Welcome, Esther Barrett. That was a lovely greeting. Thank you, Henry. Well, it's true. Like, I think you as you well know, because I've told you a few times. Like, I think you're just wonderful. I think what you've been building is is great. I'm excited and particularly excited you're doing this segment for us. It's a question you know full well comes up a lot. It's ADHD coaching, what it is and how it helps and how to optimise that, so it can make that difference. So absolutely thank you. And I think you've sent us in some slides, I'm going to hand over to you. It will go, the slides themselves will follow in about twenty seconds.

No problem, thank you.

You should definitely talk about things, otherwise it's gonna be an awkward silence for us all.

Twenty seconds is quite a long time to be waiting. Waiting. We can we can talk I'll to.

Just be like, you'll see my eyes just going elsewhere. I'll also try and work out some. Also have to grab all the things. But no, I'm very, very excited to have you here. And, you know, we've been talking over a long, long time now.

We have. It's.

I can introduce myself. I can That sounds great. When that stops this process stops this processing, you're on. Well.

Good to go. Okay. Over to you. Introduce yourself. Thank you so much. Thank you. So while that's loading, my name's Esther Barrett, and I'm an ADHD coach. I'm also an ADHD coaching supervisor, and I train ADHD coaches. I was diagnosed at the age of 53 with ADHD after my son had been telling me for about ten years that, mom, you clearly have ADHD. And I was completely oblivious to the whole thing until the pandemic when I started delivering teaching training online and had to look at myself on a screen much more than usual. And I noticed how much I moved.

And how much I was, like, putting lip salve on and drinking water. And then you'll see me doing that today as well. And when I realized how much I was moving, I realized that I the the everything started to sort of fall into place in terms of hyperactivity, struggling struggling with inattentive, but also hyper focus, realizing what RSD was. And then suddenly I was like, oh, yes. I see it now. So five years later, I've come along today to just talk a little bit generally about ADHD coaching. And perhaps we'll go on to slide two now, just to describe exactly what it is that I would like to do today, which is something around finding a coach, but also something around how we might work together as well. So.

I've got a question for you on slide three, which says, what is ADHD coaching? My slides don't have very much information on them. Do apologize. So next slide, please. Lovely. Next slide, please. The pandemic did so much, didn't it, Pete? I know.

Thank you for the smile comment. I'm just coming back to you. You have control of the slides, by the way, if wish to. You hover your mouse over you, you've got it.

Hold my mouse over. Yeah. Thank you. That's brilliant. I've got control over the slides. That's brilliant. What is ADHD coaching then? It's a good question. We know that traditional coaching is all around setting goals, working out what reality you're in right now, what options and obstacles you might have, and then working your way forward, your willingness and working your way forward. So it is about the future. And the big difference between coaching and counseling and therapy is that we're in coaching, we're looking to the future.

And it's incredibly helpful to have counseling and therapy. Of course it is. Helps us to work through what's happened in the past. But coaching is very much focused on where we're going next. Where are we now? Where do we wanna go? And how are we gonna get there? So you can see on the screen there we've got words like goals, we've got plans. We very much try and take a strengths based approach to coaching. Because a lot of people with ADHD really don't feel their own strengths or maybe identify them or even can admit or to themselves that they even have any strengths. We can have a lot of struggles around low self esteem and so on. So having a look at barriers and challenges and trying to work out how to strategize for those.

And also in a big part of my coaching is around unhelpful limiting or negative thinking. So helping people to kind of identify what are they saying to themselves, sometimes very harshly. And how can we help them kind of reframe some of those words that they're saying to themselves. So there could be new habits being developed there, new strategies, new ways of doing things, new routines, new ways of talking to ourselves. And all of that is kind of developing resilience because when you go into coaching, you might have six, ten, 12, probably at the most, maybe 20 sessions through access to work, for example.

But actually, the the point of the coaching is it's getting you ready for after the coaching. So your resilience or or your your tools and your techniques and all the things that can help you thrive in life, not just survive. So how will you find an ADHD coach? What do you need to kind of ask and where do you need to go? So you might wanna have a look on the ADHD UK marketplace. Of course, if you're in this conference today, you know all about the ADHD UK charity and you probably know about their marketplace. And there are many excellent coaches in the marketplace. There are two versions of the marketplace. There's the the regular marketplace for more experienced coaches, and then there's the low cost marketplace.

If you're struggling a little bit financially, you might be able to find a coach that can work better for you in the low cost marketplace. We know that a lot of coaches sign up to the life coach directory, which is not strictly around ADHD, but you can tag yourself as ADHD within the life coach directory. So I think a lot of coaches find their clients coming through there. So it's a place to another place to look. There are specialist companies out there, probably a bit too many. You're probably sitting there thinking to yourself, if you Google something like I want an ADHD coach, there is multiple, many, many, probably thousands of of hits that come up for you. So there are some specialist companies out there who might.

Be useful for you to kind of tap into as well. And then social media and community recommendations. We were just talking about community a moment ago and how important that is. And word-of-mouth is still probably one of the best ways to access any kind of service really. Be that word-of-mouth through social media or through community recommendations and the likes of Facebook forums, for example. So what you might want to ask a potential ADHD coach is around their their experience and their their their qualifications. So some coaches are much newer to coaching. Obviously, we've had.

You know, two and a half years ago, there were no accredited ADHD coaching training courses in The UK. And I know we're from all over the world in in this in this meeting today. But it's only really recently, certainly from a UK perspective that we've had those kind of qualifications for people to be able to do. So we've got many new many new coaches on the scene and that's that's brilliant because we're all learning together as a as a community I think. How we want that coaching to be. So it's not it's a collaborative effort between our coaches and our clients. So have a ask ask what their experience is by all means with knowing that it's fairly new a fairly new profession.

Having said that, there have been many ADHD coaches already practicing for a very long time who are very experienced and excellent. You might want to ask them how they're qualified in terms of of the courses that they've done. It's quite good to ask them if they've done a specialist ADHD or neurodiversity coach training course. That could be the difference between having somebody who is nothing wrong with life experience, completely understand that. But sometimes that that specialist course that can give you those tools and techniques to work with your client be incredibly useful. Ideally, coach the coaching training course would have been accredited.

By a professional body. So that might be the the Association for Coaching, the Universal Coaching Alliance, the ICF or the EMCC or even an ILM accredited course. There aren't any specialist ones of those at the moment, but I'm sure that will come. So that's a really good bunch of questions to ask when you're looking for a coach. And you might also want to know that they are a member of a professional body. So we highly recommend that coaches become members of professional bodies. Again, those bodies that I just mentioned a moment ago, the Universal Coaching Alliance, the the Association of Coaching and so on. If they are a member of these professional bodies, you can be confident that they have they're working to a competency framework.

That they've been trained, that they've committed to doing CPD, continuing professional development, and that they are receiving regular supervision, which is very important for a coach, any coach. But for ADHD coaches in particular, it's very important that we have supervision because actually, we need support as well. We've got ADHD, I've got ADHD autism and dyscalculia. I need my supervisor to support me. Because sometimes there can be emotional situations, there can be ethical dilemmas, there can just be learnings. You know, we don't know everything, straight away and we're learning all the time. I can see that, somebody in the chat pane, there is saying that as a professional declutter.

Declutter, you had no idea you were working as an ADHD coach for seventeen years. Amazing. Amazing. I love that. Thank you for sharing that. Okay. So in terms of working together then, you there's a few things that you might want to ask again. Questions, having a think about things like, what is going on on their website? Do their their style, their marketing, their promotions, does that fit with your values? Are they telling you what they need to know on the website to make you feel that you're really getting to know the person for example? I can see that Claire has put into the chat pane, what about the quality of providers if we want to get ourselves some accredited training? There are several accredited training providers in The UK.

That's exciting. That didn't we're causing it. Hello? Hello. What happened? I don't know. You disappeared. I'm not Well, welcome back.

Thank you.

Alright, you're put you back.

I'll carry on. I'll carry on regardless. So, yes. So what I was saying, have a look at their online profile. Have a look get the vibe, get the feel. Do they feel like the right person for you? And likewise, somebody in the chat pane just asked about accredited courses. So have a feel for that as well. When you go onto the the course provider's website, you know, are they saying things that you agree with? Is the ethos or the values the same? Is it accessible? Is it inclusive? Is it neuro affirming? So.