You Are Not the Problem: A Conversation with Dr. Jodie Wilson

I've said it a hundred times, in coaching sessions, on this podcast, in my own journal at 2am. You are not the problem. But when you've spent a career being treated like you are — told you ask too many questions, or not enough, that you're too much or too little, too direct or too emotional — it stops feeling like a statement and starts feeling like wishful thinking.

That's exactly why I wanted to have Dr. Jodie Wilson on the show. Because she doesn't just say it. She's done the research. She's lived it. And she's built an entire career out of disrupting the systems that made neurodivergent professionals believe otherwise.

Jodie is an Australian veterinarian, researcher, and self-described "disruptive academic." She was formally identified as autistic and ADHD as an adult — around the same time she was completing her master's in applied positive psychology. That combination, lived experience plus the research lens, is what makes her perspective hit differently.

The veterinary profession might be more neurodivergent than anyone realizes

One of the things that opened this conversation wide was the data. A 2024 study out of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in the UK found that nearly 30% of veterinary professionals self-identified as neurodivergent. Preliminary polling from Veterinary Kaleidoscope in Australia is sitting around 40%.

And Jodie's estimate for emergency and specialty practice? Around 70%.

I've suspected this for a long time, but hearing her say it out loud still landed hard. Because when you look at the burnout numbers, the anxiety and depression rates, the disproportionate number of women in the profession who are still being under-diagnosed — a lot of what we're calling "compassion fatigue" might actually be something else entirely.

Being told you are the problem

Jodie described something in this episode that I know a lot of you are going to recognize. The early career experience of receiving completely contradictory feedback — ask too many questions and you're making people uncomfortable, ask too few and you don't care, show too much emotion and you're unprofessional, show too little and you're cold. For a brain that needs logic to flow, that kind of feedback doesn't just sting. It destabilizes.

It eventually pushed her out of working for others entirely. Six years in, she opened her own practice. She ran it for over a decade, loved it, until she hit a wall. Not burnout in the way we usually talk about it in veterinary medicine. Not compassion fatigue. Looking back, she now recognizes it as autistic burnout — that specific, bone-deep depletion that comes from years of masking and chronic cognitive overload.

She sold the practice. She went to stack shelves at a supermarket, in the middle of the night, for a year. And honestly? She said it was exactly what her brain needed.

This is what I mean when I say autistic burnout is different. It's not "work harder." It's not "practice more self-care." It's a fundamental mismatch between the system you're operating in and the wiring of the brain you have. The recovery requires something totally different.

Unmasking isn't a switch. It's a skill.

We talked for a while about masking — and I told her something I tell my clients a lot. I always say "unmasking in a strategic way" because it's not always safe to unmask. But there's real power in choosing to mask versus that being your default, unconscious setting.

Jodie framed it in a way I hadn't heard before. She said most of us were trained very early on that there is no safe place to unmask. And so the skill of recognizing where it actually is safe — that's something that has to be taught. It doesn't come automatically just because you have a diagnosis.

This is why I always encourage my clients to work with a neurodivergence-affirming therapist alongside coaching. Not because coaching isn't enough, but because that unmasking work is deep. Having a therapist with lived experience of neurodivergence can change everything when it comes to separating what's actually you from what's the mask you've been wearing since childhood.

The moment everything shifted for Jodie

She told me about a night in emergency practice that I keep thinking about. Blue hair. Tattoos on display. A proudly neurodivergent badge. A dog in congestive heart failure. A very nervous owner who stepped outside to call his wife.

She could only hear his side of the call. But then she heard him say: "It's okay. The vet will understand. She's autistic and she has blue hair."

His wife was autistic. She was afraid to come in because she wasn't sure how her emotional regulation would land if they got bad news. And Jodie being visibly, unapologetically herself — that's what made it safe for that woman to walk through the door.

That was the moment she decided that her ongoing non-compliance with sociocultural norms wasn't something to manage. It was something to lean into.

The Turkish sailors story and what it taught her about systems

This part of our conversation is going to stick with you. Jodie told me about her first solo weekend on call in large animal practice. Her boss called, told her there was a goat to euthanize at the port authority, and hung up before she could ask a single question.

What followed: a boat, open ocean, a rope ladder up the side of a Turkish container ship, a crew of sailors who didn't speak English, and a two-week-old baby goat they had hand-raised as a pet. The moment she ran her finger across her throat — attempting to communicate "I'm here to euthanize something" — things deteriorated quickly. The ship's engines turned on. They were, briefly, being sailed to Turkey.

For years, she carried that story as evidence of her own failure. She did something wrong. She was the problem. Until she learned about cultural humility and explicit communication — and suddenly the story rewrote itself completely.

This is something I talk about in coaching all the time. Those shame memories we carry — the times we got it wrong, were too much, baffled everyone in the room — they're not evidence of who we are. They're evidence of what we lacked in that moment: the right tools, the right support, the right systems. Revisiting them through that lens is genuinely freeing.

Iteration is the love language of inclusion

Toward the end of the conversation we talked about parenting — specifically the challenge of being a neurodivergent parent trying to raise neurodivergent kids with intention, while still occasionally hearing your own parents' voices coming out of your mouth at the worst moments.

Jodie's phrase for navigating that is one I'm going to be using from now on: positive failure. When she says something she wishes she hadn't, she names it in the moment. Acknowledges it out loud. Models the repair. And her kids are starting to do the same.

"Iteration is the love language of inclusion," she said. "We try, we get it wrong, we try again, we get it a little bit less wrong, and we just keep going."

That's the whole thing, isn't it? Whether it's parenting, or building a neuro-inclusive workplace, or just trying to lead without the mask — the goal isn't perfection on the first attempt. The goal is to keep showing up and adjusting.

What Jodie wants the world to understand

I always close these episodes the same way. I asked Jodie what she'd most want the world to know about her flavor of neurodivergence.

Her answer: while most neurotypical brains are broadly similar, every neurodivergent brain is completely different. Autistic profiles are so heterogeneous that they're more individual than fingerprints. Knowing one autistic person means knowing one autistic person. You still have to stay curious.

That word — curious — showed up over and over in our conversation. Curiosity over judgment in the exam room. Curiosity about what someone actually needs instead of assuming. Curiosity about yourself and what's actually you versus what's a mask you've been wearing since you were a kid.

If there's one thing I want you to take from this episode, it's this. The systems that excluded you and asked you to act in ways that weren't authentic to you? Those are the problem. Not you.

You never were.