What is an ADHD Coach?

ADHD coaching is a unique and highly specialised form of coaching designed to support individuals with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). An ADHD coach is a trained professional who collaborates with clients to help them better understand their ADHD, develop strategies for managing its challenges, and harness their strengths to achieve their personal and professional goals.

One of the most important aspects of managing ADHD is developing greater self-awareness about where we may hit challenges and what we need to do to support ourselves.

This can be a substantial ADHD challenge in itself since it requires - foresight, planning, organisation and probably most importantly of all and often overlooked - permission from ourselves to make our own lives easier.

The love, trust and companionship of my dogs has been a constant in my life for 25 years and I wanted to share some key learnings that I think are very relevant to the ADHD experience.

Emotional expression requires trust and things start to get complicated when we anticipate the responses of other people. Of course, we want to be honest and kind yet unambiguous and usually day-to-day this isn’t too much of a problem. But it can really become a problem if one of two things happens. Or much worse both.

The first of those things is responding to the response instead of the stimulus. The second ‘thing’ is when this plays out with, or includes, big and important values and emotions. Like trust, loyalty, anger, shame, guilt, respect, honour, love etc.. In these situations responding to the response can quickly become supercharged, toxic and destructive. Personal boundaries are going to be seriously challenged.

I was helping a client to explore her need for a simple filtering system that would help to prioritise the large number of opportunities, demands, goals, projects etc. currently swirling around in her world of possibilities.

Without this type of filtering system the ADHD brain is frustrated by basic executive skill challenges such as time management, goal setting and visualisation, planning, and organising.

We hate structure but we need it to function. The concept of daily structure has a very close relationship with the concept of control. We need to feel we have control. We need to have the ability to create the structures that allow us to have control over important things in our lives. This, I think, stems from the very basic human need for autonomy and by extension, self-expression and self determination.

I recently had an interesting coaching conversation about stress and burnout with a client. It started with a question about the effects of burnout on cognitive functioning. The client had been doing some self-reflection and some exploration around the issues. She felt that burnout and tiredness went together but struggled to understand how that impacts cognitive functioning.

Recognising when we are approaching burnout, understanding why we are emotionally exhausted and, more importantly, how we can prevent this from happening are all imperative

We know that those with ADHD tend to have a negative bias when it comes to the concept of success. We can be very poor at recognising, embracing, celebrating and owning our own successes, but we can be very good at recognising and owning our failures.

The creative brain is a fantastic thing. Many of my clients are solutions imagineers in some way, seeing the possibilities, making the impossible possible. I find their company rewarding and stimulating. But the creative brain comes with some challenges of its own including the propensity to overthink.

The love, trust and companionship of my dogs has been a constant in my life for 25 years and whilst I could wax lyrical about my sheep farming days and its simple and rustic charm, I wanted to share some key learnings that I think are very relevant to the ADHD experience.

I’ve been thinking of putting Teddy on the wall as a piece of art in a display case in my new place. Sometimes, we have the idea first without really understanding where the idea has come from or why and it’s taken a while to understand some of the things that Teddy represents for me.

Have you ever seen piglets sleeping? It's the most amusing thing, for piglets sleep in a pile of hot, chubby, little bodies, all bundled on top of one another…and has some parallels with the way thoughts and creative ideas surface in the ADHD brain.

During a recent coaching session, I was helping a client to explore her need for a simple filtering system that would help to prioritise the large number of opportunities. Without this type of filtering system, the ADHD brain is frustrated by basic executive skill challenges such as time management, goal setting and visualisation…

One of the things I've noticed recently is that there appears to be a dynamic that ADHD adults quite often fall into. It’s the need to be busy. The need to be up to capacity when it comes to all the tasks that they have to manage. The need to do this thing and that thing and not forget.

Learning to understand how your own Adhd manifests itself is the key to developing appropriate ways in which to manage the challenges that it can bring. These challenges are often particularly relevant in the workplace. However Adhd workplace challenges can often be substantially reduced by making small but effective changes and embedding them until they become habits.

In October 2017 the BBC broadcast a Horizon programme presented by the comedian Rory Bremner about how he discovered that he has Adhd. There wasn’t much else on the television that night, and at that time, we had yet to subscribe to Netflix. At the end of the programme my wife turned to me. “That sounds a lot like you” she said. “I was thinking the same thing” I said.

‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’ is very commonly misunderstood. The name was applied in the 1980s and arguably reflected the collective knowledge around the condition at that time condensed into just four words.