I once worked with a 16-year-old who needed to move from one point to another, a distance of maybe ten steps. I gave him the instruction directly. Walk over there. He did not move. I repeated it, more slowly, more clearly. He still did not move. Repetition was not the answer either. I tried it several times, and nothing changed.
What worked was simple and, at the time, not something I had planned. I handed him a resistance band. He held one end, I held the other, and he walked. Independently, without me guiding him, without another instruction. The task had not changed. The entry point had.
I think about this example often because it taught me something specific: instructions and repetition assume a particular kind of processing, one where hearing a direction and then acting on it happens in a fairly direct line. For a lot of neurodivergent children, that line does not run the same way. The instruction can be heard clearly and still not translate into movement, not because the child is not trying, but because the pathway from hearing to doing needs a different kind of support.
What I try instead, session to session, is observation before instruction. Watching what a child responds to before I decide how to ask for anything. Some children need a physical object to hold, like the resistance band. Some need the task broken into a much smaller first step than I would have guessed. Some need me to do the movement first, without asking them to copy it yet, just to watch.
None of this is a universal method I apply the same way to every child. What worked for that 16-year-old was specific to him, and I would not assume it works for the next child I coach. What is consistent is the approach behind it: notice what is actually happening before defaulting to more words.
This also means I sometimes get it wrong before I get it right. I try something, it does not work, and I adjust based on what I observed rather than repeating the same instruction louder or more often. That adjustment is the actual skill, more than any single technique.
I do not think of this as a workaround for children who cannot follow directions. I think of it as coaching that starts from how a specific child's body and attention actually work, rather than starting from how I would prefer them to work. The resistance band was not a trick. It was information about what that particular body needed in order to move, and my job was to notice it.