Hey Fellow Neurodivergents!

There are two kinds of skills you need to learn when working to make the butterflies in your brain fly in formation.

You need skills for regulation and execution. There tends to be an overemphasis on execution. By that I mean techniques for accommodating executive functioning struggles.

Examples would be use of planners, digital calendars, alarms, note takers, post-it notes. They are concrete solutions that can be checked off the same way providing a wheelchair or a pair of glasses would be.

They address issues that most impact productivity and are therefore prioritized.

Now you can have all the skills in the world to execute, take action more effectively. But if you’re unable to regulate your emotions, anxious thoughts, tendency toward catastrophic thinking. Then you’re essentially wasting your time.

Whenever your emotions are dysregulated. Which is pretty constant when you’re neurodivergent. It’s just a matter of degree. The brain shuts off support for the prefrontal cortex which is where the executive functions live.

So the parts you need to use for execution go offline because the effort switches to trying to regulate your emotions.

Your ongoing feelings of anxiety, fatigue, brain fog, disorganization can have more to do with your prefrontal cortex being offline than it has to do with you lacking executive functioning skills.

Keeping yourself calm and focused helps keep your prefrontal cortex online, more often, so you can use the natural abilities you have. In addition to being able to apply any strategies you’ve learned.

So the solution is to learn to regulate your emotions FIRST! Things fall in line so much more easily after that. That’s why I emphasize teaching the women I coach how to calm their nervous systems while teaching them the executive functioning skills. It’s a perfect balance.