The Magic Bullet for Non-Speaking Autism Progress? It's Consistency

 If you've ever asked another autism parent — what's the one thing that made the biggest difference for your child? — this episode is my honest answer. 

People ask me all the time: Sara, what's the thing that transformed Rocco's journey? What's the magic bullet? 

And I tell them: consistency. 

Sometimes they're relieved. Sometimes they're disappointed. Because we live in a world of Amazon Prime mentality — where we expect results fast, and when they don't come, we quietly start to wonder if we should just stop. 

But consistency looks like nothing is changing — until suddenly, everything is different. 

In this episode I talk about: 

• Why consistency is the most transformative thing I've done for Rocco — across diet, supplements, the letterboard, and everything in between
• Why our instant gratification culture makes it harder than ever to stay the course
• The hidden subconscious reason we give up before things take root
• What you actually need to give yourself to stay consistent long enough to see real progress
• My own adult tantrum moment two weeks into tracking my macros — and what happened when I kept going anyway

If you've been close to giving up on something that matters — the letterboard, a supplement protocol, your own self-care — this episode will remind you why you started.
 
If this resonated, come find me on Instagram @sara.intonato or learn more about Autism Changemakers at autismchangemakers.com.

Autism Changemakers is a private community just for parents of nonspeaking kids. It's where you don't have to explain yourself, and where you'll always be surrounded by people who believe in your child's brilliance. Come join us. autismchangemakers.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, and welcome to the Autism Changemakers podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Intonato, and today's episode is going to be really fun. I'm really looking forward to talking about this with you because it answers the age-old question that I am asked all the time. And that question is, Sarah, what is the thing that you have done that's helped your child most? What is the thing that really transformed everything for you? In other words, people ask me all the time, what's the magic bullet? What's the thing that I need to do to totally transform my child's journey to a place of well-being on all levels? When I answer this question, I smile. I laugh to myself a little bit, and I tell them, get ready because this response is going to change your life. And they get very excited. And then I tell them the answer is consistency. And of course, sometimes they're happy and sometimes they're not, because who doesn't want the magic bullet, the magic pill that you take that changes your whole life and transforms your child's autism experience for the better? We all want that. And is transformation possible? Yes. Has my life as a parent completely transformed? Has my child's trajectory completely transformed for the better? Yes. We are simply evidence that it can happen for you too when you are consistent. So let's dive in. I heard a quote recently that said, consistency looks like nothing is changing until suddenly everything is different. And I find that to be completely true. It's true in fitness and well-being. It's true in finances. It's true in diet and nutrition. It's true in using a letterboard with your child and making progress towards open communication. It's true in healing your child's biome if they've got gut issues or parasites or anything that needs to be addressed. Consistency is the key. The challenge for us now is there are some parts of consistency, or more specifically, the challenges around being consistent that people are not discussing that need to be discussed in order to be successful. And we're going to talk about both of those right now. The first is that consistency can take time and it takes energy and patience. And as we live in a culture that more and more focuses on instant gratification, I call it Amazon Prime mentality. Consistency becomes increasingly uncomfortable because it butts up against fast energy, instant gratification, all of those things that we see in our highlight reels on social media that seem like real life, but are actually not real life a lot of the time. So look at our life now. Our kids are not learning how to have patience because all they have to do is push a button and get whatever they want. They're getting constant dopamine hits. In our culture, we don't have to wait for anything. Gone are the days where you call someone's house, they don't answer the phone, and you have to wait until they return home, whether that's in an hour or in a week, to connect with them. I'm a child of the 80s, so I remember what that's like. But the reality is our children are growing up in a time where that's no longer reality for them. So the boring work of consistency, doing the same thing day after day after day, chipping away at progress until eventually you get to that beautiful end result is a dying thing. At least in modern day conversations, it's not a dying thing in making real, true, sustainable, organic progress. And I always give the metaphor of someone who needs to lose 100 pounds. If they're committed to doing this without pharmaceuticals, there is no substitute for daily movement, hydration, eating whole foods, being in a healthy caloric deficit, and making progress day after day, even when they don't see the scale moving as fast as they want or at all, even when the progress is frustratingly slow. If someone in this situation had come to you and said, hey, I've already lost 50 pounds, but I'm so frustrated, I just want this to go faster. You know, I know I've got another 50 to lose, and I kind of feel like maybe I should just stop. What would you tell them to do? Would you say, Yeah, you know what, it's not worth it. This isn't fast enough. Just stop. Or would you say, look at what you've already done? This is evidence that what you're doing is working. Keep going. Don't get attached to the timeline, don't get attached to the end result. And whether you're parenting and focusing on a spelling journey with your child or cleaning up what everyone is eating in your house and making dietary improvements or anything, your own health and well-being? Are you giving up before any real progress can take root? Because you have not been able to be consistent yet. And this brings us to the second question: What do you actually need in order to be consistent? Or at least consistent long enough to see progress. I'm very, very thankful that my child, Rocco, is the slow and steady progress person. Very rarely have we done anything with him in the biomedical realm, in the educational or academic realm, in the sensory realm, that has been an overnight success. I can count, on one hand, things that have been an overnight success for him. Rather, there have been dozens of things that have helped him tremendously that were not glamorous, that on a day-to-day basis were helping him, but in amounts that seemed so small, from the outside, it probably looked like nothing was happening. And during these moments, often what encouraged us to keep going, whether it was him trying Luca Vorin and seeing tiny trace amounts of progress or working with him in RPM using a letterboard, it was my intuition that said, just keep going with this. Seems good. You may not know yet. Just keep going. Because it was not the equivalent of fireworks going off or lightning bolts coming down from the sky to strike us and tell us that everything was happening. This was a big deal. No, it was a small deal, but a small deal every day for years has yielded huge progress. Of course, operating from this place with a great amount of consistency takes energy. And it takes endurance. It's not something that you just pull out of your back pocket. So, what do you need to give to yourself so that you can keep going? It's one of my favorite coaching questions to ask. And when I ask clients, what do you need in order to keep going on this journey? Parenting a non-speaker, very often the answer is, I don't know. And a mentor of mine is known for saying, I don't know, is a lazy answer. Is it that you don't know? Or is it that you're afraid to say it out loud? You're afraid to ask for it? Is it that you don't know, or you haven't given yourself any time or space to sit with it for even five minutes to say, hmm, what do I need in order to be consistent, in order to keep going? Because very often when you give that to yourself, you get an answer fast. But you have to give yourself a little space first in order for that answer to come through. This is the game of consistency. If doing the things took no energy at all, you would just set it and forget it. And you'd make progress already. But these things aren't happening at the speed that you want or at all, because there's probably something deeper there for you to be with. What do you need to give yourself so that you have the endurance to be consistent? Especially if what you're being consistent in, like reducing your child's screen time, leads to meltdowns or things that require you to put out more energy than you would like. It takes energy and endurance to do those things. Of course, you can't be consistent if you're already starting this in a state of depletion. But regardless of what you need to keep going, what I encourage you to do is not quit. What do you need to give yourself so that you don't quit? Because it's easy to try something for two weeks and then say, oh, I'm not getting the results that I want. I'm just gonna give up. If I had done that with Rocco in countless different areas, diet, different supplements, he would not be where he is now because I would have given up before anything powerful could take root. Because again, we live in a culture that prides things on happening fast. Instead of reminding everyone that the results are cumulative, and in order for them to accrue, you have to give them some time. So I'll ask you the question: what benefit do you get from quitting after just a short time? Maybe you don't have to deal with the hardship of a meltdown. Maybe you don't have to deal with the financial expenditure that you might be facing with whatever you're working on. Maybe you don't have to pony up and do the deeper work that it takes in order to keep going. Of course, when I ask that question, what benefit do you get from giving up? Your knee-jerk reaction might be nothing. But there is something, and it's called a secondary gain, and it works subconsciously. Every behavior you engage in is giving you something, or you wouldn't be doing it. So, what benefit do you get from doing it? I'm 45 years old, and last year, less than a year and a half ago, I had some new fitness goals that I wanted to achieve. So I had never before tracked my macros, proteins, carbs, and fats. And I decided it was time to start doing that because I had specific things that I wanted to achieve. So I worked with someone who I trusted to help me find the right numbers and work the system. And for two weeks, I stuck to my macros and I saw minimal progress. And I promptly had an adult tantrum about it. I wanted results faster. I thought once I started tracking and doing the right things, that I was going to see huge, drastic changes in just a couple of weeks, and I wasn't seeing that, and blah, blah, blah. I went to my dear friend who was helping me with this, and I reported how I was feeling when I reported my numbers and what the scale said and what my pictures looked like and all that. I also want to say there was nothing wrong with my body. I just had different things I wanted to achieve at this stage of my life. And she laughed and she said, Go have your tantrum, let it out, and then just keep going. That was not what I was expecting. I was expecting her to say, have your tantrum and then let's change something. Let's, you know, adjust your numbers, let's do this and that. And that was not the lesson. The lesson was you have to give it some more time for us to really know what's going on here. So then guess what happened? I gave it more time. I saw results. We made some very small tweaks along the way. A year and a half later, my body is completely different. I'm healthier, I'm happier, I'm more confident than I've ever been. I have lab work to prove it. And I laugh at that tantrum moment two weeks in, thinking, if I give it up at the two-week mark because things weren't going the way I wanted them to go, I never would have gotten the results that I've gotten. Isn't that interesting? So the moral of the story is you have to give yourself what you need to keep going. And if you, like me, needed someone to go to when things were tough, please join us in Autism Change Makers. Growth, consistency, change are uncomfortable. Nobody is meant to do life alone. You were definitely not meant to parent a high support needs autistic child alone. So, what benefit do you get from insisting on doing it alone? What if you allowed yourself to be supported? Where would you be one year from now if you started today to step into a place where you don't have to explain yourself and you can allow people to support you in tangible ways through these hard things so that you can be consistent and actually get the results you desire in any area of your life. Please know that in Autism Changemakers, you can start and finish at any time. That's up to you. The door is always open when you're ready. And we would love for you to be in there and stand shoulder to shoulder with all of us. Thank you for listening. I'll see you on the next episode and have a great day.