Accountability coaching works because it matches how support is delivered to what someone is actually struggling with. Monthly coaching sessions are common, and they can be genuinely useful for insight, for stepping back and seeing the shape of a problem clearly. But if the struggle is with doing rather than understanding, a month between sessions leaves too much room for things to slip.
Rebuilding the structure that’s disappeared
We structure our accountability coaching differently. One longer session to begin, then a short session every week, twenty to thirty minutes, to plan, prioritise and review. What got done last week. What the plan is for this one. It sounds simple, and it is, but the point isn’t to add more meetings to somebody’s calendar.
The point is to replace structure that used to exist and quietly fell away. We see this most clearly with people finishing a PhD, where the timetable, the regular check-ins, the supervisor expecting something by a certain day, all disappear at once. For anyone whose executive function was leaning on that external structure without fully realising it, losing it isn’t a small adjustment. It changes how the whole week runs.
This is close to what we meant when we wrote about the knowing-doing gap: knowing what you need to do and actually doing it are different skills, and the second one often depends on structure you didn’t build yourself. Accountability coaching supplies that structure deliberately, on a cycle short enough that nothing drifts too far off course, until you’ve built enough of your own that you no longer need to borrow ours.
If any of this sounds familiar, we’d be glad to talk through what accountability coaching could look like for you.
If this sounds familiar at work, our ADHD leadership coaching helps leaders and managers build support around what gets in the way.
