In this episode of the Translating ADHD podcast, Asher and Dusty explore the various types and levels of ADHD coaching, highlighting how coaching can range from practical, day-to-day executive function support to deeper, transformational insight work. They emphasize that ADHD coaching is not one-size-fits-all; some clients benefit most from hands-on logistical help, while others thrive on open-ended reflective questions that spark new perspectives. Both hosts share real-life examples illustrating how coaches adjust their approach based on client needs and how experience plays a crucial role in recognizing when to dig deeper or focus on practical scaffolding.
The episode also provides guidance for listeners on how to evaluate if their current ADHD coaching relationship is meeting their needs, cautioning against coaches who guarantee quick fixes. Asher shares a story about helping a client realize the importance of managing time as a resource, which was a breakthrough beyond organizing tasks. Dusty adds the importance of coaching clients to develop sustainable systems that work beyond the sessions. Overall, the conversation helps listeners understand what to expect from ADHD coaching and encourages them to seek the level of support that truly fits their unique challenges.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:02:12] Asher: Hi, I’m Ash. [00:03:18] Dusty: And I’m Dusty. [00:04:17] Asher: And this is Translating ADHD. [00:07:24] Dusty: Hey y’all. I got boot camp coming up in June. It is a really great event. If you are struggling with a ton of clutter in your house and you feel like you’re kind of 12 steps behind being able to put ADHD friendly organizing solutions into your home, because first you need to, like, swamp out the 20 closets full of crap.This is for you. So it’s a 40 hour mega body doubling session structured led by me with a bunch of my clients. It’s really fun. It’s not nearly as scary as it sounds, and we’re going to help you get everything reset so that you can actually start to implement some of these awesome solutions. And it starts June 7th. It’s $100 off the cost of registration until May 11th. So go to ADHD studio AKA for that listeners.
[00:50:15] Asher: I am doing a live coaching demonstration for our Patreon subscribers on Thursday, May 14th at 8 p.m. eastern. If you’re not currently a Patreon subscriber, you can visit the website translating adhd.com. Click on the Patreon tab and for five bucks a month, you gain access to these monthly events. You also gain access to the podcast discord. Also, I am still looking to take on just a couple more new clients.So if you’ve been thinking about ADHD coaching, reach out to me at CoachAsher.com. And if finances are a challenge for you, I do offer sliding scale so that can be part of our conversation as well. So Dusty. So Ash, you want to tell our listeners what we’re talking about today?
[01:34:26] Dusty: Yeah, today we’re talking about the different types of coaching that you can leverage to get what you need in terms of support. Sometimes coaching can be very transformational. I often tell new consultants like people that I’m talking to that ADHD coaching is really just a subset of life coaching. And I always say that life coaching is really about asking the question, where are you now?What’s the more awesome version of your life? How do we get you there? And so sometimes coaching can do that same thing for us, where we really have these deep, meaningful insights and these big moments, but especially as as neurodivergent people, especially in ADHD coaching, sometimes we need that coaching to be more like executive function support or scaffolding or like help help for the logistics or, you know, from the sort of coaches perspective we call that like PCC or depending on like where you’re certified PCA, C level coaching.
And then there’s like MCC, which is like master coaching. And so we have kind of terms for it on our end to differentiate between like what the coaching is doing, sort of how deep it’s going, what it what changes it’s creating in the client. But from the client end, you guys don’t always know when we’re switching between those levels.
And sometimes you may not know which kind you are really needing. Something that’s been really interesting for me is kind of noticing which clients need what, and getting really comfortable being okay with letting clients have what they need and not feeling like I always need to be doing that. Sort of like more high level of coaching. And I find personally that people tend to really enjoy one or the other.
There’s sometimes there’s people who kind of like will use bowls, but I have some clients who come to coaching and I’ll ask them very insightful, open ended questions, and it’ll just blow their minds and they’ll go, I don’t know. Wow, I never thought about that. And for some people like intellectually playing with concepts of about themselves, about how they’re making sense of a situation is like the thing that is the catalyst for change and is, like really meaningful for them.
Other people find it super stressful. I have some clients who absolutely hate open ended questions and will just get like, it will cause a lot of anxiety and they sometimes don’t understand why I’m asking it. So with those clients, sometimes I have to front load the question and say, hey, I’m going to ask you a question. And the reason I’m asking this question is because I’m curious about blah, blah, blah.
And when I say open ended question, I mean a question that’s sort of meant to make you think kind of pause and reflect and think. So it might be a question like, you know what? When you say that, you know, this person did x, y, z, like, what did it mean to you? Or like, what does it mean?
Like it often is kind of like a meaning question. Like what does it mean to you that blah blah blah or what? What would have happened if yada yada, right. And is there are questions designed to elicit responses where you, you really kind of stop and reflect and get out of that story. Some clients frickin hate that. It’s like very stressful for them.
And I think what’s hard is, like when you’re coming to ADC coaching, you don’t always know what a coaching is about. And so you might not be expecting open ended questions like that. You might just be thinking that this coach is going to like, I don’t know, teach you how to make a to do list, right. On the other hand, I have clients who come to coaching and they’re like, okay, what I need is like, I just need to like, find a different scheduling system.
But I think sometimes because they have so many ideas about what they need, they might miss the fact that that there’s an opportunity here for like a deeper level of coaching. Right. And then sometimes I’ve tried exploring that with clients. Some clients like it, some clients, again, it’s really not what they need. They want what we would call that more level of coaching where we’re doing really kind of like logistics.
We’re breaking things down. We’re talking things through. This is especially true for the verbal processors who like just need to talk things out. I think like has you and I did like a little bit of this coaching before we got on the call, because I was very irate about getting my kids out the door this morning, and you were helping me like, figure out where my where my mornings were going wrong.
And then like, how to remember to do the right thing. And so that’s really valuable too. I think that’s like super valuable coaching. But I think it’s also interesting for clients to know that coaching isn’t just one, and it’s not just the other.
[05:49:15] Asher: Dusty, I think you meant OCC level coaching there. [05:52:28] Dusty: I did. Yeah, I get confused because there’s different like there’s different acronyms for different certifying bodies. Yes, I do mean easy. [05:59:19] Asher: Oh so Dusty. A couple of thoughts that I was having as you were speaking is number one coaches that are at your end. My level of experience, we’re able to adjust to our client’s needs. You were just describing that sort of recognizing when there’s an opportunity to go deeper versus when your client legitimately might just need help with what the the urgent and important thing in front of them in is.Might just need some help doing some boots on the ground scaffolding type work. And so listeners, I think one takeaway from this episode is the experience level of your coach does matter. A newer coach can be great support for sort of day to day building scaffolding, but may not be able to help you go deeper and sometimes with that day to day scaffolding, going deeper is what’s needed.
That’s kind of the fascinating thing about coaching. I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I’m going to tell it again because it’s such a great example of what I mean by this. So I had this client that I had been working with for quite some time, who was she had temporarily moved, and this was during the pandemic, so the logistics were already tough.
She had temporarily moved across the country to help her adult daughter, who had suffered an injury and needed another person to be there, to be support. And she was getting ready to move back and self-employed on top of that. So not just moving herself, but moving her business, right? There’s a lot of logistics. This is already a difficult and overwhelming situation for somebody with ADHD.
And so she came to the session in that overwhelm. And the topic was, I need you to help me sort out my to do list. This was so long ago now that I don’t remember exactly how we got here coaching wise, but I asked her a question that brought her to some place in her past where she was talking about how at this moment in her life, all she did was meditate, pray and take take hikes in the woods.
And the big takeaway from this session was that she needed to get out of the house. She needed to get in nature. She needed to take a break, take a hike, and that was the support she needed to be able to to sort out her to do list. She did not need me to sit down with her and make sense of the to do list.
She needed to support herself in terms of putting something back in the tank executive function wise, so that she herself could sort out her to do list. And even as her coach, this was such an unexpected place for us to end up coaching wise. But again, this sort of distinguishes a pick level coach from an ache level coach.
So listeners, I will say if you’re working with a newer coach and you feel like maybe you’re not making the progress that you’d like to make, maybe the opportunity is some deeper level coaching. But on the flip side, if you’re working with an ACC level coach and that scaffolding and support that, more boots on the ground day to day is what’s working for you, then that’s okay too.
I have some clients for whom that is the bulk of the work that we did. I had a client for 3 or 4 years where we really never had major moments. She just needed me to talk to her about her day, her week. She had this very variable schedule because she was in special education and she did some specialty roles within her school in special education.
So every week, every month was different. There was no normal in terms of how her work life functioned. She also lived in New York City, where moving was a common thing if you’re a renter. And so we navigated several moves in the summer, and because she was a teacher in the summer, it was about all of the things that I take care of in the summertime as a teacher, because I’m off during this time, and that client got tons of value out of our coaching work.
But our coaching work was never about deeper realization. She sort of knew who she was coming into the coaching process, and she needed support from me. That looked more like day to day scaffolding stuff, and there was never really any big realizations behind that. There was ADHD realizations for sure. Learning and understanding more about her ADHD and how it’s showing up, but there was never a need for that bigger.
Oh, now I know something about myself. From reconnecting to something about myself that I had forgotten. So that first client that I mentioned was reconnecting to something about herself that she had lost sight of, and connecting to a past version of herself, and realizing she could pull that forward and turn that into a useful practice for herself.
[11:28:12] Dusty: Okay, I have a kind of a weird question for you here, but like, okay, as a coach, Asher, like as someone who’s, you know, helped a lot of people through this process. For you personally, like, how do you know if you’re struggling with something? How do you know when you need that, like deeper reflection and like that deeper insight versus like just to kind of help yourself, like, how do you know when you need to slow down and have insights and moments versus when you need to just like update your system or whatever? What does that look like for you? [11:58:19] Asher: Ooh, Dusty, I love that question. For me, the difference is am I spinning my wheels or not? If it’s just a systems adjustment, especially for me because my background is in professional organizing and I’ve been coaching so long that I can kind of notice when something’s not working on a service functional level, it’s pretty easy for me to make adjustments, but when there feels like there’s a bigger barrier.I really like Brendan Mason’s wall of awful language here. When it feels like there’s something else, something that’s keeping me from action that’s bigger than planning well, for it, that’s the difference for me. So that conversation we had before we got on Mike, you were already sort of articulating. So we were talking about briefly, we were talking to you about something different that Dusty could do in the evening.
And I was noticing that she was already naming what she needed to do. And so all I did was reflect back to her, hey, can you go ahead and start doing these things? How will you remember to do it? And she said, yes, I can do these things. And I’m going to write it down on a piece of paper, take it up to my kitchen right now so that I have that prompt to remember.
And in this case, it sounds like that’s going to be enough for you when you need to go deeper would be if that’s not enough for you, or if that’s not enough of a starting place for you, right? That may not be a precisely the right set of actions, but if that feels like a good starting place to be in that action, place to to try something and it feels like you are capable of carrying out those actions, then that’s probably all you needed, right?
For me, the Distinguisher would be I don’t know how to. I don’t know how to get to this action. I don’t know how to get to this action. And I actually had a recent experience with this that didn’t have anything to do with ADHD. And I think we want to do an episode on this, but the the very short version is I had something medically going on that is routine and that I needed to take care of that was causing a lot of lethargy and brain fog.
And so I just didn’t even feel like I knew how to approach any of the things that I needed to approach. It just it felt like a mystery to me in terms of how to even get started, or how to even think about how to think about how to solve my challenges. Took care of the medical thing. Turns out that was the thing that I needed to do.
Brain fog lifted and now all of the sudden problems that seemed like they had this massive wall of awful between me and action. I’m able to easily and readily take action on.
[14:52:10] Dusty: Yeah, it’s it’s so interesting because I feel like, you know, ADHD is this subset of life coaching, and life coaching is always kind of, I think, looking to that deeper, more transformational thing. But we when we add in the lens of ADHD, we have to remember that, like sometimes people’s brains literally just don’t work like if they don’t like verbally process.And I think as coaches, our responsibility is if we recognize that what someone really just needs is just to verbally process, we want to help them, we want to scaffold them, but then ask the question like, how do we how do we help you create like a sustainable model of this? Because you’re not going to pay me for the rest of your life to talk at me.
That’d be great. Love hearing it. But like, you know, probably would be great if we could help you develop the tools to recognize, oh, what I need is verbal processing. How do I make sure that I always have that for myself and that I can always continue to build it? But I’ve noticed for clients and for myself, there are some problems that just don’t really get solved unless you address the sort of conceptual piece around it.
So, for example, the reason you and I were talking about my evenings is because I’m having a really hard time getting my kids out the door on time in the morning right now, because there’s three of them and they’re all different, and they all have different challenges, and they go to different places, and there’s a lot that needs to get done in the morning.
And and so I was talking through how, like, I know there are these pieces that I couldn’t be doing better if I was actually doing them that are like support pieces, like they’re functional, logistical things that would get us out the door sooner. But there is something a little bit more than that, I think. And I actually mentioned it to you.
So I had a client a while ago who had this problem when he was coming in the door with his kids when he had two kids, and he said, like after he picked them up at school, you know, they’re all neurodivergent. They’re all worn out for the day. His kids would be squabbling by the time they got in the door.
He was barking at them like he was like, you know, Mister military dad. And, but and so I asked him, like, who do you want to be instead? Right. So this is one of those what I’d consider sort of one of those more master level coaching. Like who do you want to be? Let let’s conceptualize not just what you want to do, but like what are the vibes?
Like, what is the picture in your head of how you want your family to be when you walk in the door and you know he wanted it to be way more zen, he wanted to be like more chill, have a lot of patience, and we can coach him on where do his kid’s shoes go when they come in the door.
How does he you know, what does he say when the one kid calls other kid a name or something? But when we really talked about who he wanted to show up as, as a father, he was able to kind of, like, see himself in his head as this, like, chill, zen, patient guy. And so we went from that high level of like, this is who you want to be in these challenging moments.
And we distilled that down to like, okay, how do we help you remember to be that person? And the answer was like, he had a, you know, like Alexa or Google or one of those devices. And he said it so that just before him and his kids walked in the door, it would start playing spa music. And the spa music was the auditory cue.
That’s like, hey, man, be the chill guy. Like, be as chill and relaxed as you feel when you walk into a spot and you hear that music, right? And so I borrowed that. And I was telling you, Ash, I was like, I’m going to set my Google Home to like, play that same kind of music just when I’m first getting up, because it’s like, it’s that 30 minutes between 7 and 7:30 a.m. where everything doesn’t go the way that it’s supposed to go.
And I’m just like the most I’m so grumpy and I’m like, just kind of, again, military mom like barking orders, like, you brush your hair like, do this, do that. And, it’s the same thing. Like, I’d like, I’d love to have, like, relaxed, chill mornings. I want to send the kids to school with, like, low cortisol. Right?
But, like, we’re always running behind. Okay. Gotta get in the car. Where? Are you sure? Where are your socks? Hey, you forgot your lunch, right? And, although being more chill and showing up as that person doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t have those challenges. It will change the way that I make sense of those challenges and the way that the kids experience me.
And so it’s both things, right? Like I have to work on, on the on the one level to make sure that, you know, things are as organized as they can be like that. I know where the keys are, that there’s gas in the car, that the kids have clean laundry, but then on the other, like deeper level, even if all of those things are in place, I could still be putting out a vibe that isn’t what I want my kids to be picking up.
Right? And so it’s kind of for me, I feel like this is two things at once, and sometimes it is both for the clients. I find that it actually is often both, but sometimes it’s just one or it’s just the other. And I think it’s good for clients to know that. Like when you come to ADHD coaching, it’s not just like, where will you keep your journal if you feel like that’s all you’re going to get out of it.
But then on the other hand, I, I personally have had clients who just want to. They love to play with those concepts. They love to think deeply, like those like little ooh like moments feel really good, but then they don’t like they don’t translate it into the meaningful action because we don’t we don’t take it from like this fun concept to play with. So like, okay, how are you actually going to do this?
[19:39:23] Asher: Dusty, I think more than anything, what we want listeners to take away from this episode is how to evaluate whether in ADHD coaching relationship is right for you or not. Not every ADHD coach has the same level of training or experience. It is an unregulated industry, so anyone can hang out a shingle and say, I’m an ADHD coach.And by the way, I’m going to use this moment to say a massive red flag for ADHD coaching is if a coach is promising you anything. If they say that they have the way, I have the way, I have the way to solve your ADHD huge red flag. I don’t promise my clients anything because as that earlier conversation about my client who was overwhelmed by her to do list illustrates, I don’t always know where the coaching is going to go myself as a coach, and that’s something that makes me an excellent coach.
You don’t necessarily need a coach at my level to have great results with ADHD coaching, but if you’re beating your head against the wall, it might be your coach, and that’s okay too. It might just be that your coach doesn’t have the experience to take you where you need to go. And I’m particularly thinking about this client I had a couple of years ago.
That would have been a nightmare client for a newer coach would have been a nightmare client for me when I was newer in coaching, but I so enjoyed working with him. This was a hyper active type client, so somebody who whose primary challenge was just doing too many things, and he came to coaching with this belief that if we could just organize the to do list in the correct way, if we could just figure out how to organize and prioritize the to do list that was going to solve all of his problems and as the masterful coach I am, I recognized very early on in our coaching relationship that that was a limiting belief of
his. But I also had to hold this space where two things could be true because he didn’t see that yet, and it was quite the process. This was really the story arc of our coaching from beginning to end, was getting to a place where he started to understand time as a limitation, because prior to the coaching, again, this belief, if I could just if I could just get get the list, organized the pieces in the right order, I could do it all.
I am capable of doing it all. And listeners, if time wasn’t a restriction, this client would be capable of doing it all. If he could. If he could bend time or manufacture time out of thin air. This is absolutely the type of person that would do everything on this list. Getting to action was never his challenge. His challenge was his relationship with time and not seeing or appreciating or understanding time itself as a resource and as a restriction on what is or isn’t possible.
And when we did finally get to that place, it was such this massive this huge, huge, long coming perspective shift where now he’s seeing the challenge for what it actually is. It’s not. Yes, some of it is about organizing and prioritizing, but that also necessarily has to include factoring in time as a resource. And once we got to that place, it was a complete game changer.
And a new coach would have had a really hard time because his client was so insistent on if we just organize it in the right way, and new coaches can kind of be led by the notes, by by clients like that, that are like, I know, I know what I need, I know what I need, you follow me.
But I was able to challenge him on that, which ultimately got us to that bigger perspective shift. So if you’ve been working with a coach for a while and you feel like you’re beating your head against the wall, that may not be anything against your coach other than their level of experience. Don’t necessarily write off ADHD coaching as a whole. You just may be in a place where you need some deeper work in order to see the change that you’re trying to create.
[24:01:08] Dusty: I think you hit the nail on the head there, Ash. Well said. [24:04:14] Asher: Thanks, Dusty. I think this is a good place for us to wrap this episode for today. So until next week, I’m Ash. [24:10:11] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.
[24:11:10] Asher: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
