Coaching The ADHD Brain: A Perfect Prescription
By: Robert G. Kirkpatrick, III

On Coaching the Individual with ADHD

Question:
What is it about the ADHD brain that makes coaching so effective?

Answer:
In this fast-paced, competitive age, even the highly organized struggle to keep up with the ever increasing barrage of information from teachers, employers, colleagues and the media. The demand for increased performance is relentless. For the ADHD and LD adult, however, there is the additional burden of difficulties in correctly perceiving and processing incoming information which often leaves them feeling overwhelmed. The singular task of the ADHD/LD adult is to simplify and order both their external and internal world.

The best model for the ADHD brain is that of a "sleepy" frontal cortex, a constant under-arousal of the part of the brain that normally serves executive functions, such as self-monitoring, emotional restraint, judgement, sequencing, planning, organization, prioritization, and task-completion. It is for this reason that many ADHDers seek high-stimulation situations,		Sign Up for our FREE ADHD E-Zine here: Name: Email:
since it is only in times of crisis or excitement that this part of their brain "wakes up" and allows them to feel that they have everything together. The psychophysiology of ADHD produces what may be thought of as a kind of Environmental Dependency Syndrome, wherein the ADHDer is dependent on constant cues from the environment in order to act appropriately. Lacking both a sufficiently-active executor to slow down and monitor events and a reliable short-term memory to refer to, the emotional and motivational components of the limbic system, deep within the brain, run rampant.

Question:
And this is where coaching comes in?

Answer:
Exactly. Because ADHD brains lack the internal means to impose structure on the world, the coach provides constant external guidance to which the ADHDer must be accountable. In a sense, coaches help to fill the ADHDers environment with the missing cues needed to keep on track. While pharmacology is still relatively crude in its approach to treating neurological problems, given the brain's immense complexity, coaching is, happily, an exact prescription for the pitfalls of ADHD.

The coach, sort of a "hired nag," compensates for the client's perceptual difficulties by serving as a reality check, meeting their short-term memory deficits with calendars, schedules and reminders, and treating problems with focus and follow-through by teaching the ADHDer to recognize when and how they get distracted from what they should be doing. Coaches act in lieu of the ADHDer's deficient cortical executive functions, not only by reminding them of the consequences of impulsivity and procrastination, but by helping them to structure their environment so they learn to form good habits and a better outlook on life. Instead of the familiar nagging guilt so deadly to self-esteem that usually plagues the unrecognized ADHDer, the coach uses good guilt, acting as a concrete reminder and encourager, and helping the ADHDer keep focused on what he or she wants to become.

Question:
How does coaching differ from conventional therapies?

Answer:
Radically. Conventional therapies are all wonderful, insofar as they have the power to help people lead better lives, but such approaches have little to offer ADHDers. Most therapists still ascribe to the linear, Newtonian, mechanistic view of the mind, believing that the purpose of intervention is to discover where a person got "off track," and then act accordingly to help them resume their life. The therapist invests a certain amount of interpretive energy in order to allow the patient a certain amount of personal insight--not unlike the Conservation of Energy law. The therapist, whether cognitive, behaviorist, or whatever, usually says, "Let's explore what is blocking you," or asks, "when you do X behavior, how do you rationalize it?"

Coaching, however, is centered on the theory of increasing positive returns. A coach, by helping the ADHD client stay focused and concretely ADHD addressing the true causes of their difficulties helps to create an internal driving force that becomes more self-sustaining with every success. This principle of increasing returns comes to life when the ADHD client finds a new way to get a handle on their life, or discovers that some aspect of their disorder may actually give them a clear advantage over their co-workers or classmates, once it is properly structured by the coach.

Coaching is about action, not reflection, and about learning how to stay on track until the coach's nagging becomes internalized, and the environmental cues they put in place become a way of life.

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