I began my SFHEA application at roughly the same time I began a formal autism assessment. I would love to tell you this was intentional, or strategic, or even wise. It wasn’t. It was simply how the year unfolded.
What the pairing has produced, however, is a rare opportunity for deep personal and professional reflection itself—particularly the kind of structured, evidence-based reflection demanded by Advance HE. The SFHEA process asks you to name where leadership and influence occurred, how values were enacted, and what impact your work had on others. For many of us, especially those working in learning design or academic development, that work is relational, distributed, and often deliberately backgrounded. You succeed by making others successful. You influence by not needing to be visible.
Now add neurodivergence to that mix.
Thinking through the challenges
One of the challenges of my neurotype is that I often do the work without registering it as leadership. I solve problems, build systems, anticipate friction, absorb complexity. I don’t always ‘clock’ these moments as achievements; they feel more like baseline survival. The SFHEA framework doesn’t let you leave them unnamed. It insists—politely but firmly—that you stop and ask: what was happening here? Who was affected? What changed because you were involved?
That insistence is uncomfortable. It rubs against imposter syndrome, against cultural scripts of modesty, against the learning designer’s instinct to point elsewhere. It also rubs against autism’s particular relationship to self-narration. Retrospective sense-making is not always our strong suit. Leadership, when it’s emergent or situational, can be especially hard to recognise in yourself.
Unexpected benefits
And yet—this is the part that surprised me—the reflection itself has been rewarding.
Like some other forms of academic writing, the SFHEA application creates a pause in otherwise relentless professional time. It demands that you slow down, assemble evidence, and read your own practice with care. For busy academics and professional staff, that pause is rare. We are usually future-facing: next session, next project, next fire. The application process creates a sanctioned space to look backward and ask not just what did I do—but what mattered?
This is where the experience of diagnosis complicated things further. As I revisited case studies—programs of care and support, Indigenous-led learning design, program leadership—I began to see patterns that had previously felt like personal quirks: a preference for systems over charisma; a tendency to design scaffolds that make tacit processes explicit; a sensitivity to overload, inequity, and friction in learning environments. These weren’t idiosyncrasies, but evidence of values, and ways of shaping outcomes.
At the same time, the process surfaced tensions that others have written about far more generously and clearly than I can. Amanda Lizier and Marko Antic’s Education Express posts on SFHEA preparation, and those by other UTS colleagues, capture the pragmatic challenges well: gathering evidence that was never meant to be archived; identifying referees who have genuinely seen your influence; translating collaborative work into a narrative without claiming undue credit.
For neurodivergent applicants, those tensions can be amplified. Asking for support letters can feel like an imposition. Writing confidently about influence can feel like overreach. There is also the cognitive labour of aligning lived, messy practice with a framework that necessarily abstracts and tidies—another reason why I encourage everyone to undertake the experience supported by the UTS fellowship program, or other community or group.
For all that, frameworks can also protect. The SFHEA criteria provide a shared language that legitimises forms of labour often rendered invisible: mentoring, capacity-building, cultural change, design leadership. For me, that mattered. It allowed me to see my practice not as a collection of ad hoc responses to chaos, but as a coherent, values-driven body of work.
Looking back
I don’t want to romanticise the process. It is time-consuming. It is cognitively demanding. It asks you to hold yourself steady under fluorescent lights and say, plainly, this had value. That is not easy work.
But I do want to name this: reflection, when structured and taken seriously, can be a reward in itself. Especially when your professional life has been shaped by doubt, difference, or the sense that you’re always translating yourself for others.
The SFHEA application didn’t just ask me to evidence impact. It asked me to recognise it. In a year of diagnosis and reorientation, that turned out to be no small thing.