I recently attended a sales training. Not exactly my natural habitat, I am not a salesperson, I am a fraud prevention consultant, but it turned into one of the most unexpectedly validating experiences I’ve had in a long time.

The trainer had spent quite some time working for tech companies in the US and Israel before returning to Germany. He also knew various cultural differences, communication styles and worlds, which turned out to be relevant.

First, a detour: Active Listening

Early in the training, the topic of active listening came up. The trainer quickly realized that this wasn’t a new concept for me and that I had been applying it for years. He asked me to explain what active listening actually looks like in practice.

Here’s the irony: active listening does not come naturally to me at all.

One of the hallmarks of ADHD is that we relate to people by sharing our own experiences. Someone tells you about their difficult day, and your brain immediately fires back with a similar story of your own, not out of selfishness, but because that’s how we connect. The problem is that it looks like interrupting. It looks like making everything about yourself. I spent years being perceived as rude or self-centered for something that was simply how my brain was wired to show empathy. I needed to make sure that people felt safe and in my head, they’d definitely feel safe if they know that I had experienced a similar situation or  challenge.

Active listening taught me to do something genuinely difficult for my ADHD brain: to be fully present in what someone else is saying without simultaneously preparing what I will say next. To listen without an agenda. To hear not just the words, but the tone, the hesitation, the thing behind the thing and then simply sit with it rather than immediately responding. I had to learn to be comfortable with silence and also potentially not having a solution or a response.

I had to consciously learn and practice this, and I developed hacks to make it work. I stopped bringing my phone or laptop into meetings and one-on-ones. Not as a courtesy gesture, but as a hard rule for my own brain. Because I will get distracted by anything and everything if given the chance. If the devices aren’t there, they can’t compete for my attention. For the same reason, I always sit in the front row when someone is presenting, and I keep my camera on in remote meetings. It forced me to be fully present with the person in front of me, and over time it became one of the most powerful tools in my management and communication toolkit.

And apparently, I had gotten good enough at it that a trainer with decades of experience thought it was innate.

Then Came the Cold Call Email

The main exercise of the day: write a cold call email that would actually get read and get a response. The trainer told us that most cold emails are deleted without a second thought. Our job was to write one that wouldn’t be.

Here’s what we knew about him: he is an avid sailor who also teaches others how to sail. That was our hook, if we chose to use it.

The brief: Pitch something in a way that would make him read the email and consider responding.

For me, the answer was immediate. I have organized fundraisers and roundtables for most of my career. I know how to ask people for things. And the one thing I have always known is that the fastest way to get someone’s attention is not to pretend you want nothing from them, but to be completely honest about what you need and why you think they specifically can help.

So I wrote this:

Subject: I could use your help and expertise!

Dear [name],

I have learned that you are an avid sailor, and not only sail to various locations, but also teach others how to sail. Based on your extensive background in coaching, training and teaching, I thought you to be the perfect person to help me with a project.

I am a consultant in fraud and risk prevention and I’m currently in the process of starting a new roundtable that would enable eCommerce companies to share their pain points, knowledge, as well as potential solutions. Unfortunately, it is difficult for me to get people to join my roundtable, since I am working for a fraud solution provider, and in the global fraud world they are usually banned from these conversations.

I am well known in the international fraud world, but not as much in the DACH region. Do you have any idea how I could engage people who do not know me yet and build this roundtable?

Please let me know if you’d have a few minutes to discuss and give me some insight.

Warmest wishes, Carmen

He read it out loud to the group. Then he went through it, line by line.

“Let’s start with the subject line. See how she is asking for help and expertise? It instantly got my curiosity, because here is someone who doesn’t seem to want to sell me anything.”

He walked through how I had connected his sailing background not as a gimmick, but as a genuine reason why his specific experience made him the right person to ask. He pointed out that I had named my own obstacle openly – that working for a solution provider typically gets you excluded from exactly the conversations you need to have. He called the tone personal, humble, and authentic. Not salesy, not demanding.

He said it could have been a little shorter, but that even that wasn’t really an issue.

“This,” he said, “is an email that gets a response.”

What He Didn’t Know

He doesn’t know I’m neurodivergent.

He had no idea that the instincts he was praising, the active listening, the radical honesty, the ability to make someone feel seen rather than targeted, weren’t things I learned in a sales course. They were things I developed over decades of having to figure out how people work, because my brain processes the world differently and I had to compensate.

AuDHD means I have spent my entire life reading rooms. Masking. Adapting. Learning to communicate across different “operating systems,” different cultures, different communication styles, different expectations of who I was supposed to be. In the US, we did the Insight Discovery test, where personalities are differentiated by colors. Colleagues read me as Red -direct, driving, assertive. In Germany, people saw the Green-Yellow immediately – empathetic, positive, people-focused. Neither was wrong. Both were true. I had simply learned to present differently depending on where I was. In Germany I present much more authentic: Green, Yellow, Blue, Red.

What looks like a communication superpower from the outside is, from the inside, the result of a lifetime of work. Work that neurotypical people never had to do, because the standard social manual worked just fine for them.

The Bigger Point

We talk a lot in neurodivergent spaces about the deficits. The things we can’t do, the ways we struggle, the systems that weren’t built for us. And those things are real and worth talking about.

But there is a flip side. The same brain that makes a crowded conference overwhelming, that replays conversations for days, that masks so thoroughly that even a trained professional reads you as an extrovert, that brain also notices everything. It listens deeply. It connects dots others miss. It leads with honesty because performance has always been exhausting, and somewhere along the way it learned that authenticity is simply more efficient.

I didn’t write the best sales email in the room because I’m a natural salesperson. I wrote it because I have spent my whole life learning how to be genuinely heard and it turns out, that’s the only sales skill that actually matters.