Does ADHD Coaching Work?

There are three things to know about coaching.

First, if you read Russell Barkley, scholar and researcher on ADHD, the idea of coaching makes sense.  Barkley argues that what you need with ADHD is something external to guide your behavior right at the moment that the behavior’s needed.

Imagine you need to study for a job interview you have the next day and you are about to surf online.  Right at that moment, with your fingers poised to tap the keyboard, you need something external to stop you (or to guide you toward stopping).  This something will then need to remind you of your interview and reinforce studying over surfing.  This is ideally what a coach does…guides your behavior at the moment it most matters, which is when you play the game…of job-seeking or whatever it is.

A coach guides your action as it is happening.

Second thing to know is that the reality of ADHD coaching appears to approximate this at best.

You can get a coach working with you multiple times a week and the work can center around where you most struggle.  But, at best, it’s like having a coach available by phone some of the times you play the game.  It’s just unrealistic to have the ideal kind of coaching…unless you’re wealthy and want to pay someone to be with you, guiding your behavior at various points of the day, as needed.  Perhaps one day, we’ll have robots do this for us, should we choose…hmm.

The third thing to know is that the research on what makes for an effective ADHD coach is sorely lacking.  Only a few exploratory kind of studies, primarily focused on college students, seem to look at this, with the recommendation for future larger scale, more rigorous research.  So while you can find folks credentialed to be an ADHD coach, there’s no real research showing coaching clearly works and under what circumstances.

This leaves us all figuring out for ourselves, if we pursue coaching, whether it’s working. Actually, even if research clearly said it’s likely to be effective for most, we’d still have to figure out whether it was effective for us.