Advocacy Insights for Navigating Toxic Coaching Spaces

This week, leading up to my new podcast episode (dropping next Monday), advocacy looks like focusing on a critical conversation:

The challenges of neurodiversity and invisible disability advocacy in toxic coaching spaces.

Neurodivergent individuals and individuals with invisible disabilities deserve ethical coaching, not manipulation.

- Help people identify scam coaching practices vs. ethical high-ticket coaching.

- Raise awareness and share essential language around this topic.

- Empower neurodivergent individuals and those with invisible disabilities to make informed, sovereign decisions in coaching spaces.

- If any comment is harmful, dismissive, or not worth my energy, it will be deleted without explanation.

- If you want to support advocacy, SAVE and SHARE this post.

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When a coach positions themselves as the authority on your lived experience or uses “tough love” to override your autonomy, they’re engaging in authoritarian leadership.

This creates a harmful and unequal power dynamic that makes invisible disability pain points a target for manipulation for the purpose of exploiting an individual to make a sale like:

RED FLAG: Medical Gaslighting

Downplaying symptoms, blaming them on stress or mindset issues.

RED FLAG: Denial of Accommodations

“Just work harder.” “Stop being so lazy so you can level up.”

RED FLAG: Dismissing Reality or Lived Experience

Often by using cognitive re-framing to invalidate struggles or systemic inequities by reframing them as excuses, personal or character flaws, “not wanting it bad enough” or self-sabotage.

I have posted the 12 Disability Microaggression Archetypes in the past. but here’s how the most common ones specifically apply in coaching spaces that are harmful for individuals with invisible disabilities. (Awareness = power. The more you recognize these patterns, the more you can protect your mental health and stop hiring harmful coaches.)

What it looks like: The coach reduces a client to their diagnosis.

Example: Occurs when a coach or person denies ANY aspect of a person’s identity other than the disability. For example, a coach looks at a client and all they see is ADHD and they make assumptions that a person with ADHD does not have any ability to be organized or focused. A coach might assume that because someone has ADHD, they are incapable of being organized or focused, rather than recognizing that executive function challenges vary.

Why it’s harmful: It erases the person’s full identity beyond their disability.

What it looks like: The coach dismisses or denies real struggles.

Example: Where the coach or person flat out denies a challenge exists either within in the individual or systemically. This can show up as a coach minimizing, questioning, denying or saying things like “they are complaining or using it as an excuse” or “that’s not a real disability” or “you’re not THAT disabled.”

Why it’s harmful: It positions the coach as an authority on the client’s lived experience and gaslights the client into doubting their own lived experience.

What it looks like: Where the coach or person undermines individual autonomy by...

- the coach mining for limiting beliefs to inflate perceived struggles by framing the invisible disability challenges as an insurmountable personal failing rather than a neurological difference.

- the coach over praises basic actions as breakthroughs, treating ordinary productivity as an extraordinary accomplishment, subtly reinforcing the idea that the client is incapable without their guidance. Or the opposite - pushing hard for breakthroughs at the expense of the client’s capacity to work and maintain intrinsic motivation or mental health, instead of honoring their own timing which might look different outside ableist structures.

Why it’s harmful: It positions the coach as a savior, reinforcing dependency instead of empowerment.

What it looks like: The coach positions and centers themselves as the hero or do-gooder and exploits persons with invisible disabilities for personal or business gain.

For example, a coach offers scholarships, extra 1:1 help, or tech accommodations, but expects praise and validation or mandatory positive testimonials in return. They center themselves instead of the people they claim to be supporting.

Why it’s harmful: Equal access is a right, not a favor that a coach should exploit for clout or social proof.

Have you experienced these microaggressions in coaching spaces?

Have you noticed any of these patterns in your own work that you may want to shift?

This is just the beginning.

Stay turned for more this week.

#invisibledisabilities #neurodiversity #mindset #BusinessCoaching #coaching #EthicalSelling

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