The art of giving feedback through a Neurodiverse lens

Ever walked away from some feedback conversations feeling uplifted, renewed, and crystal clear about your next steps are and ready to propel yourself forward? Whilst on the other hand, other conversations have left you, what I call “circling the drain,” stuck in a shame spiral about what you did “wrong,” wanting to run away or hide?

So, what makes the difference?

Feedback is a topic I feel extremely passionate about. First of all, I love growing and learning. In my view, we cannot develop what we are not aware of, and we cannot celebrate what we are good at if we do not recognise our strengths. Feedback provides us with this powerful awareness. It enables us to celebrate who we are, develop, learn, grow and change. When done right, feedback is transformative.

As a former teacher, feedback was part of my daily bread. If I was not being observed by others, I was giving my students feedback.

As a learning designer, I pay close attention to how my content is landing. As a coach, I contract around safety and working agreements, check in with clients about how sessions are going, and make constant micro-adjustments. It is these small, ongoing iterations that build toward something powerful in the end: a product, a service, or a relationship that becomes a seed of growth without shame.

Nature has a lot to teach us on the topic of feedback. It is constant and provides direction for the next step in growth:

- A sunflower leans toward light without shame.

- A tree sheds its leaves with the seasons, without being told it is underperforming.

- A river shifts course when blocked, not out of failure, but adaptation.

The Problem with Feedback

Feedback is an art, and it can be difficult to get right. While intended to spark growth, it can often trigger defensiveness, confusion, or shutdown. This often happens when feedback is poorly timed, vague or generic, delivered without full context, lacking clear and actionable steps, or given without curiosity or collaboration.

Through a Neurodivergent or Sensitive Lens

For neurodivergent individuals (and many sensitive humans in general), feedback can be especially powerful when it is clear, collaborative, and respectful of different ways of processing.

Here are some examples of how differences in processing can shape the experience:

• Literal processing: Many neurodivergent thinkers excel with clarity. In the words of Brené Brown, 2018: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”

• Emotional sensitivity or hypervigilance: A heightened awareness of tone, body language, or micro-expressions can make comments feel personal. That same awareness also enables deep empathy and relational leadership when feedback is delivered with care.

• Rejection Sensitivity (RSD): A strong desire to belong can make feedback feel high-stakes. When framed with safety and encouragement, it fuels perseverance and growth.

• Executive function differences: When goals are broken down collaboratively, neurodivergent thinkers can harness creativity and focus without unnecessary barriers.

• Burnout from norming: Expending extra energy to adapt to systems not designed for them means feedback can feel like just another demand. A key question to consider is whether the feedback genuinely adds value, or whether it unintentionally pressures neurodivergent individuals to conform to neurotypical styles.

• The Double Empathy Problem: Neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals may process communication differently, leading to misunderstandings on both sides. When feedback becomes a two-way exchange, both parties can adjust, learn, and strengthen the relationship.

This does not mean feedback must be softened or avoided. It means it must be intentional: clear, kind and regulating.

Five Inclusive Practices for Feedback

Here are five simple shifts that support everyone, but are especially powerful for neurodivergent or sensitive team members:

1. Prior to the conversation: Self-preparation

Clarify your purpose: What do you hope the person will learn or gain? How do they prefer to receive feedback? Check in with your own nervous system and mindset. Being grounded and regulated yourself sets the foundation for a calm and safe conversation.

2. Resource and set the intention at the start: co-create safety

Once the conversation begins, focus on mutual safety. Ask what each of you needs for the discussion to go well. Check your tone, body language, and approach to ensure they feel respected and not judged. Clearly share your intention: why you are giving feedback and what do you hope the conversation will achieve.

3. Use a clear feedback model: ground the conversation

Start by asking what they think is going well or what they think could be improved from the situation. Another expression I like to use is that “Context is King.” Often, people already have an awareness and will have a specific reason for why they did something a specific way, and sometimes they may just not know how to move forward. It is incredibly important to take a strengths-based approach, acknowledging what individuals already do well. This helps people see their existing capabilities, fuels confidence, and makes feedback feel motivating.

Where further clarity is needed, use a framework that grounds feedback in observation and impact. Focus on behaviour, not identity. A couple of my favourites are the BOOST model (Balanced, Observed, Objective, Specific, Time-bound) and the AID model (Action, Impact, Development or Do differently).

4. Check in on how it landed: validate understanding

This is a really important step and is often missed. Ask: How did that land? Be open to the fact that even helpful feedback can trigger past experiences or require extra processing time. It may also help to schedule a pause and revisit the conversation later.

5. Co-create next steps: build forward together

Instead of giving advice and walking away, build forward together. Offer a few actionable options if the individual feels stuck and ask which of those feels most doable. This supports executive function, autonomy, and engagement without leaving the individual feeling infantilised or shamed.

Better feedback is better for everyone

This is not just about being sensitive to neurodivergent or sensitive folks. It is about evolving how we approach growth, communication, and leadership. When feedback is clear, kind, and collaborative, it builds trust, creates autonomy and becomes an act of respect rather than critique. Feedback works best when we remember that growth is not instant, change requires safety, language shapes experience, and every mind blooms in its own way.

Let us give feedback that feeds, nourishes, and helps people grow in their own time and in their own form.

I would love to hear from you:

• What has helped feedback land well for you?

• What practices do you use to make your feedback inclusive?

• Have you ever felt misunderstood or overwhelmed by feedback?

Let’s keep the conversation going.

References:

Brene Brown (2018): Clear is kind, unclear is unkind. Available at: https://brenebrown.com/articles/2018/10/15/clear-is-kind-unclear-is-unkind/ (Accessed 20 August 2025).

Building self-trust: be the safety you wish to create

“Being the safety I wish to create” is a principle I’ve been examining deeply lately through my own experience and relationships with others, as well as the shared explorations with clients I coach. I've noticed how easy it can be to seek safety and validation externally, only to find it missing in the moments we need it most. Over time, I’ve come to understand that the most dependable safety often begins within, self-trust being the foundation of this safety.

Like lichen, which survives through a fine-tuned balance between two distinct organisms, algae and fungi, we grow most sustainably when we can nourish ourselves first and then connect with others from that grounded place. Interconnection becomes possible when we’re not reaching from emptiness, but from wholeness, able to self-trust, self-grow and co-create.

What If Your Sensitivity Isn’t a Flaw, But a Form of Intelligence?

When a situation causes emotional shutdown or nervous system overload, it can feel like failure. But what if it’s not? What if your body is simply offering you data, letting you know something’s off, even if your mind hasn’t caught up yet?

Our nervous systems don’t wait for full sentences. It responds to tone, micro-expressions, power dynamics, unclear signals, and subtle energy withdrawals or inconsistencies. It tracks not just what’s being said, but how it’s being said, and what’s not being said, as well as whether it’s safe to stay open and engaged, or not. When danger is sensed, whether harshness, exclusion, ambiguity, or emotional disconnection, the system reacts, often long before your rational brain can explain why.

From a trauma-informed lens, these aren’t flaws. They’re adaptations your system learned in environments where safety and attunement were inconsistent or absent.

Neuroscientist Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett notes that the brain doesn't just react, it predicts based on what it’s seen before. If you’ve been dismissed, ignored, or criticised in the past, your system might brace for it again, sometimes before a single word is spoken. And here’s the hard part: sometimes your system is reacting to a past pattern. And sometimes, it's pointing to something very real happening right now.

At the same time, our own reactions can also trigger others’ nervous systems, making them feel threatened or defensive. This doesn’t excuse the impact behaviour can have, whether the intent is good or not, but it shows how emotional energy flows between people, and why it’s so important to hold compassion for ourselves and others, and to seek our own safety within first, before we try to co-create.

Practical Ways to Support Yourself

1. Resource yourself in the moment
Resourcing means giving yourself cues of safety, connection, and choice. Build a daily practice that helps resource your nervous system, something reliable to return to when the world feels too fast, too much, or too uncertain. This might look like: breathwork, a walk after a hard conversation, a calming scent, a soft blanket, or a favourite playlist.

Recognising when you are at capacity before your system is flooded, is incredibly important. Take breaks with something fun, less intense, and more light-hearted. That doesn’t mean avoiding courageous conversations, but making the time to schedule them when you feel you have the energy required to do so. Managing your own boundaries are critical in this.

2. Get clear on what you’re feeling

Use a feelings wheel or metaphor:

• “My brain is racing ahead of me.”

• “My chest is tight and I can’t focus.”

• “I’m in the red zone—I need a pause.”

Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research shows that accurate emotion labelling reduces ambiguity and helps shift the nervous system from threat back toward regulation. Acknowledging our feelings to ourselves doesn’t always mean we share our moments of activation with others in the moment either. There is a reason people say that it can be good to count to ten.

Emotions can get stuck in our bodies when we resist feeling them or when our brains overanalyse in order not to feel or process. Let the emotion pass through you, and remember to do so in a resourced way.
Helpful visualisation:
Imagine a pebble being dropped at the top of your head, and it running all the way through you. Imagine that being the emotion. Observing how it drops through, rather than becoming the emotion, can help support feelings of overwhelm.

3. Practice between the storms

You don’t rewire in crisis. You build capacity in calmer moments so regulation becomes a reflex.

Try:

• Practice expressing needs. A good framework is Dr Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: When [x] happens, I feel [y], and I need [z]. Sometimes, even just identifying what we need to give ourselves to move forward can mean we don’t have to expect it from others and can ask for support from a grounded place.

• Create grounding rituals with tools like paced breathing, butterfly tapping, orienting, or visualisations or meditations.
  

4. After the storm, get curious

Once your system settles, reflect gently:

• What felt off? What was I afraid of?

• Where do I need to meet my own needs more clearly?

• Where do I need to reset boundaries, or renegotiate agreements with others?

• Where have I over-functioned in the hope that someone else would finally step up?

• Where is my brain overprocessing, instead of feeling what I need to feel?

• What is within my control that I need to take responsibility for?

• How can I have the conversation with the other person with humility and compassion?

• What still needs integration or healing in me? Others may mirror back unmet needs or places we’ve ignored our own truth. That reflection can hurt, but it can also guide us.
  

It can also be helpful to notice the stories we tell ourselves about what we think is happening. Sometimes, past experiences can shape our stories and can add extra layers of fear or meaning that aren’t fully about the present moment.

So, pause and ask yourself:

• What am I believing right now about this situation?

• Is this belief based on what’s truly happening, or is it influenced by past pain?

• What else could be true here? How can I honour the truth of what happened, whilst telling a more compassionate story?

• Is someone else’s discomfort making me question my worth?

This practice doesn’t mean doubting your feelings or the data you see about the situation, but it means holding them with curiosity, compassion and kindness, so you can respond with clarity rather than reactivity.

5. Collaborate or carry it alone

When you’re unsure whether to hold on, collaborate, compromise, or let go, focus on the consistent patterns, not just the potential or occasional efforts. Clarity calms the nervous system, and accepting the truth saves energy spent hoping things will change without real collaboration.

Grace is for the occasional misstep, but repeated patterns without accountability or mutual willingness matter deeply.

Ask yourself:
• How does the other person respond when I express a need, boundary, or invite collaboration?
• Do they engage and follow through, or avoid and withdraw?
• Over time, do I feel more supported and energized, or depleted and alone?
• Is there a shared willingness to work through challenges together, or am I carrying the effort alone?

It is equally important to not only track what hurts, but also what lands. Noticing these patterns helps you decide whether there is room to co-create a healthy way forward, or if it’s time to step back and protect your own wellbeing.

Growth comes from self-trust

Building self-trust means learning to be safe with uncertainty. You don’t always have to know exactly what you want to honour your boundaries, say no, or make choices that protect your wellbeing. Self-trust is about pausing, feeling into what’s true for you in the moment, even when the ground feels unsteady. It’s about returning to yourself moment by moment, noticing what feels true, and responding from that place.

It deepens when you start listening not just to your thoughts, but to what your body is telling you: signals of tension, ease, warmth, or shutdown. Your body often knows the truth before your mind can catch up. Trust grows stronger when you reflect on what has worked and honour your own inner experience, rather than being swept away by fear or doubt.

This is what creating inner safety looks like:
Not being unshakable, not wanting to force the outcome or trying to predict the future, but staying present with yourself in each moment: with your own clarity, care, and courage.

It is self-leadership rooted in gentleness, truth, and discernment, right from where you are.

Perfecting the art of perfectionism

Perfectionism Isn’t a Flaw – It’s a Nervous System Strategy

Perfectionism is often misunderstood as ambition or a desire for excellence. But from a nervous system perspective, it’s usually something much deeper—a survival strategy.

Many of us have learned to equate being good, competent, or impressive with being safe. Our bodies internalised the message: “If I do it perfectly, I won’t be criticised, rejected, or hurt.” This survival intelligence lives in the amygdala, which scans for threat and stores relational and emotional memories. When a task feels high-stakes—even something small like writing an email—it can activate this circuitry.

In these moments, the nervous system often shifts into fight, freeze, or fawn. We might over-perform, over-prepare, or delay entirely. What looks like procrastination is often a protective pause: our body buying time to avoid perceived failure.

Perfectionism, then, isn’t a mindset flaw—it’s a nervous system response trying to keep us safe.

My Ongoing Dance with Perfectionism

I’ve spent a lot of years trying to get things “just right.” In writing, in relationships, in work. I’ve felt the pressure to be polished and prepared—to anticipate every possible outcome, to make it seamless, impressive, impeccable.

And yet, perfection always moves just out of reach. The more I chase it, the more it whispers, “Just a little more.”

A Nervous System Reframe of Perfectionism

Lately, I’ve been holding a quieter kind of wisdom—one carried by the wisdom of the squirrel.

To me, the squirrel reminds us that there are no mistakes. It doesn’t shame itself for forgetting where it buried a nut. It doesn’t spiral into self-doubt because it changed direction. It trusts that whatever it’s doing belongs to the rhythm of the moment. It adjusts, it plays, it moves. Without overthinking.

There’s a deep kind of intelligence in trusting the flow.

Helpful beliefs:

• There are no mistakes – only redirections

• Everything happens the way it needs to.

• I lovingly hold myself and others accountable, whilst also giving myself and others the space and opportunities to learn and grow.

• I enjoy learning from my mistakes.

Grounding Meditation: “Squirrel Spirit” (5–7 min)

Find a comfortable seat or lie down. Let your eyes gently close. Take a slow inhale through the nose… and sigh it out.

Feel the ground beneath you, holding your weight. Let your breath anchor you here.

Begin to imagine a quiet forest in late autumn. The air is crisp. Leaves rustle softly. There’s golden light between the trees.

Ahead of you, you notice a small squirrel. It’s darting playfully between branches, tail flicking, full of energy and purpose. You watch as it digs up an acorn… pauses… and then buries it somewhere else. It doesn’t hesitate. It doesn’t overthink. It simply responds.

There’s no anxiety in its motion—only instinct and trust.

You breathe with the squirrel. You feel its rhythm in your own body.
You remember:

Not everything needs to be planned.
Not everything needs to be perfect.
Nothing is ever truly lost.
What you need will find you again.

Let this gentle creature remind you that you, too, can move. Can change. Can return.

Take another slow breath in… and out.

Place a hand on your chest or belly. Say quietly to yourself:
“I am allowed to trust the process.”
“I don’t need to be perfect to belong.”
“I am safe to move forward.”

When you're ready, begin to return. Wiggle your fingers. Feel the ground. Open your eyes softly.

Carry the squirrel's spirit with you today—playful, light, instinctive, free.

Reflection prompts to journal on:

• What does my perfectionism try to give me (control, certainty, approval, connection)?

• What would I do differently if I trusted that there are no mistakes—only learning?

• How can I meet my perfectionism with curiosity, like the squirrel?