ADHD career and leadership coaching for women academics and professionals
Understand your unique brain and transform from overwhelm to thriving
Ready for growth and transformation, not just coping strategies?
My ADHD career and leadership coaching helps high-achieving neurodivergent women academics and professionals move from surviving to thriving. This isn’t about quick fixes or superficial changes. It’s about fundamentally shifting how you understand and work with your unique brain.
Through a strengths-based, neuro-affirming approach, you’ll develop deep self-awareness that creates lasting change. Unlike neurotypical productivity advice that never quite fits, ADHD coaching is designed specifically for how your brain works — helping you leverage your natural strengths while managing what drains your energy.
The result? Transformation from overwhelm to confidence, from scattered to focused, from depleted to energised. You’ll be empowered to craft a career and life that works with your neurodivergence, not against it.
Ready to find your sparkle?
“I described myself before as a spinning top, bouncing off everyone and everything, feeling out of control. I now have the strategies in place I was seeking, and rarely have a bad day at work or a situation I can't handle.
I’m most proud that I didn’t have to change myself or tone down my enthusiasm, as I feared I would — worrying I was “too much” for people.”
– Coaching client
“I wish I had found her earlier!”
“Coaching has given me an important grounding and foundation to build upon. I’ve found a way to move past simple cynicism and frustration, by understanding my needs and priorities and the underlying mechanisms that contribute to my experiences, and consciously placing myself in situations that better meet my needs.
I am more conscious of my own needs. I'm more active in acknowledging my needs to myself, and am working towards expressing these needs to others. Although I get overwhelmed with inputs, I can better understand why that happens and, when I give myself the opportunity, can be mindful of sorting through the inputs and prioritising.
Erica’s lived experience and knowledge around neurodivergence and the intersection with workplaces and careers was incredibly valuable. It meant she was able to deftly identify tools and strategies to help me based on what she was hearing of my experiences. And knowing we had shared lived experience was important to trust.”
– Lecturer
What is the coaching process?
Coaching is a partnership where you lead and I support your growth and transformation. Unlike therapy, we work as equal partners towards your self-identified goals. The ultimate aim is for you to finish coaching feeling confident you can sustain your progress independently.
The coaching journey typically includes:
Meet and Greet call (free 30 minutes)
Before you make a commitment, we have a chat to determine if we’re a good fit and clarify your goals and challenges. Before this call, you'll complete a brief questionnaire to help you reflect on what you'd like to achieve from coaching.Session 1: Contracting, goal setting and strengths
We establish how we’ll work together and build the foundation for a successful coaching relationship. You’ll also complete the VIA Character Strengths assessment and we’ll explore how to leverage your strengths in coaching, work and life.Session 2: Understanding your unique brain
Everyone experiences the world differently. This session focuses on developing awareness of your cognitive profile — including how your executive function works — so you can use this understanding to achieve your goals.Coaching sessions
You determine the focus of each session based on what matters most to you right now. As your coach, I create a supportive environment, ask powerful questions to facilitate insight and growth, and offer relevant tools, strategies or examples to help you progress towards your goals.Closing session
We reflect on your coaching journey, celebrate your progress and achievements, and create a plan for sustaining your growth beyond our coaching partnership.
ADHD career and leadership coaching packages for mid-career professionals
To achieve progress coaching requires consistency, commitment and routine. This is why coaching is delivered as packages rather than single coaching sessions.
Individual coaching packages include a tailored combination of psychoeducation to understand your unique brain, guidance, tools, between session support and accountability.
In a Meet and Greet call we clarify what you want to achieve in coaching and explore how coaching can best support your unique brain and context.
Foundation package
$1,600 + GST
One-on-one ADHD coaching for high-achieving professional women ready to rediscover their sparkle and transform from overwhelm to thriving.
Ideal if you want to:
Develop deeper self-understanding of your neurodivergence
Overcome specific workplace challenges
Gain clarity about a career goal
Build confidence in your professional identity
What’s included:
VIA Character Strengths assessment + 90-minute debrief and goal setting session
1-hour self-awareness session focused on understanding your unique brain
4 x 1 hour private coaching sessions
Between-session support and accountability check-ins
Educational resources and tools tailored to individual growth areas
Expansion packages
Start from $660 + GST
The next step after the foundation. One-on-one ADHD coaching packages for those ready to deepen their transformation.
Ideal if you want to:
Navigate a major career or life transition
Achieve longer-term professional or personal goals
Deeply change how you work and live with your ADHD brain
Create lasting, sustainable change
“I really wanted to be a person who could perform confidently in my role before I started the coaching. I’d secured a job that was just about a perfect fit for me, but felt I was drowning most days.
I would have left this near-perfect role without this coaching. I now see I earned the role, and don't work so hard feeling I still have to prove myself. I feel fulfilled most days, which used to be rare. I leave on time, I take breaks, and I create boundaries that help me better manage the situations I find difficult.”
– Coaching client
Ready to grow and start your transformation?
What people say about working with Erica
“Erica was my mentor for over 18 months. When I first started working with her, I was shy in my work and would downplay my contributions. With regular meetings, she empowered me to become more confident in my work, teaching me that there is no benefit in shying away from my own success. Over that time, she helped me grow my skills and career, taking me from one promotion to the next, and I am forever grateful.”
– Clare
Research Assistant
Making coaching accessible: Funding options
There is financial support available to help with the cost of ADHD coaching. To access some of these, you need to have an ADHD diagnosis (or other relevant diagnosis) and be prepared to disclose your ADHD.
Employer support
Employers are legally obligated to provide reasonable adjustments to their employees with disability. This can include ADHD coaching.
You will need to disclose your ADHD diagnosis to your employer and discuss your needs to access this support.
Coaching as a business expense
You may be able to claim coaching as a business expense if you have an ABN, or claim a tax deduction for professional development if you’re an employee
Student support
Students may be eligible for coaching support via disability services at their university.
To access this, you will need to disclose your ADHD diagnosis and register with the relevant service at your university.
“I’m really grateful this kind of support exists.”
“When I first shared my diagnosis, I was worried I might feel regret, but instead I felt supported and able to be myself authentically. Before this, I often felt like I was drowning. Perimenopause made things even harder, and receiving a late diagnosis as a woman has been a complex journey. I do feel some sadness that I didn’t find this support sooner.
I’d love to see neurodivergent people better supported and recognised as a positive force. More visibility matters too, so that kids like we once were can see people like them thriving in professional spaces designed with all of us in mind.”
– Coaching client
Or send me a message:
I’m ready to create success on my terms.
How do I get started?
Chat with me to clarify your needs and discover how we can work together.
I work from Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, Australia and coach online in Australian Eastern Time.
Common questions about working with a specialist ADHD coach
What is coaching, and who do you work with?
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Coaching is a forward-focused, collaborative partnership. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines it as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential”.
In practice, as a coach I work with you in the present to help you move toward the future you want. A coach is a thinking partner — someone who asks the questions that help you see yourself and your situation more clearly, challenges the assumptions keeping you stuck, and holds you accountable in a way that works with your brain, not against it. No judgement or one-size-fits-all solutions. Coaching provides a safe space to think, reflect, and move forward.
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Therapy and counselling are therapist-led and typically explore your past experiences to treat mental health concerns. In contrast, coaching is client-led — the coach facilitates a process that starts from where you are now and supports you to build self-awareness, strategies, and momentum to achieve personal or professional growth. Many of my clients work with both a therapist and a coach — they can complement each other beautifully.
If I ever feel that what you need is outside the scope of coaching, I will let you know and help connect you with the right support. For example, if someone is experiencing a mental health crisis they will need mental health support.
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ADHD coaching is a specialised form of coaching for people who have — or think they might have — ADHD or ADHD-like traits. ADHD coaches are trained the field of ADHD and general coaching skills.
The Professional Association for ADHD Coaches (PAAC) describes ADHD coaches as practitioners who create safe, non-judgmental environments, listening with an ADHD understanding and exploring ways to maximise a client’s strengths, talents, and passions — developing strategies that are aligned with the client’s own learning, processing, and organisational style.
“ADHD coaching is not just a conversation. It is a process of activation, regulation, and transformation.”
- PAACADHD coaching is a deep partnership to understand how your unique brain is wired, and how to work with it and advocate for your needs so you can be the best version of you.
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A specialist ADHD coach has completed advanced, accredited training specifically designed to work with the full complexity of what it means to be an ADHDer — not just the surface-level challenges of executive function.
My ADHD-specialist coaching training was completed with Gold Mind Academy, whose program is accredited at ICF Level 2. The training also aligns with the Professional Association for ADHD Coaches (PAAC) competency framework — the global peak body that sets the standards for what effective, ethical ADHD coaching looks like in practice.
What does specialist training actually equip a coach to do?
It means being trained to coach at depth — to work confidently and sensitively with the more complex dimensions of the ADHD experience, including other neurodivergent identities such as autism and anxiety, plus experiences of shame, masking, self-identity, and nervous system overwhelm. Going beyond supporting executive functioning and using productivity tools and planning systems.
It also means coaching in ways that are trauma-informed, knowing how to adapt as a coach to create a safe, supportive environment — adjusting pace, presence, and relational attunement to what each individual ADHDer needs in the room (or on screen) at any given moment.
For more on how this shapes the coaching environment I create, see the question: Is your coaching trauma-informed and neurodivergent-affirming?
Why does this matter when choosing a coach?
ADHD coaching is unregulated in Australia. Anyone can call themselves an ADHD coach. Asking about a coach’s specific ADHD training and expertise — not just their general coaching credentials or lived-experience — is one of the most important questions you can ask.
Want to find out if we're a good fit?
Book a free Meet and Greet call for a conversation about how we could work together.
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Where general coaching works with goals, strategy, motivation, and accountability. ADHD coaching also works with how your specific brain processes information, manages time, regulates emotions, and initiates action. It draws on current neuroscience and a deep understanding of executive functioning.
My ADHD coaching also uses a neuro-affirming (strengths-led), trauma-informed approach that considers how your intersectionality (e.g., gender, age, culture) influence how you experience the world. This means the way we approach the pace and structure of the coaching is led by what you need to support your neurodivergence and your whole self, so you can participate in the coaching process with confidence. Think of ADHD coaching as providing the stable foundation that enables you to achieve career and leadership goals.
For example, to navigate a career transition an ADHDer may need more scaffolding and structure plus psychoeducation to support decision-making and self-regulation. In other words, general career coaching helps you write better songs, plan your album and next tour. ADHD coaching makes sure you can finish writing the songs, get into the studio, sit through the session, and not abandon the album halfway through when inspirered by a new idea.
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No. You don’t need a formal diagnosis to benefit from ADHD coaching. PAAC’s definition of an ADHD coaching client includes people who “feel, think they may, or know they have ADHD or ADHD-like qualities”. There are many reasons why people may not have a diagnosis or want one. While most people won’t meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, executive functioning strengths and challenges are experienced by everyone to varying degrees.
Many of my clients are late-identified — they have spent decades being told they are “too sensitive”, “not living up to their potential”, or “brilliant but disorganised”. They are not broken. They have brains that work differently, and they have never had support that genuinely understood or recognised that.
If you recognise yourself in what I describe — overwhelm, burnout cycles, masking, struggle to sustain the energy of demanding work — coaching is likely relevant for you.
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Yes, absolutely. ADHDers frequently have other neurotypes too — such as autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, or anxiety. My coaching approach supports the whole person, whatever their neurotype looks like.
I also work with people who don’t identify as neurodivergent, but who want to better understand how to support neurodivergent people in their lives — whether that’s a family member, a student, or a colleague. Understanding neurodivergence can be genuinely transformative for the people around us.
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Yes! All gender identities are welcome to work with me. I specialise in supporting late-identified women, because this is both my lived experience and my research area — but my coaching supports the whole person, whoever you are. I also work with an awareness that we’re all different, and that the various parts of who we are — like gender, age, culture and background — overlap and shape how each of us experiences the world.
Is coaching right for me?
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Yes — this is exactly who I work with. High-achieving neurodivergent women are often outwardly succeeding while internally running on empty, feeling overwhelmed and not achieving what's most important to them.
Coaching helps people who are tired of surviving and want to flourish. You can be accomplished and still be overwhelmed, exhausted, and wondering why everything feels so hard when you are clearly so capable in your work.
The gap between how capable you are and how exhausted you feel is where coaching works. It helps you achieve clarity about what you need to succeed on your terms.
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I work primarily with high-achieving, neurodivergent women — academics, researchers, educators, practitioners, and leaders — who are overwhelmed, burnt out, or stuck in a cycle that isn’t working for them anymore. Many are late-identified as ADHD. Many have spent years masking in environments not designed for their brains.
They are intelligent, committed, creative, and deeply passionate about their work. They are also often on the verge of walking away from careers they love because the systems they work in are making them unwell.
I help them move from surviving to thriving more often — by developing deep self-awareness so they can build systems that actually work for their brains, and reclaiming control of their careers without having to choose between success and their own wellbeing.
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Absolutely! These are often the starting point. For neurodivergent women overwhelm, perfectionism, procrastination and burnout are often deeply tied to executive function, nervous system regulation, masking fatigue, and working in complex environments that do not support how our brains work.
Research on ADHD in Australian academic women, has identified these patterns: chronic underestimation of time, difficulty initiating tasks even when you care deeply about them, emotional dysregulation — often linked to rejection sensitivity, and the particular exhaustion of being brilliant in a system designed for a different kind of brain that others don’t understand or no how to support.
In coaching, we work with all of this — not by adding more strategies to your to-do list, but by understanding your brain and transforming how you work and live.
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If you’re asking this question, you’re probably more ready than you think — and the fact that you’re here, looking for support, already tells you something important.
Many of the people I work with come to coaching feeling genuinely depleted. They worry they don’t have the mental or emotional bandwidth to engage with something new on top of everything else they’re already carrying. That hesitation makes complete sense. Coaching is designed to work with your current capacity, not against it.
There’s no “perfect” moment to start. Waiting until things are less overwhelming can mean waiting indefinitely, because the overwhelm doesn’t tend to lift on its own — that’s usually what coaching helps with.
Research on how people change tells us that readiness isn’t a switch that flips — it builds gradually. If you’re noticing that things aren’t working, feeling a pull toward something different, or starting to weigh up whether change is possible, you’re already in the process. You don’t need to have it all figured out before you begin.
In coaching we start with where you are right now. If that means our early sessions are slower, more grounded, more focused on understanding what you need before we do anything else — that’s exactly right. There’s no performing or getting it wrong in coaching.
Sometimes people first need to recover from severe burnout or wait until they have more capacity to think clearly. This is important. Coaching sessions will not work for you if you’re too exhausted to think.
If you’re curious but unsure about your readiness, book a free Meet & Greet call and we’ll work out together whether now is the right time, and what support might look like for you at this stage.
What happens in coaching?
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Sessions are structured one-on-one conversations usually between 1 to 1.5 hours. As your coach, my job is to hold space, ask powerful questions, and offer insights and observations that help you develop your own thinking and evoke self-awareness so you can move forward and achieve your goals. They are not lectures or mentoring sessions offering advice.
Coaching sessions can be reflective and exploratory, or practical and action-focused. They are led by what's most important to you right now. As a coach, I facilitate a process that creates safety and structure. I also bring my knowledge of neuroscience, neurodivergence and psychology, but the direction is always set by you.
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Meaningful coaching transformation takes time. Most of my clients work with me for three to six months, sometimes longer. This allows us to move well beyond surface-level goal setting into the deeper identity, values, and systems work that creates lasting change.
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Coaching packages are available for individuals, and I offer tailored programs for organisations. For current pricing and package details, see the coaching for individuals page or book a free Meet & Greet call to discuss what suits you best.
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In Australia, coaching fees may be tax deductible as a work-related self-education expense if the coaching is directly related to your current employment. Many universities and employers also have professional development funding that may be used for coaching.
Please check with your accountant or the ATO regarding your specific situation. I’m happy to provide receipts and documentation that may support a claim or professional development funding application.
Safety, trust and fit
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Yes. I hold a deep understanding that many neurodivergent women, gender diverse individuals and men have experienced years — sometimes a lifetime — of being told they are too much, not enough, or simply doing it wrong. The many micro-aggressions we experience accumulate overtime often causing trauma and shame. This shapes how we respond to our environment and show up in coaching.
My approach is strengths-based and neuro-affirming, with an emphasis on safety. I approach sessions with curiosity, not judgement. I’m also mindful that emotions can show in session — if that happens, you’re supported to choose what happens next — this may involve a guided self-regulation exercise or stopping to take a break.
I work within my scope of practice and I am not a therapist. I work collaboratively alongside mental health professionals if needed as part of a client’s support team.
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I often hear this — and it’s an important question. Most coaching models are built on neurotypical assumptions about motivation, productivity, and change. If you’ve been told to “set SMART goals” and it didn’t stick, it is probably because the approach was not built for your brain. Also, not all ADHD coaches have accredited credentials and we all have different approaches to coaching.
I have lived this. I spent years trying strategies designed for a different kind of brain and wondering why I couldn’t sustain them or why they were overwhelming. When I finally got the right type of specialised ADHD coaching, the difference was transformative — because I was well supported and finally understood how my brain actually works and what I needed to support it.
I specialise in ADHD and neurodivergence and bring lived-experience, professional training and research expertise. A free Meet & Greet call is the best way to see whether my approach resonates with you — this is a chat with no pressure to commit.
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No. Coaching cannot replace medication, psychiatric care, or psychological treatment. What coaching can do is complement those supports beautifully.
Medication may help manage certain ADHD symptoms, but it does not build the self-awareness, self-regulation, career clarity, or sustainable ways of working that many high-achieving women with ADHD are still missing. That is where coaching comes in.
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The first step is a free 30-minute Meet & Greet call — no sales pitch or obligation. It is a conversation to explore what you’re hoping to work on and whether my approach feels right for you.
The coaching relationship only works when there is genuine trust and connection, and I want you to feel confident before you invest your time and money.
If I’m not the right coach for you, I will say so — and I will do my best to point you toward someone who is.
