ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder):
It’s Not Just for Children Anymore...

by Linda WALKER

You can’t help your client if you don’t understand your client. Through coaching, you help clients develop goals, hammer out an action plan and remove limiting beliefs preventing them from achieving success. The better you understand them and they understand themselves, the more effective your coaching. Occasionally, however, you encounter clients for whom standard approaches and proven techniques just don’t work.

These clients make you scratch your head. They have the desire, the right attitude and the ability, but nothing works. They resist structure, finding it boring, and despite their best intentions, fail to make significant progress. They procrastinate, and if they start projects, they rarely finish, and certainly never on time. Despite defining clear goals, they lose focus, are always off on a tangent, can’t get organized and forget even recent conversations. You don’t understand the problem, and neither does your client, a frustrating situation for you both.

You do not realize it but these may be symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD or ADD). Four to six percent of North Americans have ADHD, and your client might be one of them. Most people dismiss ADHD as hyperactivity in children. They blame it on poor parenting or say it’s a crutch used by lazy people. This is wrong; the U.S. National Institute for Mental Health found irrefutable evidence of ADHD in MRIs, PET scans and SPECT technologies.

In the ADHD brain, chemical neurotransmitters that transmit information from one nerve cell to another are “called back” by the transmitting nerve cell before they can deliver the message, leading to a number of problems such as inattention, impulsivity and/or hyperactivity.

Furthermore, new research shows that in 70% of cases, the resulting severe problems with executive function affecting the level of inhibition of attention, working memory, organization to time and future events, emotional management, self-motivation and planning continue into adulthood. ADHD is not an all or nothing condition and symptoms of varying severity could prevent your client from succeeding when all evidence indicates success should be inevitable.

Very frustrating, ADHD relegates adults with normal or above average intelligence to underachievement. Only one in ten adults with ADHD are officially diagnosed, and thus ADHD takes a hidden toll on their professional, personal and social lives. If you don’t know if your client has ADHD, ask. Given the stigma of ADHD in adults, your client may not mention it. If your client doesn’t know, they’ll need a diagnosis. Unfortunately, diagnosis is a struggle given the limited number of psychologists with ADHD expertise.

Once diagnosed, medication combined with ADHD coaching is one of the most effective treatments for ADHD adults. ADHD coaching is different than general coaching and in many instances, counter-intuitive. Besides the obvious ADHD expertise, ADHD coaches receive specific training and apply ADHD-friendly models and tools to help their clients identify strategies that work for them.

If you suspect ADHD is holding your client back, you owe it to your client and to yourself to take steps to make the right coaching happen. Though no substitute for professional diagnosis, you’ll find a preliminary self-test you or your client can use to decide if further investigation is necessary. Download it here