Separating Autistic from Disabled and Limited

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Growth Mindset Can Help Us Reframe Our Abilities

For many years, I couldn’t stand growth mindset talks. I’d sit through workshops and presentations on the topic and walk away irritated, because so much of what gets called growth mindset devolves into toxic positivity. You know the pitch — “I know you’re 65 years old, but if you just put your mind to it, a year from now you can be as rich as Oprah Winfrey.”

That doesn’t help anybody. It minimizes real challenges and pretends effort alone erases every barrier in front of us.

So when I set out to build a six-week series on growth mindset for the Autistic Business Network, I made myself a promise: This would not be that.

My approach is incremental and based in reality. Small changes. Small steps. No minimizing what any of us are actually dealing with. And it starts with a distinction I think we skip too quickly: There’s a difference between being autistic, being disabled, and being limited.

Those three things get fused together in most people’s minds, including our own, but they are not the same thing. Some of us are disabled. Some of us are limited in specific, real ways.

But those aren’t labels we have to wear as a total identity, and they don’t have to define what we believe is possible for us.


When I look back on my life, the throughline is simple: Some of the things I was told I couldn’t do were not the same as what I could actually do. I suspect that’s true for you too.

Where Our Beliefs Come From

Before I explain the framework I use to look at growth mindset, I want to ask you a question:

“ What is the first thing you were ever told you couldn’t do because of how your mind works?”

I have a trait called highly superior autobiographical memory — I can recall extremely specific details from my past, sometimes without warning, sometimes only after working and waiting to recall something. I have no shortage of examples to draw from. But you don’t need a special memory for this. Most of us can find at least one moment, if we look.

A lot of where these beliefs originate traces back to the medical model. Autism is something many of us get diagnosed with. We meet with a psychologist or psychiatrist, and they pronounce a verdict.

Historically, that diagnosis has been framed almost entirely around deficit. They look at what’s missing, broken, or impaired.

I did not learn that I’m Autistic until age 60, so the “diagnosis” for me in my early years was often my parents continually asking “What’s wrong with you!?”

I’m not going to pretend I don’t have real challenges, because I certainly do. But I also have real strengths I’m grateful for. A framework built entirely on deficit crowds out any room to see our strengths. The clinical question is narrow by design: “Something is wrong with this person. What supports do we put in place? How much can they actually do?”

Everything gets oriented around limitations instead of capabilities. What if we identify our strengths and lean into what we can do?

That framing gets reinforced early, and it gets reinforced by the people closest to us — school and family.

In my case, I was assessed for kindergarten readiness back in the 1960s and my parents were told I wasn’t ready. The school suggested that my parents should bring me back the next year to be evaluated for special education.

At the time, “special ed” wasn’t the individualized support it can be today. It was one room holding every child who didn’t fit the mold, from kindergarten through sixth grade, regardless of what was actually going on with them. It was essentially a parking lot for kids who were “off” so they wouldn’t disturb the learning process for the normal kids.

Fortunately, my parents knew I was sharp — I’d spent enough time in my father’s car repair shop that by age five I could explain how a carburetor worked and take one apart. But at home, the dominant message was still confusion: “What’s wrong with you?”

Nobody had an answer, including me. So I withdrew into books, negotiating with the school librarian to let me check out more than my limit. I quietly absorbed the belief that I didn’t do well around people, that isolation was just who I was.

(The irony is that as an adult I realized that understanding people is my special interest. My business focuses on helping leaders improve business performance by how they lead the people and manage the human dynamics of business.)

The workplace adds its own layer. I worked from 1983, straight out of college, until I started my own business in 2007 — nonprofits, for-profits, big companies and small.

Performance reviews can have a way of penalizing traits that are actually just how we’re wired. I once had a boss ask me to explain exactly, in detail, exactly what had gone wrong on a troubled project. I did — thoroughly, because she’d said “exactly.” Partway through, she cut me off. What she’d actually wanted was for me to say “It’s my fault, I’ll fix it,” – not a full accounting.

In another organization, my executive vice president held me up to my peers as a positive example. He said that my ability to give him direct feedback on how he could improve his performance was exactly what he wanted from everyone. It was the same trait – providing honest and objective information – but the opposite reception, depending entirely on the culture I was standing in.

I’ve watched the same pattern show up around physical environment — the shift from private offices to cubicles to fully open floor plans, no privacy, constant noise and visual distraction. I once had a quiet office that let me do serious writing and strategic work, until someone complained I had more square footage than my job level allowed.

I got moved to an open work station next to the customer complaint call center. I didn’t last long there. Had I known I was Autistic at the time, I might have had language to ask for an accommodation. I didn’t, and neither did most workplaces in the ‘90s.

Inherited Beliefs vs. Real Support Needs

Here’s a core distinction we need to look at: Real support needs and inherited beliefs are not the same thing, even though they get tangled together constantly.
A real support need is specific and describable — tied to an actual sensory, communication, or processing difference. Things like:

  • I need written instructions instead of verbal ones to do my best work.
  • I need a quiet space to work.
  • I need the ability to focus on completing one task before you ask me to switch to another.
  • I need clear deadlines instead of open-ended requests.

The reality about this list: Almost everyone, whether they are neurodivergent or neurotypical, benefits from this work culture.

I’ve had executives complain to me that an employee “Needs everything written down” as if it’s a special accommodation, when in reality, everyone performs better with clear direction. Support needs don’t disappear when expectations change, either — if anything, they tend to grow.

Inherited beliefs are a different animal. They’re vague, sweeping, and tied to somebody else’s expectations rather than any actual evidence. They sound like “You’ll never. . . ,” “people like you don’t. . .,” or the softer, more insidious version: “You should really. . . — as in, “You should really keep your desk neater,” or “It would just be easier if you didn’t come to that meeting.”

A late friend of mine used to say, “Don’t let anybody should all over you.” Crude, but accurate. These beliefs rarely get tested. They just get repeated until we absorb them as fact.

I had a boss once tell me I needed to keep a neater desk to be successful. I knew exactly where everything on my desk was. I didn’t need anyone else to. I went on to a significant level of corporate success — so the belief obviously wasn’t true — but I still carried a private sense of failure around it for years.

In sixth grade, a teacher told me I’d never survive seventh grade because my handwriting was messy and my notebook wasn’t organized well enough. Think about how much of that matters in a world where we type everything now. It never held me back. It just felt, for a long time, like it might.

What Growth Mindset Actually Means Here

Growth mindset, as a term, comes from psychologist Carol Dweck. Although she is often seen as the originator of the concept, I’d argue the underlying idea existed long before she gave it a name. Her distinction is simple:

  • A fixed mindset assumes ability is set in stone — you either have it or you don’t.
  • A growth mindset holds that abilities develop through effort, strategy, and learning.

Neuroscience backs up growth mindset. Neuroplasticity means we retain the capacity to learn and change well into adulthood.

When I was a kid, the prevailing science said your brain essentially stopped developing after a certain age. I teach continuing education classes for seniors now, and my oldest student is in her nineties and still learning. Capacity isn’t fixed by what we were once told it was.

But most growth mindset material is written for neurotypical people, and it shows:

  • “Just try harder.”
  • “Be more motivated.”

I’m not suggesting any of us should aim to become neurotypical. Quite the opposite. I think we as Autistic people carry real, underused potential. In my consulting work, I regularly see patterns and connections that go completely unnoticed by my clients. When I point out something that is obvious to me, I’m often told it’s brilliant insight.

That’s not a deficit story. That’s a strength most growth mindset frameworks never make room for.

The Takeaway

If growth mindset language doesn’t fit your experience the way it’s usually presented, that’s not a personal failure — it’s information. Every time something doesn’t go the way you hoped, that’s a data point, not a verdict.

Here’s what I’d encourage you to reflect on: Some of what you believe about your limits was never actually about your limits. It was about someone else’s expectations, dressed up as fact.

“I’ve always been told I can’t __________” is data about other people’s assumptions. It is not a verdict on your actual capacity.

In our six-week series on growth mindset we build on this foundation and explore how we can adapt growth mindset thinking to our own lives, businesses and careers. The sessions are recorded so you can go back to them. We also have three sessions scheduled each week so we can discuss growth mindset, hold masterminds about our own growth, and ask each other questions to help us move forward. The growth mindset videos are available on YouTube:

 
 

Membership in the Autistic Business Network is exclusively for Autistic people and is free for three months. You are welcome to check us out. For more information, go to https://AutisticBusinessNetwork.com.