Coaching
Coaching is a path of personal development aimed at everyone, but it is crucial for adults with ADHD.
Description
Coaching is a path of personal development that aims to help the clients to set goals and provide support to achieve desired results. It promotes the learning of new strategies to better manage critical situations and increase performance and interpersonal effectiveness, while favoring fulfillment in personal and professional life.
Coaching helps people to stay focused on their goals, overcome obstacles, and solve basic daily problems such as time management and organization.
Many people with ADHD may have difficulty prioritizing, planning, persevering with tasks, and sustaining motivation toward goals. Coaching addresses these and other practical issues by giving support and without judgment.
It can be delivered either face-to-face or remotely, and the frequency of sessions can vary widely, depending on the individual's needs.
Compared to classical psychological therapies, Coaching also involves updates between sessions: it is not uncommon for the coach to send messages to ensure that certain actions are implemented, or to request updates from the client at certain times of the day/week. This approach in Psychotherapy would not be possible. Traditional Psychotherapy does not go outside the consultation time, unless there is an emergency. In Coaching, on the other hand, the client is often allowed to send a few sentences about his or her experience between sessions via e-mail, text, or a brief phone call.
A psychologist may choose to adopt a Counseling or Coaching model depending on certain characteristics of the person. In general, if the diagnosis is recent or if the age is less than 16-17 years, a Counseling session may be more useful, for acceptance of the diagnosis and for understanding how the disorder has affected one's way of being and reacting to others. When, on the other hand, the diagnosis is not recent and there are specific goals that one would like to pursue (e.g., succeeding in taking exams in college or a career change) then Coaching is more appropriate.
However, it is possible to use both interventions, and in these cases the psychologist figure may alternate between a listening position and a more active and sometimes directive one, to more fully meet the specific needs.
The ultimate goal will be the client-patient's understanding of the ways and strategies essential to achieve the desired success, and the day-to-day implementation of the steps necessary to make his or her desires achievable with perseverance and determination.
