Why Your Last ADHD Business Coach Didn't Work Out the Way You Expected
If you hired an ADHD business coach and things didn't work out the way you imagined, and you've come to the conclusion that you're the problem or the coach wasn’t “the one”, I'd like to offer an alternative explanation.
I hear this a lot, usually in a first conversation, typically delivered in the flat voice people use for things they've decided are their fault. “I've worked with three coaches. Maybe four, depending on whether you count the group program. Maybe I’m just not coachable.”
Chances are you are coachable and maybe you've been hiring the wrong type of help, repeatedly, for a reason that makes complete sense once you see it.
What my ADHD pattern recognition skills are picking up
The clients who schedule a consultation with me having worked with several ADHD coaches are rarely people who quit. They're people who finished. They completed the programs, did the worksheets, showed up to the calls, built the habit stacks, tracked the things. Not 100% consistently, but with genuine effort and commitment. They did the work.
And each coach they worked with helped them solve something real. One got them to stop saying yes to shitty clients. One helped them stop working until 11pm. One got them to finally create a pricing structure, and stick to it.
Nobody failed. Nobody was a fraud. Which is why it's so disorienting when you get to the end and the fundamental thing is still wrong — because there's no one to blame for it. There's just you, and a series of well trained and well intended coaches, holding a stack of receipts for help that technically worked, and still left you feeling uncertain and unsatisfied.
The clue that was hiding in plain sight
You did everything you were asked. You showed up. You held the accountability structure. You built the habits and you kept them. And you still don't like the business you built.
Read that again, because people skim past it. Not you didn't build it. You built it. It exists. It functions. You just don't want it. And you are beginning to wonder if you are just not cut out for owning a business or maybe you’re expectations are just impossible and it’s time to lower your standards.
This is not a follow-through problem. Follow-through problems look like unfinished things. What you have is a finished thing, pointed somewhere you didn't want to go. No amount of additional coaching fixes that, because coaching is an accelerator, and the accelerator was never the issue. The steering was.
Why you kept buying the same thing, and not getting further along
This is where I have to name the pattern bluntly, and it's not a flattering one — and hey, I have ADHD too, so I’m not throwing shade.
The Optimism Trap is the ADHD habit of solving a structural problem with a fresh burst of excitement based on nothing but the lack of evidence. If your business is working but it’s not working for you, the honest explanation is that something in the structure is wrong. But the easier explanation — the one that shows up automagically (not a typo) — is that you haven't found the right version yet. The right coach. The right program. The right system, and this time it will be different. You will be different.
So you buy again. And here's the cruel part: it kinda works, at least a little, just about every time. You get real gains for eight weeks. Which confirms the theory that the approach was fine and you just needed a better version of it. So when the plateau comes back, the conclusion isn't “maybe I am going about this the wrong way.” It’s “Something is wrong with me.”
And around and around we go, consuming time, energy, effort and dollars, engaging the services of perfectly decent coaches who are doing their best to help. After awhile, you’re totally convinced you are the problem, or coaching is a scam. Turns out neither one is true.
What was actually broken (and is not your fault )
Coaching is meant to solve execution problems. Focus, follow-through, consistency, the gap between intention and implementation.
What was broken was the container— its shape, its offers, its pricing, the way it demands your energy at times when you don't have any to give. Structural problems. And structural problems couldn’t care less about how well you execute. You can be brilliant at running and still be running toward the wrong finish line.
A coach who’s handed a structurally broken business can make you better at operating it. That's not incompetence. That's the job description. The mismatch happened at the point of purchase, before anyone did any work at all, and neither of you knew.
If you’re still feeling like you’re not coachable and wondering what The Optimism Trap is, check out episode #277 of the ADHD-ish™ podcast after you finish this post.
The question you didn’t know to ask
Stop asking whether you're coachable. It's the wrong question and it has never once produced a useful answer. It’s no secret that folks with ADHD are hard on themselves, no matter how successful, so I am not slamming you, I’m reminding you that being uncoachable is not the problem. I promise.
Ask this instead: when it stopped working, what specifically stopped?
If what stopped was doing the things — the habits disappeared, the calendar collapsed, the follow-through evaporated — then you had an execution problem and coaching was the right solution. It may well be the right solution again. Keep reading.
If what stopped was caring — if you kept doing the things and the doing just went hollow — then you didn't have an execution problem. You had a business you'd stopped wanting to run, and no one addressed it, because you didn’t know it was the problem and you didn’t hire anyone to look at that.
That distinction will not be solved by signing up for another eight-week program.
Believe it or not… You are NOT the common denominator
Well — you are, technically. You're in every one of those coaching programs and relationships. But being present at all your own disappointments is not the same thing as being responsible for them.
You were shopping in the right store and the wrong aisle. That's a much smaller mistake than the one you've been telling yourself you made, and it's a fixable one. Those ADHD coaches weren’t a waste of time, they were preparing you for the next step.
