Have you just tried communicating more clearly?
People love to say, “Have you just tried communicating more clearly?”. It sounds reasonable. Sensible. Professional. As if the problem is simply that the message came out slightly scrambled and needs better packaging next time. The implication is that clarity is always available, and that if it did not land, the failure lies in how much effort you put into organising your thoughts.
This piece is for people who suspect the problem was never their communication, but the conditions under which they were expected to perform it.
For many of us, especially AuDHD adults, this advice misses what is actually happening.
I have spent more than thirty years in professional environments, and I have been a Managing Director in the finance industry for well over a decade. I have been a consultant, a senior leader, and a board member. I regularly speak to hundreds or thousands of people, both in person and online. I can explain complex systems, go deep into technical detail, and lift my head to think strategically across organisations. Most of the time, I communicate clearly. The moments where I am told I did not are not random. They cluster, and when they do, they hurt in a very specific way.
Communication does not fail for me when things are calm, structured, or safe. It fails when the cost of getting it wrong is high. When there are consequences. When judgement is present. When I am being evaluated rather than collaborated with. In those moments, something shifts. I am an auditory processor. I often think by speaking. The words arrive as the thinking forms. In the right environment, that works well. In the wrong one, it becomes a liability. Monitoring increases. I start watching my words as I say them. I become more aware of what might be misunderstood, challenged, or later used as evidence that I was unclear or unfocused. The need to be accurate, not misleading, not wrong, begins to compete with the need to be brief. The harder I need to be clear, the less available clarity becomes in the moment.
This is not because the understanding is not there. It is because access to it is state-dependent. When the nervous system does not feel safe, the path from knowing to saying narrows. This is a well-described pattern in both autism and ADHD. Autistic cognition often builds meaning bottom up, assembling detail into coherence rather than starting with a headline and filling it in later. ADHD adds speed, associative thinking, and urgency, but also reduces the ability to hold a pre-compressed version of an idea under pressure. When those combine, thinking can be deep, fast, and integrative, but difficult to summarise cleanly on demand.
I can move very comfortably between deep technical detail and high-level strategy. Both are natural to me. What is harder is explaining the intellectual process that takes someone else from one to the other. When asked to explain the strategy, I often rebuild the argument from the ground up. Not because I am lost, but because I feel I need a logically sound case that I can stand behind. I want to show how the conclusion follows. I want to be honest about the steps. I want to ensure I am not skipping something that matters. It is, in effect, a thesis defence.
From the outside, this can look like over-explaining or poor judgement. From the inside, it is about integrity. About truthfulness. About not compressing meaning so much that it becomes distortion. Autistic communication tends to prioritise internal coherence over rhetorical efficiency. ADHD communication tends to prioritise capturing the full picture before it slips away. Dyslexia adds another layer. Difficulties with sequencing, working memory, and translating between internal representation and external expression can make summarisation harder, not because the ideas are unclear, but because the act of organising them into linear language is effortful and fragile under pressure.
I screen positive for dyslexia, and in hindsight it explains a lot. Not just in writing, but in speaking. The sense of knowing exactly what I mean while struggling to land it in a form others immediately recognise. The need to reconstruct rather than paraphrase. The feeling that if I skip steps, something essential will be lost. Dyslexia is often misunderstood as a reading and spelling issue, but at its core it is about information processing. How ideas are held, ordered, and retrieved. When combined with autism and ADHD, it can produce thinking that is rich and multidimensional, but difficult to compress into the neat, linear summaries that professional culture often rewards.
The problem is that many environments reward the destination but not the journey. They want the punchline without the reasoning. When the bridge between detail and strategy is not visible, people fill in the gap themselves. Often incorrectly. I once worked with someone I jokingly called my translator. In meetings, he would regularly say, “What Graham just said was…” and then repeat what sounded to me like exactly what I had already said. But when he said it, people understood immediately. Nothing changed about the content. Only the interface.
That experience stayed with me. It showed me that the issue was never clarity. It was translation across cognitive styles, in environments that only recognise one. It also showed me how much invisible scaffolding had been present throughout most of my career. Managers who framed and mediated. Agendas and pre-reads. Time to prepare and script. Clear expectations about what level of detail was required. That scaffolding did not make me clearer. It made clarity accessible.
In some contexts, particularly those with less explicit structure and higher levels of scrutiny, much of that scaffolding quietly falls away. Expectations become implicit rather than stated. Stakes increase. Feedback arrives retrospectively and in abstract terms. “Be more concise.” “Focus on the key points.” “Exercise discipline.” These phrases sound neutral, but they locate the problem entirely within the individual. They do not ask what conditions were present, what support was missing, or what the nervous system was responding to in the moment.
Before diagnosis, being told to communicate more clearly landed as shame. It felt like evidence that I was fundamentally broken. That despite everything I had achieved, there was something basic I could not get right. After ADHD and autism diagnoses, it began to look different. Not a flaw, but a mismatch. I do not communicate badly. I communicate differently. The sadness comes from realising that some systems are not built to accommodate that difference, and instead moralise it.
This pattern shows up outside of work too. Doctors’ appointments are a good example. I often do not yet know how I feel in language-ready form. Sensations arrive before meaning. Understanding comes later, once the pressure has passed. Afterwards, the words are suddenly there. The coherence is obvious. And the familiar thought appears. I should have said that. The system treats the appointment as the only valid moment. Anything that arrives later does not count. Again, it is not a lack of insight. It is timing, consequence, and the expectation that clarity should always be available on demand.
What makes this harder is that I know I can communicate clearly. I have done so for decades. Which makes every failure feel like proof that I should have been able to do better. Tried harder. Been more disciplined. But pressure does not sharpen everyone. For some nervous systems, it narrows access instead. The higher the perceived cost of being wrong, the more resources are pulled into monitoring and self-protection, and the fewer are available for sequencing, summarising, and speaking with ease.
If I were coaching someone on this, I would not start by assuming their communication skills were the problem. I would want to understand where they felt things had gone wrong, in their own words, and what they believed that failure said about them. Often, people arrive already convinced that they are bad at communicating, when what they are really struggling with is a particular context, relationship, or set of expectations that they have never been helped to make sense of.
From there, we would slow the story down. We would look carefully at the moments where they felt they had not communicated clearly and ask whether this was genuinely a skills gap, or whether it was a mismatch between how they think and the environment they were operating in. We would also look for counterexamples. The situations where they feel confident, articulate, and effective. The meetings, conversations, or settings where things tend to flow. The aim would not be to dismiss the difficulties, but to widen the picture enough to see that the problem is not universal.
That contrast usually tells you something important. Communication does not exist in a vacuum. It is shaped by structure, time pressure, power dynamics, emotional safety, and sensory load. In some environments, people are given time to think, context to speak into, and clarity about what is being asked of them. In others, they are expected to perform clarity on demand, under scrutiny, with little margin for error. The same person can look articulate in one and inadequate in the other.
Only once that distinction is clear does it make sense to ask what needs to change. Sometimes that will involve adapting how someone communicates, experimenting with preparation, framing, or pacing in ways that feel tolerable and authentic. Other times, the more honest answer is that the environment needs adjusting. More structure. More explicit expectations. More space to think. Less pressure to perform certainty in real time.
The work, as I see it, is not about forcing people to communicate like everyone else. It is about helping them understand where the friction really is, and then deciding, deliberately and compassionately, whether the best lever to pull is the person, the context, or the relationship between the two.
For me, this has been a slow shift from self-blame to self-understanding. I still care deeply about being understood. I still work on making my thinking more visible when it matters. But I no longer believe that clarity is simply a matter of effort. Sometimes it is about safety. Sometimes it is about timing. Sometimes it is about translation rather than compression. And sometimes it is about recognising that the problem was never my ability to think or communicate at all.
I write about these experiences because I spent years thinking I was broken, when what I actually needed was language for how my nervous system works.
I write one thoughtful piece a week for people who find themselves overwhelmed by things that everyone else seems to cope with. If this resonated, subscribing just means you’ll get the next one quietly, without pressure or expectation.
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Baird, J., Stevenson, J. C., & Williams, D. C. (2000). The evolution of ADHD: A disorder of communication? The Quarterly Review of Biology, 75(1), 17–35. https://doi.org/10.1086/393256
Lindsay, S., Osten, V., Rezai, M., & Bui, S. (2021). Disclosure and workplace accommodations for people with autism: a systematic review. Disability and Rehabilitation, 43(5), 597–610. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2019.1635658
Hayward, S. M., McVilly, K. R., & Stokes, M. A. (2018). Challenges for females with high functioning autism in the workplace: a systematic review. Disability and Rehabilitation, 40(3), 249–258. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638288.2016.1254284
https://embrace-autism.com/autistic-verbal-and-nonverbal-communication-differences/
https://embrace-autism.com/autism-and-the-double-empathy-problem/
