What is AuDHD coaching?
A lot of the people I work with as an ADHD coach are either diagnosed or identify with both autism and ADHD, a combination sometimes referred to as AuDHD. I’m AuDHD myself – my autism diagnosis came first, and the ADHD diagnosis came soon after.
And although I tend to advertise and refer to myself as an ADHD coach (mainly because it’s the term most people tend to be looking for, and also because I consider myself a specialist in managing executive functioning challenges, which do show up frequently in autistic individuals but are really a defining hallmark of ADHD), probably a little over half my clients identify as both autistic and ADHD.
So I consider AuDHD coaching to be one of my specialisms, and I guess that makes me an AuDHD coach!
Despite this, I’ve never written before about how coaching can differ for those of us with AuDHD, and how I approach this in my own practice – so I figured there was no time like the present.
What AuDHD might look like (briefly)
There’s often a huge amount of overlap between autistic and ADHD traits in practice; the differences are frequently in degree and nuance rather than in kind. Dr Megan Anna Neff has an excellent article deep-diving the overlap, and I can’t do better than that here, so I direct you to her on this.
In summary, though: executive functioning challenges show up for many autistic people, but are not considered core to autism, while ADHD is arguably defined by difficulties with executive functioning. Social communication differences and sensory differences are core parts of autism, but many ADHDers experience these too, even though they don’t appear in the diagnostic criteria. Strong interest is central to both profiles: whether framed as monotropism in autism or situational variability (where impairment disappears or reduces in the presence of strong interest) and hyperfocus in ADHD, attention and motivation are framed in both cases by interest.
Where this becomes particularly relevant is for those of us who experience both at once.
For those of us with AuDHD, different needs can pull in different directions, sometimes at the same time. We might need routine and also struggle with creating it. We might want familiarity and novelty. We might need order and have trouble maintaining it. We might be exhausted by socialising and also crave stimulation from other people. The same sensory input might feel regulating one day and overwhelming the next. We might have longstanding special interests alongside shorter-lived obsessions that burn bright and then burn out.
Some autism and ADHD traits overlap, while others actively feel like they conflict. The experience of AuDHD can therefore feel contradictory, messy, and hard to make sense of - especially when a lot of advice and informational resources are written as though we must be are one or the other, but not both.
How I approach AuDHD in coaching
I fundamentally believe that structured, outcome-focused coaching approaches are inherently supportive of executive functioning when done well. Coaching is a rehearsal space for finding new ways to “do” executive functioning that really suit us. I have a future blog post (and hopefully, at some point, a peer-reviewed article, and perhaps further research, and and and…) in the works on this, so more on that later. This, I believe, is why ADHD coaching has become a “thing” at all.
But when autism is in the equation, it can sometimes complicate things. The flexibility of coaching structures can itself become overwhelming. While I always aim to tailor how I work to the person in front of me - and I’m always happy to adapt where something would help us work better together - there are some approaches I notice I’m perhaps more likely than average to use with AuDHD clients.
Explaining context
Some coaching approaches assume that the client will infer why the coach is asking a question, or be able to intuit the purpose of the session being structured in a particular way, or will just know what to do with an insight after the session.
But for some autistic people, being asked to reverse-engineer a coach’s intent to figure out where to go with answering a question or setting an intention creates anxiety or uses up processing power. The potential executive functioning support gets lost amongst trying to figure out which interpretation of a question is the “right” one.
I approach this by, well, giving more context, and explaining why I’m asking a question, or the underlying point of each turn the session might take. I try to explain the rationale of what we’re doing and what options might be available next. Sometimes I’ll ask a deliberately broad question which can be interpreted a bunch of different ways, and what matters to me is what comes to mind for the coachee first - and if I do that, I’ll try to be explicit about that, too.
Offering choices
A lot of coach training centres around asking good open-ended questions - “what would you like to talk about today?” is open-ended, “would you like to talk about managing your energy?” invites a yes/no and leads in a particular direction. Open-ended questions are great, and can be really important for handing agency back to the person being coached - no one knows what is important to you better than you.
But for anyone prone to overwhelm - and AuDHDers are often especially prone to overwhelm - the infinite possibility space opened up by an open-ended question can lead to freezing up. Many of us need our options narrowing down to be able to choose one at all.
I can’t choose a session topic for you - I don’t have to live your life, so I can’t tell you what we should talk about. With all my coachees, I like to have an initial “mapping” session where we figure out where we might like to go, and this can give us a useful resource to select from if we are looking to find a direction for our conversations later on. Another alternative, for more in-the-moment choices, is for me to offer options for you to choose between - broad but finite, rather than infinite , possibility.
This is an area I don’t always get right. Often that’s because I also have trouble pulling ideas out of thin air, and when someone asks me a question like “what kind of things do people talk about in coaching” all I can think of is every single session I’ve ever done and the millions of different things we’ve talked about and I don’t even know where to start!
So an approach I’m using now is pre-drafting myself “menus” of possibilities I can offer when someone feels stuck on where to go in a session. I have some of these ready-made - for questions like “what kind of things can I bring here?” and “what are some more practical/more exploratory things we can use sessions for?”, and if the question is a more individual one I’ve not answered before, I try to practice the art of pausing, and might ask you for some time to think and gather my ideas so I can give you some clear options.
Considering sensory processing
Sensory needs are something I try to keep in mind more generally. If we’ve just met, I’ll probably ask you something like “is there anything you need to adjust in your environment to make it easier to engage?” and this is really a question asking you to tune into and respond to your sensory needs - if your chair is uncomfortable or you’re thirsty or the lights are too bright, it’s worth the time to change that if you can. But if a coachee has told me sensory differences are a significant part of their experience - or sometimes if you aren’t sure what’s going on, or something feels “off” - I might ask about what’s going on for you at a sensory level, and if there’s anything you might experiment with to regulate that, even if you aren’t sure (sometimes when we haven’t been attending to our sensory needs for a long time, we can lose touch with what they even are).
While this can be important for anyone, for AuDHD or autistic coachees it’s especially likely to be a significant part of the picture, and is worth paying attention to.
Action planning
I’ve written about my approach to action planning elsewhere, but this is often particularly important for AuDHD clients. Many of us are really skilled planners, because planning itself can be regulating - and we don’t always take that into account once our sensory needs, energy variability, and competing demands show up in the real world, which can cause shame to show up when we least (or most) expect it.
So in addition to making who-what-when-where-how plans and planning for the most difficult day, we might take that variability into account directly, thinking about the version of you an action is designed for, or what conditions would need to be true for it to be doable. Sometimes progress isn’t about adding the right strategy but subtracting the wrong one.
Making space for internal contradictions
Another important piece of AuDHD coaching is making space for internal conflict, without necessarily trying to resolve it. Sometimes the contradiction is just how it is. If part of you craves routine and the other part rebels against it, the right path might not be to pick one side and silence the other. If part of you longs for solitude and quiet and part of you wants stimulation and connection…maybe that tension is information.
When this kind of tension shows up, we might not be looking for a single right answer, but for flexibility and responsiveness, for systems that can bend, for plans that have more than one mode or difficulty level. It can sometimes feel like we are fighting against ourselves…but it’s all the same self, and there might not need to be one single answer.
On identity-affirming work
AuDHD coaching is not and should not be about learning to mask better. It is not about prioritising productivity over wellbeing, or teaching you to tolerate environments that hurt you. What it is about is guiding you to understand how your particular mind and your particular nervous system works, and then beginning to build a life and a work pattern and expectations of yourself that fit that, rather than how you’ve been told things “should” be.
If you’re AuDHD and considering coaching
If you’re AuDHD and thinking about coaching, you may already have a long history of trying to “fix” yourself. You might be very aware of why things are hard, but still find that insight alone doesn’t necessarily translate into anything changing. And you might also have had experiences of support that were too vague or too rigid or too motivation-focused or that just didn’t really see you as you are.
Our aim in coaching is to slow things down to notice what helps your nervous system, and your executive functioning, and your energy, and designing new ways of doing and being around that. That can look like building structure that supports you but that you don’t hate. It might look like figuring out where your real capacity limits are. It might look like learning to plan around your sensory needs, interests, and recovery time. Or it might just look like having a space where the infinite complexity and contradictions of being you don’t need to be resolve, just understood and worked with.
Coaching done well is supportive, curious, flexible, and respectful of how your brain works. We get to co-design the process together, and you are at the centre of that. If that sounds like something that might work well for you, you might consider adding yourself to my waiting list by using the button on my front page, or dropping me an email - when space opens up, this might be a place where you can experiment, gently (always gently!) with doing things differently.
And, if not, you’re also very welcome to just stay here and read my blog. That’s okay too. :)