Working With Adults

Neurodivergence doesn’t disappear when we reach adulthood.

For many neurodivergent adults, particularly those who have been diagnosed or begun questioning their neurodivergence later in life, adulthood can bring years of accumulated exhaustion, self-doubt and confusion.

You may have spent years wondering:

“Why do things seem to take so much more effort for me?”

“Why can I cope brilliantly one day and feel completely overwhelmed the next?”

“Why do I procrastinate on something that I genuinely want to do?”

“Why do I need so much recovery time after work or socialising?”

“Why am I successful in some areas of my life but struggle with seemingly basic everyday tasks?”

“Who am I underneath all the masking?”

These are conversations I regularly explore through 1:1 neurodiversity coaching.

My role isn’t to tell you how you should function or teach you to become more neurotypical. Instead, we work collaboratively to understand how your individual brain works, what creates barriers for you, what helps you regulate and what practical changes could make everyday life feel more manageable.

Understanding Your Individual Neurodivergent Profile

No two Autistic or ADHD adults are the same.

You may have a formal diagnosis, be awaiting assessment, be exploring whether you could be neurodivergent, or already understand your neurodivergence but want practical support with specific areas of your life.

Coaching can help you explore how neurodivergence affects areas such as:

Executive functioning – task initiation, procrastination, planning, organisation, prioritising, working memory and completing tasks.

Time management and time blindness – estimating how long things will take, arriving on time, transitioning between activities and managing deadlines.

Attention and focus – distractibility, hyperfocus, difficulty switching attention and understanding the conditions your brain needs in order to concentrate.

Sensory processing – recognising sensory triggers, sensory seeking, overload and the impact of sound, light, touch, movement, temperature, smell and internal body signals.

Emotional regulation – understanding intense emotions, overwhelm, frustration, shutdowns and the relationship between your nervous system and your ability to cope.

Masking and camouflaging – recognising how much energy may be spent monitoring yourself, suppressing natural responses or trying to meet social expectations.

Rejection sensitivity and people-pleasing – exploring patterns around criticism, perceived rejection, boundaries, conflict and the need for approval.

Demand avoidance and task paralysis – understanding why even things you want to do can sometimes feel impossible when they become demands.

Communication and relationships – recognising your communication style, expressing your needs, navigating misunderstandings and developing healthier boundaries.

Routines and transitions – balancing the Autistic need for predictability with the ADHD need for stimulation, novelty and flexibility.

Interoception and self-care – recognising signals such as hunger, thirst, tiredness, pain, stress and the need to use the toilet before they become overwhelming.

When Autism and ADHD Meet

Understanding AuDHD

For adults with both Autism and ADHD, life can sometimes feel contradictory.

You might desperately need routine but struggle to maintain one.

You may crave predictability while simultaneously becoming bored by repetition.

You might want an organised environment but find the executive functioning required to create and maintain it incredibly difficult.

You may need quiet because of sensory sensitivity while also needing background stimulation in order to concentrate.

You may plan everything carefully and then suddenly make an impulsive decision.

This is why generic advice doesn’t always work.

Through coaching, we can begin to understand these apparent contradictions rather than treating them as failures.

The question becomes less:

“Why can’t I just do this?”

and more:

“What does my brain need in order to make this easier?”

That change in perspective can be incredibly powerful.

Late Diagnosis, Masking & Rediscovering Who You Are

Being identified as neurodivergent in adulthood can bring a mixture of emotions.

There may be relief and validation, but there can also be grief, anger, confusion and a period of looking back at your life through an entirely different lens.

You may begin recognising how much you have masked.

You may question which parts of you are genuinely you and which behaviours developed because you learned that they were expected of you.

As someone who was diagnosed later in life myself, I understand how significant this process can be.

Coaching can provide a safe, non-judgemental space to explore your neurodivergent identity, recognise patterns from your past and begin developing a way of living that requires less constant masking and self-monitoring.

The aim isn’t necessarily to suddenly “unmask” everywhere.

Instead, we can explore where you feel safe, what masking costs you, what your boundaries are and what authenticity looks like for you.

Neurodivergent Burnout & Overwhelm

Some adults come to coaching because the strategies that allowed them to cope for years suddenly aren’t working anymore.

Work, parenting, relationships, caring responsibilities, sensory demands and the constant executive functioning required by adult life can gradually exceed a person’s capacity.

This can sometimes present as increased sensory sensitivity, reduced tolerance for demands, difficulty communicating, emotional overwhelm, exhaustion, loss of skills or needing significantly more recovery time.

Coaching can help you identify your personal patterns of overload and recognise earlier warning signs.

Together, we can look at what is taking energy from you, what helps replenish it and where expectations, environments, routines or responsibilities may need to change.

Rather than continually asking:

“How can I push myself harder?”

we can start asking:

“How can I make my life more sustainable?”

Practical Strategies for Everyday Life

Understanding yourself is important, but coaching also needs to translate into everyday life.

Sessions are therefore practical and tailored to the areas that matter to you.

We might work on creating ADHD-friendly planning systems, reducing decision fatigue, breaking down overwhelming tasks, developing realistic routines, managing emails and administration, creating visual reminders, body doubling, managing household tasks, preparing for difficult conversations or developing strategies around work and family life.

We can also identify sensory regulation strategies and build personalised approaches for preventing and recovering from overwhelm.

There isn’t one organisational system, morning routine or productivity technique that works for every neurodivergent person.

If something hasn’t worked for you previously, that doesn’t automatically mean you failed at it.

It may simply have been the wrong strategy for your brain.

Workplace Support & Reasonable Adjustments

Work can be one of the biggest sources of pressure for neurodivergent adults.

I can support you to understand how your neurodivergence affects you within the workplace and identify adjustments or strategies that could help you perform at your best without continually working beyond your capacity.

This might include exploring:

• workload and prioritisation
• communication preferences
• written versus verbal instructions
• sensory aspects of the workplace
• meetings and information processing
• interruptions and concentration
• working memory
• time management
• task initiation
• flexible or remote working
• predictable routines
• additional processing time
• managing transitions and organisational change
• recovery following socially or cognitively demanding work.

Where appropriate, I can also support adults in identifying and communicating potential reasonable workplace adjustments and Access to Work needs.

The aim isn’t to lower expectations.

It is to remove unnecessary barriers so that your skills and strengths have the opportunity to be seen.

Coaching Built Around You

You don’t need to arrive at your first session knowing exactly what you want to work on.

Sometimes the starting point is simply:

“I’m overwhelmed and I don’t know why.”

We can begin there.

Together, we can identify patterns, explore what is happening underneath the difficulties you are experiencing and gradually develop strategies that work with your neurodivergence rather than constantly fighting against it.

My coaching is collaborative, compassionate, practical and neurodiversity-affirming.

I bring professional training and over twelve years of experience within mental health and care alongside something equally important to my practice: lived experience.

As a late-diagnosed Autistic and ADHD woman myself, I understand that knowing the theory of neurodivergence and actually living it can be two very different things.

You are the expert in your own experience.

My role is to help you make sense of that experience, recognise your strengths, understand your needs and develop tools that make life feel more manageable, sustainable and authentically yours.

You don’t need to become a different person to make life work better.

Sometimes you need to understand the person you’ve been all along.