Neurodivergent Celebrant Training: The Mindset That Matters

The question you’re actually asking isn’t whether celebrancy is a good career fit. It’s whether this is going to feel like every other time you tried to learn something.

If you’re neurodivergent and you’re considering celebrant training, that’s the honest question underneath. Not “am I capable?” You already know you’re capable of a great deal. The real worry is whether this course is going to feel like every other course, whether you’ll fall into the old shape of trying twice as hard for half the result, and whether you’ll come out the other side feeling smaller than when you started.

We want to answer that properly. In our experience of training more than 1,000 celebrants worldwide, what shapes success more than any single skill isn’t your writing background, your speaking confidence, or your previous career. It’s the mindset you walk in with. AMC mentor Julie Chudleigh, a former headteacher and senior education leader who now trains celebrants, calls this your learning stance. She sees three of them, and each one can shift.

That last part matters, so it’s worth saying twice: the stance you’re standing in right now is not fixed. Once you can name it, you can move.

Why your feelings about learning might not be about celebrancy at all

For many neurodivergent adults, learning has a history. Being marked down for handwriting. Being the child who “wasn’t applying themselves” when you were trying harder than anyone in the room. Being told you were bright but lazy, or bright but disorganised, or bright but “if only you’d focus.” Watching classmates get results from methods that never quite worked for your brain, and quietly deciding the fault was yours.

For plenty of adults, that history was formal school. For plenty of others, it was a workplace that rewarded a very narrow kind of thinking, or a training course that punished you for asking too many questions, or the years of masking so well that nobody noticed how much energy you were spending just staying in the room.

None of that was designed to exclude you. Most of it was built without your brain in mind and left to run. But it built beliefs. Beliefs about what you can and can’t learn, about how much effort things should cost you, about what feedback means when you receive it. Those beliefs become a stance. And that stance walks into every new learning environment with you, years and sometimes decades later, whether or not it’s still true.

So when a new course starts and something inside you tightens, it’s worth asking: is that tightness about this course? Or about every course that came before it?

Meet Julie, the mentor behind the framework

Julie Chudleigh is a celebrant mentor at AMC and the founder of Latansani Celebrant. Before celebrancy, she spent years as a teacher and headteacher, in senior education leadership, and running professional development for other teachers. She’s seen how adults learn from both sides of the desk. That background is why the three-stances framework in this article lands the way it does. You can read Julie’s mentor spotlight here.

Three learning stances every student experiences

Julie has trained hundreds of adult students across her career, and she recognises three distinct stances that turn up across every intake:

• Learned helplessness: “I can’t do this and nothing I try will change that.”
• Perfectionism: “It has to be perfect the first time or I’ve failed.”
• Growth mindset: “What can this experience teach me?”

The first two look like opposites. They aren’t. They do the same job in different clothes: they stop you learning. The third is the one every AMC mentor works to help students grow into, because it’s the stance that carries you not just through training but through the rest of your celebrant career.

It’s important to note that sometimes one person may experience all 3 stances across different areas of their learning. You might experience growth mindset in areas you consider strengths and feel helpless and blocked in other areas you believe you’re terrible at. Let’s look at what that actually looks and feels like:

Stance one: learned helplessness

Learned helplessness is the belief that your efforts don’t really change the outcome. Julie describes it as what develops when we begin to believe our efforts have little or no influence over the outcome. One piece of feedback on a ceremony draft becomes “I’m not a good writer.” Feeling nervous during a practice ceremony becomes “I’ll never be confident speaking in public.”

The stance quietly closes the door on learning. You practise less because you don’t believe practice will help. You avoid feedback because you’ve already decided what it means. What makes it so harmful is that this belief feels fixed and real.

For many neurodivergent adults, this stance isn’t new. It’s inherited. Years of “you’re not trying hard enough” when you were trying twice as hard as everyone else. Years of methods that worked for the person next to you and didn’t work for you. When feedback lands on a ceremony draft, it doesn’t feel like feedback. It feels like the same old verdict returning.

The shift out of it starts with a small act of naming. When the voice speaks up, try: “That’s the old story, not what’s happening now.” It sounds small. It isn’t. Julie puts it plainly: what you’re often experiencing isn’t inability; it’s the normal discomfort of learning something new. Discomfort is not evidence.

When you feel that familiar panic setting in, take a breath, pause and remind yourself that you will find the answer – even if you don’t know it now. If you’ve been assigned a mentor, that’s what they’re there for! Don’t be afraid to ask for help or clarification.

If you don’t have a mentor yet, bring your questions to the Q&A sessions, email our support team, or ask for help in the Facebook group.

Stance two: perfectionism

Perfectionism is the stance many capable, high-achieving adults arrive with. Julie describes them as people who’ve spent much of their lives being highly competent. Successful careers, businesses, families, professions where they were expected to know the answers. Celebrancy places them back in the unfamiliar position of being a beginner, and that can be deeply uncomfortable.

From the outside, perfectionism looks like the opposite of learned helplessness. Inside, it does the same job. Students in this stance redraft the same ceremony fifteen times. They avoid submitting. They defer the live assessment. They treat any note from a mentor as failure. The pressure comes from comparing your first attempts with the work of experienced celebrants who may have spent years refining their craft. The learning stops. Perfectionism is not a superpower. It’s a well-dressed brake.

For autistic adults who have spent a lifetime hyper-competent by necessity, and for ADHDers with rejection-sensitive dysphoria, ordinary constructive feedback feels like personal rejection; and this stance is often the default. It usually shows up disguised as “I just want to do it properly” while, quietly, nothing gets finished.

The shift out of it starts with noticing which standards are actually yours and which are the mask talking. Loosening perfectionism inside training isn’t lowering the bar. It’s making room for the finished-not-perfect version of a ceremony that a real family will actually experience. Something completed teaches you more than something perfect that stays in a drawer.

Worth a listen: Check out episode 11 of the podcast where Award-winning Celebrant and Celebrant Mentor Miranda Ash shares her thoughts on the value of feedback and mentorship

Beyond The Ceremony Podcast Ep 11: Authenticity and Being Your True Self with Miranda Ash

Stance three: growth mindset

The third stance is the one every AMC mentor works to help you grow into. Julie describes the shift plainly: rather than asking "did I succeed or fail?", you ask "what has this experience taught me?" Feedback becomes information instead of judgement. Not knowing something becomes a normal stage of the process rather than a verdict on your worth.

For a neurodivergent brain, growth stance looks like self-accommodation rather than white-knuckling. It looks like learning what actually works for your brain and arranging your training around it, rather than forcing yourself to work like a neurotypical person and calling the exhaustion progress. It looks like curiosity about your own process. It looks like being kind to yourself when something takes longer than you expected, and remembering that longer than expected is often just longer than someone else expected of you.

Rosalind Miles, a former AMC mentor who works professionally as a BACP-registered psychotherapist and ADHD/ASD specialist coach, and who is openly ADHD herself, describes the shift as looking for the opportunity for learning and growth rather than chasing the next dopamine hit that comes with starting something new. Recognising the pattern is half the work.

A moment to check where you're standing right now

Before you read on, take a minute with these four questions. Answer honestly. No mentor will ever see your response.

1. When you got your last piece of feedback on anything, from anyone, what was your first thought?
2. Is there something you've been avoiding? What's the story you're telling yourself about why?
3. When was the last time you asked for help? What stopped you before that?
4. If a friend was standing in your shoes right now, what would you say to them?

If the answers point to "I can't," that's learned helplessness surfacing. If they point to "it has to be perfect," that's perfectionism. If they point to "what would help me learn from this?", you're already practising a growth stance.

All three are moveable. That's the whole point.

What meets you if you bring the will and the curiosity

Here's the deal we make with you. Your job is to bring the will to try, the willingness to believe you can grow, and enough curiosity to stay interested when things get uncomfortable. Our job is to build flexible training and a support system to guide you.

That's why the course is self-paced with a 12-month completion window on each certification. No cohort deadlines. Start, pause and pick up again as energy and life allow. For a brain that runs on interest cycles rather than fixed rhythms, that flexibility is often the difference between finishing and not finishing.

It's why every student is paired one-to-one with a mentor for the assessment phase, rather than being taught in a group. That's where accommodations happen at the individual level. AMC graduate Sophie, who has ADHD and was mentored by Rosalind, describes it in her graduation interview: "She was really attuned to the fact that I had ADHD. We decided to go for false deadlines because nine weeks is a very broad period and people with ADHD, particularly the way my ADHD works, I lose track of time quite easily. She sent me false deadlines. We stuck to them. She was incredibly supportive."

It's why the final step of every certification is officiating a real ceremony rather than sitting a written exam. For dyslexic and dyspraxic students in particular, that's often the moment they realise celebrancy is a home for their strengths, not another test of the ones they've been penalised on for decades.

And it's why the AMC Student Hub exists as a live, mentor-attended community, so that at 1 am when you're stuck down a rabbit hole, someone is in there with you. Nobody is doing this alone.

None of that removes the discomfort of learning something new. It isn't meant to. What it does is give a growth stance somewhere to take root, instead of asking you to muscle through a system built for someone else's brain and calling that support.

Where this leaves you

If you've read this far, you're already doing the work. You're looking at your own stance honestly rather than pretending it's something else. That's the beginning of the shift.

Julie's line on this is the one to hold: resilience develops every time we experience disappointment and choose not to stop. It grows when we receive feedback without becoming defensive, when we acknowledge that something didn't work as well as we'd hoped and then decide to try again. Like creativity, resilience is learned through repeated practice rather than inherited at birth.

You do not need to arrive at training with a perfect growth stance. Almost nobody does. You need to arrive willing to notice which stance is speaking, and willing to practise choosing the other one. Everything else, we can help you with.

Ready when you are:

• Take the free celebrant training quiz to find the certification path that best matches your interests and strengths.
• Explore our Celebrant Training courses to see the modules, mentor model and self-paced structure in full.