Julie Legg chats with London-based certified ADHD coach Laurence Pratt, the founder of ADHD Goals, with a background in UX research and design.
Laurence shares his journey to an ADHD diagnosis and the purpose it brought him in becoming a coach. Laurence describes how his coaching approach focuses on empowering clients to reach their goals by identifying their strengths and addressing common ADHD challenges like time management, task completion, and workplace dynamics. Through a personalized, strengths-based framework, he helps clients harness their abilities and navigate ADHD’s complexities.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Background and Journey: Laurence shares his late diagnosis of ADHD and discusses how challenges in his career and personal life led him to discover ADHD, eventually inspiring him to become a coach. ADHD coaching provided him with a new sense of purpose, allowing him to support clients in understanding and managing their own ADHD challenges.
- Common Client Goals: Laurence’s clients typically seek help with specific ADHD-related challenges, such as time management, task completion, and navigating workplace dynamics. He addresses interconnected ADHD traits using an executive functioning framework.
- The Role of Strengths and Saboteurs: Laurence uses initial assessments to identify a client’s strengths and “saboteurs,” which helps personalize solutions and align strategies with the client’s natural inclinations and obstacles.
- Framework and Process: Coaching sessions start with a free introductory call to assess the client’s needs. Laurence’s approach involves identifying strengths and challenges and equipping clients with tools to manage ADHD traits and achieve personal goals. Many ADHD traits are interconnected so, when seeing an ADHD coach for one life challenge, you may end up working on several traits together – both positive and negative traits.
LINKS
- Julie is the author of THE MISSING PIECE: A Woman’s Guide to Understanding, Diagnosing and Living with ADHD (Harper Collins, 2024)
- Laurence’s ADHD Goals, Coaching, Resources and Podcast: ADHD Goals
TRANSCRIPT
JULIE: I’m Julie Legg, author of The Missing Piece and diagnosed with ADHD at 52. Welcome to ADHDifference. Today I’ll be speaking to London-based ADHD coach Laurence Pratt. We’ll be talking about ADHD Goals and how coaching can really help us overcome some ADHD challenges. With long waiting times, in the UK especially, you don’t need to be diagnosed really to reap the rewards of some one-on-one coaching sessions. Thank you so much for joining us today.
LAURENCE: Oh, you’re welcome. Lovely to see you again, Julie. How are you?
JULIE: Yeah very, very well. Spring has just sprung in New Zealand, whereas has Autumn hit the UK?
LAURENCE: Do you know what, I was actually thinking this myself last night. I was taking my dog Coconut for a walk last night and it was about 8 and it was getting dark and I thought “Oh there we go. That’s the summer gone.” So yes, it’s on its way, the Autumn. [It changes pretty quickly, doesn’t it.] The seasons can change quite … change quite rapidly. Yeah yeah. It’s yeah, particularly where you just notice it when because that was the first walk that I took him out in the evening that it was starting to get dark. I’ve got used to taking them out in in the nice evening sunshine but there you go. I do like this changing of the season so I’m not too mournful of summer going. It’s a chance for nice jumpers to come out so …
JULIE: It’s a win-win all round I say. Yeah. But thank you so much for coming on board. Now you’re an ADHD coach in the UK [that’s correct] and you also have ADHD yourself. [Indeed.] From an ADHDer, it’s music to my ears. I have had experience with therapy counselling with a non-ADHDer, being undiagnosed myself at the time, and really struggling to see what seemed quite rational suggestions just weren’t resonating with me. So, it’s fabulous there is an ADHD coach for ADHDers. Now I would love, if you’d like to share, your own personal ADHD journey.
LAURENCE: Yeah so, I wasn’t diagnosed as a child or anything like that, and I wouldn’t have said, with my experience of what I thought ADHD to be, I wouldn’t have said I presented in that way either. But, I mean I’m 42 now and I suppose, in my mid-30s, I unfortunately got divorced and I would probably say that it was at that point in my life that I first started to sort of examine myself and to wonder why certain things had caused certain challenges, you know in relationships and things like that. But in my working career I suppose is where I experienced most of my challenges. You know, I was burning out a lot and so I, at some point, I went to have some therapy because procrastination was a big issue for me. So, I had gone back to work after the divorce and I had wanted to do other things but I went back to the same job. And, all that time I was kind of saying to myself “Oh there’s a whole bunch of projects that I would quite like to do.” I mean I was a UX designer for 12 years and if I explain what that is, that’s user experience. So, if you think about a website or an app or anything really where a customer uses something they get an experience and it’s the company’s objective to try and improve that experience. And it was my job to research with the user, ask questions, find out what the challenges are, and then design a solution for it. So, I’m seeding a little idea there as to why that might come useful later on. [Yes.] But anyway, I was in the digital space so I had, you know, we live in a digital world now where we can make money online. So I thought I’ve got all these ideas that I would like to pursue and because I wasn’t necessarily enjoying it as much as I used to in my job, I was saying “Well this would make my life better if I could work for myself and do X, Y and Z.” But I couldn’t find a way to make that happen and I was, you know, feeling quite depressed and everything like that. And, so I went to the therapist and said “Can you help me out, working through this procrastination issue. I want to figure out why I can’t do the things that I want to do.” And it was suggested to me then that I had ADHD but I didn’t know what ADHD was. My only experience of it was, you know, what we hear about, you know, American kids, boys you know, who are disruptive and I thought no that’s not me and I poo pooed it and … but it was only a little bit later on when various family members had sort of looked into it, and I was looking into it for people close to me. And a few lights switched on in terms of … and bells rang, and I was like “Ah.” And to use a very useful quote “I found the missing piece.”
JULIE: Oh goodness me, and that’s a good one. That’s a great title for a book, don’t you think?
LAURENCE: Yeah, I think so. So, I’d read it. Yeah so, I mean then a lot of things became clear essentially because as I mentioned you know, as a designer I was always … I had adapted previously. I had adapted a design thinking methodology that I went to San Francisco for a holiday, and I went to Silicon Valley and I went to some meetups. And they used … I went to this meetup that had design thinking for life and I had at that point got the idea of “Oh well yeah. All the things I use for design could work in designing little workarounds for challenges that you had,” but this was all before I knew about the ADHD. So, I had already been investigating it. I was already working along this path but, I don’t know about you, but when you sort of focus on one little aspect of your life, that’s useful, but you ignore everything else. And it’s like Whack-a-Mole, you know, that when you think you’ve sorted one thing out and another one pops up somewhere else. And the way I resonate with your book title. ‘The Missing Piece’ is it was when I’ve realized that the ADHD was really an umbrella for everything, it then allowed me to change my focus. It wasn’t necessarily just focus on this and focus on that. It’s like they’re all connected and you need to start looking at the way your brain works and the, you know, how that affects your decision making. And only If you’re sort of looking at it as a whole are you going to have any sort of chance of, you know, making significant improvements. So that was it in a nutshell.
JULIE: I completely agree and especially about the interconnectedness with our traits. You know, seldom would you have passion without some sort of impulsiveness creeping in. Or, overthinking and procrastination, or hyperfocus and limited focus in some areas. You know, it all works together and it can be really confusing when you don’t understand your brain. You don’t know why, why you do these things. So, what age were you diagnosed Laurence?
LAURENCE: It was a … yeah, a couple of years ago. [Fabulous.] So, I’m yeah, I’m 42 now. I had to work that out for, yeah. So, 40 yeah, yeah.
JULIE: For those watching, I will just introduce Coconut who has just sat on the couch behind you, glorious little dog.
LAURENCE: He may wander around and show you a bit more but seems content where he is.
JULIE: Brilliant. Now so diagnosed and having your UX experience for quite some time, when did you decide to become an ADHD coach? Was it a natural progression?
LAURENCE: Yes, so yeah, I mean you’d probably recognize this trait in terms of, you know, hyperfocus. Once you get your claws into something you want to know everything about it. And, like I say I had this coming from an angle of design, I had like an enthusiasm to approach it in that way. And, you mentioned the word a moment or two ago about passion and I found, you know I mentioned earlier that I had a few projects that I wanted to almost tick off my list. I would have said that I would’ve had a passion for all of those things but one thing I think maybe trump’s passion is the feeling of purpose. And, I … when I left my job last year, I gave myself some time to, you know, try some of these projects that I wanted to do. And, you know, I set them up and you know, got them started but I realized that, you know, whilst I was passionate about them, dividing my time up for, you know, towards them didn’t really give me any satisfaction. And one thing I had lost previously with my old job was a sense of purpose. I mean you know, I was working you know, as a UX designer and we were a small agency that helped independent hotels and in the travel industry. But you know all my clients were people that worked for a company. So, you’re helping them and you know, you’re making experiences better for their customers, but there was no sense of purpose. And I wasn’t changing the world in any fantastic way and you know, the people that I was working for … no not the people I was working for, the clients you know, they might leave their job and work at another place in 2 years’ time. So, there was no real sense of achievement that I could identify as purposeful. And so what I’m trying to say is, is when I found out about the ADHD and I looked into coaching, and I felt that I had built up this experience in what I could see as designing solutions for challenges, I felt I could really throw myself into this. And, like I say, I think then I found a purpose you know. You can work one-to-one with somebody and actually, you know, you see when they arrive, they’re coming to you because they, you know, they don’t know what else to do. They’ve had all these challenges all their lives. It’s a very, very difficult time for them and then to see them take a bit more control back and, you know, controlling that chaos. It’s I mean, if that doesn’t give you, you know, satisfaction then I don’t know what will. So, I would like to say that I finally feel like I’ve found my purpose.
JULIE: That is brilliant and what an amazing feeling that is, for sure. Yeah. Now, so you’re based in the UK. You’re a certified ADHD coach [yeah] and you go by the name of ADHD Goals. [Yes, yeah.] Which to me is self-explanatory but I think it’s marvellous because at the end of the day, coaching is about achieving goals, isn’t it? It’s not necessarily therapy that a counsellor or a psychologist may work on, you actually looking at achievable goals. What are your clients coming to you with? What would you say is one of the top two goals, if you were to average them out? Are they coming to you because they struggle with time management or is it trying to achieve a certain task that’s been on their hit list for a while? What sort of things may they come to you for?
LAURENCE: Yeah well, I mean, it does vary. So, they might come to me with one specific challenge that is at the top of their list but as we sort of discussed before, you know, the interconnectedness of ADHD means, you know, it’s highly unlikely that’s that the only thing that they’re finding difficult. And as we go through, you know, so my program goes through the executive functioning framework so you kind of highlight that there’s, you know, the challenges are showing themselves in other areas as well. But I mean I would say that most people are, you know, start off with saying that it’s challenging at work. And this could be because they are newly aware of the fact that they’ve got ADHD. And there’s this fear of disclosing at work, and trying to find ways of communicating that. Or, now that they have disclosed, you know, people are, you know, they’ve got this sense of people sort of treating them a little bit different, and that they feel like they’re in the hot seat of being in charge of figuring out what it is that they need. And I think, you know, the challenging thing is, if somebody’s just found out that they’ve got ADHD, they don’t necessarily know what is going to help them. So, you know, going to work and disclosing and then the company, if they’re not well versed with dealing with these sorts of processes, then they push it back on you. And they don’t really know what it is that they should suggest to them that would help them, and it’s really difficult. And, you know, if we think about you know RSD and, you know rejection, it makes it more challenging once they have disclosed to feel that, you know, trying to get people to understand what ADHD is and what will help can be quite difficult in that time where you know everything’s up in the air a little bit for them.
JULIE: Absolutely, so are your clients coming to you newly diagnosed? Is that the kind of the time frame: newly diagnosed, wondering where to start, have a few areas in their life that they want to improve. Is that the time that they would come to you?
LAURENCE: Yeah, it seems that that is the general way it’s happening at the moment and I think that is, that doesn’t surprise me because, well not only because of my own journey, but the waiting times to get diagnosed on the NHS … I mean there are different routes you can take if you go privately. Depending on where you are in the country it can be anything from 2 to 8 years and so people are trying to figure … it’s insane, it’s insane isn’t it. I mean we’ve got a new government now so there has been talk of them trying to improve the situation but, you know things take time. So, I don’t know how well that will go.
JULIE: No, I get … two to eight years is just outrageous. I would suspect potentially you would have clients coming to you undiagnosed but on their journey nonetheless. Perhaps resonating with ADHD traits and not being able to wait for a diagnosis but seeking help anyway. Yeah?
LAURENCE: I can imagine … yeah. Yeah sorry, I’m grouping those in the same bucket I suppose. I think … so, my opinion is that if you have got to the point where you are feeling challenged in any way in your … in any aspect of your life, so challenged to the point where you think you need help, then you want to do something about it. And I think with the way I think about ADHD, a lot of the executive functioning challenges that we have is due to … so if you have ADHD biologically, you biologically don’t have the same number of dopamine receptors that are filling up your little daily tank of dopamine that feeds, it’s the juice for your executive functions. And so, you need help where you can either manage that with medication, but you wouldn’t get access to that if you haven’t got diagnosed, so you need to find a more holistic way of managing that dopamine through exercise, morning sunlight, things like that … diet and everything like that. But even if you had medication, pills don’t give you skills. You still are going to have challenges with going about doing tasks that involve your executive functions and I provide a framework to do that. But I’m slightly losing my thread. Oh yes, that’s it … so the dopamine aspect. I think we’re live in a society nowadays where the environment that we live in, we are being … we are trashing our dopamine baseline levels. You know, just by spending so much time looking at our, scrolling through our phones, sitting on the sofa watching the next episode on Netflix. We’re seeing people less and less, you know, people are becoming more and more isolated. And you know, people’s diets aren’t necessarily always great you know, with sugary foods and everything. And what that means is that we are having so many quick spikes of dopamine that it’s almost when you give a child one of those really naughty sugary drinks, they go zip, straight up hyperactive but what comes after that is a big crash and the crash is lower. And overall, what it’s doing, it’s bringing down your dopamine baseline level and so we … what I’m trying to say is, is you may, there may be a lot of people that don’t have biological ADHD, they’re not wired in the same way, but they are having a diminished dopamine baseline and that would also display what looks like ADHD symptoms. So, whether you are ADHD biologically or you’re experiencing ADHD symptoms, still the coaching that I would do would help. So, I think you know, that’s something that we might experience a little bit more and more as we go along.
JULIE: Brilliant. So, if I was a first-time client meeting you Laurence, what … if someone’s not really familiar with seeing a coach, tell me or walk me through, what they could expect. Is it in person? Is it online? What’s the process? From a client’s perspective, what can they expect?
LAURENCE: So, first of all we would arrange … it’s online so as we are talking now. This is how we would conduct our sessions. And the first one would be just a free call for half an hour to just discuss why it is that you’ve brought yourself to the situation that you feel that there’s some challenges that you’re facing. So, we would discuss what those challenges are, and then I would just sort of give an overview of what the coaching looks like, what the framework looks like, and what can you can expect from the tools and exercises. And then we would start and we’d book in some sessions. Obviously, you know, a few sessions is going to be more effective than just one session, so it would at least four, but you know four, six, 12 however many. You’re not tied into any specific … you know, it’s not forever. The idea is to give you the tools to be able to feel confident to address the challenges yourself in the future. So, I tend to start off with two specific sessions and I’ll explain the reason for that, and the first one is a strengths assessment. So you would fill out a form and it would identify what your strengths are, and the second session would be a very similar thing but it would be identifying your saboteurs. And so that’s identifying you know, the ways in which you like to learn, or the way that you know, you digest information and what your passions are and the other things are the things that tend to be tripping you up. And the reason I do those two first is because this helps us to understand you know, how you operate. And by knowing what those are, what’s the top of those lists, it gives us a good idea of what we might need to think about when we come to design a solution for any particular challenge. We’ll say, well you’re more likely to go and want to tackle this like that, but then this is going to rear its head. So, it’s very interesting, almost like Lego bricks. When we talk about some of the challenges that come up later on in the sessions, it might be that one of those saboteurs becomes one of our friends. Because you might need one saboteur to be helpful in sort of tricking you out of doing the thing that’s actually stopping you from doing that specific challenge. So, really understanding that about yourself is very useful moving forward in terms of being able to identify ways forward.
JULIE: I love that approach and particularly when you talk about strengths because I think when you’re newly diagnosed depending on your state of mind, and how you’re feeling, whether you feel validated or feeling grief and anger, which is often a common response as well, to highlight some of those strengths I think is a beautiful process. Because I believe we all do have strengths and sometimes we just need to dig around a little to find them but certainly, were those strengths we can lean on, and even subconsciously has got us through survival to thus point, if you know what I mean. Whether it’s just strength, or just tenacity, or passion, or whatever it may be, so that’s a wonderful thing. We’re not, you’re not just looking at negative problems but you’re using the yin and the yang to work together and then customizing that for that client. So, it’s not a paint by numbers, you’re looking at the client’s goals, and you’re looking at their personal strengths, and again ADHD isn’t a one-size- fits- all disorder. So, what may be a strength for one, isn’t for the other person. I think that’s a wonderful, wonderful thing you’re doing. And you’re certified, which is a lovely word to hear as well Laurence, because several years ago when I was looking, just after my diagnosis, it was a bit flimsy as to what qualifications an ADHD coach could have. And pretty much at the time, and so we’re talking three years ago even in New Zealand, it was pretty hmmmm. You know. Well, you know, you need qualifications to be a therapist, or a counsellor even, but a coach wasn’t so. So, I’m delighted that each country potentially has their own standardization now, I think, maybe peer regulated but it really gives confidence to those ADHD clients coming through that, you know what you’re talking about, and it’s not just a chinwag session. You’re there to give really genuine advice and to help them, you know, really resolve their own challenges. It’s absolutely wonderful.
LAURENCE: Yeah and also, I mentioned about the sort of the free call that I do at the beginning. That’s also to identify … that’s not to just say “Oh great I’ve got a new client,” it’s to say, it’s just to say you know “What are your challenges?” And, if I thought “Oh this sounds a bit more like there’s a lot more going on and this person probably ought to see a therapist about something else,” then it’s an opportunity to do that. It’s not simply to just you know, get people through the door. It’s to check that you know, coaching is the right thing for them as well.
JULIE: That is absolutely wonderful. Laurence, thank you so much for taking your time this morning, your time to chat to me and ADHDifference and you’ll be an amazing success and people will be very very lucky to have you as their coach. So, thank you.
LAURENCE: Oh thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure chatting to you again.