PAAC (Professional Association of ADHD Coaches) Definition of ADHD Coaching
ADHD coaching is a specialty skill set that empowers clients to manage their attention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.
Process
ADHD coaching is an ongoing collaborative partnership between a person with ADHD traits, including persons impacted by ADHD, and a professional coach who brings current ADHD knowledge, best practices, understanding, and ADHD-friendly skills and tools to facilitate positive personal and professional change for the client.
The ADHD coaching partnership is an appreciative and creative inquiry process that empowers clients to learn about themselves and their unique brain processing so they can make choices and take actions to create the lives they choose to live. The ADHD coach listens with an appreciation and working experience of how ADHD may be impacting the client.
ADHD coaches create a safe, non-judgmental environment, listen with an ADHD understanding, observe what is preventing the client from reaching specific goals, explore ways in which the client can maximize strengths, talents, and passion, and enlist strategies and behaviors congruent with the ADHD client’s learning, processing, and organization styles. ADHD coaches regard their clients as naturally creative, resourceful, and incredible human beings.
Clients of ADHD Coaches
ADHD Clients
Those who could benefit from ADHD coaching include persons who feel, think they may, or know they have ADHD or ADHD-like qualities*. Others who may benefit from ADHD coaching are persons who are related or connected to someone with ADHD.
For example, this might include:
- Spouses and partners of persons with ADHD
- Employers, managers, co-workers, and employees of persons with ADHD
- Parents, children, relatives, friends, and teachers of persons with ADHD
- ADHD families
- Service professionals who work with persons with ADHD or have ADHD clients
* ADHD and ADHD-like qualities may include inattention, impulsivity, hyperactivity (physical, mental, or emotional), procrastination, disorganization, forgetfulness, inconsistency, etc.
Non-ADHD Clients
Non-ADHD clients impacted by a person with ADHD or ADHD-like qualities may realize:
- How to listen and communicate more effectively with the person with ADHD
- What strategies and tools they can use in supporting the ADHD person
- Better understanding of the person with ADHD and greater levels of patience and appreciation
- How to set boundaries and manage their expectations
- How to provide appropriate positive reinforcement and acknowledgement to change negative patterns and behavior
