Building Workplace Resilience For Neurodivergent Minds In The Age Of AI

AI is changing work faster than most humans can comfortably process, and that speed is colliding with already exhausted nervous systems. We sit down with Marie-Hélène Pelletier (MH), a leadership psychologist, executive coach and author of The Resilience Plan, to unpack what resilience really means when the pressure is constant and the stakes feel personal. The big shift: resilience is not a trait you either have or lack. It’s a state you can grow, and it lives inside a system that includes you, your team and your organisation.

We talk neurodiversity in the workplace through a practical lens: where hidden friction shows up, why “just cope” is not an inclusion strategy, and how rigid performance reviews can overload neurodivergent minds. We also dig into workplace realities many leaders avoid: employee engagement dropping, burnout rising, and the gap between how optimistic leaders feel about AI and how stressed employees may feel. MH shares research-backed insights on isolation risks as work becomes more mediated by AI tools, and why staying connected to humans is a resilience practice, not a soft extra.

You’ll leave with concrete ideas you can use this week: adjust feedback formats, build team-level resilience habits, make space for neurodivergent representation on AI decision groups, and lean on the four core anchors that protect mental health and performance: exercise, nutrition, sleep and relationships. We also address chronic cognitive overload, how it can impair judgment and even nudge ethical drift, plus self-compassionate ways to find your voice when speaking up feels hard.

If you care about mental health at work, inclusive leadership and responsible AI adoption, subscribe, share this with a colleague and leave a review. What system change would make your workplace feel more human?

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Neil Milliken 0:00

Hello and welcome to Access Chat. I'm delighted that we're joined today by Marie-Hélène Pelletier, or MH, as we're going to refer to her for the rest of the show. So MH is a multi-skilled person. She's bringing a mixture of business psychology and sort of knowledge from both, doing a PhD as a psychologist and an MBA. So bringing together the sort of mechanics of business and how the mind works in these places. So she's got over 20 years of experience as a leadership psychologist and executive coach. And she's written an award-winning book called The Resilience Plan, which is in a strategic approach to optimizing your work performance and mental health. And given how much talk there is right now about the need for resilience and the impact of the working environment on mental health, it's a perfect time to start a conversation with MH. So welcome, MH. It's great to have you with us. Please tell us a bit more about the work that you're doing. And particularly, I know that you've recently been focusing around neurodivergence and have done a TED talk on the topic. So please tell us all about it.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier 1:19

Actually, the TEDx is a bit more focused on the notion of building our resilience in the context of AI specifically. Now, it does connect with all of us, diverse populations, everyone. But uh but you're right, you said it exactly at what I do is I bring psychology and business together in especially with the lens of increasing our resilience. So our ability to go through adversity or demands and come out even stronger. And as we start this conversation and as this applies to neurodiversity, there is a specific aspect of the definition of resilience that I think is so important. And it is, and it we won't blame each other for this. It's the way the academic literature was for years, where it was very much defining resilience as an individual state. So, number one, not a trait. So it's not a personality trait, it's a state. So it will evolve and we can nourish it and increase it over time, which is great. But what's very important for us to keep in mind, especially in today's conversation, linking it with neurodiversity, is the fact that it is a system. So when we think of resilience as it relates to neurodiversity in the workplace, as it relates to other important aspects as well, but specifically as it relates to neurodiversity, we want to think about it in terms of the individual, all of us, the teams that we're in, the organization we're in as well. Because all of these components influence each other. So that's something to have on top of our radar as uh as we uh dive into today's conversation.

Neil Milliken 2:54

That's great. One of my favorite things that I took from doing my MBA was the idea of systems thinking. So applying systems to or seeing systems is is a particularly key strength amongst a lot of the neurodivergent population as well. We we're quite well known for seeing the things and connecting the dots.

Pandemic Aftershocks And AI Demands

Debra Ruh 3:16

And MH, thank you for going by MH. I'm a Deborah Maria. I'm not a Marie, but so we're closely related, I guess. We are in my very weird world. But you know what? Speaking of a weird world right now, a lot of people seem to be traumatized right now, traumatized in the workforce, trauma diet, trauma all the things that have happened to us starting maybe, maybe we'll just go back to 2020 where we started traumatizing people. And I I think, you know, the conversation resilience and AI or resilience with AI, very, very important part of these conversations. And of course, we are relying so much more. I know I am a lot on AI, and people are also relying on AI for mental health, as as do I sometimes as well, but I try not to, you can go too far down some rat hole. It's such interesting times. And so, on top of it, people are just trying to be employers and do their job and make sure that they're supporting their employees. It's a very, very tough topic topic right now. And then you add neurodiversity into it, and people like me, I didn't realize I was neurodiverse. All my other friends and family knew it before I knew it. I remember telling Neil, and he said something very, very sarcastic, and Antonio laughed because they didn't know I didn't realize I was neurodiverse. But all of those components, first of all, I imagine I don't guess you sleep because you have so many people you're trying to help. It's a really intense time right now with these issues. How do we even begin to wrap our hands around it?

Self Regulation When Work Overheats

Marie-Hélène Pelletier 4:50

Oh well, you identified such important pieces to this conversation. And what I love, I mean, many things about what you just said, but one of the important pieces with your observation is how we are here today in part as a result of how life has felt like over the past few years. All of this, you know, a pandemic is one of the ways to think about it is as a chronic demand that was very high chronic demand during it, and to some degree stayed in smaller ways after that. And then we've got AI that was there, but in different people listening to us today are at different places with it in their work life and personal life also. But some workplaces right now are seeing it go extremely fast. Some others know it should and it isn't. One way or the other, that too is representing another chronic demand. And then we've got on top of these various chronic demands, the acute demands that are happening in our personal and professional life. So even if we're thinking and talking in terms of work context, for example, our work selves is also impacted by what's happening in personal life. So you put all this together and it is taxing for the system. It creates a, in a way, a state of chronic cognitive overload. And so you add this to a brain that's already used to thinking about multiple things at the same time and linking things in ways that others may not be, and uh, it can feel fairly overwhelming.

Making Neurodiversity A Team Conversation

Neil Milliken 6:24

So I I once used to sort of describe my brain being a bit like a pressure cooker. And you know, it starts off cooking at the beginning of the day, and there's not that much pressure, but by by the end of it, there's so much going on that you need a sort of pressure release valve to let the steam out. And you know, lots of lots of people don't have effective ways of dealing with that pressure or letting off steam, or not healthy ways, right? There's plenty of unhealthy ways of dealing with it. So when you're thinking about that sort of resilience, part of that surely has to be sort of finding ways not of ignoring those pressures, because we we can't always avoid the the pressures of back-to-back meetings and the requirement of our organizations to adopt AI at a galloping pace. But we still need to be able to find a way to self-regulate and to allow our brains to sort of ramp back down and and and calm down. So, how do you build that into a framework for resilience? What are the sort of things that you recommend?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier 7:38

Yes. Okay, big question. And let's let's uh identify some aspects that all of us in our organizations can contribute to. Because again, if we think, keep thinking of this as a system. Yes, there is us, and let's say there is in the individual category, so individual team, organization. In the individual here, we have a number of people who are neurodivers. And so, and let's say this neurodivers person is Neil, pressure cooker and trying to manage the brain during the day. Yes, we will want, and each person will have different healthy ways to help manage this. And but this, we want to think about this in, and I'll come back with some examples still, but we want us as and in the neurodiverse individual to not just think about this on their own as something they need to be better at self-managing or self-regulating. That's something that, yes, each individual we want to have on our radar. And we want to think of this in the workplace in the context of that system. So it's not just Neil and how can Neil do this better. It's also Neil in this team and how do we do this, do things in this team. How is my how are we, me and my leader, having conversations about my performance? For example, how often we're having them, what's the format? Does it help me with how my brain works? For example, let's say you realized that for you, a face-to-face performance evaluation is way more demanding, brain goes in too many directions than having a phone conversation followed by something in writing by your boss, for example, or by yourself sent to your boss. So let's say you know this about yourself. Sure, you could ask this, but you can also share this with your boss and see what other ideas your boss may have to make this even easier. So, what we're doing, the way this overall resilience conversation as it relates to neurodiversity in the workplace is so important is to make this a conversation. So there might be very specific things, like this example of how do we perform do performance evaluations, but it can also be having a conversation about do we have a representative, neurodiverse representative from this team on the organization's AI committee, for example? And could we ensure we have representation to decrease that sense of maybe the neurodiversity is not as present as the AI at the AI table as it needs to be, that we're unfortunately continuing to maintain that invisibility factor because of how we've not been involved, perhaps. So these are some examples of how sometimes reactively, but sometimes proactively, we can increase resilience for everyone, especially neurodiverse individuals.

unknown 10:27

Okay.

Neil Milliken 10:27

So I mean, as a neurodivergent individual, you know, I've I've also managed a lot of neurodivergent people and a broadly neurodiverse team with lots of different neurodivergences within it. And and a bunch of neurotypicals to keep us on the straight and narrow. One of the things that is really difficult for people is to, in large organizations at the very least, to be able to sort of have those changes made to those evaluation processes. Performance evaluations are often pretty strict in terms of the process and the policies and the tools that you must use, and are not very adaptable. They're very much uh sort of right, here's the objectives, you fill in a form and you go through a mechanistic process for for all of these things. I was lucky in that I did have a manager at one point that actually hated the performance evaluation system as much as I did, and much preferred me to give him a presentation on what I've been doing. But most people don't have that privilege. So I think that that then feeds into your other point, which is about having the representation on the board and the making the decisions about how those processes can be implemented and what might go around. And I know Deborah also wanted to comment.

Debra Ruh 11:51

I did want to comment, and and this was something that I experienced as an individual that it shouldn't have had such a big impact on me, but it really did. I was working in the banking industry still, and I was working with a team that just happened to be all women. I don't I believe if there'd been a man on the team, it would have been more balanced. But we were not performing well as a team. We're not functioning as well as we really should have as a team. And so we did an off-site where we did this a little exercise, not the NDJ or the I forget Malcolm or whatever. Myers Briggs. Myers Briggs, thank you. But this was to me a little, it took a little further because it really talked about who we were as individuals. I obviously am a very hyper person, and I benefit by getting in there and talking to you and energizing myself. But I learned that were other people on the team that actually, as I rushed in to get all energized, I actually took their energy away because their learning styles were so different. And it wound up being so profound to me. I realized that three of the team members really did so much better if their door was just shut, when they were ready to come out. If it's an emergency, fine. They're ready to come out, interject. Other of us that can't shut up, we would all energize each other, then go back. But when I went in and rushed into the offices that don't perform like that, I actually distracted them and made them less they I didn't realize it as an individual on the team. That was very helpful to me. So I was just wondering if that's some of it Well, you both made so many important points.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier 13:19

So just going back first to Neil, your observation about the rigidity at times, especially in larger organizations of how say performance evaluations are done, immense benefits when we can actually have a bit of flexibility to get basically we create the best out of everyone when we bring this. So a couple of ideas. I mean, one of the things is that will sometimes be a sort of a different way to hopefully move things in a useful direction. Sometimes large corporations, as much as they have so many processes and policies and rigidity, they also will tend to have often more than smaller outfits. They'll have strategies. They'll have a business strategy, they might even have a mental health strategy. If they don't have a mental health strategy, they probably have a health strategy, which they focus right now a lot on physical. But more and more big corporations will actually have a mental health strategy that's connected with their physical and financial health strategy. And all of this is connected with the business strategy. Where I'm going with this is that we can then bring in the conversation the need to have a neurodiversity angle to our potentially mental health strategy or wherever it fits best. What is happening if we are able to then weave in this aspect as part of the strategic approach is that now we've got an in, right? Now, if it's part of strategy, that means we're going to find tactics, right? Active. And now it's sometimes a bit easier to bring up, say, the performance evaluation piece. So just a thought on that, because I've seen some organizations do this never easy, never fast, but a way to use one of the things that's often there in a large organization to help move this forward in a way that I can work. So, okay, now I got uh distracted. Sorry, but Deborah, you were talking about, and I'm so sorry, you may need to remind me now. You were talking about the big impact of those just understanding different learning styles.

Debra Ruh 15:18

I mean, and how people work through the day and process information. It was like, I'm being distracting. Yes.

Employee Engagement Drops As AI Rises

Marie-Hélène Pelletier 15:26

And that's and see again, that too actually could be part of a wonderful neurodiverse and diversity strategy in an organization. If it's big, we can be formal about it. But if it's we're in a small, more informal setup, we can still do that. Where, you know, human, humans in general, in the absence of information, we will make assumptions. And often assumptions will be risky. They will be even dangerous at times. Well, they'll tend to go in not helpful directions. So, and this is going to be true with AI, this is definitively true with neurodiversity as well. The more we can learn more, and it's not because someone is neurodiverse that they're very knowledgeable about other types of neurodiversity either. So we don't want to even assume that, right? There is great diversity within neurodiversity. So that whether it's training, workshops, we need to bring even more information, even today. So, yes, we're talking about this way more than we were, thankfully, and it's wonderful. It's still very far from where we need to be. And so more information absolutely needs to happen. And it's in part what happened in the retreat that you're describing. So it was not like a formal training with slides and content, which sometimes absolutely also contributes, but you learned more about each other's style, then probably reset some assumptions that you were all making, and then everything worked worked out better. So there is this aspect of, yeah, we do need to increase information training that not only it provides decreases assumptions and just provides good information, but it will also allow everyone to be part of this conversation more. Sometimes people don't speak because they either feel like they don't know enough, that they're not in a position where they can speak. And so there is an element of training that's not just information, it's sending in itself a message of inclusion, of openness, and of this need to communicate with each other to create something even better. So there's so much there. Yeah. Antonio?

Antonio Vieira Santos 17:33

At this moment in time, we are we reached the lowest level of employee engagement ever in the history of work. It's been like that over a decade. So something is definitely not working besides all the arguments, all the strategies, everything that HR is doing. Things are definitely going down. At this stage, many professionals in HR are all excited about AI at work, more excited than employees are, sometimes even more optimistic than employees are. So they have not fixed employee engagement and they want to succeed bringing AI at work, knowing that employees are not as excited as them. So we face this kind of a dilemmas where I was at AGR conference last week and AGR professionals were all almost excited and taken to to go to every panel that would talk about AI, the panels focus on the employee and human relations were more empty. So I saw we are in a phase that you know where people seem a little bit confused about priorities. And I know and Neil was talking about the fact that the the evaluations, people getting uh assessed about how the how they perform. Most people don't care about that. That's what employee engagement tells us. People just ignore performance reviews. I do that because I have to, not because it's going to have an impact. Anyway, early in the year, people say, oh, AI is impacting my work. Then we have the oil crisis. Things change so fast that what I was being asked to do in January does not make any sense in March. So the slowest day of my life was yesterday. So how do we do we navigate all these contradictions without losing our minds?

Human Connection And The Four Anchors

Cognitive Overload And Ethical Drift

Marie-Hélène Pelletier 19:23

Okay, well, here's the sample answer. No, I'm kidding. You brought so much again here. Okay, so and it's fascinating in the entire thing. But just to add to also what you were saying, your observation is also backed up by by research and surveys that was looking at exactly this. The American Psychological Association has a survey, many surveys they do yearly, but one of them was showing how many employees are very stressed out about AI. Leaders tend to feel more positive about AI. Almost sometimes that can lead to disregarding this and just going with the positive message and going. And as we do this, and we would, no leader would do this consciously. Sometimes we'll maybe not see it as much or whatever. It's not, you know, a deliberate thing, but it happens. And as this happens, it creates even more disengagement, right? Because now employees totally feel even less connected with the direction, with their leader. So it just makes everything worse. And on top of all the things you were talking about, we also are seeing higher rates of burnout, which is also a systemic type type situation. So yeah, we've got a lot. We've got a lot going on. And and you're right, things are also changing fast. So we need agility more than ever. Agility has always been a great idea and something useful for all of us in our work, but in the context of AI, even more important because of the speed. So, what do we do with all this? Oh, and also your observation about how you were noticing HR professionals going to a lot of the AI things and that kind of thing. This, you know, is interesting because it could be that they need to go to the AI things so that then they can retreat and think back, because they again need more information here to be part of this conversation. So that could be part of what's going on. But what we are seeing from research is that as we have in some contexts, individuals working exclusively with AI agents, for example, in the context of their work, what we're starting to see, it's recent research because that's what we have. But it is showing that people are feeling less connected to humans in general, feeling more isolated. I mean, we it makes sense intuitively, but research is also showing it. So I'm saying this because back to then the end part of your question of so what do we do with all this? Well, so there's a few areas we want to invest in. One is staying connected with humans. And even if outside of all of these more recent significant demands and changes, and that's a lot of what I find in my work, I'm pairing what we've known from decades with what we need to shift given the current context. So some of what we've known for decades that increases our resilience, everyone's resilience. There's four main areas to invest in. There are many others, but the four, and we've heard learned, we've heard about them throughout the pandemic, but they are still things that today, as we navigate all these big changes, each of us, and some of that is individual to each of us, may want to invest in as much as we can. The first, and they're not in order, but one of the four, is exercise, cardio, strength training, meditative type activity. Now, if your brain's going in all kinds of directions while just sitting there, don't do that. Maybe do something else. Maybe it's tai chi, maybe it's yoga where you have movement, maybe it's swimming, so your body's moving, but you're getting the flow, right? There are different ways to help your brain calm down, close some some tabs sort of in the brain. So exercise is one, nutrition, huge impact on our resilience, sleep, protecting it. Then relationships, investing in just being around people we enjoy spending time with. So these are some examples. Now, this is sort of high-level true for all of us. And even if they look like we've known them for years, are we, all of us here today, investing in this on a daily and weekly basis as much as we want? Maybe we are. Okay, Deborah is like, I'm there, girl. Love it. And uh that's sorry, that's my interpretation of the right. I'm being I'm being being intentional about it now. Well, and that's where we want to to be because especially as Antonio was describing, things are moving so fast and with so many demands piling on top of each other that unless you are very deliberate about it, there will not be any minutes available to you with nothing else to do to take care of yourself and do these things. So these are some at the individual level. At the team level, this may mean in the workplace, either joining a committee that exists or having a conversation to create one on how do we, as a team in this organization, build our team resilience even more. And we always want to ensure that there is a specific angle with neurodiversity. So let's bring these two conversations in structures because same thing. Creating a structure for this kind of thing is the deliberate, the corporate deliberate, the corporate deliberate equivalent of making sure it happens. So these are some examples, but the key direction is we need to be deliberate. Another key direction is we need to take actions at all levels of this system, not leaving it, even though we we experience it, obviously, as an individual. And there are there is agency we have and we want to take it. We just don't want to leave it there because we're missing part of the picture, but also it almost turns against us. Like it becomes an unrealistic expectation that if I do all the things, then I'll be fine. No, the context is also there, and we need to invest in that too.

Antonio Vieira Santos 24:50

I just want to make a quick comment is that recent I've been very vocal about talking many of these topics over over time, and I have people reaching out to me saying, in the current scenario, I'm having very difficult to express myself and to have an opinion. No, I'm almost anything. So I'm doing well in my let's say my private life, everything's fine. But publicly on topics that are on on the day to day, I'm I'm experienced it's very, very difficult for me to make a judgment and express myself. And I found this very, very concerning.

Self Compassion And Finding Your Voice

Thanks Sponsor And Closing Thoughts

Marie-Hélène Pelletier 25:26

Yes, it it is, and something that uh research is also pointing to because when you remember when we were talking just a moment ago about that that sort of chronic cognitive overload, that these piled demands, both on the chronic side and in the acute ones, so they create a chronic cognitive overload. When we're chronically cognitively overloaded, it does impact decision making, it impacts judgment. So of course, yeah, it's harder to even know what I think about this. So, yeah, let alone you know express it publicly. So, number one, even that, that awareness that this is part of what's happening can be helpful. And it's not just me or you and I talking about this today. We know this from research. It's yes, it's there. And and it's important because in addition to, I mean, if our decision making, our judgments impact it, we could also be at risk of ethical drift, right? That desire to make good ethical decisions may drift without us wanting or even realizing it's happening. So it's very important what uh you're you're mentioning that people are coming to you with. So, number one, I would say we validate that because we're in it, even if whether we realize it or not, it's probably impacting us. So, and that realization in itself is important towards more deliberately, ideally proactively if we can, as soon as possible, investing in our resilience, because that's then what allows us to decrease, distance ourselves a bit from the impact of that chronic, uh, chronic, chronic overload. And so that's one piece. Now, the second piece you were talking about was the expressing my once I have maybe an opinion after I've created space for my brain to have one. Sometimes it might be difficult to express it publicly. We want to, I'm gonna bring in the self-compassion here, that we need to acknowledge our feelings and acknowledge them as valid, and then look for what we need. And so I may be in a situation where I want to contribute, say, to my workplace conversation about how we're handling AI and neurodiversity. I'm not, say, comfortable with taking the mic at the next meeting and saying something. What am I comfortable with? And if it is a, if I have created the space, I have my opinion, I and even if I don't have a specific thing, but I know I want to contribute, then then I'm I'm searching for what are the ways? Are there written ways? Are there one-on-one ways? If I have no idea, can I go to my leader and just mention this? I want to bring my voice to this conversation. I know it's not in the big vocal in front of every one way. What are your thoughts? Because we want to keep in mind that our leaders here usually have, often in a structure, especially in a big, bigger structure, but even in smaller ones, they tend to have a visibility on things that we don't, because we're in this team, just like we may have visibility on things that others, more junior, may not have. That's the structure of how things are, meetings we're in, and that kind of thing. So why not go to our leader and say, I need your your visibility on this? Does anything come to mind in terms of ways I could bring my voice? They may have ideas.

Neil Milliken 28:37

Excellent point. Thank you so much for for joining us today. I also need to thank Amazon for sponsoring us, keeping us on air. It's been a pleasure to get your perspectives and and really, you know, in a world today that has so many demands, we all need to be mindful about how we we create the the environment in which we can be resilient, we can be our best selves and and and continue to be well, because you need to be well in order to perform. So thank you, MH. It's been a it's been a real pleasure.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier 29:09

Well, thank you. Very much uh true for me as well. Thank you.