Student Coaching

Coaching and Therapy are similar in many ways, as they both seek to help people become more functional and successful in their lives. Whereas Therapy focuses primarily on treating mental disorders and coping with past traumas, coaching focuses on helping you gain self-awareness and develop strategies for responding more effectively to inherent challenges. Coaching does not focus on “why” but “what now?” Your coach is not the expert but rather the facilitator to help you develop insights, tools, and strategies to learn your own best way. Coaching is a comprehensive process that may involve all areas of life, including work, finances, health, relationships, education, and recreation. When appropriate, we work collaboratively with therapists and psychiatrists.

ADHD Coaching is a collaborative process designed to help minimize the effects of ADHD on your day-to-day life and help you more easily achieve your goals. The approach is not to fix a perceived flaw or deficit but to help you enhance and leverage the creativity, skills, and resources you already possess. The goal is to help you improve your ability to regulate attention, reduce impulsive behavior, and manage hyperactivity. Together we shift problems into goals and help you stay accountable to those goals. A certified ADHD Coach is trained in the latest research and the most effective treatments for working with people with ADHD, Executive Function disorders, and related issues. We provide support to help you develop a deep understanding of ADHD and its impact on all areas of life: school/work, home, and social.
Widely respected organizations and individuals, including the National Institute of Mental Health, Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (CHADD), Russell Barkley (ADHD: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment), and Edward Hallowell (Driven to Distraction), have endorsed Coaching as a vital missing link for achieving success.

Your ADHD Coach collaborates with you to help you achieve the goals you set and help you develop tools and strategies to better manage the steps along the way. It’s a partnering process to help you evaluate your challenges and establish new methods of addressing them.

Coaching usually involves weekly sessions and includes brief check-ins by email or text during the week to help with accountability toward your goals. Dealing with challenges and results between sessions accelerates awareness and skill-building while emphasizing accountability and encouragement.

While change can begin immediately, it often takes time to experiment with new behaviors and see if they are helpful. Most coaches suggest three months or a semester to practice new problem-solving skills and evaluate solutions. As the client, you must engage willingly in the coaching process and be ready to experiment with new strategies and behaviors. This should include a gradual education to determine what obstacles hinder learning and how ADHD affects thinking. Often the real work begins when the novelty of change wears off, and we begin to address some of the more systemic changes that are needed.

Sometimes parents and partners need coaching, too, to better understand how ADHD and Executive Function impact learning, motivation, behavior, and the whole family system. We also offer support for Parents and other family members.