Why Community Is Everything for Neurodivergent Success

Coaches struggle too: full bullet journals and feeling discombobulated

Hello there. I’m Danielle Ralston, founder and head coach here at ND OutLoud. ND OutLoud is a team of neurodivergent coaches. We are neurodivergent, every single one of us. TBI, PTSD, ADHD, autism, bipolar disorder, all of the things. We have a passion for supporting others like us, so you don’t have to struggle like we did in our past. We have all taken trainings and certifications so we can support you in living a better life. What is this session going to give you? Actionable tips. Yes, we’ll talk about our programs, but I want you to walk away with something actionable for whatever is overwhelming, frustrating, or just plain annoying you right now, or, if you’re a parent or spouse of someone with neurodivergence, something to help them as well.

Good morning everyone. This is Danielle and Shay with ND OutLoud, ND Hive, all of the ND things. We are talking about why community is everything. We were actually just talking about getting bullet journals set back up, because mine is totally full and I can’t fit anything else in it. I’ve been without it for a couple of weeks and I’m feeling discombobulated. And Shay only has a couple of pages left in hers and is getting hers set up, because, hey, discombobulated.

But this is why having these discussions is so important, why we come live and talk about the things we’re struggling with. Because just because we’re coaches and experts in this industry, especially since we’re neurodivergent ourselves, doesn’t mean we don’t still struggle with the same things all of our clients do.

Oh, absolutely, Shay said. In fact, sometimes we may struggle with it a little more than our clients. But that gives us better insight into how to help our clients and our community. Being able to say, “Yeah, I got you. Feeling that way is normal.” Especially when people don’t feel like they’re okay, being able to tell them, “No, you’re not broken. That’s just a moment. It’s going to move on. It’s okay.”

Getting real about executive dysfunction

I did a video last week, it’s on YouTube, it’s all over the place, and it’s gotten the highest views of anything we’ve put out recently. What was it? Me showing my disaster and my executive dysfunction in my office. I’m not showing you my office right now. I got real, and you could see empty boxes and junk, especially since I’ve had two conferences and the Disney trip, and I have been very ill recently with my pain levels and my MS. For the last year of really struggling with my MS, my office has become my junk pile.

It’s easy to put it in there, Shay said, because we think, “I’ll get to it eventually.” And then we put something else on top of the thing we put in there. In my office right now, what you see behind me is the best of the whole office. This is definitely my most organized corner, and of course it’s cluttery, but that’s always me.

Let’s be very clear, I like stuff. So I always have clutter. But getting real matters. As coaches, we are experts in the industry. I’ve been paid to speak at major conferences. I’ve been asked to speak at very high-end PhD-level conferences. I’m still ADHD and autistic. We still have it. It doesn’t mean we’re going to stand up with a flag yelling, “Hey, look at me, I’m autistic, I’m ADHD.” This is our day-to-day living. And when you have a community you can step into and say, “Look, I’m really struggling today. Is this normal? Is there a tip you can give me? Is there something I can do, or not do?” Because a lot of times we get stuck in the doing when we need to take a break. Being able to bounce it off somebody else is huge. It’s helped me move forward in a lot of ways. I’ve been the most productive I’ve been in the last five years, just since we got back from Disney a little over a month ago.

As coaches, that was something pretty funny about being at Disney with other coaches. They said, “Oh yeah, we tell our clients to use the body doubling, use the community, use the thing, and I’m not using it myself.” Now, of course, I have been, because I’m the one facilitating 99.9 percent of the time, which is why I created the community. Because I needed this. And I saw that another major ADHD app is getting ready to start their own community, they’re about 60 days out. But this is why I do what I do. I’ve been doing this for five-plus years. We have our live community right now. A half hour ago, I had seven people in body doubling saying, “Oh, this helps me get stuff done. Good morning, I’m so glad to be here, I’m glad to start my day.” And this is a Monday, after some people are coming back from vacation, sick, and all of the things. And they can’t wait to start their day.

It gives us motivation to not only get our stuff done, but to connect with somebody else, Shay said. As a coach, we tend to think, “I’ve got this, it’s fine, we don’t need this.” You called me out on it totally. You said, “Shay, just try it and actually follow through. You have all these tools available and you’re not using any of them. Just try it and see.” And I did. Because of it, I’ve started another company that has been building slowly, and with the help of body doubling, I’m getting through a lot of that little stuff. The things we hate: the paperwork, the details, the get-this-together-and-that-together. We’re quick to do the fun things, but that detail stuff is annoying. Who wants to do the boring things?

A community where you do not have to mask

We all feel this, at all times. I do too. Some days I don’t want to show up for my clients, I don’t want to show up for myself. It’s boring. But I am really lucky. I think I’m one of the luckiest ADHDers out there. We get to show up and work with our people, who get our brains. We don’t have to mask. I get to wear my weird Stitch gear to work every day, goofy headbands and ears and makeup, and nobody criticizes. Actually, somebody will say, “You’re having a good day, aren’t you?” because they notice I’ve done something weirder than normal, or, “You definitely have energy today.” That’s how people notice. There’s no criticism, no judgment, no having to explain why I did what I did.

It’s so exhausting having to mask, Shay said. It takes so much energy to mask and then do the productivity things we need to do, instead of just being ourselves and getting it done. When I really stepped into the community fully, it was a release of that stress. It’s been a place of safety, a place where I can jump in and say, “Oh my gosh, you guys, I have done the dumbest thing,” and you laugh with me instead of making fun of me. We had somebody who was trying to lock their front door with their car keys and couldn’t figure out why the door wouldn’t lock. When they told us, we just laughed, because we’ve probably all done the same thing. It’s fun to be us.

It is. And it’s fun to not have to explain us. She didn’t have to give us an explanation. She just said, “Oh my gosh, guess what I just did?” She was already giggling at herself. I almost fell off the treadmill when I read it, I was laughing so hard, because I’ve done the same thing. Okay, I do have one complaint about hanging out with neurodivergent, ADHD, and autistic people: I have to clean my monitor often, because I’m always spitting out whatever I’m drinking. Somebody sent me a meme yesterday while I was drinking coffee, and it was so dead-on that now I have to clean my monitor again. But this is why community is so important.

What Disney World changed

So I want to ask you, because your first introduction to us as a community, not just coaching one-on-one, was Disney World. What did that change in your understanding of yourself?

One of the first understandings, Shay said, was that I could just be me, and it’s okay. It’s okay to be goofy, to run around and not act my age. You get pigeonholed a lot with your age: “You’re 53, why are you behaving like that?” Because I want to. A quick story to add to that. I was down visiting relatives about three hours from us, and my nephews are four and six years old. We went outside and played for over an hour, with them putting me in jail, which meant I had to go stand by the garage door, and they’d say, “You have to eat this, you have to do that,” and I was spitting it right back at them. We went back and forth for an hour. My daughter came and played too. We were chasing these guys all over the driveway, and they had a blast. But the thing is, I had a blast, and I was able to enjoy being me. I didn’t care if my brothers or sisters-in-law thought it was strange, which they didn’t.

The biggest thing is that learning to be yourself opens so many other doors. When we are masking and closed off, we miss a lot of opportunities, a lot of things we could step into or enjoy. And it’s not all about having fun. How would you like to just be content with who you are? Content with your day, content with, “You know what, if they don’t like me, that’s okay. I have my community and it’s fine.”

The physical cost of masking

I don’t know if it’s just contentment, though. A lot of it, for me, is that when I have to mask, I become more clumsy, because my physical body can’t handle me masking long-term. My anxiety goes through the roof. My physical pain goes through the roof.

You’re pulling energy away from taking care of your physical self with the energy you’re using to mask, Shay said. So how can you be you? And when I say be you, I’m not saying go running up and down the street hollering “I’m free,” although you can do that too. It’s more about allowing your energy to flow where it needs to flow, being connected to like-minded people who allow you to be the way you were meant to be.

But again, pain, anxiety, executive dysfunction, all of these things go through the roof when masking. And let’s face it, executive dysfunction is a major issue for me anyway. We all know this. Go watch my recent video if you don’t understand quite how bad it is.

Community, accountability, body doubling: three keys to success

People ask, because I am successful at what I do, and I have been for a long time: why am I successful? Because I have community. I body double constantly. I was making my employees body double with me twenty-some years ago. Of course, it was on a phone or via Skype back then. I drove them insane, but they started to miss it. I had a conversation with one of my past employees the other day who said, “You know what? I missed that. That helped me get so much more done than I get done now.” So I have community, I have accountability, and I have body doubling. Those are my three keys to success. Not hiring some $80,000 coach or buying some program. They were really simple things.

But they weren’t foolproof. The one thing I realized is I couldn’t body double with my best friend. We tried to build a business together. You want to know what happened? We failed, in a huge dumpster fire sort of way. It was actually really bad. Our houses were a mess, our lives were a mess, our marriages, everything was bad, because we were trying to force something that didn’t work. I learned I had to invest in body doubling in a space where I could get to know people. I tried the drop-in style apps where you’re matched with strangers so many times, and they’re fantastic for people whose brains work like that. But body doubling with people I never get to know, who are always different, just doesn’t work for me. I need to build close-knit relationships with people. We’ve got to have connection. That is ingrained in us.

To me, a lot of it is that we love relationships, Shay said. We love being able to connect with others. When somebody’s down, we can help them up. When we’re down, they can help us up. And when we’re all up, we celebrate each other without jealousy, without “I’m not as good as,” because we combine it together to make it work together. Sometimes Danielle is my executive function for the day, or one of the other people in the community is, because I’m so overloaded or overwhelmed with a situation that they can come in and say, “Okay, let’s bring this down and bring this up so we can get your executive function back on track. And if that’s not going to work today, what kind of rest do we need? What kind of reboot?” And that’s okay. We have forgotten that it’s okay to rest, because we’re constantly in that go-go-go, feeling like we’re being lazy. It’s nice to have someone else say, “No, look at this and this and this. You’re not being lazy. You just did too much. Take a minute.”

Connection that survives silence

So again, community is so important, connection is so important. What kind of connections did you make at Disney World that you continue to make?

There are the connections with the relationships, Shay said. The connection of being able to have fun and smile and throw in a meme, and everybody gets what I’m saying. Somebody put out a “happy Monday” today in our group chat from Disney, and it’s great, like, oh, somebody else is there. Having the group chat is great. Having the body doubling is great. This sense of community, knowing I could call on any of them at any time, call, text, group chat, and know that I’m okay, they’re okay, and we have a great relationship. But we also know that if we’re not talking for a few days or even a few weeks, it’s okay. We’re still cool. We’re still connected. That’s just how our brains work. Nobody’s going to take offense, because we all get it. It’s a lot easier to stay connected that way.

We don’t hear from Tim very much, because he’s busy building his business, but when we do, he’s still there, he’s right here, and it’s okay. And some of us have full-time jobs. Tara has a full-time job and jumps in and out when she can. All of those things are so important.

Decluttering together and taking action

That’s why connection is so important, and it’s something we’re going to be creating more and more of. This week we’re adding some decluttering times that we’re going to pop in and offer to everybody in our community, so people have specific actions they can take during body doubling time, rather than just open body doubling during the workday. Many of us are entrepreneurs or have a day job, so during the day we can’t necessarily do things like that. But this weekend, Sunday afternoon around 2 o’clock Central, I’m going to do a decluttering time. We’re going to declutter, and for me it’s my office. My office needs to be decluttered. I’m claiming that now.

It could be a simple declutter too, Shay said. It could be just one drawer you need to take care of that you’ve been putting off.

I’m going to have one square foot that I’m going to work on, which, for me right now physically, is about all I can do. One square foot of my desk, so I can actually use my desk, because I cannot right now. I have this tiny space where my keyboard and mouse are, and that’s all I can use. We all have those moments, and that’s okay. This is why community is so important: when you are neurodivergent, ADHD, have PTSD, TBI, dyslexia, autism, whatever it is, and we all have different levels of all of the things, it is so important to find a space to create the action you need to take in life.

And this is something I’ve realized over the last month, Shay said: this community bleeds out into other communities. It has helped me with productivity, but it’s also helping me with relationships. When I went down to see my brothers, it was quite hilarious watching all of us siblings trying to make a decision about when to leave for something. Finally one of the sisters-in-law said, “This is the time. We’re going to go then.” And we said, “Okay,” because we could not figure it out as the siblings. It bled out into that part of my life, because when we understand us, we are more open to letting others step in where they need to, and we don’t take offense. I even said to her, “Thank you so much for being our executive function today,” because we were all so tired and worn out. If I hadn’t had this community and understood these relationships, I’m not sure I would have taken that the same way.

What we are building and how to join

I love that. And I love when those moments happen. If you are looking for community: we’re crowdfunding right now, because we need an additional $200,000 to finish our app the way we want it to look, with the animations and the fun prizes. We want the fun stuff in the app before we release it, not just the basics, because we already have the basics. Our community is up and running. We have 165 members, with about 35 who are super active, and when I say super active, you will see those people every single day. And that’s not possible for everybody with ADHD, and that’s fine. We have five coaching calls a week available to everyone, and you could come to all five or just one, or a quarter of one if you wanted. We have body doubling all day long, and we have the online community where you can post memes, ask questions, and do whatever you need. We want to put it all in a cute app so it’s more integrated, not body doubling in one place and community in another.

I’ve been doing this work for 25 years, and in this format for 5 years. Come join us. Come have some fun. Come find your tribe. Come find your hive, because we are building a hive where every one of us has a job, has a purpose, and feels that without judgment. And if we screw up and don’t show up for whatever our purpose was for the day, it’s okay. Somebody else will jump in and cover you, and totally get whatever the reason is why you couldn’t do it. We are here. Please come join us. We look forward to seeing you.