Leadership coaching case study
She wasn’t bad at boundaries. She was very good at helping.
How ADHD coaching supported a business owner to hold clearer boundaries, delegate more and stop absorbing everybody else’s urgency.
She owned a small practice in a regulated professional-services field, worked directly with clients and managed one employee. Capable, caring and highly responsive, she was the person people could rely on to answer, fit them in and find a way through.
But she was working far longer than she wanted to, often into the evening and sometimes into the night. Saying no felt uncomfortable, particularly when somebody might be disappointed. When work she had handed over came back, doing it herself was usually the quickest way to make the problem disappear. The work phone stayed close, and stopping rarely felt simple.
She had also recently been diagnosed with ADHD. Urgent client needs could pull her quickly into action, while hyperfocus made it difficult to notice that the working day had gone on for too long. Personal administration was different: without another person waiting or an immediate deadline, it could remain untouched even while the guilt about not doing it followed her around.
At a glance
This was a longer coaching engagement focused on gradual habit change. Monthly coaching, body-doubling sessions and frequent check-ins gave her repeated opportunities to try something, notice what happened and adjust the approach without treating a difficult week as failure.
The pattern underneath
Her care and responsiveness were real strengths. Clients trusted her, and she wanted to be fair to her employee. She could also see the quickest route through most problems. Saying yes, sorting something out or taking a task back often brought immediate relief, because the issue was resolved and nobody was left waiting.
That was what made the pattern so difficult to change. Every individual decision made sense: one client who genuinely needed help, one call that ran over, one task that would take longer to explain than to complete. Her willingness to step in gradually became part of how the business worked, and her own thinking, administration and time away from work were repeatedly pushed later.
She already knew that stronger boundaries and clearer delegation would help. The difficult part was holding onto that intention when a client needed an answer, when somebody might be unhappy, or when taking the work back would provide immediate relief. ADHD-inclusive coaching meant understanding what made those moments difficult and finding support that worked with her, rather than asking her to try harder.
Why ADHD mattered in day-to-day leadership
Why personal administration got stuck. Professional work came with somebody waiting, a clear need and immediate accountability. Personal admin and paperwork did not. Without that outside pull, they could remain untouched for weeks, even though carrying them created stress and guilt.
Why stopping was difficult. Notifications and live client needs could quickly change the shape of the day. Once she was focused, it was easy to continue beyond the time she had intended to finish. Quiet could also feel uncomfortable rather than restful, which made downtime harder to protect.
Why saying no felt so uncomfortable. A boundary was not just a sentence in an email. It meant allowing somebody else to be disappointed or to wait, and she described a physical sense of squirming when she tried to hold one. Worry about what might happen next could then take up attention of its own.
When there were too many things to think about. She was considering whether to leave her existing business arrangement for a new one. Financial risk, contractual questions, the possible effect on her employee and concern about how other people might react all made the decision difficult to settle.
The aim was to understand what made the pattern so hard to interrupt, offer practical support where she was getting stuck, and help her try different responses without turning a difficult week into evidence that she had failed.
Understanding on its own rarely changes anything, and new experiments can be difficult to start and keep going without support.
The practical support also created room for leadership. She could think more clearly about what needed her attention, what her employee should own, what could wait and where a conversation needed to be clearer. Some of the work therefore focused on her choices in the moment; some focused on the systems around her: changing the diary, the phone and the business arrangements so that the same choice did not have to be remade every day.
What we worked on
The coaching changed shape according to what she needed. Sometimes she needed time to slow down and hear herself think. Sometimes we prepared for a difficult conversation. At other times, the most helpful thing was simply having somebody alongside her while she started a task. The rhythm combined planning and reflection, body-doubling Power Hours and frequent accountability by text. She later said this flexibility was one of the main reasons the support worked for her.
Starting difficult tasks together. Priorities, finish times and next steps were written down rather than held in her head. For the personal administration she had been avoiding, we did not stop at talking about why it felt difficult. Body doubling meant staying alongside her while she started the paperwork and moved it towards completion.
Making boundaries easier to hold. She experimented with protected administration and thinking time, space for emergencies, fewer back-to-back appointments, clearer response times and referring work on when the diary was full. Keeping the work phone separate also made time away from work more possible. These changes reduced the number of boundaries she had to create from scratch in a difficult moment.
Preparing for clearer conversations. We prepared for an appraisal by clarifying what the employee was responsible for, where work was being handed back and what needed to change. The focus was on asking direct questions, listening to her response, and ending with clear expectations and agreed actions.
Breaking a large decision into steps. Rather than trying to settle a complicated business question in one leap, she gathered evidence, checked the finances, spoke to people, took legal advice and set a decision date. The decision still carried uncertainty, but the thinking now had somewhere to go.
Creating space to think. Later sessions explored her tendency to catastrophise and then try to push the thoughts away. Instead, she experimented with allowing them into a safe, time-limited space. Some worries contained useful information; others needed to be acknowledged without being allowed to fill the whole day.
The same approach sits behind our 12-week ADHD leadership coaching programme, shaped each time around what the person in front of us actually needs.
What changed
Over several months, changes began to appear in ordinary moments: a client request she did not automatically accept, an evening when she finished at five, a weekend off work, a task she returned to her employee, and personal administration that finally got done. None of those moments transformed the whole pattern on its own. Together, they showed that a different response was becoming more possible.
She took real time away from work. In September she went a whole weekend without checking the work phone and came back feeling rested. In December she finished at five and did not log back on, moving or referring clients she could not fit in before Christmas. Over Christmas she did no work apart from one call she felt she had to take. Months after the sessions paused, she reported taking most Fridays off.
Saying no became more possible. She declined a request she would previously have absorbed, closed parts of her diary before leave, let her administrator answer the phone and updated her terms. One client call that had previously lasted nearly 90 minutes was completed in under 30. She did not find every boundary easy, but she was practising allowing somebody to wait or hear no without immediately undoing it.
She had a clearer conversation with her employee. When a team call was going nowhere, she ended it, explained what it was costing her in time and returned a task that had been handed back. She arranged to continue when the conversation could be more useful. Afterwards, she described herself as ‘firm but fair’ and said she saw more proactive behaviour almost straight away.
Personal administration stopped following her around. Body doubling and accountability helped her complete claims and paperwork that had been sitting for a long time. Finishing them resolved the practical problem and eased the guilt that had been attached to not having done them.
She described a wider personal change. In her written reference, she said the coaching helped her make significant business decisions and move towards self-acceptance and self-confidence. She described the period after diagnosis as chaotic and said she had moved towards ‘some form of calm and clarity’.
Taken together, these moments suggested that other people’s urgency was no longer deciding everything by default. She was beginning to find more ways to pause, say no, hand responsibility back, rest and change her mind when new information emerged.
A realistic view of change
This remained difficult work. There were still late nights, periods of hyperfocus, missed lunches and recovery activities, and experiments that did not happen as planned. Saying no could still bring guilt. A difficult week did not mean that the earlier changes had disappeared, but it often meant the support or the experiment needed adjusting.
The strongest indication of change is the repetition. Across different situations, she made choices that had previously felt very difficult: finishing work, declining requests, completing personal administration, speaking more clearly and giving responsibility back. The pattern had not vanished, but she had more ways of responding to it.
In her own words
“I feel like 6–7 months of working with Alison in this way entirely turned my life around, professionally and personally, from a chaotic time after diagnosis to some form of calm and clarity.
The body doubling sessions were, for someone with ADHD, extremely valuable, as I am easily overwhelmed by ‘life admin’ and paperwork and end up distracted and swamped. She helped me focus on what needed to be done, making claims and moving things forward, which was a very practical solution to some of my issues.
Alison was always non-judgemental and worked with me to a place of self-acceptance and self-confidence, with a final result of me making some big business decisions.”
Business owner, regulated professional-services sectorThis coaching was funded through Access to Work. Identifying details have been generalised; quotations have only minor spelling and punctuation edits.
If you recognise yourself in any of this, our ADHD leadership coaching programme is usually where this work starts.
For employers and L&D
For a similar employer-funded engagement, we would agree the desired outcomes and a small number of measures at the beginning, supported by opening and closing conversations with the sponsor. The coaching itself would remain confidential, while the leader and sponsor could review progress against what they had agreed.
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