Speaking, workshops, & partnerships on neurodiversity at work

This training can be delivered as a standalone session or as part of the three-session Core Workplace Series.

Every workplace includes people who think, communicate, process, and work differently. This introductory session gives employees, managers, and teams a shared language for understanding neurodiversity and why it matters in the workplace. 

Depending on your organization’s needs, the session can include more focus on workplace communication, sensory access, masking, burnout, capacity, manager support, or team collaboration.

Your audience will learn:

• What neurodiversity, neurodivergence, neurotypical, neuronormative, masking, stimming, and executive functioning mean

• The history of the neurodiversity movement and why self-advocacy matters

• Common differences in attention, sensory processing, communication, and information processing

• How workplace norms can create barriers without anyone intending to

• Practical ways colleagues and managers can support different approaches to work. 

Shared language gives teams a better starting point for noticing barriers earlier, responding more effectively, and creating more sustainable ways of working.

Interested in a deeper engagement? This session can be part of a three-session series, that includes Understanding Your Neurodivergent Capacity for employees and Supporting Neurodivergent Capacity in the Workplace for managers and leaders.

Workplace practices often assume that people have steady access to the same energy every day. For many neurodivergent professionals, energy varies with sensory, cognitive, emotional, social, and physical demands. Understanding those patterns can help people plan their work and recognize when they need to adjust.

This employee-focused session helps participants notice how their capacity changes across different demands and use that knowledge to plan more sustainably at work. Focusing particularly on ADHD and autistic experiences, this session will cover how we spend our energy across various demands, why energy fluctuates, and how to build recovery into the workweek to reduce overwhelm and exhaustion.

Your audience will learn:

• How energy is spent across different demands, and why capacity changes across time.

• Alexithymia and the challenge of recognizing emotional and bodily signals.

• Early signs of overload, shutdown, and burnout

• How to plan work around changing energy and capacity

• Recovery strategies and supports to use when early signs of exhaustion appear

Employees leave better equipped to make effective choices about how they approach work and ways to sustain their performance over time.

Want to go deeper? Pair this session with Supporting Neurodivergent Capacity in the Workplace, the companion session for managers and leaders.

Managers shape many of the demands employees navigate each day, from workload and competing priorities to meetings and communication expectations. Understanding how those demands impact capacity helps managers make practical adjustments that support consistent, sustainable work.

This manager-and leader-focused session helps participants examine how they assign, pace, and communicate work. Focusing particularly on ADHD and autistic experiences, it shows how managers can make expectations clearer, reduce unnecessary demands, and work with employees to find adjustments that help them perform their best.

Your audience will learn:

• Why the same work process can create different demands on neurodivergent employees

• How neurodivergent capacity can change across the workweek, and how managers can respond

• Signs of overload, exhaustion, and burnout at work

• How to distinguish essential outcomes from processes that can vary

• Discussing support needs with employees, while keeping goals and expectations clear

Managers leave with practical ways to support neurodivergent employees and create conditions for sustainable participation and performance.

Want to go deeper? Pair this session with Understanding Your Neurodivergent Capacity at Work, the companion session for employees.

Work can be a place where curiosity, intelligence, detail orientation, and intensity are rewarded. But often only when such traits are presented in ways the workplace recognizes as “professional.”

This session explores the ongoing work of monitoring, adapting, and often hiding parts of oneself to meet workplace expectations as part of impression management. ADHD and autistic masking can drain energy, affect identity and belonging, and distort perceptions of capability.

Your audience will learn:

• What ADHD and autistic masking can look like at work and why it often goes unnoticed

• How unwritten rules of professionalism shape whose competence is recognized

• The masking cost of suppressing natural ways of moving, communicating, and working

• How leaders can reduce pressure to mask while maintaining clear standards for the work
  Organizations leave better equipped to recognize hidden effort and assess employees by the quality of their work, rather than by how closely they match a preferred image of professionalism.

Want to go deeper? Pair it with the workshop Burnout: What Happens When Work Becomes the Whole Story?

For ADHD and autistic professionals, work can provide structure, recognition, and meaning. But when professional identity becomes the main path for self-value and belonging, work can also absorb the rest of life and contribute to burnout.

This guided reflection workshop explores how professional identity is shaped by workplace expectations, adaptation, masking, and belonging. Participants choose one significant work chapter and examine what work rewarded and required, and how those expectations affected their identity at work and beyond.

Participants will learn

• Which workplace expectations shaped their professional identity

• What adaptations and performances they used to belong and succeed at work

• How masking and self-monitoring affect energy and capacity

• At what point work identity starts to replace personal identity, making burnout harder to recognize

• What participants want work to mean in their lives moving forward

The session includes guided teaching, quiet solo reflection, and optional sharing.

Participants leave with

• A completed or clearly started workbook chapter

• A more integrated view of how work identity impacts work-life balance

• A clearer sense of what they want to change, protect, or carry forward

This workshop helps organizations support sustainable performance without making overextension the price of succeeding and belonging.

Want a shared starting point? Pair this workshop with the ADHD and Autistic Masking at Work talk.

Workplaces are culturally and neurologically diverse, but inclusion efforts often treat culture and neurodivergence as separate conversations.

This advanced session examines how cultural expectations and neurodivergent differences interact at work, shaping communication, self-advocacy, and perceptions of competence.

Since cultural expectations vary across organizations, this content is tailored to the audience and workplace context.

Your audience will learn

• How workplace culture may be experienced differently based on an employee’s cultural background and neurodivergence

• Common ways cultural and neurodivergent differences can be misread, and how leaders can respond more accurately

• How to recognize when workplace norms and assumptions obscure an employee’s skills, performance, or potential

• Practical ways to create more inclusive conditions for culturally and neurologically diverse employees

Understanding these dynamics gives organizations a clearer basis for responding to employee differences and creating flexibility within shared workplace expectations.

Want to go deeper? Pair it with How Do Cultural Rules Shape Who We Become?

For neurodivergent employees, cultural expectations can influence which personal traits are recognized, hidden, or misread. Revisiting those expectations can help them separate who they are from the roles they learned to perform, creating a clearer understanding of their past and present identity.

This guided reflection workshop explores how family, community, and social expectations shape identity and belonging. Participants choose one significant life chapter and examine the cultural rules they encountered, where they felt aligned or misaligned, and what they can see now with the language they have.

Participants will learn

• What cultural expectations shaped how they understood themselves

• Where they felt aligned or misaligned with those expectations

• How neurodivergent traits may have been hidden, misread, or treated as character flaws

• What becomes visible when they revisit that chapter with the language they have now

The workshop combines guided teaching, quiet solo reflection, and optional sharing. Participants are never required to disclose more than they want to.

Participants leave with

• A completed or clearly started workbook chapter

• New language for patterns they have noticed but could not name

• A framework for continuing the reflection privately

This workshop helps organizations support cultural and neurological diversity by making the rules of participation and belonging more visible.

Want a shared starting point? Pair this workshop with the Neurodivergence and Cultural Inclusion at Work talk.

The most effective teams bring together different ways of thinking, communicating, and working to improve decisions, reveal blind spots, and spark creative solutions.

Conflict research helps us understand when differences improve teamwork and when they begin to slow a team down. Drawing on conflict research, lived experience, and a neuro-affirming perspective, this session explores how teams can work effectively with differences in communication and working styles.

Your audience will learn:

• How people process, express, and interpret communication differently

• When disagreement strengthens decisions, creativity, and collaboration

• How power, assumptions, and expectations affect whose ideas are heard

• How to recognize a communication mismatch without assuming bad intent

Understanding the productive role of difference helps teams preserve efficiency and creativity while building the shared understanding needed for effective collaboration.