The Positive Learning Coach
Online executive function coaching for kids, teens, and young adults with ADHD, helping them build the skills, systems, and self-awareness to become more independent.
Your child knows what to do, but doing it is the hard part.
Most of the families we work with have already tried a lot of things, including the planner, the checklist, the app, and sitting right there at the kitchen table making sure it gets done. Some have taken the phone away, and some have even had a tutor confirm what they already suspected, which is that their child understands the material just fine.
And some of it works, at least for a while, as long as you’re the one running it.
That’s the part that gets missed. Knowing what to do and being able to consistently make yourself DO it are two completely different skills. The second one is executive functioning, and it doesn’t come from being handed a better system. It comes from understanding how your own brain works well enough to build something that actually fits it.
That’s what we work on with your child. We’re ADHD-trained coaches, and between the three of us we have more than 60 years of professional experience working with kids.
What coaching actually looks like
Your student meets with their coach on Zoom, and they work with real stuff, like the actual assignments, the actual calendar, and the actual project that’s due in nine days and hasn’t been started. They figure out together why the last system fell apart and try something different. When that doesn’t work either, they get curious about why instead of deciding the student just isn’t trying hard enough.
But a lot of what we work on never shows up in a gradebook. It’s the reaction that was three sizes bigger than the problem, the shutdown when something didn’t go as planned, the friendship that got complicated for reasons nobody can quite explain, and the homework fight that wasn’t really about homework.
Those things aren’t separate from executive functioning, because they’re underneath it. A kid who can’t tell they’re overwhelmed can’t do anything about being overwhelmed, so we start there. We help them notice what’s happening, pause before reacting, and figure out how to recover when things go sideways, because they will.
Along the way, your student starts building something harder to see than a turned-in assignment, which is an understanding of their own brain. That includes what drains them, what helps them focus, when they tend to put things off, and what actually gets them started.
We’re not here to be another adult reminding them. We’re here to help them get to where they don’t need the reminding.
Find the right starting point
Coaching looks different depending on where your student is, because a fourth grader who can’t find anything in their backpack and a college sophomore who keeps missing deadlines need very different kinds of support.
But wait! Before you think about coaching, start here.
Our free Executive Function Guide walks through the 10 executive functions in plain language, with specific examples of what each one looks like in real life — the kid who reads the same paragraph four times, the one who can't start until the pressure is unbearable, the one who melts down over a small correction.
Most parents finish it and think, "Oh. THAT'S why he does that."
It's free, it's yours, and there's no pressure attached to it.