ADHD Coaching and it’s benefits – officially a neurological disorder that makes it hard to control both your attention span and decision making skills, in terms of both behavior and general function. And when you’re an adult with ADHD, you’re expected to be able to make rational, informed decisions and focus your attention on day to day tasks – that’s what adults do, right?
When we think of ADHD, it generally includes visions of children unable to hold still, going from one unfinished task to another. However, it’s not just children that struggle to cope with the effects of ADHD, and it’s not something you’ll ‘naturally grow out of’ as you get older, especially if you’ve never had access to help in the past. And ultimately, growing into a self-reliant and independent adult can be incredibly hard to do when the ADHD brain you’re living with is both misunderstood and uncared for.
Maybe you yourself aren’t sure how to deal with an ever shortening attention span, or the relative inability to connect the dots in a series of mundane tasks that other people seem to have no trouble with. Maybe everyone around you is failing to understand where and when you need help, or indeed, how to help you. And in both of these cases, that’s where ADHD coaching can step in to offer guidance.
Living as an Adult with ADHD
ADHD in adults presents in similar ways to children with ADHD; common symptoms can include restlessness, impulsiveness, and a lack of attention, although not everyone will experience all of these symptoms. However, when it comes to adults living with ADHD, the expectations and consequences of symptoms like these can be severe, especially when you have day to day responsibilities and interpersonal relationships to maintain and foster.
Maybe you forget to take food out of the freezer before your partner comes home, even though they specifically asked you to this morning. Or, perhaps, you forget to message friends and family you haven’t seen in a while, and struggle to keep up a conversation without being face to face, which harms the closeness the other person feels towards you. Maybe you’re an impulse buyer who often gets into financial trouble. Or maybe you’ve had quite a few ‘failed’ relationships, and trouble with settling down or being content.
All of these are common struggles in the personal life of someone with ADHD, and they can be seriously disheartening in your approach towards the rest of the world. However, even if you feel hopeless in finding workable solutions for dealing with them, there’s help out there specifically designed for you, namely in the form of ADHD coaching. You can find out more on this below.
The Effects of ADHD in the Workplace
Another area of life that ADHD can impact is the workplace. For example, you may struggle to sit through and pay attention in meetings, or maybe forget to follow up on that client lead from time to time, or maybe getting to work on time is a struggle. And because of all these things, your boss has had to call you in a few times to ask what’s going on.
ADHD can be very hard to work with when you’re trying to build a career, as well as succeed at your job. After all, you know yourself and your tendency toward procrastination, and you find it hard to manage your time effectively. You know you struggle to sit still at a desk for 8 hours at a time, and sometimes you come close to simply quitting on impulse and finding something a lot more active to do!
If you’re finding any of the above situations are becoming a problem for you, and you’re feeling a severe lack of job security over any of them, don’t be afraid to reach out for help. ADHD coaching can be an incredibly beneficial thing to do if you’re struggling to stay focused, take part, and make decisions regarding your career. It could help you to understand how your ADHD affects your work, and what you can do to better manage the symptoms that cause this kind of ‘chaos’ when you’re in the workplace.
How ADHD Coaching Can Help
In relation to the two areas of life above, ADHD coaching can offer specific and targeted support for the symptoms and/or effects that worry you the most. Because anyone with ADHD has heard it all before; well meaning people telling you to ‘just try harder’ or ‘remove distractions’, as if either of these things are possible to do, and as if you’ve never tried them yourself before!
And because of this, ADHD coaching takes a different approach, to both personal and workplace situations you’d like to seek support for. Indeed, something such as ADHD group coaching is a form of empowerment, allowing you to be surrounded by people just like you, as well as to hold each other accountable for the change you’d like to make in your life. You know what each other are going through, and that’s the most critical part of this form of coaching.
For example, an ADHD Group Support program can help in the workplace, by allowing you to keep up with deadlines in a much more structured and effective way. Someone can be there to hold you accountable for getting reports in on time, and to help you retain focus on multi step tasks, such as sending and answering emails. After all, ADHD brains work well with consequences they can actually visualise, rather than the abstract marching on of time.
Similarly, when it comes to your personal life, an ADHD coach is there to get to know you, and to find out what really makes you tick. Because people with ADHD can ‘hyperfocus’ when something they love is in front of them, and finding out how your behaviors present when in this ‘mode’ is key to determining a support plan that can help you retain focus in other areas of life.