[Quick Tip] The Most Effective Way to Get Teams on Board with a NeuroAffirming Approach
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Why is getting the whole team on board the biggest barrier to neuro‑diversity affirming practices?
If you are struggling to get your team on board with neurodiversity affirming practices, you are not alone. As many of you guys know, Chris and I speak all over to many different teams, school districts, clinics, and this is the number one thing we hear from people when we ask them, what is your biggest barrier to using neurodiversity affirming practices? It is that their whole team is not on board. So today I am going to give you my most effective tip This is the one thing that you need to do, the first thing that you need to do to help get your teams on board.
What's up, everyone? And welcome to Making the Shift for Autistic Kids.
We're an SLP couple from California with four boys.
And we're here every week to bring you neuro-affirming tips, tricks, and tools. Are you ready to make the shift? Let's do this!
Okay. So like I said, Chris and I speak a lot.
What are the two common mistakes that prevent teams from adopting neuro‑affirming strategies?
We go around and we always say, what is your biggest barrier to implementing neurodiversity affirming practices? And at least 50% of the audience always says getting teams on board. It's our school is stuck in compliance-based approaches or the other therapists working with this kid wants this and we don't, or we can't do it for whatever reason. And it's so often a people problem it's a but i'm the only one or there's a small group of us that are neurodiversity affirming and we can't get the rest of the team on board so i'm going to tell you the number one trick that i have up my sleeve of the most effective way to get teams on board The thing is that when we learn about neurodiversity affirming practices, we want to just word vomit all over people.
We just want to dump on them everything that we know because it's so fun. It's so exciting. We love what we do. We're passionate about it. And all we want to do is tell the person that we're training everything under the sun about neurodiversity affirming practices, okay? That is one way to lose them. It's too much information.
How does giving too much information too soon backfire when training staff?
It's too overwhelming. And it's not strategies. It's typically not strategies that they could just take and implement right away. Because usually when we are starting from... A, with neurodiversity affirming practices, we're describing the foundation and the theory and how it evolved and all of this. But too much information at first. I'm not saying those conversations aren't important, but save them. So the number one mistake we make is we give too much information. to others the second mistake that we make is that we just flat out tell people we're wrong they're wrong okay and we're not like you're wrong but we might say something like oh i see you are using this specific approach did you know that the majority of autistic the autistic community doesn't support that approach so what happens then
we have offended the person. They go into fight or flight because when someone feels threatened in any way or attacked, that's just what we do. It's what our brain does. We feel attacked.
Why does confronting people about “being wrong” trigger fight‑or‑flight and block learning?
Okay, so now this person feels attacked and they don't feel receptive to listening and that is not going to help us accomplish our goal. Okay, so we can't come in hot by telling them, hey, yeah, what you're doing is wrong in any way like that. Okay, so the biggest mistake we make The two biggest mistakes we make are we give them too much information too soon and we basically tell them that they were wrong, which leads them to not being receptive to learning new strategies. So what can we do? What you want to do is you want to give them a strategy that you know this child so well and you know that this one strategy is so helpful for the child and you know that if they just started implementing this one strategy, they would see massive change in the child.
And that is what I call giving them a quick win. You want them to have a quick win. If you can give them a strategy and then they go and they use that strategy and it's easy and it works, they're going to have buy-in. And everything else you say to them in the future is going to be more meaningful. They're going to be more likely to listen to you because they are going to realize that the advice that you give them works.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why is getting the whole team on board the biggest barrier to neuro‑diversity affirming practices?
0:00–1:08
2
What are the two common mistakes that prevent teams from adopting neuro‑affirming strategies?
1:08–2:16
3
How does giving too much information too soon backfire when training staff?
2:16–3:17
4
Why does confronting people about “being wrong” trigger fight‑or‑flight and block learning?
3:17–4:38
5
What is the “quick‑win” strategy that creates immediate buy‑in from skeptical team members?
4:38–5:39
6
How can a single, simple, child‑specific activity transform team engagement and compliance?
5:39–6:22
7
What long‑term benefits arise after a team experiences a quick win with neuro‑affirming tactics?
6:22–7:15
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from The NeuroAffirm Podcast
Ep. 125 How to Run Successful Social Groups
Ep. 124 Building Rapport Isn’t Enough...How Therapists Become Part of the Intervention
Ep. 123 Not Seeing Progress in Speech Therapy? Start Here.
Ep. 122 Screen Time Considerations for Autistic Kids
Ep. 121 The Biggest Sensory Mistakes SLPs Make
Ep. 120 Why Anxiety is So Common in Autism (And What Actually Helps)