The Chair That Changed How I Think About (my) Neurodivergency

I've built my coaching practice around neurodivergent people. Not because I thought mainstream coaching was broken — though I did have my questions about it — but because I wanted to work with people for whom the standard playbook often doesn't quite fit.

What I didn't expect is how much of my work would end up looking like this: gently, sometimes firmly, redirecting someone away from their neurodivergence as an explanation for things going the wrong way.

It comes up constantly. Someone describes a situation at work — a manager who never gives clear feedback, a team that keeps shifting priorities, a culture where unwritten rules change without warning — and the story they've absorbed is: this is hard for me because of how my brain works. And sometimes, yes, that's part of it. But often - no, actually, stop. Most people would struggle here. Everyone finds it hard to navigate a manager who expects you to read their mind. Nobody likes chaotic, unexplained change. This is not about being neurodivergent, this is about being human.

The opposite assumption — that if something is hard for you, it must connect to your neurotype – is harmful. It makes people take responsibility for something they are not responsible for. It can make them absorb problems that genuinely belong to the system, the culture, the manager, or just the plain ordinary difficulty of being a person at work.

Then something happened to me personally that made this much more concrete.

I've always been uncomfortable in office chairs. I sit in strange positions — legs folded under me, weight on my toes, perched on one knee, shifting constantly. I assumed this was neurodivergence. Some need for movement or proprioceptive input.

Then I watched a video. A short person — genuinely short — describing their experience of chairs. How standard office furniture is sized for average height, and when you're significantly below that, your feet simply don't reach the floor. And after about ten minutes, you get pins and needles. Cramps.

I sat with that for a moment.

Then I thought: oh.

I'm short. I live in the Netherlands, where the average male height is around 180 cm, female – 170ish. I am just 152 cm high. I have spent years sitting in chairs that were never built for my body, attributing the physical discomfort to my psychology, when it was just biology. The gap between my feet and the floor.

Now I walk into a room, find an adjustable chair, set the height, and move on. I don't think twice about it. It stopped being a puzzle I was trying to interpret. It was just a practical problem with a practical solution.

And if anyone ever comments on how I sit? I will stand up next to them and let the height difference speak for itself.

This is what I keep coming back to in my coaching work. Not every difficulty is a neurological signature. Some things are just bad management. Some things are just chairs built for taller people. The work — for me, and often for the people I coach — is learning to tell the difference. Because when you stop misattributing the cause, you can actually do something about it.