Why Neurodiversity Matters at Work (with Khushboo Chabria)
Release Date: 07/13/2025
Why Men Refuse to Admit They're Struggling
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
First aired September 6, 2026 Dennis Bairos oversees more than 29 fitness locations across Texas, and somewhere between the grand openings and the late-night emails, he noticed a pattern: he was the guy who'd rather miss a flight than admit he needed help, the coach whose sideline energy made his own wife ask if he was okay, and the traveler who'd rather squeeze in one more phone call than let 20 free minutes in a rental car go to waste. That pattern became his book, Wired Like This: Why Men Push Too Far and Still Say, I Got It!, a look at the small, everyday decisions at home, at work, and on...
info_outline
Why Your Nervous System Won't Let You Rest
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
First aired September 6, 2026 Dr. Charleanea Arellano has spent over 30 years as a clinical psychologist and leadership coach, but the framework she's best known for now, the Embodied Narrative Framework, didn't come from a textbook. It came from putting away laundry five years ago and noticing her own body bracing for impact, for no reason at all, at age 55, after decades of actually being safe. Dr. Arellano built her career studying how high-achieving women lead while carrying nervous systems shaped by trauma, and by the added weight of managing how their race, sexuality, or gender is...
info_outline
Why Business Leaders Need Negotiation Skills
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
First aired August 23, 2026 Annette Mullin spent 24 years with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, nine of them as a crisis negotiator, eventually leading one of the busiest negotiation teams in the country — averaging over 100 call-outs a year. She worked patrol, sexual assault, internal affairs, and homicide, becoming LVMPD's first female homicide sergeant, before spending her final years as the department's director of employee wellness in the aftermath of the October 1 Mandalay Bay shooting, the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. Now a negotiation instructor and coach...
info_outline
Why Comedy Might Be the Best Medicine For Mental Health
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
First aired August 16, 2026 For over a decade, Dave Mowry couldn't get out of bed, couldn't shower, and couldn't walk to his own mailbox without waiting until dark so a neighbor wouldn't catch the look in his eyes. In 1994, a psychotic break sent the successful businessman and family man into a depression so deep it cost him his house, his career, and 14 years he calls his "lost years." He slept in his clothes for months at a time. At parties, he'd stand against the wall and pray no one came over to talk to him. Then, at his wife's urging, he walked into a stand-up comedy class for people...
info_outline
Why Imposter Syndrome Keeps Leaders Stuck
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
In this episode, Dana is joined by Kurt Bush, a trauma-informed coach who helps leaders move from imposter syndrome to authentic confidence. Kurt shares his own journey with imposter syndrome, from feeling like a fraud in corporate leadership meetings to realizing his true calling. He explains that to make a change, the pain of staying the same must become greater than the pain of changing, a threshold many of us fear crossing. Kurt introduces the ERT (Encounter + Reflection = Transformation) framework, a practical approach to help you get unstuck. He reveals why the first step to moving...
info_outline
Your Midlife 'Crisis' Might Be Burnout (with Jody Brooks)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
A midlife crisis isn't actually a crisis. That's the challenge Jody Brooks puts to anyone who's ever felt lost, restless, or quietly convinced something's wrong with them somewhere around 40 or 50: what looks like burnout, and what people love to write off as a freakout, is more often a calling. His own arrived at lunchtime at the office, buzzing canteen and all, when he found himself sitting in a restroom cubicle, crying so hard he could barely breathe. No brutal meeting that morning. No disaster. Just the quiet moment his body picked to file its formal complaint: burnout wasn't a "rough...
info_outline
How You Can Find Hope After Rock Bottom (Aaron Ryan)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
Two in the morning. Sitting on the toilet, clothed, bawling into a pillow, because a broken PC was the last thing standing between him and the self-employed life he wanted so badly he could feel it in his teeth. That's where my guest this week hit rock bottom: not one dramatic collapse, but months of computer problems piling on top of a dream that felt like it was never going to happen. A client shared one quote with him that day, and Aaron Ryan has carried it in his back pocket for almost twenty years since: "The temptation to quit is always greatest just before your greatest success." Aaron...
info_outline
How Your Body's Intuition Can Heal You (Rebecca Russell)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
Four years of chronic pain. A fibromyalgia diagnosis. Muscle relaxers, pain pills, migraines, MRI after MRI. And through all of it, my guest this week kept hearing the same quiet voice: something doesn't fit. Rebecca Russell listened to it anyway, tracked down a neurosurgeon, and asked for one test nobody else had run: a discogram. It found the bulging disc that had been the actual problem the whole time, and eighty-five percent of her symptoms disappeared after surgery. Rebecca is a metabolism and lifestyle coach, certified essential oil specialist, and author who's spent more than three...
info_outline
Why Successful Entrepreneurs Set Boundaries (Chris Shurian)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
My guest this week has a word for himself I'd never heard before: "entrepreholic." Over 39 years, Chris Shurian has built, operated, bought, broken, and resurrected companies in remodeling, construction, manufacturing, real estate development, foreign investment, hospitality, restaurants, and retail. He's also survived cancer and finished two Ironmans. And in 2008, when the economy crashed, he was so extended, so "all in, all in, all in," as he puts it, that he spent the next two years meeting with his banker once a week just to survive it. We talk about what it actually felt like to launch...
info_outline
Why Loneliness Hits the Young Hardest (Dr. Anthony Silard)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
Picture a hand-written sign taped to a bus stop in Japan: "I'm 87, I don't have a family. Would some family take me?" No one answered. He died a couple of months later. That story, from my guest this week, is the starkest snapshot I've ever heard of what loneliness researcher Dr. Anthony Silard calls a global epidemic, and the twist is who it's hitting hardest: not the oldest of us, but the youngest. Anthony is a professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology and an internationally recognized authority on relationships, emotional intelligence, and personal transformation, and he's the...
info_outlinePicture a teenager waking up at 3 a.m. to study for AP Biology, reading the same paragraph over and over, and it just will not go in. That was Khushboo Chabria in high school, years before anyone said the word ADHD to her. She carried that "something is wrong with me" feeling all the way into her thirties, into a career as a clinician who was, ironically, already serving neurodivergent kids every day. Neurodiversity in the workplace is not an abstract diversity-statement topic for her; it is her own life, cracked open at 31 when a late ADHD diagnosis finally explained a lifetime of unanswered questions.
Khushboo works with Neurodiversity Pathways at Goodwill of Silicon Valley as a career coach and mental health advocate, helping neurodivergent professionals enter and thrive in their careers. We talk about what happened when she brought her new diagnosis back to her own workplace (it did not go the way she hoped), the mindset shift she now teaches organizations, trading judgment for "compassionate curiosity," and why neurodiversity, like biodiversity or cultural diversity, is simply normal, not a problem to fix.
If you have ever felt underestimated, misunderstood, or like you were somehow doing life "wrong," this conversation is for you. We get into how to self-advocate when you do not have the words for what you need yet, common workplace misconceptions about neurodivergent behavior, and how to find your people when your current workplace is not one of them.
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-l678RVMlo
In this episode
- Why a late ADHD diagnosis is not "too late": it can answer a lifetime of unanswered questions about why you felt misunderstood
- The mindset shift from judgment to "compassionate curiosity" that changes how teams treat neurodivergent coworkers
- Why "when you meet one neurodivergent person, you've only met one," and what that means for how you support others
- How to advocate for your own accommodations before anyone else names them for you
- Common workplace misconceptions about neurodivergent behavior, and why "office humor" is not a universal language
- Where to find community if you suspect you are neurodivergent and feel like you are the only one
Timestamps
- (00:01) Welcome and guest intro: meet Khushboo Chabria, neurodiversity specialist and career coach
- (01:41) Diagnosed with ADHD at 31, as a "burnt out clinician"
- (04:45) The 3 a.m. study sessions, and a lifetime of "if only you would..."
- (06:38) Taking her diagnosis back to work, and slowly feeling managed out
- (10:36) What neurodivergence actually means, and why it's normal
- (14:38) The manager who said, "I don't want you to keep trying to prove you can do all the things"
- (16:27) Common misconceptions about neurodivergent behavior at work
- (17:25) From lenses of judgment to lenses of "compassionate curiosity"
- (23:52) How to advocate for yourself in a workplace that isn't working for you, and the book "Neurodiversity for Dummies"
- (29:41) Finding community, and advocacy groups like ASAN
- (32:38) Where to find Neurodiversity Pathways at Goodwill of Silicon Valley
About Khushboo Chabria
Khushboo Chabria is a neurodiversity specialist, career coach, and mental health advocate with Neurodiversity Pathways at Goodwill of Silicon Valley, where she coaches neurodivergent professionals entering or navigating their careers. Diagnosed with ADHD at 31 after years of working as a clinician serving neurodivergent children, she is a co-author of the book "Neurodiversity for Dummies," published this year.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Favorite quotes
"When you meet one neurodivergent person, you've only met one." —Khushboo Chabria
"It's not really about the label, it's about the individual." —Khushboo Chabria
"Instead of jumping to a conclusion, get curious, ask why." —Khushboo Chabria
Resources mentioned
- Khushboo Chabria on LinkedIn
- "Neurodiversity for Dummies," the book co-authored by Khushboo's team, discussed as a resource for neurodivergent individuals, parents, educators, and managers
- Neurodiversity Pathways at Goodwill of Silicon Valley, Khushboo's organization, including their Career Readiness Training program for neurodivergent job seekers
- ASAN (Autistic Self Advocacy Network), mentioned as a Bay Area advocacy resource
Related episodes
- Anxiety at Work: another look at what it takes to feel safe and supported inside the modern workplace.
- How to Reclaim Your Energy When You're Burned Out: pairs with Khushboo's own burnout story before her diagnosis.
- Adapt or Drown: Finding Your Life Raft in the Modern Workplace: more on what today's workplace demands of every kind of brain.
Subscribe & connect
If this episode gave you something to sit with, follow Phoenix and Flame so you never miss an episode: all apps in one place, or jump straight to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or YouTube. And if it moved you, leave a review; it's the easiest way to help another listener find the show.
Learn more about Phoenix and Flame, connect with Dana, and listen to more episodes here.
Curious where your own boundaries stand? Take my free Work Boundaries Quiz: danaskaggs.com/quiz