Neuroinclusive Leadership: My Conversation with Ron Sosa

So let's move out a little more towards people with probably more so with invisible disabilities since that's your specialty, in the workplace and in business interactions.

Because we talked a little bit about this before we started recording that regardless of disability, we all deal with the expectations that we're responsible for solving for accessibility.

And one of the things I really liked about your bio is that you want to help people reduce the expectation of overadapting and overthinking.

I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on what the current situation is and what are some things that people who don't live with these types of challenges can do to improve things for the neurodivergent?

Yeah, I think that it's much harder for employers or colleagues to understand what's going on for an invisible disability because, and I can speak to neurodivergence in myself, is we make it very easy to go unnoticed, right? That over adaptation, the people pleasing, the make sure that I don't receive this, the negative criticism that I've received growing up.

So I'm always anticipating everyone else's needs.

happens and we make the job look good until we can't and we're struggling and we're no longer a culture fit and we are terminated or exiled from the workplace and we start the cycle all over again.

And oftentimes, like you and I sort of talked about before starting is, is it always safe to advocate for our own needs? And it's not, unfortunately.

So I have a four-part framework that I've sort of developed, and I talk about the internal world for the neurodivergent person because I think that that is the unsafest place in the beginning for somebody who hasn't been able to advocate for their needs or have the safest place.

And that's the cost, C-O-S-T, of masking.

And it's chronic self-monitoring, over-adaptation, self-criticism, and tension that we hold in our bodies.

And so those are the four parts that I help individuals and leaders kind of discover about themselves and what they're carrying around with them.

And then if we are carrying that around as leaders, we can understand that the people underneath of us that we are leading are probably also carrying around as well.

best producing high achiever underneath you also needs to be handled with care we often think about the person who is low performing and we performance them out we have conversations on how we can support them how we can support them and then we don't get their performance up but what about the people who are over achieving and i think overachieving also needs to have a ceiling on what we consider achieving and if we're over that threshold we should also bring them down because it's just going to lead to workplace burnout which often happens with our neurodivergent individuals who are masking.

Right, because neither of those are sustainable.

Underachieving, if it continues, can't be tolerated by a successful business.

And overachieving by an employee or a leader just can't be managed long term without something destructive happening.

Yeah.

But often we praise that high performance, right? And then people seek the validation of continuing to high perform.

And then we wonder why one day they're taking leave of absence or they're quitting to go to another job who can appreciate their high performance or like, oh, the next job, I'll take less responsibility.

That was kind of the history of me is I would be a high performing somewhere.

And then I would want to like, oh, I don't want to be a leader anymore.

I just want to go to a place where I don't have the responsibility.

But you guess what happens? I take on and I'd be a high achiever in that role.

And then I get pushed up into a leadership position.