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Lived experience, Think Autism Melbourne 2026
Paul Micallef says doing nothing by halves is a weakness and a strength
In short
At Think Autism Melbourne in 2026, the founder of Autism From the Inside described teaching emotional intelligence to autistic and neurotypical people alike, and said his habit of doing nothing by halves cuts both ways.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
Paul Micallef told the autistic entrepreneurs showcase at Think Autism Melbourne on 30 May 2026 that he started Autism From the Inside to share all the things he had to learn the hard way. Being undiagnosed and autistic, he said, felt like the world was on hard mode, with unseen challenges, unspoken expectations and decades of masking, trying to mould himself to neurotypical standards. He offered what he called a cheat code to dial the difficulty down a little, which was teaching emotional intelligence and neurodiversity in a systematic, structured way, with a focus on explicitly addressing the invisible traps no one tells you about. The part he was most excited about was that it works in both directions. When neurotypical people learn the same skills, he said, autism starts to make sense to them, which removes the communication barrier and addresses the double empathy problem at the same time.
He did not come to the stage as a newcomer to that work. A speaker profile published by the National Autistic Society in the United Kingdom, which carries no date, describes him as an autistic life coach, speaker, facilitator and trainer, and names Autism From the Inside as his YouTube channel. A Torrens University article from May 2018 reported that he was by then teaching emotional intelligence through an online four week course designed to be autism friendly.
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Sources the story draws on
- Paul Micallef (speaker profile, Annual Professionals Conference) (opens in a new tab), National Autistic Society
- Paul's journey on learning Emotional Intelligence with autism (opens in a new tab), Torrens University Australia
- The double empathy problem (opens in a new tab), National Autistic Society (author Dr Damian Milton)
- Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective (opens in a new tab), Autism (SAGE), via PubMed Central; Crompton, Ropar, Evans-Williams, Flynn and Fletcher-Watson
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