There are three things I keep coming back to in my work with neurodivergent people: logic, clarity and efficiency.

I’ve yet to meet a neurodivergent person who doesn’t recognise these three things as fundamental to how they experience and navigate the world. Whenever I bring them up in coaching, there’s an immediate recognition. They matter enormously.

For a long time, I’ve thought of them as foundational values. But recently I’ve started wondering why they’re so important to us.

And I think the answer might lie in childhood.

When we grow up neurodivergent in a world that largely expects us to experience things in the same way as everyone else, we spend a great deal of time being told that our experience is somehow wrong.

We’re overwhelmed by things other people barely notice. We notice things other people seem oblivious to. We find things difficult that we’re repeatedly told should be easy, and things easy that others find difficult.

We learn quite early on that our experience doesn’t necessarily match the experience of the people around us.

And I wonder whether that leaves us without some of the anchorage that other people get from having their experiences reflected back to them.

If the world keeps telling you that what you perceive, feel or understand isn’t quite right, how do you know what to trust?

Perhaps that’s where logic, clarity and efficiency come in.

Logic gives us something that makes sense. Clarity helps us know where we stand. Efficiency helps us navigate a world that can demand an enormous amount of energy simply to get through the day.

Together, they offer a way to establish something solid. Something we can rely on.

And perhaps, ultimately, what we’re seeking is certainty.

Certainty gives us a sense of knowing, of control, of having established what is real. It can make the world feel easier to navigate because there are fewer possibilities to consider. Things become right or wrong, true or false, black or white.

But certainty isn’t truth.

In fact, I would argue that certainty is rarely truth, because life is far too complex for that.

The earth must be flat because the horizon looks flat. That’s a wonderfully simple explanation, and one that can feel absolutely convincing if we stop looking any further. But the certainty of the explanation doesn’t make it true.

And I wonder whether we sometimes do something similar with ourselves.

Take the familiar thought, ‘I’m a shit human, so what’s the point?’

It’s a dreadful thing to believe about yourself, but it might also offer something strangely reassuring. It provides an explanation. It removes uncertainty. You know where you stand, even if it’s somewhere thoroughly unpleasant.

And that’s brought me to another question: is comfort necessarily comfortable?

We tend to think of comfort as something pleasant, but perhaps comfort is sometimes simply familiarity. We know the territory. We know what to expect. We don’t have to deal with the discomfort of uncertainty.

And perhaps familiarity can give us a feeling that’s remarkably close to safety, even when what we’re familiar with isn’t good for us.

There’s something rather circular about this. We look for certainty because we want to feel safe, but we can become attached to explanations and patterns that actually undermine our sense of ourselves.

Which brings me to something I was talking about in a coaching session this week.

We want to retain the capacity to question ourselves, but we also need to be able to trust ourselves.

Both matter.

And they’re not opposites.

Self-trust doesn’t mean believing we’re always right. It means being able to take our own experience seriously while remaining open to the possibility that our interpretation might be mistaken.

It means being able to say, ‘This is what I’m experiencing, and I trust that experience matters, even if I don’t yet understand what it means.’

Perhaps the real alternative to certainty isn’t uncertainty at all.

Perhaps the opposite of certainty is self-trust.

Because when we trust ourselves, we don’t have to know everything. We can question what we think without questioning our entire worth. We can tolerate ambiguity without immediately reaching for an absolute explanation.

And perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to what I consider the most important skill we can develop: checking in with ourselves.

Where do I stand? What do I want? What do I need? What do I feel?

Not necessarily to find an immediate answer, or to make an uncomfortable feeling disappear, but to become familiar with our own experience, and to learn that we can listen to ourselves without having to be certain about everything.

Maybe that’s where we begin to find the anchorage we’ve been looking for all along.