own head, you deserve support. Full stop.

What I wish employers knew about neurodiversity in the workplace

Compliance is not inclusion

I have delivered neurodiversity training to thousands of HR professionals and managers. Most of them were well-intentioned. Many of them left those sessions feeling informed and motivated. And then they went back to organisations where the culture had not changed, the processes had not changed, and the neurodivergent employees still felt like they were asking for too much.

A one-day awareness session does not change a culture. A policy document does not change a culture. What changes a culture is sustained, practical, personalised support, for managers and for employees together.

Adjustments fail when they are generic

The most common question I get from HR teams is: what reasonable adjustments should we be offering neurodivergent employees? And I understand why they want a list. Lists feel manageable. Lists feel like progress.

But a reasonable adjustment that helps one autistic employee concentrate might be exactly wrong for another. An ADHD employee who thrives with flexibility around hours might need something completely different from a colleague with dyspraxia who finds unstructured time overwhelming.

The adjustment has to follow the person. And to follow the person, you have to actually understand them. That means creating the conditions where neurodivergent employees can share what they need, without fear, without a lengthy medical process, without having to justify themselves.

Your neurodivergent employees are not a diversity box to tick

Twenty years ago, neurodiversity barely existed as a concept in the workplace. Today it is everywhere, in DEI strategies, in recruitment campaigns, in company values statements.

That visibility matters. But it can also become performative. I have seen organisations celebrate neurodiversity awareness month and make a neurodivergent employee redundant in the same quarter. I have seen hiring initiatives that welcome neurodivergent candidates into workplaces that cannot retain them.

Inclusion is not what you say. It is what you do after the awareness session ends.

What twenty years as a neurodiversity specialist taught me about myself

I carry the stories. The client who had been told by three separate managers that she was not trying hard enough. The senior leader who had built an entire career on masking and came to me when he had nothing left. The young woman who cried in our first session because no one had ever asked her what her day actually felt like before trying to fix it.

I also carry my own story. The girl who failed her maths test at nine and was told she was not working hard enough. The woman who spent two decades becoming an expert in other people's neurological differences without recognising her own. The moment, at thirty-five, when everything I thought I knew about myself shifted.

That shift changed how I work. It changed what I ask clients. It changed what I say to organisations. It made me better at this. Not because lived experience is more valuable than professional expertise, but because having both means I can hold both sides of this conversation at once.

Twenty years in neurodiversity. A lifetime of lived experience. That is what Seren is built on.

 Ready to talk?

Whether you are an individual who finally wants to feel like yourself, or an organisation that wants to go beyond compliance into real inclusion, I would love to hear from you.

Book a free 30-minute discovery call at seren-neurodiversity.co.uk