About Coaching | micheletoner

Coaching

Michele offers 1:1 coaching sessions with parents, teens, and adults.

Why is ADHD coaching so important? ADHD is not a matter of not knowing what to do – it is about feeling unable to do what you know you should. Often the knowledge comes a split second after the action, and this is frustrating for all concerned. This problem of choosing the appropriate response for the situation is caused by impairments in the Executive Functions of the brain. ADHD coaching focuses on that “point of performance”, teaches you to pause, consider your options, and choose the appropriate response.

For this reason, Professor Russell Ramsay refers to ADHD Coaches as “Executive Function Avatars”.

You can watch a 3 minute video about Executive Functions below.

ADHD coaching is an ongoing collaborative partnership between a person with 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.

ADHD coaching occurs in a safe, non-judgmental environment, The coach listens with an ADHD understanding, observes what is preventing the client from reaching specific goals, explores ways in which the client can maximize strengths, talents, and passion, and designs strategies to suit the ADHD client’s learning, processing, and organisation styles.

How to choose a Coach

Choose your coach wisely.

The Coaching profession is not officially regulated by government bodies. In other words, anyone can call themselves a coach, regardless of the training they may have received. However, there are international organisations which monitor the quality of coach training and provide credentials for coaches who have undertaken their training; and they also require subscribed members to uphold a code of ethics. It is therefore important for clients to receive coaching from credentialled coaches.

The largest leading global organisation for coaching is the International Coaching Federation (ICF). The ICF developed competencies and behavioural markers for the purpose of evaluating coaches. It offers 3 levels of credentialing, each with specific requirements and evidence of:

(i) coach training hours (60, 125, 200),

(ii) coaching experience hours (100, 500, 2500),

(iii) mentor coaching, (iv) an ethics knowledge assessment and

(v) submission of recorded coaching sessions for evaluation. Credentials are valid for 3 years and coaches must submit evidence of Continued Coaching Education (CCE) for credentials to be renewed.

You can verify your coach’s credential here: https://coachingfederation.org/find-a-coach/verify-a-coach

Alongside the ICF, the need for an ADHD-specific credentialing body was recognized for the ADHD community accessing suitably trained and qualified ADHD coaches. The Professional Association for ADHD Coaches (PAAC) specifies ADHD coaching as: “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”. (4) PAAC, like the ICF has developed core competencies for ADHD Coaching, a code of ethics, a three-tiered credentialing system.