You should be doing it.
You're not. The voice in your head telling you to stop sounds reasonable. You can hear it lying. You almost never override it.
The people around you don't have this voice. They sit down and the work happens. You don't know what's wrong with you.
Everyone thinks you need to take it more seriously. They've never heard what you call yourself when you don't.
You want to be able to start a thing without the war. You want to stop disappearing inside the version of you that's been getting by.
This is the cycle.
You've had this fight ten times. Are you done. Yeah. Show me. I will. Why didn't you. I tried. It doesn't look like you tried. Shutdown.
The evidence is on the kitchen table. Missing assignments in the parent portal. Emails from teachers. The registration deadline they missed. The thing they swore they brought.
You've tried timers, apps, consequences. A tutor for the work, a therapist for the feelings. Backing off. Hands-on. Some of it worked for a week. None of it held.
What you don't hear is the conversation happening inside their head while the kitchen-table one is going on.
They aren't lying when they say they're working on it. They've been outvoted by a voice in their own head that sounds reasonable. The voice tells them to stop. They can hear it lying. They almost never override it.
Whatever you've been thinking they need to take more seriously, they're already calling themselves things you'd never call them. The harshness inside their head is louder than anything you've ever said.
Something cracked open last week.
You'd been pushing again, the same way you'd been pushing for years. They said something, or didn't say something, and you saw it. The fear that they're not as smart as people thought. The fear that turning the work in and struggling will prove the narrative that's been quietly assembling about them for years. The one who picks the easiest way out. The one who doesn't try. They'd rather not try than try and fail, because at least then the failing is a choice they made.
You stood in the kitchen. You let yourself look. Underneath the version they've been performing, the kid you actually have. The mind that works sideways and original. Loving and resourceful and with more to give than they know what to do with. They've been performing a smaller version of themselves for so long you'd half forgotten the bigger one was real.
Then a second thing happened. The kind of thing a parent rarely lets herself see all the way through.
The hands that have been pushing them back into the world they've been hiding from.
Some of those hands have been yours. Not all of it. Not none of it.
You don't quite have the language for it yet. But you know.
That's where this work begins.
How I work.
Coaching does a specific job that none of the other people on the kitchen table are built to do. The tutor knows the content. The therapist knows the underlying drivers. The school counselor knows the systems. You know your kid better than anyone. None of you can do the weekly partnership on the gap between knowing what to do and doing it. That gap is where most stuck students live.
A recent moment with one of my college-aged students. He was deep in self-criticism in a session, articulating something that was clearly bigger than time management. I told him directly: this is the right thing to take to your therapist, who can work with it at the right depth. We finished the session on what was in scope. He told me later that having both — therapy on Tuesday, coaching on Friday — gave him the structure he needed. They were doing different jobs at different depths. The difference was the point.
If a coach can't tell you what isn't theirs to work on, you don't have the right coach.
The other thing that takes some explaining is why this work has to be student-led even when the parent is paying for it. Teenagers and young adults with ADHD have spent years being told what to do by adults who can see what they should be doing. The advice is usually right. It still doesn't move them. Add one more adult administering one more correct plan and you'll get the same shutdown you've been getting.
What does move them is a partnership that runs on their agency. Their goals, their experiments, their structure, their accountability. I sit beside that work, ask the questions that open it up, and recognize what they're producing as the real thing. The shift parents notice most is not a kid who's been fixed. It's a kid who's starting to run their own life.
I've been coaching professionally since 2023, hold PCC (ICF) and PCAC (PAAC) credentials, and serve on the teaching team at MentorCoach.
The program.
The structure is simple. Weekly individual coaching across the school year. Three scheduled triad meetings to keep the family oriented. Monthly retainer.
What the structure does is harder to see in a one-line description, so the rest of this section tries to show it.
Why weekly, why for the year
A coaching session every week for a full school year sounds like a lot until you see what it does that nothing else can.
A college-aged student I worked with had hit a hard stretch. Burnout, real fear about whether he could keep going. In a typical week, he'd have spiraled. He didn't. Halfway through a session I said something to him: in the past, when you've hit this point, I've watched you begin to descend. That you're not is a big accomplishment.
He paused. He hadn't seen it. From inside his own week, it felt like the same mess. From outside, with someone who'd been watching weekly for months, it was something else entirely.
A few weeks later he said something I keep coming back to. He named the weekly rhythm of therapy and coaching as anchors. When one of those weeks got cancelled, even if nothing big was happening, it felt destabilizing. The cadence was load-bearing in a way he hadn't seen until he had to do without it.
That's what a recurring program does that an ad-hoc session does not. The arc. The kid stops measuring their progress against an idealized version of themselves and starts measuring against the version of themselves who was sitting in this chair last month, last quarter, last fall. The coach is the witness who can hold all of those weeks at once.
Three triad meetings, anchoring the year
The work the student and I do together happens in weekly individual sessions. The three triad meetings are how the family stays oriented to that work without compromising the student-led core.
The student controls what gets shared in any of these meetings. That's not a courtesy. It's how the work continues to move.
The retainer
The retainer covers weekly individual sessions, the three scheduled triad meetings, document and progress review when relevant, and between-session support across the school year.
A real commitment in time and money. I'd rather tell you that up front than dance around it.
Want to see if we're a fit?
The discovery call is sixty minutes. For high school students, some families prefer to talk with me first; others have already had the conversation with their kid and we all meet together. For college-age students, the call is with the student. Tell me what makes sense for your situation.
The families I work best with have come to a place where the strategies they need are not the next planner, the next consequence, the next conversation about why they didn't just do it. They're ready for the work to belong to the student, with the family in support, and they want a partnership that takes that seriously.
The goal isn't to fix a broken student. Your student isn't broken. The goal is to help them rediscover pride in who they are and what they can actually accomplish.
If that's where you are, this is the right next step.