Executive Functioning Coaching is a skill building service that helps children, teens and adults develop and strengthen organization, time management, planning, task completion abilities and goal setting and achievement. Unlike therapy, coaching focuses on practical strategy development and implementation rather than addressing underlying emotional or mental health concerns. Executive functions include working memory, task initiation and follow through, sustained attention, performance monitoring, impulse control/inhibition, goal-directed persistence, and metacognition. Many people, particularly those with ADHD, learning differences, or neurodivergent thinking patterns, benefit from specialized coaching to strengthen these skills as well as adults going through different types of life transitions.

One of the responsibilities of parenting is to teach children the skills they need to become effective, independent and self-regulated adults. And for the first decade or so, most children are receptive to their parents teaching them. As they come up on adolescence, however, they begin to resist instruction from their parents. This is because a primary developmental task of adolescence is establishing their own identity and independence. 

When children begin to push back at their parents’ effort to teach them new skills, coaching is an option many parents turn to. Coaching serves as a way station between kids relying on parents to manage (or micromanage them) and them being able to function independently. It’s an approach ideally suited to helping teens grow the executive skills they need to become the independent self-sufficient individuals both they and their parents want them to become.

Coaching is a process whereby adults work with students to help them identify goals that are important to them and to make plans to help them achieve their long-term goals. With younger teenagers, long-term goals may be those the student hopes to accomplish by the end of the marking period. With older teenagers, coaches may continue to work on marking period goals, but they may also work with students to identify the goals they want to accomplish by the time they complete high school.