by Bradley McDevitt, MA, ACC

Early in my coaching career, I encountered a client whose presence shifted something fundamental in my understanding of human communication and leadership potential. For the sake of confidentiality, I’ll call her Renee.

Renee was a senior-level strategist at a design firm known for its innovative approach to systems thinking and cross-functional collaboration. She had built a reputation as someone who saw patterns before others could name them, often connecting parts of a project in ways that opened new possibilities. Renee had recently been promoted to a global leadership position and sought coaching to help her transition into a more externally facing, communicative role. From the outset, she was direct: "I want to do this my way, but I know my way doesn’t always land." We began our work together.

Renee shared that she had recently received a formal diagnosis of both autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and ADHD. She said it plainly, without apology or pride, just as a fact that might clarify some of what she called her "contrast points."

"I don’t think in sentences," she told me. "I think in pulses and spatial layers. Sometimes I don’t know what I know until I’ve drawn it." I did not understand at that moment that she meant that last idea literally.

This wasn’t the first time I had worked with someone who identified as neurodivergent, but it was the first time a client had invited me into the architecture of their inner world with such clarity and openness. And it was the first time I realized how much of my own coaching reflexes were designed around neurotypical expectations: tidy verbal reflections, swift rapport building, and a shared rhythm of responsiveness that values articulation over incubation.

Our first few sessions together were unlike any I’d experienced. Renee often paused for long stretches. At first, I mistook these silences for hesitation or discomfort. I would reflexively fill them with follow-up questions, paraphrasing, or offers of metaphor to try to bridge the space. But eventually, I asked her if she preferred I stay quiet during her processing. She nodded.

"When you talk too soon," she said gently, "I lose my trail."

So I began to unlearn. I drew on my Quaker upbringing, which valued silence as a form of reverence. I stopped inserting myself into the flow of her cognition. I allowed silence not as a strategic tool but as a habitat. And within that habitat, Renee thrived. She would close her eyes, sometimes moving her head

side to side slightly, and then begin to speak in fragments that slowly coalesced into insights. What initially appeared as disjointed became, over time, astonishingly cohesive.

What I witnessed was not a deficit but a different form of brilliance—a mind that didn’t move in a straight line but in spirals and webs. And with each session, I became more attuned to her rhythm, her metaphors, her need for visual processing, and her discomfort with performative small talk. She told me once, "I don’t need to feel 'understood' in the way people usually mean it. I need to feel 'uninterrupted.'"

This was a wake-up call.

Coaching, as I had been trained, emphasized presence, attunement, and responsiveness. But what Renee needed from me was not responsiveness in the traditional sense. She needed me to be a stabilizing presence: not a mirror, but a container. Not a conversation partner, but a co-witness.

Here are some of the practices I continue to use that emerged from our work together:

Silence as Spaciousness

In most coaching training, silence is framed as a tool—a deliberate pause to allow the client to speak. However, in coaching neurodivergent clients like Renee, silence must become more than just a tool; it must become a space where thought can unfold in nonlinear ways. Renee taught me that silence is not absence but an invitation. Her most profound insights often came after long periods of quiet. I learned to trust those spaces and to trust her timing.

Metaphor as Portal

Renee often reached for metaphors to explain what she was sensing: "This team feels like a spiderweb after the rain," or "I’m standing at the edge of a dense forest, and the trailhead is somewhere behind me." These weren’t poetic flourishes—they were her most explicit available language for complex emotional and relational dynamics. Once I embraced metaphor as her primary mode of communication, our sessions became far more productive. We could extend those metaphors together, shaping shared understanding without demanding neurotypical forms of expression.

Pacing as Autonomy

Standard coaching engagements often follow a predictable arc: identifying goals, assessing obstacles, and planning actions. But this linearity didn’t work for Renee. Her goals would emerge mid-session, sometimes without warning, and then vanish again like mist. Rather than pushing for continuity, I began to let her set the pace, trusting that what mattered would come back around in time. This meant abandoning my own need for closure and resolution. In its place, I adopted what I now call "non-linear fidelity" – staying faithful to her process rather than to an agenda.

Co-Regulation Over Interpretation

When Renee became dysregulated (usually from workplace overload or sensory fatigue), she didn’t need coaching analysis—she required grounding. I learned to become a co-regulating presence: slowing my speech, softening my tone, and sometimes just breathing audibly to give her an anchor. This was not therapy, and it wasn’t coaching in the conventional sense either. It was care through presence. It was somatic attunement. It was, in her words, "a dock to tie off the boat."

Interrogating "Professionalism"

One of the most profound lessons I took from our work was how much of what passes as "professionalism" is steeped in neurotypical bias. Expectations around eye contact, verbal fluidity, or "emotional intelligence" often exclude those whose gifts don’t manifest in normative ways.

Renee was emotionally brilliant—just not in the ways that corporate HR manuals describe. She could detect subtext in team dynamics with startling precision. She could spot a disingenuous leadership narrative a mile away. But she couldn’t always sit through a meeting without stimming, or answer "How are you?" without scanning for intent.

To honor Renee’s leadership, I had to deconstruct my own assumptions. I stopped trying to help her "fit in better" and instead helped her articulate the value of her difference—to herself, and eventually, to her team.

Over the months, Renee began to design rituals for herself: silent start-of-day walks, internal postmortems after meetings, sketching out ideas before team debriefs. She also started training her team in "mixed-format meetings" that allowed for written and visual contributions alongside verbal ones. She didn’t become more "communicative" in the neurotypical sense, but she became a better communicator on her own terms. And perhaps more importantly, she began to feel less alone.

Working with Renee changed my practice. It changed how I listen, how I pace, and how I prepare. It taught me that supporting neurodivergent leaders isn’t about special techniques—it’s about deeper integrity to the coaching stance we already profess: unconditional positive regard, radical presence, and trust in the client’s inner authority. Renee gave me the gift of her difference, and with it, the gift of my own expansion. And in a world that still too often treats difference as deficit, that feels like a small act of rebellion. Or, a new way of being.

More about Bradley McDevitt, MA, ACC

Bradley is a presence-based leadership coach, creative strategist, and educator with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of psychology, performance, and human development. Founder of Carolina Commons Creative, he helps leaders, teams, and emerging talent build trust, clarity, and confidence through somatic, Jungian, and experiential methods. Bradley also serves as adjunct faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute and as an affiliate leadership coach with the Center for Creative Leadership.

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