[00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the Autism and Neurodiversity podcast. [00:06] Speaker B: We’re here to bring you helpful information from leading experts and give you effective tools and support. I’m Jason Grygla, a licensed counselor and founder of Techie for Life, a specialized mentoring program for neurodiverse young adults. [00:19] Speaker A: And I’m Debbie Grygla, a certified life coach. And maybe most importantly, we’re also parents, parents to our own atypical Young Adults.

[00:29] Speaker A: Friends. Hello. Welcome. Glad you’re here. So many of the parents that I talk with and coach have such desires to help their kids be happy and to be successful. And we’re all looking for ways to better support and provide interventions and different things. We’re all looking for whatever we can find to be able to help our autistic and our neurodivergent children to be able to be successful. And so many of you will research and hyper focus on how to help them and spend a lot of time in worry and stress and anxiety about whether you’re doing it right or whether you’re being a good parent or you’re being a good teacher or whatever role that you’re in working with this population. And so today I want to talk to you about how cultivating a supportive and mentoring relationship is one of the most effective ways that we can help our autistic and our neuro divergent young people. And when you cultivate that type of relationship, you are better positioned to be able to support their development and support their overall sense of wellbeing in the world, their regulated emotional state, if you will. And when you don’t cultivate this kind of relationship, when you stay in a relationship where there’s a power differential, you actually undermine development and you can actually contribute to mental health challenges.

And this is backed up by research and understanding of neuroscience and a lot of the work that’s done with attachment disorders and things like that. This is important stuff to be able to shift how you see yourself in the relationship and what you’re trying to do, to take on more of a mentoring mindset, a mentoring approach. And it takes some undoing of maybe things that have been ingrained right in us, maybe the way we were parented or raised or the way society kind of puts expectations on parents. And we have to undo some of that and take on a different way of seeing ourselves and seeing our role in the relationship.

So what I want you to understand is that when you’re working with someone that’s autistic or neuro divergent and they have unique challenges, they have a little different than typical way of thinking and seeing the world, and they’re motivated more by their special interests versus being socially motivated. And they have disabilities and challenges and struggles and the different things that go into making them who they are in this moment. As a mentor, we want to be able to meet each person that we’re working with. If we’re parenting and we’re mentoring as a parent.
Each child that we’re working with, each teen, each young adult is unique. Now, there’s some common traits of being autistic or neurodivergent or with their diagnoses. It’s going to be some common traits. A diagnosis is really just a way to describe common traits and maybe a common cause for why they display those traits. And so we got to recognize their uniqueness and what’s going on for them, what makes them who they are.

When we work with young adults at Techie for Life, our school, where we mentor autistic and neuro divergent young adults on their next steps, we’re taking kids, young adults that maybe haven’t finished high school, maybe they’ve failed college several times. Some that we take already have a college degree, but they can’t get a job, or they can’t do that next step. We even have students that actually have good jobs, but they’re just depressed and anxious and miserable, and they have no life. So we’re supporting them with next steps wherever they’re at in their adulting journey to be able to support their development and to support a sense of well being where they’re not in a constant lower brain fight, flight freeze, nervous system triggered state. And the students that we take, they tend to have between ten or 15 or 20 different common traits.

And then each young person that we that we accept in our school, they might have, like, some combination of five to eight of those traits, for example. And I’m just pulling general numbers so, like, students that we work with and support often will have a lot of anxiety and depression, maybe OCD tendencies. They are average to be average IQ, but they might have maybe some processing challenges or executive functioning challenges, working memory challenges. So it’s some learning disability. They might have issues with hygiene. They might just overall be developmentally delayed. As compared to neurotypical peers, for them, they’re right on track. But as compared to neurotypical peers, they may struggle with social nuance. A lot of behavior we see is, like, avoidance, social anxiety, maybe. They are socially anxious, and they’re very extroverted and kind of come across as sort of needy or hard for people to be around. So one or the other, like withdrawing, or they’re like paper challenges with staying organized, a lot of time blindness. There’s just, like, common traits that each student has some kind of combination of those.

And so if we’re going to work with them as mentors, we have to be educated about their unique challenges and where they’re at and how they tend to respond to stress and what are their strengths and really looking at, where are they at developmentally and what is the next step for them. So, as a mentor, we’re looking at, and we’re informed by their diagnoses, their history, their patterns, where they tend to get stuck on what they struggle with. And so, as a mentor, mentoring your own child or children in your classroom or whatever role that you’re in.

You’re wanting to look at what are their struggles, what are their strengths and weaknesses, and you want to be able to connect to each individual young person that you’re working with. We want to be looking at where do we want to head? Right? What’s blocking them or keeping them from growing and developing? What’s keeping them stuck? What skills are they missing? They can do this thing well, but then there’s this other thing that they’re not doing well. You’ll see a lot of that in an academic setting where they might have, beyond their peers, skill sets. In one area, maybe. They’re really amazing at math, but they have a really hard time writing things down, and so they’re doing math in their head, and then they make mistakes because they’re not writing it down, or they have a hard time producing work, and they struggle from the brain to the hand getting it on paper. So there’s like a skill set developmental piece there that’s keeping them maybe from being successful.

So we’re looking at where are they at? Where do we want to go? What’s blocking their growth and development? And we want to connect to them. We want to tune in so that we can better assess what they’re needing. And the cool thing is that when we connect with them, they will in turn, often feel seen. They will feel heard, they will feel cared for. And when we feel that as humans, it builds trust, they start to recognize you’re someone that they can trust. You’re someone that’s safe, you’re someone that understands them and gets them. And then what happens then is that our ability to support them increases because we’re tuned in and connected to them, and then they’re feeling safe and trusting us.

So then their ability to receive our support increases and our assessment improves because we can have a collaborative relationship with them. Hey, it seems like you’re struggling. Tell me more about this. They’re much more likely to be willing to share what they’re experiencing if they know they can trust you and that you genuinely care about them. So that connection piece in a mentoring relationship is very different than if you are in a power differential where I determine that I’m a good mother because you obey me, or I’m a good teacher because all my children obey, all the kids in the classroom obey my instructions.

It’s a very different dynamic than a mentoring relationship where I’m like, where are you at? What are you needing? How can I support you? And then mentoring is collaborative in nature. When we take on a mentoring mindset, we’re working together with someone. So when you have that kind of mindset, your goal is to help their development. It’s not just to get the thing done or win the award or do the task. My goal is to support each person’s development and support my child’s development. When I’m in mentoring, I’m not as likely to do more for them than is helpful. So I’m not going to over support them because my goal is to help them become more independent and them to have successes and for them to have a sense of well being like I’m okay in the world and I’m capable and I can do things. And I’m also not going to under support, I’m not going to withhold support because my goal is to make sure they have what they need, baby step developed to the next thing. And if they’re needing certain support to be able to be more independent and to feel more capable, I’m going to provide those supports. I’m going to be always assessing what can I do to help support their success, right? And my goal is to get support just enough for them to develop and grow. So I’m not over supporting, I’m not under supporting, but I’m collaborating with them to figure out what can they handle, what’s too much, what’s too little? Do I have appropriate expectations? Where are we at? So that mentoring relationship is very collaborative in nature, not above them, they’re not below me. I’m not trying to make them behave a certain way. My goal is to support their development with them, not for them, with them. And so I guess I’m offering to you that a lot of the approaches out there and sort of traditional parenting approaches and the way that children have been viewed and what we society has deemed as oh, you’re a good parent or you’re a good teacher. You’re a good whatever, Coach. I want to offer to you that cultivating a supportive, mentoring relationship that’s connected and it’s collaborative in nature is truly the most effective way to help support your autistic or your neurodivergent child, teen or young adult, to be able to develop and to have an overall sense of well being as they move through life as the human that they are on this planet. And that mentoring relationship. While I think it’s absolutely valuable for everyone so this is especially helpful for our Autistic and our neuro, divergent young people to have a mentoring relationship that’s informed by our understanding of brain states and nervous system regulation and informed by understanding of development and what’s needed for development to happen and what developmental stages are. And then that relationship where we’re connected and we’re collaborative. So cultivating a mentoring relationship and then especially for autistic and our neuro divergent young people, a mentoring relationship that’s informed by our understanding of brain states and nervous system regulation and stages of development, we can be so much more effective as mentors. And so that is what we teach and what we’re all about. And if you need help and you struggle in this area and you’re not sure what to do, make sure you’re on our email list and keep listening to this podcast. And we’re going to have some offerings coming up soon. To be able to support you in being the most effective mentor that you can be to really improve outcomes and quality of life for these young people that we so much love and care about. Some food for thought and maybe even thinking about who were your mentors and what were the qualities about them that made them have an impact on you. And that’s, I think, what we all want to be for the young people in our lives, is that kind of a mentor. So take care. Have a great week.

[13:26] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us on this episode of Autism and Neurodiversity with Jason and Debbie. If you want to learn more about our work, come visit us at JasonDebbie.com. That’s Jasondebbie.com.