Neil Locke
I’m an AHPRA-registered occupational therapist and ACA-registered counsellor based in Melbourne. My background in occupational therapy means I’m interested not only in how people feel, but in how life actually works — relationships, routines, work, decisions, responsibilities, environments and the things people are trying to do.
I’m also a husband and father, and I’m autistic and ADHD myself. Those experiences influence how I see things, but I don’t assume my experience is representative of yours. I’m particularly interested in the gap between appearing capable and actually coping — and in helping people work through the parts of life that haven’t quite resolved themselves.
Being a father has influenced the way I work alongside my professional training. One of the things I value most is the connection I've built with my own children. It's given me a particular interest in helping parents understand what's getting between them and their child and finding practical ways to build connection again — including in families where autism or ADHD changes what communication, expectations and support need to look like.
My approach
How I approach problems — and how I try to make our conversations useful in real life.
I don't assume every problem needs another strategy. Sometimes the useful work is understanding what's actually happening, questioning an assumption, changing something practical, making a difficult decision — or accepting that there isn't a perfect answer.
How I think about change
There are a few ideas I find myself returning to in both my work and my own life. They aren't rules I expect anyone else to follow, but they influence the questions I ask, what I pay attention to and how I approach change.
Make what is important the most important.
It’s easy to spend enormous amounts of energy on things that are urgent, uncomfortable or difficult while losing sight of what actually matters.
Think enough. Then act.
Reflection is useful when it helps us understand something or decide what to do. At some point, more thinking becomes another way of staying stuck. Often the next useful information comes from doing something.
Try to create the outcome you want. Then work with the outcome you get.
Acceptance isn’t giving up before you’ve tried. Put your effort into what you can still influence. Once something has happened, accept that this is the reality you’re working with now — then decide what comes next.
Anxiety doesn’t have to disappear before you act.
Anxiety can create remarkably convincing pictures of what might go wrong. Sometimes, though, what we fear most is the anxiety itself — the feeling that it will be unbearable or that we won’t cope with it. Acting despite the anxiety can help us learn that we can experience anxiety without needing to escape it or let it decide what we do.
You don’t have to sign for and accept everybody else’s opinion.
Other people’s views can contain useful information. They don’t automatically deserve authority over how you see yourself or the decisions you make.
You’re allowed to recreate yourself.
The person you’ve been doesn’t have to dictate the person you become. Our habits, beliefs, priorities and even the stories we tell about who we are can change. Identity can be useful, but it shouldn’t become a shackle that prevents us from trying a different way of living.
Connection changes what becomes possible.
Especially with children, connection isn’t just something nice to have alongside everything else we’re trying to achieve. The relationship can change what a child is willing to share, hear, try and learn. Sometimes the most useful question isn’t “How do I get my child to do this?” but “What’s happening between us that’s making this so difficult?”
Structure can create freedom.
The right systems, routines and environment can reduce the amount of effort required to do what matters. Structure isn’t necessarily the opposite of spontaneity; sometimes it’s what makes spontaneity possible.
Create the life you want without requiring life to always go the way you want.
For me, these ideas ultimately come back to agency: work towards what matters, act wholeheartedly, learn from what happens, adjust, and keep moving.
It still has to work in real life
Family life has given me a perspective that professional training alone can't provide. Parenting, relationships, work, competing responsibilities, neurodivergence and simply trying to fit everything into a week have reinforced something I first learned through occupational therapy: what makes sense in theory still has to work in real life.
That's particularly relevant to the way I think about family. You can love your children enormously and still find parenting incredibly hard. Different people in a family can need different things, and sometimes there isn't a perfect response. You're trying to work out what matters, where to hold a boundary, what needs to change and what you can realistically sustain.
But the same principle applies well beyond parenting. A strategy for managing ADHD isn't particularly useful if it doesn't survive a busy Tuesday morning. Relationship insight needs to translate into what happens during the next difficult conversation. A career decision eventually has to become a decision. Understanding why you're stuck matters — but so does working out what comes next.
I want our conversations to be thoughtful, but I also want them to lead somewhere useful in real life.
I'm interested in what isn't obvious
I'm naturally drawn to problems that don't have obvious answers.
Outside clinical work, that often means technology, AI, creating things, organising things that aren't working particularly well, or getting absorbed in a project because I'm convinced there must be a better way to do something.
That probably explains why I'm drawn to counselling and coaching in the way that I am. I like complicated situations, problems without obvious answers and working alongside someone until we can see the situation more clearly.
I don't start with the assumption that every problem needs therapy, that every difficulty needs to be eliminated, or that I already know what the answer should be. Sometimes people need space to understand what they're feeling. Sometimes they need to make a decision, have a difficult conversation or do something differently.
The starting point is understanding what's actually happening for you — and what would make life work better.