Sue Langley
It's interesting because I never went the academic track or anything like that. For me, I'm a normal person doing normal things. I used to be a truck driver in Europe, but I was fascinated by human psychology and human behavior. I did a level in psychology because I thought it would be interesting. Then, I traveled around the world for a year and found myself in a leadership role where I decided that rather than teaching my team sales, I would teach them some of the things that I'd learned about self-esteem, self-efficacy, confidence overall, emotions, etc. that I learned just for fun. I watched our profits double two years running, so I thought, "Well, clearly something's going well" because my team were more confident, more able, and more comfortable. From there, when I moved to Australia, I then studied for a psychology degree, did a double degree in psychology and management, and then completed my master's in Neuroscience of Leadership.

I did all that while running my own business or starting my own business because I really thought that I had the ability to synthesize the science. I didn't want to be an academic. I enjoyed reading research papers— which not many people do—but what I really enjoyed was trying to translate them into real things. For example, the very first research paper I read on Post-Traumatic Growth I translated in my mind as sort of a race of who starts running first and what they do along the way, and I tried to explain it in different ways so that people would say, "Oh, now I get it."
For me, my master's in neuroscience and then studying in Venice at the Neuroscience School for Advanced Studies was really about how to take the science and make it real for normal people—real people who have normal jobs, who are in leadership roles, who are running a family, who are running a home, who just want to be the best they can be. And I've really loved doing that ever since in the sort of positive psychology, emotion, and neuroscience space.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I love that, and I can so resonate—maybe not with the master's in neuroscience, but with the notion that there is a role for some of us in translating complex medical and scientific concepts into language that everyday people can understand and relate to because it influences our lives. It matters for us to understand these things.

Sue Langley
Yeah, it does. And I think for me, the more I've learned about the brain in particular, the more it's helped me understand why sometimes I—and other people—do the weird things that we do. We sort of think, ''Oh, no, I get it.'' That makes sense. But it also helps me then understand the system that is the human. Whether it's focusing on neuroscience, whether it's the microbiome, whether it's the environment that we're surrounded by—the people we're surrounded by—so looking at everything from biology through to environment and system science. Positive Psychology for me is how do I take all of that to help myself, other people, teams, communities be the best they can be and to flourish.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. And it's interesting—one of the things I learned at the Positive Psychology Conference is that there is language in this realm: the language of flourish, the language of wellbeing. I come from a coaching realm. Positive Psychology does the research that explains all the why behind what we do in coaching. So I had a lot of fun, as you guys can imagine.
When you think about this biology and systems and human dynamics and neuroscience, what's important for parents to understand—particularly for parents with neurodivergent or atypical kids in terms of their neurological development?

Sue Langley
There are a few things. And I'm not gonna say I'm an expert in neurodiversity as such, but when I first heard the term neurodiversity years ago when that term first started, I thought, ''Well, everybody's neurodiverse.'' My first thought was that every brain is different. All of us, as individuals, have similar structures in our brain, but the way our brain wires itself is different. I suppose what I really wanted to do is for people to treat others as individuals rather than assume we're all the same. So I think that's the first thing: understanding that our brain is plastic and it can change.
But sometimes, we're concerned about labeling and assuming that everybody with a label is the same. I mean, hopefully we've got over this now, but once upon a time we would put people into extroversion and introversion categories, or use the MBTI—which was debunked about 30 years ago—and still people use those labels. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Even if I just use extroversion, introversion, we go around and say, "Oh, every extrovert is the same," which is ridiculous.

Assuming every left-handed person is the same, or every American is the same, or every Australian is the same—that is ridiculous by itself. It helps us in some ways to chunk things down, but it's not accurate. I worry sometimes that, from a neurodiversity perspective, we are using that term to label somebody who is different in a not-so-good way, as in there is a deficit or something. I'm always cautious about this because it's sometimes not always helpful. Sometimes it is.

But if I give you an example, there was a lovely gentleman who flew from Vancouver to New Zealand to do our Diploma of Positive Psychology and Wellbeing many years ago. An absolutely gorgeous gentleman—I’m still in touch with him. When he first joined the program, he came up quietly to me and said he had Tourettes. Now, Tourettes is a label that we would put on a neurodiverse person. And I said, ''Okay, cool.'' He said he might, if he was nervous, have a sort of twitch or a little rock in his chair. He introduced himself to everybody and let us know he had Tourettes—he said the word "chickens" a lot. Sometimes, I would ask if anybody had any questions, and he would just say "chicken," and everybody just rolled with it.

Yeah, it was completely irrelevant. Although, the funny story is when he taught somebody to juggle, he kept saying "Monkeys, chicken stock, monkeys, chicken stock," and now I still use that when I juggle. So he is with me all the time. But what I really loved is I watched the whole group be completely oblivious, if you like, to any Tourettes, and just treat him as Danny, which he is, and which he's amazing at being Danny. I suppose that one of the things I sometimes worry about is: "Yes, we need support, and we need help to understand." But what I'd really love is for people to treat her people as Danny, in this case, as opposed to a person with Tourette's. Nobody wants to be known for their label.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
And yet, as I hear your story, can you imagine what would've happened in that room had he not given you the chicken? What I always say about our kids is that if we don't give them an explanation for what they're struggling with, what they're gonna make up is a whole lot worse. And they're "Oh, absolutely that they're lazy, crazy or stupid." Yes. So we don't want that. So, the label becomes a mechanism to help us understand what we might need support with.

Sue Langley
Yeah. But again, to your point: yes, I understand the importance of a label, but I'm nervous about assuming everybody with Tourettes is the same because another person with Tourettes is different—just as another person with ADHD is different. I hope that from a neurodiverse perspective, we don't immediately say, ''Okay, that's a deficit we have to fix.'' It's about having the conversation. It's about how this plays out for the person—whether it's Tourettes or anything else. Not every person in a wheelchair is in one for the same reason. I have a phrase: "the future is human." I do a lot of keynotes on this space, and I just want people to treat each other as human. The label is there, and it's useful, but then let's treat the person as a person and understand them for who they are, not just by their label.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
That is an extraordinarily helpful message for parents of young people who are learning to navigate these issues. Part of what I see in our community is that sometimes parents get so fixated on discovering or naming a label that they almost lose connection to the human being experiencing it. And that's kind of what I'm hearing you saying.

Sue Langley
And if I give you another example, there was a lovely gentleman who came on our diploma program at age 27. Before he joined, he told us, “I’m dyslexic. I might have trouble with study and writing. Can we make adjustments?” We said, “Absolutely. We’ll provide literacy accommodations."
The week before he arrived, his mother called—interesting, given he was 27—and said, “I don’t think my son should do this. He’s dyslexic; he won’t be able to cope.” I replied, “That’s OK. We’ve already spoken with him. Tell me what you need, and we’ll work together.”

When he arrived, he reminded me he was dyslexic, and I said, “No problem. We’ll do what you need.” Let’s call him Peter for the sake of this story. On day five of our six‑day immersion program, we did a 15‑minute journaling exercise. I gave him a look and a thumbs‑up to show I wouldn’t single him out. He nodded and went to write. After a while, I noticed he looked distressed and walked outside. It was three degrees and snowing in Tasmania, and he was huddled under the eaves with tears streaming down his face. I gave him another thumbs‑up, and he went back to writing.
When he returned, I asked the group, “What did you get out of that exercise?” He said, “My entire life, I’ve labeled myself—and been labeled—as dyslexic. I just wrote a letter to myself forgiving myself for that.” He said as he wrote, his hand relaxed and the words flowed. He realized it didn’t matter if he spelled every word correctly; he just needed to express his thoughts. He had never felt so free. That was beautiful.

Elaine Taylor‑Klaus
Rolled with it.

Sue Langley
Yeah. It was like everyone just treated him as Peter. He’s an amazing person, and I think that’s a lovely example of how a label can help someone get extra support, but we must allow them to define how it plays out for them. Peter’s mum probably called with the best intentions—she wanted to protect her son—but at 27 he’d already found a way to function. If we treat him as the wonderful person he is, the dyslexia pales into insignificance after a bit, and that's what I really love. If we can give that space for people.

Sue Langley
Which I think is really cool because he allowed his label to hold him back, yet dyslexia doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. It just means you might have challenges with reading, learning, transposing, etc. But it doesn’t mean you can’t write. You can still use tools like Grammarly to check your writing if you want to. It meant he could still express his ideas. That was a lovely example for me: a label can be useful to get extra support, but we need to allow that freedom. His mom probably called us for the best reasons—to protect her son—but Peter has figured out a way to be in the world. If we treat him for who he is, the dyslexia pales into insignificance after a bit and that's what I really love if we can give that space for people.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I love that. That's beautiful. Such a beautiful story. So many things come up. My guest is Sue Langley, and she's a beautiful storyteller—as you may have heard. I love the notion of allowing whatever our brain wiring is doing to be understood without it defining us based on its limitations. That's what I'm hearing you say. And it's interesting—in the autism world, there's a lot of conversation about ''Do I have autism? Am I autistic?'' and it's interesting because that is claiming the label in a different way. I'm watching the shift in the neurodiversity community. We don't have much time left, but you said something earlier, and I want to go back to it. When you were talking about the brain being plastic and that it can change, the term you used was "Everybody's neurodiverse."—how our brain chooses to wire itself. That is a lovely language. Can you talk a little about what that means to you? How do you understand the differences in brain wiring from that lens?

Sue Langley
Yeah. Well, I suppose I think the brain is amazing. If you think about the way it works—we have neurons, and I always imagine the palm of my hand is a neuron, and then the ''pokey bits'' that I call them are the axons and dendrites, the parts that allow one neuron to talk to another. And then of course we’ve got the neurobiology of the chemicals that jump across the gaps that allow one neuron to talk to another. So if we think about neurogenesis—is can I grow new neurons? For many years, and certainly when I went to school—which I don’t think was that long ago—when I went to school we were taught that once you reached a certain age, usually around the 25‑year mark, you had all your neurons and they’d only die off from there. We called it gray matter, like, “Oh, well, you’ve reached your peak and it’s done.” Thankfully, we now know that’s not true. And for me that was really helpful because—I don’t know why—but I never injured myself much at school. But when I did, it was always my head: I got a concussion a couple of times.

I fell off a horse and cracked my head. I walked into a wall once and cracked my head, so I was a bit worried about that—I thought I was killing my neurons. It was really lovely to learn that we can still grow new neurons into older age. A wonderful study of people who took up running at age 40 showed they were growing new neurons—real neurogenesis.

But that’s only one piece. The other piece is the connections—the pokey bits, the axons, and dendrites—that allow one neuron to talk to another. If I keep running down a certain pathway—and we think about this as habits I might have: habits of behavior, habits of thought, habits of emotion—those become neuropathways. Like a lot of people say, if you have a superhighway from one city to another, it’s easy to travel. Or it might be a little dirt path you have to duck under trees and hop over roots.

Obviously, the easiest one for my brain to run down is the one I’ve always run down. So I suppose that’s not saying we have no choice. If I grow up in an environment where, when I feel sad, I deal with it with a bottle of vodka, and when I feel angry, I punch things, that’s the neuropathways that I’ve learned. Does it mean I can’t learn new pathways? Of course not—I can learn more—but it might be harder ‘cause I don’t have good role models or I don't have an environment to support. What we do know is people can grow new neurons. You can even Google “live neurogenesis” and see a new neuron being created in real time—which is kind of cool. So I think for me it’s remembering that we might read books on building great habits, but really these are the neural pathways in our brains—not only behavioral habits, but habits of thought and emotion. I love Atomic Habits.

Elaine Taylor‑Klaus
Atomic Habits.

Sue Langley
Yes, they’re grea but what people sometimes fail to recognize is that habits are neuropathways in your brain. If I continually complain about stuff, that’s the neuropathways I’m running down. If I continually look for the good in the world, that’s the pathway I run down. So I suppose I like to think, what neuropathways am I creating with what I do every day? The things I think, the things I feel—what am I reinforcing?

This is the same for others. For example, I had a lovely diploma student whose son had ADHD and was struggling at school. She chose to flip that after doing the diploma—telling him, “It’s a superpower. How could you use your superpower wisely?” She helped him flip his challenges into something from which he could learn to self‑regulate because he saw it as a superpower. And that’s a lovely way of looking at strengths.

I have another story of a girl who was going to be expelled from school because she was always getting into trouble, leading other people astray, doing things she shouldn’t. Thanks to a lovely colleague of mine who encouraged her teachers before they suspended her, they started to flip it—spot her strengths instead of her disruptions. Initially they thought, “Oh, she doesn’t have any. She’s just really annoying—always getting into trouble.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
She's got a lot of leadership skills right there.

Sue Langley
Well, that was one of the things they eventually picked up on. She clearly had leadership skills because she was leading people astray. They noticed her persuasion skills because she could always persuade others to get into trouble with her. And when they started recognizing those as strengths, she became less disruptive. She began using her strengths for good and ended up being like a big sister in the school to other girls coming in from low‑socioeconomic and challenged families. That was a beautiful way of transforming those strengths that had initially been seen as weaknesses into positive assets.

So, if I think about neuroplasticity, about the neurobiology, and about how the microbiome influences what we eat and thus our neurochemical makeup, we have some choices—especially as parents. We might not be able to “fix” things, but does our child, our friend, our colleague, our partner need to be fixed? Or can we find a way of really helping channel and create new neural pathways that are gonna be supportive and helpful for that person rather than seeing them as a problem to be fixed?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
That’s so beautiful. There’s so much more I could talk about, but of course we have to stop. When we started this conversation, Sue, we both said "OK, let’s just see where it goes." As we’ve gone through this conversation shifting a label into an asset instead of letting the label define us, and you’ve described growing new neurons and all the chemical aspects, where you landed in this conversation is exactly the message parents of complex kids need to hear most: these kids aren’t broken. They don’t need to be fixed. Our job is to help them see their capacity, understand their strengths, imagine what’s possible for them, and believe in that vision.

I did a podcast episode with Andreas Krafft—one of the keynote speakers at the conference Sue and I attended—and I’ll link to that in the show notes. In his research on hope, he found how important it is for parents to believe in what’s possible for their kids and to help them create a vision. I hear you saying the same thing from a different lens but still that this is not about their being broken. It's about by helping them see their strength, we help them actually rewire their brain.

Sue Langley
I think, on that note, I'm not suggesting we can all be anything we want to be—that's a very privileged statement. We can be anytging we want to be. For instance, Usain Bolt is probably one of the world's best runners, and it's very unlikely that, at my age and physicality, even if I ran every day, I'm never going to beat Usain Bolt. But what I do know is if I practice running, I'll get better at running. And what is important is we're not saying anybody can be the next Einstein or the next Nelson Mandela or whoever you want to pick.

But what we do know is we can all be better than we were. And we know this even from the research from Mika Barthel, who talks about genetics. Yes, some people might be happier than others, but all of us have the capacity to get happier, if you like. And so I think what's really important to say is we are not saying everybody can be anything they want to be, but we are saying anybody can possibly be better in some ways if we can, to your point, develop those things, see them as strengths. Whenever people come and say, “Oh, I was broken,” it's like, “You're not broken." Life has happened, and life is gonna happen to all of us. But you're not broken. You're you. You're the amazing person you are. Why is it I can see it and you can't?”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
After that, we can say that when we practice, we get better. When we identify and work on our strengths, there is a compounding capacity. In the neurodivergent space, we often see kids who struggle in math or reading, and then we have them keep working on what they struggle with most instead of highlighting their gifts and strengths. It's not that they can't get better at math, but at some point, there are diminishing returns.

Sue Langley
Absolutely. And again, are we using their strengths to do this? And I heard this wonderful story about a boy who was struggling in maths, and the teacher tried to identify what he loved. He loved parkour, and so the maths teacher asked him to create a parkour course around the school and used that to teach him maths. Now how cool is that for a teacher?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
That is just a beautiful story. I love it. Yeah. OK. I hate to end this conversation, but we have to bring it to a close, everybody. My guest is Sue Langley from the Langley Group. You can reach her at suelangley.com or langleygroup.com.au. We think it's definitely ".au," so you can find it. Sue, do you have a favorite quote or motto that you wanna share?

Sue Langley
Yeah. Well, I have so many sayings that I'm known for, sort of like, "Do it. Treat yourself as a scientific experiment." But there are a couple of things I think are really important. One of my sayings is—I talk about emotions a lot—emotions are data. They're information; they're trying to tell us something. So, one of the things that I often remind people is sometimes it's really important to get comfortable with the uncomfortable emotions. We often try and push them away when we're feeling anxious and frustrated and things like that, but they're there to teach us something. Sometimes getting comfortable with the uncomfortable can be one of the pathways to flourishing. We know that the pursuit of happiness by itself usually has diminishing returns, again, if we're trying to attain it.

And sometimes being able to be comfortable with all of the emotions can be helpful. But I might just share one more, if I may, which was when I started my own business, I did find, for the first few years, a bit of a struggle. I was out there, had no experience, never been a consultant, new in Australia, didn't have any networks. I basically didn't do what most sensible people do, as in they work for a consulting firm for a while, then they go out on their own, and they consult back to the consulting firm. So I had none of that. And we have these little cards that we use, this little pack of cards called Inspire Action Cards. We created them at the Langley Group, and they're images on one side, and on the backs of them—they're real playing cards—but they have inspirational quotes on the red ones and actions to do with positive psychology on the black ones.

So I had just had another meeting with another 55-year-old white male when I was a 30-year-old female, where I knew I wasn't gonna get the work, and I knew I didn't have the experience, and I was feeling really flat and down, and low. And I was living in Sydney, and I was going across the Harbour Bridge on the bus, heading home, thinking, "Oh, this is too hard. I'm gonna have to go and get a job again." And I picked my pack of cards out that was in my handbag, and I searched for an image to represent how I felt. And I turned it over, and on the back was a saying that was really useful for me. And I've used it; I've thrown it back at people many times. It was, "Most people give up just as they're about to succeed."
And I'm really grateful for that card because 20 years later, I'm still in business and very grateful.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Thank you. I appreciate it so much. There are times where I can so relate to that feeling of deflation, right? Like, "Is this really worth it?" And then something happens, and if you can look for the signs, you recognize the signs, as you did. Very often, there's a message to remind us.

Sue Langley
Well, especially whether it's a business, whether it's as a parent, a partner, in your role—just reminding ourselves, "Most people give up just as they're about to succeed." So we might get that breakthrough around strengths; we might be able to support somebody. But let's not give up too soon.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I love it. Thank you. I appreciate you so much. Thank you for taking the time and having this conversation.

Sue Langley
Thank you, Elaine. It's been delightful.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I could talk for hours too. Yeah. To those of you listening, take a minute and ask yourself, what's your insight from this conversation? I know what Sue and I have been talking about, but what's come up for you in this conversation? Was there a particular relationship you were thinking about, a particular scenario, or a dynamic? What's your awareness from what you've heard today? And perhaps what's one action you might wanna take based on that insight or that awareness that you have, that you wanna bring forward with you into your week this week?
As always, my friends, thank you for what you're doing for yourself and for your kids. You make an extraordinary difference in their lives, and I really wanna acknowledge and honor your presence, your tuning in, your listening to this, and the work you're doing as a parent or as a professional to support these amazing young people. See you on the next call. Take care, everybody.

Helpful Links:

• Parent Expectations: 2 Steps to Success 
• Parenting is Leadership Guide