Professional athletes face unique challenges when transitioning from different leagues/levels, locations, teammates, and coaches, in addition to transitioning out of sports and into the next chapter of their lives. That last one can happen quickly sometimes.
For neurodiverse athletes, those with ADHD, dyslexia, autism spectrum disorder, or other neurological differences, these challenges can be more complex and create undesired outcomes in the process. As a leader in high-performance coaching for neurodiverse thinkers, I understand this. I offer specialized support tailored to the distinct needs of these remarkable individuals because they are now their own business on top of being an athlete. They are many things all at once and it can get complicated.
I can’t talk a lot about the clients I am working with right now or have worked with. NDA’s kind of keep me in check about it. What I can tell you is that the more successful my clients have become the more it amplified their weaknesses. The overload and overwhelm have caused harder crashes and the pressure from other people gets more aggressive, and none of them realized that it was their different thinking style that is causing a majority of the mess.
Typically, I get professional athlete clients back into their success system by teaching them about their adult neurodiverse traits and how it is connected to day-to-day life. The lightbulbs go off on their faces, and they realize how connected all this is and how it can be easily adapted from past experiences and success.
Confidentially is key to everything I do at this level. It is all about the client and their success.
Why Neurodiverse Athletes Seek Specialized Support
Pro athletes with neurological differences often possess extraordinary talents alongside distinctive cognitive processing styles. Most often they will not disclose this for fear of other people’s ignorance on the topic causing them to judge or exclude them. These differences can manifest as:
- Hyperfocus abilities that contributed to athletic excellence but may create an imbalance in the bigger context of things.
- Visual-spatial strengths that excel in physical performance but struggle with traditional systems and general living skills
- Difficulty with transitions between career phases, because the process is not geared for their neurodiversity. Something really small can create a big sticking point
- Executive functioning challenges when faced with complex business systems and administrative requirements
What this might look like to coaches, trainers, and agents
- Session-to-session recall is inconsistent
- Routines and multi-step sequences break down, especially with coordination demands
- Focus wavers in busy or noisy environments
- Multi-tasking triggers overwhelm or momentary shutdown
- Time awareness is off, impacting transitions and tempo
- Cognitive energy drains quickly, reducing quality late in sessions
- The “yips” out of know where with no connection to something obvious
- Late to meetings, practice, and travel departures
I had a coach reach out to me once with some questions, just trying to understand his player better. The biggest worry he had was that there wasn’t anything they could do to stop this player from spiraling, and he knew the athlete had undiagnosed ADHD. I suggested a couple of minor shifts in his language.
That went so well, that two days later I was sitting on zoom with his player talking about their life, goals, and how he processes new information. Months later we talked about ADHD, until then we focused an traits and new mastery skills. I only hear from this client a couple times a year now, just to check in and talk through adjusting his system to what is new coming in. He knows what to ask for from the support staff and people around him and he knows how to adapt to different communication styles quickly.
Common Challenges Neurodiverse Athletes Face
Systems Navigation
The business world operates on systems that often favor neurotypical thinking patterns. Athletes transitioning into professional sports or new careers may struggle with:
- Overwhelming administrative procedures
- Complex financial management requirements
- Sequential planning processes that don’t match their thinking style
- Communication formats that don’t align with their processing strengths
I have assisted with it many times when someone moves from one system to the next and they didn’t realize all of the ways they aligned the last system for their success. This new team or coach’s process and system do not align. You need to take steps fast to make the adjustments and to prepare for the next time that happens.
A friend of mine recommended me to a sports agent who was in the process of signing someone into the pros from college. He knew that his soon-to-be client was dyslexic- when he was talking to my friend, he happened to mention it in his story. My friend suggested that the agent be proactive and bring me in during the process. The agent laughed and said, “That stuff won’t matter anymore.” My friend proceeded to call me and hand the agent the phone, saying “just talk to her, you will thank me later.”
I explained all the ways this could affect the bottom line for himself and his newest client just by asking how did it go when he went from high school to college? It was a hot mess. I responded, “What makes you think this won’t be any different if we don’t have a different plan?” We got a plan in place and things went very well for everyone. The agent just made me part of the necessary tools for supporting this client.
Leveraging Strengths
Many neurodiverse athletes don’t recognize how their neurological differences contributed to their athletic success or how these same traits can become athletic and business advantages when properly channeled.
Confidence Outside Their Domain
Despite tremendous success in sports, it’s not uncommon for ADHD, dyslexic or autistic athletes to experience heightened imposter syndrome when entering unfamiliar and new environments. They also have few people to turn to who can assist them.
Why You Want to Work with Me
My approach is fundamentally different from traditional leadership and life coaching because it’s built on understanding neurodiversity as a variation in human cognition and having that human cognition myself, I speak the language fluently and one of my best strengths is creating customized systems for high performers.
Personalized Systems Design
Together, we create life, business, and training systems that work with the different thinker’s brain, not against it:
- Custom workflow designs aligned with your specific processing style
- Adaptive communication methods that leverage your strengths
- Alternative documentation approaches that replace traditional written formats
- Time management strategies tailored to your attention patterns
- Procrastination removal processes
Strength Translation
I help identify the specific neurological strengths that made this person exceptional in sports and develop strategies to apply these same advantages in all areas of life and in business contexts.
Confidence Building Through Understanding
Understanding your neurological makeup provides context for past challenges and clear pathways for future success. This knowledge builds authentic confidence based on self-awareness rather than masking.
If you are not neurodiverse or don’t have a family member who is, this sounded like a bunch of fluff, I am sure. Let me explain, because this is important.
For most people who are different thinkers, there has been bullying, extreme judgement by parents, teachers, and coaches, and other traumas. At some point that crap unpacks itself and makes a big o’ mess of things. Removing the small traumas and being prepared with a system and support for when the big one comes makes all the difference in how this plays out. I am always playing the long game for my clients and their success. I just plan for it, and when it is done, they have more confidence in all aspects of life. It is amazing.
The Path Forward
Working together, we’ll create sustainable practices that honor your style and makeup while building toward your BIG goals. Unlike generic approaches to neurodiversity that focus primarily on accommodations, our work centers on identifying and amplifying your unique advantages, learning what to do with the weaknesses and building for an amazing future of success.
Your extraordinary mind helped you achieve athletic excellence. With the right approach we can make sure it does even more than that for you and it never gets in the way of what the future has in store for you.
As a high-performance coach specializing in neurodiversity and unconventional thinking, I work with professionals across industries to develop personalized systems that align with their unique cognitive profiles. My work with athletes focuses on up-leveling hard-earned discipline and exceptional abilities into new contexts while honoring someone’s natural style.
I work with clients in the NBA, NHL, WNBA, NFL, MLB, MLS, PGA, LPGA, Olympics, College Sports, and The Premier League Just to name a few of the associations. Just because your organization is not on my list, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work together. Give me a call. 612-605-1905
Video transcription:
Coaching and supporting neurodiverse athletes, it is a special kind of coaching, because it’s a combination of understanding an athlete’s mindset, understanding priorities for an athlete, understanding the amount of drive that it has taken to get to that level, and then also understanding and merging in that different thinking — that different comprehension at times of things, that different processing speed, and understanding how sensitive at times their brains can be as athletes to outside influences such as an injury, such as whole changes in diets, such as environments. How that can shift things up, and all of a sudden, something that wasn’t an issue or wasn’t even noticed before all of a sudden becomes a thing.
I don’t talk about this often because it’s not something… I’ve signed a lot of NDAs, so there’s not a lot I can say about the people that I work with in this environment. What I can say is they are incredible, and because of the environment they’re in, and sometimes the money that’s available to them, the challenges that come with it would be minor if not for all of that money and influence around them causing the dyslexia, causing the short-term memory issues, causing some of those things to even be more amplified. There’s a lot of additional stress and anxiety that comes with it.
Obviously, they’ve learned to process that at a level, and what I found is quite often when big changes are happening — moving from one environment to another, moving from one team to another, moving locations, having coaches change out — that type of situation can definitely spark an environment that creates a catalyst and a role in a direction that nobody intended. But the neurology got triggered, and there we are, struggling and not having words for it, and not quite understanding why there’s such a great struggle.
And that’s kind of the environment. So I’m gonna check my notes real quick, don’t lose me here.
Why athletes seek out extra help — I’ve actually only been contacted twice by the athletes themselves, and really, it was somebody close in their environment that reached out to me as a buffer to make sure that I could be trusted and so forth. Otherwise, I’m usually actually sought out by coaches and by agents that are watching their clients or their athlete struggle and wondering, “What in the world? We’ve applied everything that we know. Something’s not matching. The sports psychologist is even confused.” Like, it’s not quite making sense.
Those have been some environments where I’ve been brought in and able to be like, “Oh hey, yeah, I can talk this. I know this language.” And it’s really been helpful for them to have clarity and to understand what’s happening, and to get the right type of support that feels like support and doesn’t feel like, “Well, just shape up,” or, “This will just fix itself in a couple of weeks.”
Usually, I’m brought in after the couple of weeks have passed, and we’re into, “Oh my goodness, how do we cut this off? How do we make this not happen and discontinue from happening any further?”
So, some of the things coaches and agents might notice is just routines — multistep routines — like they’re all of a sudden off. Their routines and so forth are really not what they normally are, and they’re having a hard time regaining that momentum in those routines. Also, possibly their focus is really off. They’re going through playbooks, they’re getting the proper feedback in the coaching, and they’re just having a heck of a time applying it, and so they’re kind of all of a sudden not growing and expanding.
In particular, I had one client who all of a sudden started showing up to everything late. Like, nobody could understand it — late to practice, late to team meetings, late to just about everything — and we really had to dig deep to figure out why that was happening.
Also, sometimes it can create all of a sudden a fatigue because so much mental energy is going in a direction. I had a client with a big coaching change — new coach, and then whole new assistant coaches and support staff — and the way they talked, the way they shared information, was so cognitively draining for this client that it just overloaded their system, and they just started to slowly kind of shut down and not be able to retain some information.
So we made some small adjustments, and that worked out really well. It’s knowing those types of things that means having the right coach for the right situation, and that’s where having a neurodivergent coach who also can work with athletes is important.
From my end as a coach, it’s really fun because I can see their success on a bigger level, and when they’re on television or something, it’s quite something. They don’t always have to report back to me — I can see their success happening in real time. I can also sometimes see their struggles in real time. That is a little different in coaching; I can’t do that with all of my other clients, so that’s kind of a fun thing for me.
Some of the things to also know about coaching athletes and what that can look like — it’s also confidence outside of… I’ve been brought in for a couple of athletes as they were injured and were not going to be able to return back to the career and the lifestyle and the world that they had built for their entire lives, that they had dreamed of. And all of a sudden, the goal had shifted, their life had shifted, and they weren’t obviously prepared for that, and their neurodivergent brain got really hijacked and started to self-sabotage.
They brought back all sorts of baggage from childhood about how they thought their life would turn out, and they were unpacking it in the moment, which did not need any of that. We were able to stave that off, cut that off, clean that up, and then get them focused on the space ahead and what opportunities were ahead, and how they could take the learnings from their experience as an athlete, and how they could give back, and how they could use that as a catalyst — actually in business, in particular for one client — which was incredible to see that growing.
All of this has to be very personally designed. It all has to be very specific, and it all has to be very much under lock and key. Coaching athletes who are neurodivergent is a definite different environment, and I have worked hard to understand that and to be able to be there for them.
I just don’t talk about it enough, and I wanted to take a moment to honor and appreciate those athletes out there that have risen to incredible success with their neurodivergent gifts and talents, but also with some of the weaknesses that come with that.
I’m so impressed and so proud, and every time I hear of another athlete described as having ADHD, or autism, or dyslexia, or anxiety, or struggling with depression, I just kind of laugh and go, “Well, yay — and not surprising.” It’s a really stressful environment, and it takes an incredibly resilient person to be in that space.
So I love that more and more athletes are stepping forward to say, “Oh hey, I’ve got a different-thinking brain. It helps me in many ways, and in some other ways, I just gotta protect it and know how to handle it.”
So if you are an agent, if you are a coach, if you are a good friend of someone who is a prime athlete — that is their primary career — and you see them struggling and are not sure how best to help, having a conversation with an exclusive coach who understands that could be game-changing for them.
So I highly recommend you make an introduction for us.
I’m JoyGenea, Unconventional Leadership Coach, Neurodiversity Success Coach, internationally encouraging you to go out and have an amazing day, and get heavily involved in your game and your strengths. Bye now.