Coaching ADHD and Autism
Coaching for ADHD and Autism
Truly Comprehensive Coaching for ADHD and Autism
Traditionally, coaching and therapy have been provided separately, leaving many clients wondering which service they need first. We believe the key to successfully understanding your diagnosis is both.
The coaching provision we offer at Harley Row Clinic is part of a holistic treatment path, founded on the belief that a multidisciplinary approach is the most effective method to help you successfully manage your ADHD or autism symptoms.
Therapy facilitates emotional healing, personal growth and enhanced levels of mental health and well-being. Coaching addresses challenges, leading to the creation of solutions, action and change.
Treating one without the other may offer some solutions, however, if one does not treat both simultaneously there is a risk of a patient finding themselves stuck in a perpetual cycle which will likely prevent them from completely mastering their neurodiverse brain.
What typically tends to result from just investing in a ‘solution-based’ coaching treatment plan without the therapeutic care element, is learning about a range of very useful skills and techniques which can certainly be implemented at your disposal. However, this isn’t always effective.
For example, someone with ADHD brain might not stick to these tools in the long term, or maybe even the following week, as ADHD brains biologically favour novelty due to the dopamine release a new activity provides. When you’re trying to implement long-term skills, this can lead to an inner tug of war for someone with ADHD, which may erode one’s levels of self-confidence and self-esteem if they feel they can’t keep up with the coaching.
However, by investing in coaching and therapy simultaneously within your sessions, through our holistic coaching service, you will learn how to regulate overwhelming emotions caused by ADHD, which so often hijack the success of implementing the coaching skills you have learned.
How can Harley Row Clinic's coaching service provide support for ADHD?
ADHD medication and Functional Medicine can address the dopamine deficiency in the brain, along with other factors. These treatments lend help you with the primary, physical presentation of symptoms – such as impulsive, hyperactive behaviours and inattentive features.
Once you have the knowledge of how and why your ADHD brain works like it does, you will find it easier to master the many demands you face in day-to-day life. This will help reduce feelings of being overwhelmed, like you’re a failure and prevent you from reaching burnout.
ADHD coaching provides individuals with essential insight into overcoming secondary challenges from the consequences of an imbalanced ADHD brain, such as executive function and challenging behaviour.
With our comprehensive ADHD-specific coaching and therapeutic intervention, you will cultivate a compassionate, healthy relationship with your past and your current self. You will make sense of your diagnosis, and what this means for you and your future.
In addition, you will arm yourself with the best possible tools to achieve your full potential. Tools that are sustainable, manageable and fitting for the long term.
How can Harley Row Clinic’s coaching service help autistic people?
We work collaboratively with our patients, through a process of individualised psychoeducation based on extensive lived experience, many years of practice within the field of autism, and by actively seeking to engage with a ‘nothing about us without us’ approach that centres you, our patient.
Psychoeducation is a focused programme of self-awareness and understanding training, and preventative support. The goal of our psychoeducational autism coaching is to help you understand your diagnosis as someone who is on the autism spectrum.
By exploring and developing your understanding of autism with one of our coaches, you will gather tools to reduce the challenges that autism can bring and develop your strengths as part of the richness of the neurodivergent landscape.
We offer coaching specific to autistic children and young people. We also work with family, parents and caregivers of our young patients, as well as the wider community, to provide education, and explore how interpersonal interaction can impact neurodivergent people.
You have a say in your treatment, and your voice is important. We are here to listen, understand and to support you in developing positive strategies to help you to live your best neuro-affirmative life. We use empowering language, in line with recommendations from the National Autistic Society.
How does coaching fit with my other treatment?
We encourage collaborative relationships, by jointly identifying needs and areas you would like to work on to create coaching sessions that form an individualised plan.
By arming our patients with information and knowledge about their autism or ADHD, they are in a position to make informed decisions about their care. With coaching, you, or your child, will be able to continue self-advocation, long after the last holistic coaching session.
At Harley Row Clinic, our comprehensive approach supports the notion that the neurodiverse condition you were born with no longer should be viewed as a detrimental aspect of your personality, but rather a positive one that contributes to the very uniqueness that makes you, you.
With the correct psychological diagnosis, appropriate medication, a specialist whose expertise resonates with you, and the psychoeducation and therapeutic interventions you need, you can feel confident and happy in your abilities to navigate the world.
Every patient benefits from the collective minds of the practice’s clinicians, to ensure they are carefully matched to the right specialist for their care. We have a collaborative team that can encapsulate all elements of your treatment pathway. This eliminates the consuming process of communication between individual facilities, departments and providers, ensuring the highest possible standard of confidential care.
Here at the practice, we are very pleased to offer such a facility in which interventions intersect perfectly to provide you with the life-sustained skills to achieve your innate potential, all under one roof.
What Are The Symptoms of ADHD and Autism?
The following problems may have arisen:
- Difficulties organising yourself or household – keeping track of physical, mental and social tasks or responsibilities.
- Initiating & completing tasks – being able to start, remain focused on and complete a task.
- Planning and prioritising – making plans and prioritising tasks, especially as new/time sensitive tasks appear.
- Time management – too early or too late, difficulties with estimating how long it takes to get somewhere, over/underestimation of how long it takes to complete a task.
- Working memory – keeping information in your mind whilst using it.
- Emotional regulation and cohesion– knowing how to accurately identify, acknowledge, process and manage emotions,
- Self-awareness – being able to acutely track how you are doing in the moment.
- Impulse control – thinking before acting.
- Flexible thinking and behaviour, being able to adapt to and cope with change.