Two Brilliant Minds One Bright Idea
It all started with Kate and Tracy in 2023.
Multipotential High-Achievers Both of Them.
Tracy Winter was a highly-skilled ADHD coach who specialized in neurodiverse and twice-exceptional clients, as well as executives and leaders with ADHD. She was working with students through Rice University’s Doerr Leadership Institute and serving as an ADHD coach trainer and mentor coach at the International ADHD Coach Training Center (iACT). Somehow, she still found time to facilitate leadership development for Tesla and other companies.
Prior to becoming a coach, Tracy worked as a legislative researcher, a legal editor and writer, an adjunct professor, as well as a professional musical theater dancer. She received a PhD in Human Development, an MA in Human and Organization Systems, along with BA degrees in International Relations and Political Economy.
Kate Arms had a similarly varied life before becoming a coach: lawyer, actor, theatre director, non-profit board leader, spiritual leader, improvisational dancer, and special needs advocate. She received a JD from Harvard Law School and a BA in Theatre and BioPsychology from Cornell University.
Kate was an ICAgile Certified Expert in Enterprise Coaching, a Certified Co-Active Coach, and Certified InterPlay Leader. She was combining applied neuroscience, embodied cognition and presence-based coaching to work with executives, teams and leaders in tech and profoundly gifted and twice-exceptional adults in all fields. She was the author of L.I.F.T: A Coach Approach to Parenting, and The Extreme Resilience Workbook and had started podcasts on leadership and self-coaching.
Together, they had a bigger vision.
The state of training for coaches working with neurodivergent indivuals was missing the big picture. Nobody had a developmental model of coaching that included a rigourous understanding of the science of neurodiversity, the requirements of coaching in a complex world facing existential crises, evidence-based coaching practices, and trauma-informed, gender-aware. and racially-inclusive practices.
Between them, they sensed a need for a new approach to coaching, a developmental and neurodiversity-inclusive approach that could be used with all clients, including indentified and non-indentified neurodivergent clients.
So they put their heads together, mostly metaphorically, and developed the Arms-Winter NeuroDiversity Coaching Model. They took a rigourously experimental approach to validating the model and developing neurodiversity-inclusive coaching training.
Everything taught at the Neurodiversity Coaching Academy is built on that foundation, though modifications, enhancements, and improvement of the model and how to work with it have been ongoing.