Like almost anyone else, breaking into the subject or field of leadership presents itself as a significant challenge. With many responsibilities to consider and to fulfill, an exemplary leader must have confident power in communication, creativity, competence, ethics, organization, and decisions, just to name a few. Unfortunately, most youth and adults with Aspergers Syndrome often have difficulty in any one of these things. Typically, they desire to be able to learn from others, rather than lead by example themselves for the same reasons that most people fail to become leaders. Often times, they fear failure, rejection, or unfamiliar tasks and responsibilities, or all of these things.

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However, the myth that leaders are born, rather than made, is untrue and many prominent leaders throughout history dispelled it time and time again.

Primarily because most of them faced significant (sometimes extreme) odds to get to their current positions and to form the amazing personal images that they have. Many Aspergers youth and adults can take it upon themselves to work hard to achieve such standout images for themselves.

Initially, entering the leadership arena sounds difficult. Here are a few suggestions to get started:

1. Establish a conceptual foundation in your own mind:

To understand the keywords of quality leadership; understand how you can embrace them; realize the mistakes you make and learn from them as you progress.

2. Study communication tactics and picture yourself using them:

How do you look (appearance to others) and sound when you communicate? The best communicators prepare and deliver their messages well. If a message provides aid, insight in a necessary, moral, and honest manner, it will serve its purpose. Also, use your own feelings to acknowledge if a message has complete clarity and usefulness or if it requires modification. The next step helps with this process.

3. Develop power and structure statements:

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Aspergers, growth, intense interests

Everybody in the Asperger’s Community already acknowledges that aspies have that one thing that keeps them happy and comfortable: their intense interest. Whether you are a teacher, a parent, a sibling, or a friend, coming to understand the aspie’s intense interests is crucial for creating a relationship and helping them grow.

Aspergers, growth, intense interests

The aspie’s intense interest comes with many challenges and rewards, just as the jobs of parenting and teaching do. This article explores the real benefits and best parameters of understanding and working with the restricted interests for people with Aspergers. Following the 5-step process below can provide a window into the Asperger’s world and show how an intense interest influences the various aspects of personal development.

1.First, identify the interests and the aspie’s behaviors, feelings, and habits that surround it in order to profile the aspie.

  • Then, express interest in the aspie’s interest and ask them what they like most about it.
    1. If the aspie turns you away, tell them that they can share whatever details they want in their own time. Let the aspie come to you to tell you all about it, and don’t feel hurt if they turn you away initially. The aspie’s request for you to leave is very common with introverted aspies.
    2. If the aspie wants you to get involved, you can then perform a strategic inquiry in relation to the intense interests.
  • As you learn about the aspie’s interests, begin to take them out of their comfort zones and push against what triggers undesirable behaviors.
    1. Dig deep into both good and bad behaviors in order to strategize how to prevent and remedy them as the aspie grows as a person.
    2. Then, learn to set different kinds of boundaries, but be careful with discipline. Demonstrate the utmost sensitivity to each situation to avoid further negative emotions and behaviors.
  • One way of thinking about this is to draw developmental circles; more specifically, the innermost circle is the aspie’s current comfort zone with their interest and everything else that surrounds it. The next-largest circle represents a larger comfort zone into which the aspie gradually transitions. The parent/guardian/caregiver defines each subsequent circle using keywords that describe increasingly better and better trends in the various aspects of the aspie’s personal progress.
  • This circle model serves as a reference point that measures the aspie’s progress based on their interest(s) and any other governing factors in personal development. Therefore, the interest serves as a common bond between the circles. 

2.After profiling the aspie’s interests, bond with the aspie while advantageously using their specific interests.

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Emotional Intelligence

As many people in the Asperger’s Community understand, aspies often have trouble dealing with emotions. The emotional intelligence of a child’s mind is not much different from an aspie’s mind. Unfortunately, without useful tools, this emotional thinking carries into adulthood and can lead to poor decision making.

Emotional Intelligence

If an adult aspie has a low EQ (Emotional Quotient), then impulse control, critical thinking, voice control, behavior self-modification, and problem solving fail to appropriately play their roles. In school, this means a bad reputation for the aspie with ramifications that make it worse for everybody. A low EQ could affect the relationship of the aspie student with the school faculty and also result in peer bullying. In the workplace, this usually means a write-up or an immediate layoff. At home, it means family tension.

Indeed, negative emotions and behaviors are contagious. They always create toxic environments and habits in the aspie’s life.

Ideally, everybody would like to get on top of this important issue in order to establish a solid foundation of peace. What sort of step-by-step process is necessary to do this? The answers vary depending on the aspie’s age, personal dilemmas, comorbidities, learning schema and environments, mentalities, and general life satisfaction.

In adulthood, the amount of contributing factors significantly increases. The main reason for this is that many professional life aspects are added to personal life aspects.

The good news is that even with a low EQ, aspies have a high IQ (Intelligence Quotient). Aspies can use their IQ to discipline their own minds and to break down each complex and difficult situation.

A 9 step process for the aspie to break down difficult emotions and avoid all definitions of a breakdown

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A life with Asperger’s in a neurotypical world is, not surprisingly, difficult. Aspies must overcome countless necessary challenges that have to do with three big categories of stimuli: environments, the brain, and relationships. Unfortunately, aspies too often face unnecessary challenges; terrible burdens on their already heavy shoulders.

Any kind of imbalance in or between the three big categories usually stems from and causes isolation. Isolation is a primary example of trauma to an aspie, regardless of age, traits, or background. Isolation primarily encompasses the relationship factor and its damaging effects on the brain, the psyche. This isolation can cause the aspie to become petrified of their environments.Continue Reading

Starting from an early age, many Aspergers adults consistently feel like they have little chance of success, productivity, or joy in the real world. Negative early-life experiences that typically fall under the categories of isolation, ignorance, exclusion, or sheltering, in addition to present challenges, collectively form this delusional mental/emotional construct.

Fortunately, Aspergers adults who claim to have it hard have the power to turn the tables of their lives right-side-up and to make incredible progress as adults in both their personal and professional lives. Even though Aspergers adults usually have numerous struggles in adulthood for countless reasons, there are crucial practices they can incorporate into their daily lives to work towards success. The happiest and most successful Aspergers adults significantly understand:Continue Reading

Too frequently, Aspies face highly adverse circumstances. On top of the necessary challenges that they must embrace, Aspies face many unnecessary challenges that threaten to offset the balance in their lives. Many of these challenges result from in-home or in-school adversities during childhood.

These harsh experiences sow toxic seeds that later become poisonous. However, every aspie has at least some control of their lifestyle and significant control over how they interpret and develop from such circumstances. Of course, even adults require aid along the way as they walk on the path to prosperity. Here are some examples of difficult early life situations for people with Aspergers, and how to resolve them:Continue Reading

Surely, anyone who has or works with Aspergers Syndrome has received encouragement of the idea that people with Aspergers and their closest acquaintances (i.e. parents and teachers) ought to discover and to nurture that ONE thing that they know or do best. Such an interest is indicated by extreme focus on a particular topic or series of topics in which the person with Aspergers is able to memorize it down to the last detail and able to recount any detail imaginable.

Ideally, a person with Aspergers uses this to his/her advantage in order to get a head start on his/her education and career, as well as to generally enjoy life. Therefore, such strong interests are also therapeutic in the sense that they help people with Aspergers to confidently tackle their daily challenges within secure comfort zones.

As beneficial as they are, however, restricted interests do not always ensure that people with Aspergers achieve long-term personal development and sustenance. More specifically, restricted interests can take away from the ability to develop mental strength.Continue Reading

suicide prevention

As dramatic as it may sound to some, the challenges aspies face can lead them to have countless reasons to give up on themselves and their lives. This can often lead to thoughts of suicide and attempts, too many of which are successful. Bullying, grave misunderstandings, absent and abusive relationships of any kind, long-term unemployment, and mental illness are all common reasons why suicide occurs among aspies.

suicide prevention

Aspies often tend to keep quiet about their troubles, typically under the belief that no one will truly understand what they experience; not only in a given environment, but also in their mind. Therefore, even though an aspie appears happy and productive in their life, they can still anonymously harbor difficult thoughts and emotions; sometimes until it is too late.Continue Reading

companionship

Cultivating healthy long relationships can be difficult for everyone, whether they be romantic or platonic. This important life skill becomes a special challenge for those with Asperger’s who can often have trouble making and keeping connections. However, there are ways in which the Aspie can learn to actively create beneficial companionship.

companionship

All of these habits do not come naturally to everyone and should be learned in order to create the best relationships.

Read Reese Eskridge’s 25 key lessons about companionship:

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We had a fantastic year of valuable content from all of our dedicated writers. Listed below are our four most popular blogs of 2016. Read these short introductions and click “Read More” to see the full blogs!

Aspergers is Not the Same as ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder)

By Marcia Eckerd

People with Asperger’s usually collect labels like ADHD, anxiety disorders, or bipolar disorder before they’re diagnosed with AS. The label that annoys me is Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Is there a difference between people whose Asperger’s-related behavior is misunderstood and ODD? I find that ODD is sometimes simply a description of behavior without a cause.

People with Aspergers Become Multi-Talented and Mentally Strong When They Expand Their Interests and Keep an Open Mind

By Reese Eskridge

Surely, anyone who has or works with Aspergers Syndrome has received encouragement of the idea that people with Aspergers and their closest acquaintances (i.e. parents and teachers) ought to discover and to nurture that ONE thing that they know or do best (…) As beneficial as they are, however, restricted interests do not always ensure that people with Aspergers achieve long-term personal development and sustenance. More specifically, restricted interests can take away from the ability to develop mental strength.

Alone Time for Teens with Aspergers is Crucial: Allow Them Their Space

By Jennifer Allen

Breathing room or ‘alone time’ is good for anyone, but for someone on the spectrum it is crucial. When Sam was very young I found myself, as his mother, wanting to arrange play dates with other children who were not exactly knocking on our door for playtime. My reasoning was he must be lonely, so I did everything in my power to elicit playmates. Offering the best snacks, coolest toys, or excursions to area attractions, but it didn’t take long before no one came around.

Aspergers, “The Twilight Zone”, and The Perception of Beauty

By Ken Kellam

Remember Ellie Mae on “The Beverly Hillbillies?” She was portrayed by Donna Douglas, in her day considered one of the most beautiful women on television. But she also once played a character who wasn’t so beautiful (…) In an episode of “The Twilight Zone” titled, “Eye of the Beholder,” Douglas portrayed a woman who was so ugly, she underwent an operation to make her less so (…) Obviously, her character was not inherently ugly, but she was simply born in the wrong world. That’s a dilemma similar to that which the Aspie faces.
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phone apps, aspergers, personal growth

As mentioned in the previous article, mobile applications support developmental concepts that foster virtually every aspect of personal and professional growth. This growth encompasses five categories: Personal/Family Needs; Endeavors/Professional Tools; Entertainment; Life Improvement; and Lifelong Education.

phone apps, aspergers, personal growth

All apps that I discuss here are samples from the iPhone.Continue Reading

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