Adult ADHD Treatment: Mastering Executive Skills for Success

Course overview

Executive skills are underlying brain processes that help people manage their everyday lives, get things done, control their emotions, and help them manage obstacles that interfere with productivity and behavior change. Because of their executive skill challenges, adults with ADHD often struggle to finish college, hold down a job, progress in their career, or maintain satisfactory relationships with friends and family. Failure and the recognition that they are working well below their potential erode self-confidence, eat away at self-esteem. Even highly motivated clients with executive skill challenges struggle to follow through on the changes they need to make to improve their physical or emotional well-being. They know they need to change, they know what they need to do to change, they may even be able to take a step or two toward making those changes and then they plateau or give up. What's getting in the way is not their unwillingness or resistance to change, but weak executive skills. This workshop will present a model for understanding executive skill challenges in adults with ADHD, outline a process for diagnosing ADHD that takes into account executive skills, and present a treatment model focusing on executive skills coaching as a way to help adults with ADHD navigate their world more successfully.