How Helpful Is Your Mindset?
One of the first things a coach will ask you when you come to coaching is what would you like to achieve, or works towards. What would you like the future to look like? Coaching is very different to therapy in that we are looking to move you forward, supporting you to realise what it is you truly want and helping you to navigate your route to get there.
In ADHD Coaching often one of the first things that a new client will say is that they just want to know what tools and strategies they need in order to make their ADHD more manageable. We know that ADHD is a challenge of Executive Function, and many people that I work with would like help with organisation, planning, time management, ways of supporting their working memory and so on. Of course these are all very legitimate and important things to work on, however there is no fixed list that works for everyone, each and every one of us has a different brain and what works for me might not work for you. If making our ADHD work for us purely came lists of tools, then there is plenty of great information in books, on podcasts, online and using Google is much quicker and ‘cheaper’ than hiring a coach!
Coaching is not a ‘quick fix’ and it requires time, investment, curiosity and bravery on the clients part. One of the biggest challenges that my clients experience is often a lack of self belief, confidence, fear of failure - especially for many who have not been diagnosed during childhood and have struggled with why they have found certain things hard for years, or consistently heard that they were not good enough (and storing all of these comments in the memory bank). A feeling of not fulfilling what they are truly capable of is extremely common.
Mindset is a word that can be used quite flippantly these days and what does it actually mean? To quote the Cambridge dictionary mindset means ‘a person’s way of thinking and their opinions’. We now know so much more now about how important it is to work on our ‘mindset’ if we are to achieve our goals. This obviously applies to ‘everyone’ (ADHD or not) however as many ADHDers have created a series of unhelpful narratives that have been stored and then lived by, working on our mindset first and foremost is so important. For many of my clients the time that we spend talking about and working on mindset can be surprising for them. The tools and strategies will come later, however it is often not the best place to start. The self realisation and awareness that you experience for the first time, when someone asks you powerful questions and challenges you on the things that have been keeping you feeling stuck or playing small. Whilst many come to ADHD coaching looking for tools it becomes obvious pretty quickly that at the foundation of everything is our mindset. By understanding and adapting our mindset, we can manage our stress better, improve our well being and build resilience. All essential tools in helping us to move forward to where we want to be.
In the words of Wayne Dyer, ‘ Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change’. Working on my mindset has given me the awareness and clarity needed to better manage my ADHD and it has subsequently enabled me to change career and build a life that works better for me and my family. Working with someone who reflects what they hear, helps you to challenge and break down the unhelpful beliefs, tolerations, fixed mindset narrative and other cognitive distortions that get in the way can be truly empowering. Doing this inner work takes time (and we can take two steps forward and three steps back sometimes) it requires bravery to face some hard questions and consciously choose to move forward. The reward is seeing the payoff and the huge shifts that take place. Positive shifts that lay the foundation for everything else and enable us to move forward way more smoothly.
That is something you definitely can’t just learn from Google.