ADHD at work: Should workplaces have neurodiversity coaches?
This week, I'm joined again by Helen Garcia, discussing her role as an ADHD coach who has carved out a unique and much-needed role in today's workplaces. We explore what it means to support neurodivergent employees, how ADHD shows up in professional environments, and why understanding brain diversity is crucial to creating more inclusive and productive teams
Participants
- Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Prospects
- Helen Garcia - ADHD coach
Transcript
Emily Slade: Hello and welcome back to Future You, the podcast brought to you by graduate careers experts, prospects. I'm Emily Slade and in this episode, I chat to Helen Garcia, who rejoins me to discuss her role as an ADHD coach.
Helen Garcia: Okay, so hi, I'm Helen Garcia. I'm an ADHD coach, strategies and communication. I'm an accredited and qualified coach, so accredited with the Association for Coaching and a qualifying diploma, which I'll talk about a little bit later, but also qualified as a professional ADHD coach.
Emily Slade: So what drew you to become an ADHD coach in the 1st place? And then what process did you take to become one?
Helen Garcia: Okay, so my coaching life started back in 2017. So it started really around the agile coach side of things. So I trained properly as a scrum master and we've got a podcast on that. And in scrum mastery, there's a percentage of your job that really sort of looks at team coaching. So you're helping the team look at their processes and improve them. And part of what I found out about it was actually, you know, we've got all these processes in place, but we're still having this pressure and this stress on on the team and actually their well-being is perhaps not the best that it could be. So I started to look a little bit more into coaching. So in 2020, I started a diploma in coaching. I qualified in 2022 and it was a really, really good course that I'd done, which was around, you looked at multiple different areas. So you looked at stress, you looked at psychology, coaching, you looked at the differences between coaching and therapy, as well as counselling. You looked at communication, just multiple different things, which are very good. And also cognitive behavioural coaching, which I found particularly interesting because it's around, you know, how do our cognitions, our thoughts impact our behaviours and how, if we change the way we think, could we change the way that we behave, which is actually quite interesting in terms of ADHD and the link to ADHD. So not only agile coaching, which is around, breaking things down into small, bite-sized pieces, and in my mind, making things fun to get things done. You also had this cognitive behavioural link as well around, okay, so especially in women with ADHD, it can be very noisy in your head. How can we start to look at that in order to support our behaviours in the day-to-day? So that was really great. And then I met a lady called Astaia Barrett, And she was just really inspiring for me. So she's an ADHD coach and she's got quite a lot of experience and was talking about the different traits and symptoms of ADHD. And as she was talking for, I think it was an hour or two hours, I just couldn't stop being like, oh my God, this is me. Like everything that you're talking about, I can just relate in so many ways, which was a real light bulb moment for me actually, because I felt quite, I guess, quite alone and quite disorganised and just not really knowing what was going on with me. Like I felt a little like I was going mad. And then I guess the past five years generally through that coaching journey have been quite difficult because you do do a lot of reflection, you do do a lot of self-development and you discover a lot about yourself, which is difficult and challenging at times. But I stopped doing certain things. I stopped doing a lot of exercise, for example, and I'll come back to why that is important in a minute. But I became quite depressed. My anxiety levels just rocketed. I'd moved house, I'd moved job. I had a whole ton of things that were going on. And actually, my day-to-day was really becoming quite unmanageable. Going to the doctors and trying to describe this, I joined to therapists that didn't really understand ADHD, just basically came down to, well, you're just, you know, you're stressed and you're a little bit depressed. So I had all of this going on and to a point where I heard about Esther's running a course, so she made a course in January this year. And it was finally kind of meeting people that were like me and that had that I don't know, the same sort of fight, because there is a lot of things. It's not just about being distracting and hyperactive. It's many things in between that. So for three months, I learned about ADHD. I learned about strategies and tools that could support my ADHD, which was amazing. I finally got the guts to get actually a private diagnosis, which came out as dyslection and as attention, more attention deficit. what ADHD is, it used to be known as. And this was like the best thing that ever happened to me because I was like, my God, I now have an answer. It's not, yeah, of course I'm depressed and anxious. My God, like with everything going on, I definitely that, I mean, the doctors were wrong, right? But being prescribed medication just for that is definitely got, wasn't the answer. So after that, I basically, I qualified as an ADHD coach, obviously with life experience in it as well. And I decided I never want anybody else to go through what I'm going through because the spiral is really, it's very depressing. I mean, you can go from being, on top of the moon to be suicidal and that's horrible. And actually, that isn't normal and it's okay and we should talk about it more and I don't want other people to go through that. So that's why I made that change was like, you know what, I need to make my focus different now. I need to support professionals in thriving and not just trying to survive the day-to-day.
Emily Slade: Yeah, fantastic. That's brilliant. So you've sort of touched on it there in terms of what does the role entail. Was there anything else that you wanted to mention?
Helen Garcia: So I think it's interesting because I'm not sure if it's necessarily qualifying as, it is a role, it is in a sense, but it's obviously quite difficult because we don't necessarily, at this point in time, being 2025, have ADHD coaches within organisations. I think if that is a route that people were to go down as a starter, then the sort of thing that I did was, hey guys, I have ADHD, I want to raise awareness about it because there's multiple things and multiple strengths that we can bring and there's different things that we can do between organisations to help people. But also, I want to be actively doing that because it is hard in the coaching world to just suddenly have a coaching business and, thrive off of that and be able to live off of it. So that's the first step. I think I'd probably add to that in terms of Is it a role at the moment? No. Do I have a vision for it to be a role? I really hope so. That would be amazing in the future if actually we could have not ADHD coaches, but neurodiversity coaches pinned within companies to be able to support the people that are there. The other thing I guess just to touch on is around the role, and I think it's important, is coaching itself is very much based around values. And I think this is what drew me to coaching in the 1st place. when I started with my Scrum Mastery and team coaching is it was all based around values. And to understand yourself and your values is really important. So it's not a role in the sense that you are trained and then you are a coach and you're a great coach and you can help people. I think it's a lot more than that. It involves a lot of self-development. So I think that probably isn't the standard answer when you come to a role like what is it that you do your day-to-day? But it is part of that, learning yourself and learning how to grow and develop. I think another part of the role as well is understanding your boundaries, being really able to put a sort of ring fed to your boundaries because you come across lots of different types of problems. And in the coaching world, just generically, obviously, I'm a strong believer in coaching is looking at the now and the future and how actually we can be better at, or we can make life easier in the future if we are able to adapt and use different strategies and tools to put in place. And it's not about looking at the past. And it can be difficult in coaching to not do that because somebody comes with you and they sort of offload and sometimes they can go down. So knowing your boundaries, saying, you know, the coaching is about this. And I understand this is obviously a very difficult situation, but how can we start to look forward? How can we put things in place in order to do that? Because it becomes a very fine line to therapy and counselling. if you start to look back. And actually, as coaches, we're not equipped or qualified to be able to deal with that. So I think that's a good call out in terms of the role of what it entails around your boundaries and your values. There's other things I think that are also important as coaching and obviously self-employment is can be quite lonely. So in your role, again, another important thing is if you want to go into coaching, you want to sort of take that path is there are so many things that you can learn about within coaching. There's so many communities, meetups, well, actually there was the first ADHD conference this year that again, Esther Barrett and her team ran. And the one, there's one next year. Well, I don't think the dates come out for that yet, but Going to these things and really learning from your peers because everybody has such a different way of coaching and a different, there's so many different types of coaches out there that actually it's great to be able to speak and learn from others. And I think I'd recommend that for all types of. roles and all types of careers, but especially when it's one that could be quite siloed. And sort of moving on from that as well around supervision, especially as an ADHD coach. Obviously with ADHD, you're dealing with various different things. And ADHD, it has been shown, I think, in research that there can be trauma. And from trauma, sometimes you can develop some ADHD around it. Lots of other things kind of circle around that. So you're dealing with quite serious issues sometimes, although you're saying, we're here now, we're looking to the future of how we can change that. There's a history of that, right? There's a history for a person. So making sure that you go to supervision on a regular basis, and not only for your coaches and their well-being and their journey, but also your own as well. Because it can be quite rewarding, but also quite draining. And as an accredited coach, you actually have to have supervision. So it's based on a percentage of the amount of coaching you do. Or in my case, I just like to have supervision every sort of two to three months or as and when I need to.
Emily Slade: Let's now veer into understanding ADHD itself a bit more. So how does it present itself and how can it impact the workplace? And I imagine there's not going to be a one word answer for this.
Helen Garcia: No. And actually, it's an interesting question actually, because you're right, there's not a one word answer. There's a lot, you know, A1 presentation meets all. And I think especially between men, male and sort of female presentation of ADHD can be different, not always. But it's thought to be that around men, it's probably a little bit more presented outwardly. So there's a lot more energy, maybe a lot more. Yeah, I'd say a lot more energy is probably a fair way to describe it. And For women, some of that hyperactivity is actually within the head. So it's very noisy in the head rather than outside of the head, which does present differently. And I think for quite a long time, it was just presumed that men had ADHD because it was a lot more obvious in that sense. And actually, that's obviously not the case. Anybody can get ADHD or have ADHD, I should say. So yeah, so that's one thing. I think a lot of the time we also focus on some of the elements that are quite obvious, like people talk about, the AD being attention deficit, so being distracted, hyperactivity being, maybe a bit more repulsive, hyperactive, potentially that could look at sort of disorganisation. But I'd like to focus more on what are the different ways that we think in comparison maybe to a neurotypical person. Obviously, we're all diverse as people. We're all, that's just a natural sort of way of our being. But particularly for ADHDers, like we have the ability to have quite divergent thinking, which is really exciting because actually that brings like novel and new approaches to the way that we we can see things. So it's not always that linear path the way that we think. It is, could be more of a, I don't know, I like to describe this in a numerical fashion of, you know, neurotypical might be one, two, 3, 4, 5, feel a bit more linear. In my head, it might be 7, 100, 40, 20, 38, 9. But the beauty of that is that you do see things differently. And particularly in complex or chaotic environments, I work really well. And the opposite, I guess, sometimes I can create complex and chaotic environments because it kind of suits me, but it may not suit other people, if you see what I mean.
Emily Slade: Yeah, absolutely.
Helen Garcia: So I think there's. there's definitely helpful and unhelpful things about that.
Emily Slade: Yeah, Clearly, like for centuries now, people will have been neurodiverse and they just would have gone undiagnosed and sort of lived through the workplace with that. So before people started getting diagnosis and before people started understanding how their brains worked and were able to reach out and get this sort of support, were they just Were they just sort of 50% of the workforce having to figure it out themselves? Does that make sense?
Helen Garcia: Yeah, it does make total sense. So it's a really good question. So I think, oh, I was doing a bit of Googling on this. I'm like, how big of the population does have ADHD, do we think? And it came up to 3.6% of the population that they think is estimated to have ADHD at this point in time. So it's still a really, really small percentage. But like you said, it's the not recognising that and having the ability, I think we talk about, if you've heard of masking A lot. So basically you're trying, you're fight, you're saying, I guess I think it would be fair that you're kind of fighting your natural behaviours in order to be like, no, I can do this. I can work in a nine to five organisation. I can deal with the noise around me. I can deal with somebody say to me, you know, do you think you could just get this done, you know, not giving you a deadline? And so you start to change, start to mask, sorry, some of those behaviours. which in theory, for a little while, actually, when I was learning about ADHD, I was like, what is really the problem with that? Because then surely that means you're just kind of behaving a bit more, put in first commas, normal. But the problem with that is that it's really training. So part of my story is really, I suppose, even about 6, maybe six, nine months ago, it might even be before then, I was having to start to go to bed in the afternoon and I'd get terrible, terrible headaches. I'd have to go to sleep. If anything was like too exciting or too stressful for me, because for years and years and years, I'd just been just pretending that I could do multiple things. And I could have one social event after another, after a hard day at work, and maybe somebody just dropping something on my desk at the last minute. And all of those things, I mean, no, it's 35. Actually, it was having an impact on me that I didn't realise was quite detrimental to my well-being. Because when you're, you know, I consider myself quite young. And I don't feel like I should be having to, you know, have these moments, these massive burnout moments where I just need to go to bed because actually I can't put centres together. It's those sorts of impacts that it has on you. So you might appear to be normal and let's say functioning in nine to five at work, but outside of those hours, how is that person surviving? And what we really want is people at work. It's not just to come to work because it's a job, but actually thriving and being in an environment that really energises that person and helps them, live a, good life, which is both inside and outside. Does that answer your question?
Emily Slade: Yeah, no, it does. It makes complete sense and it leads quite nicely actually into what advice do you have for workplaces to help support their neurodivergent staff?
Helen Garcia: Yes, yeah. So, I think... This is an interesting one because often when I speak with organisations about supporting their staff, often there's this, okay, so we need to give spaces for ADHDers or neurodiverse people to be able to get away, sit in a silent group or be able to dim the lights or have different kind of furnishings or textures or things like that. And I'm not poo-pooing, technical word, those wings. That's all really good. Like that is a good thing to do, right? That's helpful because it does get space. But why are we not thinking broader than that? Because actually we need to be thinking well, as a manager, if I'm a manager with ADOD or a manager who has ADOD employees or colleagues, then how do I actually communicate with that person? And how does that person, how can I help that person communicate with me? Because I believe it's a two-way thing. We often talk about, you know, we've been living in a, you know, let's call it neurotypical world for many years. We need to make change in, yes, but we also need to understand how other people like to communicate. Because I know for myself, sometimes I can come across quite direct and quite maybe sometimes brutal. And if somebody communicated with me, directs or brutal, like that could like break me. I could be, you know, destroyed by that, which is really ironic. So how do we have that two-way communication sort of understanding in place? So supporting supporting organisations to understand that. And I think for things like that, it's just, let's have the conversation. Let's not be frightened to say, you know, add part of our, maybe onboarding. What is it, you know, if you, if you're, you know, ADHD or autistic or some part of that, you know, neurodiverse community, then what? these are the ways that we understand communication will help. What would help for you kind of thing? And if people aren't comfortable with coming out and talking about it, and I totally understand that as well, because it can be very scary, then just naturally, let's just talk to people in a way that they want to communicate. Let's just ask the question, how do you like to be managed? How do you like to be communicated to rather than saying, this is how we like to do it? And every year we have an annual review. that might be terrifying for somebody with ADHD because you don't know what's going to happen because has things, have we stacked up a whole load of things just for that year's review? Like there's so many different, you know, there's so many different things. It can be, it can be a bit scary. So I think one thing is around communication. The second thing is, and I still haven't quite worked out or quite managed to convince people of this, but especially for the ADHD brain, making things fun to get stuff done is a real, is just a massive tick in the box, right? So my motto, especially as a scrum master, agile coach, team coach, is having fun whilst getting stuff done. That's what I say. And I've had that. like 2 decades. And I've never really understood what, because I felt all boring stuff, I'm just not interesting. Literally, you cannot get like to do a bill. I know everybody finds stuff like that boring, but it's like a, I don't know how to describe it. I'm almost paralysed by boring things. I just have to move forward with them. And that's really, obviously in a workplace, you can't just say, I'm never going to do a boring thing. That's just not feasible. Or no expect that in a company, right? But, I was talking to a coach, a coach the other day, and I just write all these numbers really boring. And I said, Oh, was there anybody in your team that actually really loves numbers? Because there might be an ADHD or actually anybody in that team who just gets really like, you know, get a buzz out of looking at numbers and finding stuff like that. Well, why don't you just say, like, you know, you either want to work on it together or do you want to do this because I know that you find this fun? So why do we Why are we still, we have JDs, right? We have job descriptions. We have, you know, the goal in which we want to achieve in our day-to-day. But it doesn't mean that we can't say, well, these are the really fun things in my job, but I loved it. And I understand I will have sprinkling of boring stuff. But the stuff that is actually paradoxing to me, why am I taking that away from somebody who actually might really enjoy it? Does that make sense?
Emily Slade: Yeah, that makes sense. No, just that more like completely flexible way of working where you look at the team in front of you and you delegate accordingly instead of just by job description, as you say.
Helen Garcia: Yeah, I think that would be below. And this comes back to like that sort of agile way of working or cross-functional teams, right? But again, you've got your, you know, T-shaped person, so you've got a core skill, but is there an opportunity to actually share out of work? Right, exactly. Let's make things fun so that you actually feel more energised at work. And also, surely, that's just much better. You don't want to get out of bed and be like, oh, God, I've got to look at another spreadsheet today. I've got to go to another 100 meetings. Like, you want to get out of bed being like, yeah, I've got to do this, but I've got all of these, you know, 90%, 70% of my day is actually going to be really interesting and something that, you know, lights a fire will be.
Emily Slade: Yeah, absolutely. Brilliant. And then finally, where do you see ADHD awareness and support heading in the future?
Helen Garcia: So I really hope that there is a role for sort of neurodiversity coaching or ADHD coaching in the workplace. I hope that people actually feel they can talk about their differences and can actually be proud of saying that my brain is different and the reason it's, the reason it's different is because maybe it falls into this, let's label it, whatever it needs to be. But actually the benefits of that are this, that and the other. So it would be so cool to see on even job descriptions, like we're looking for a divergent thinker for someone who's good at over focusing, you know, someone who's able to recognise patterns. All of these things are actually stuff that we're really good at and being able to have that as helpful sort of indications to a diverse workplace, I think would be really great. I think, again, sort of coming back to your previous question around the what can organisations do for people with ADHD, it's, like I say, it's not just about actually ADHD and autism around colours and noise and many other things. I think it's also about that diversity of ideas. So I can sometimes come with an idea and say it to a room of people and everybody sort of goes by it because it's probably a little bit wayward and I've got there in a way that maybe I haven't explained very well. But rather than saying, oh, that's a bit wayward, let's keep going along this one, two, three, 4 linear way, actually writing that and saying, okay, so we don't have to do my idea, right, but let's explore a little bit more. So let's explore more crazy fun ideas and see where we we come out with that rather than just taking the normal path. So I suppose in short, I'm saying, shall we be more experimental and having that in our organisations because that is supporting the future of, you know, ADHD and true diversity and true sort of inclusion across the board. It's not just, you know, we need to talk about this more or we need to be aware that we have ADHD colleagues. No, it's actually practically doing something different about it.
Emily Slade: Yeah, fantastic. If people want to reach out to you, if they've got questions or they want to learn more about what you do, can they get in touch?
Helen Garcia: Yes, absolutely. So you can either get in touch with through LinkedIn. So I'll send you my LinkedIn and please do connect, connect, follow me on there, drop me a DM. Otherwise, my website is www.helen-garcia.com. And you can also connect with me there. And I would love to speak to more people. There's a lot of us out there, regardless of whether you're diagnosed, not diagnosed, but there's certainly a lot of things that we can recognise to get to support day-to-day to thrive. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you, Emily. It's been such a pleasure to speak to you again, and thank you for having me on.
Emily Slade: Thanks again to Helen for their time. For more information on the role of an ADHD coach, you can get in touch with Helen through the links in the description. For more information on neurodiversity in the workplace, head to prospects.ac.uk. If you enjoyed the episode, do feel free to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. Thank you as always for listening and good luck on your journey to future you.
Notes on transcript
This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.
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