Individual Coaching
What a coaching session
actually looks like
One of the most common reasons people hesitate before enquiring about coaching is not knowing what they are signing up for. This page answers that honestly — what happens in a session, how a block of six sessions is structured, and what to expect from the experience.
Gemma Pezzack
Beyond Linear
Individual Coaching
Gemma Pezzack
Founder, Beyond Linear · ADHD Coach · Late-diagnosed at 40
Before someone commits to coaching — or even to an initial conversation — they deserve to know what they are walking into. Not a vague promise about transformation, but a clear, honest description of what actually happens.
So this is that. A walkthrough of a typical session, a map of what a six-session block tends to move through, and an honest account of what clients often say about the experience.
The shape of a single session
Every session is 60 minutes. That time has a consistent structure — not because rigidity is the point, but because a predictable shape actually frees up cognitive space. When you know how the hour runs, you spend less energy orienting and more energy on the work itself.
The structure is a guide, not a contract. If something significant has happened in the week and the session needs to flex around it, it does. What stays constant is the intention of each part.
5
mins
Check-in
How has the week been — honestly? Not a polished summary. A real account of where you are arriving from. This sets the tone for what the session needs to be.
10
mins
Review of actions from last session
What did we agree to try? What happened? This is not an accountability audit — it is an honest look at what worked, what didn't, and what that tells us. Nothing here is a failure. Everything is information.
30
mins
Main focus — exploration and coaching
The heart of the session. This might be working on a specific challenge, exploring a pattern that keeps showing up, reframing a long-held story, or going deeper on something from the previous week. The direction is shaped by what you bring and what the work needs.
10
mins
Tools or strategies
Where relevant, this is when a specific tool or approach is introduced — something practical to take away and experiment with before the next session. Not every session will include a new tool. Sometimes the work of the session is the tool.
5
mins
Actions and close
What are you taking away? Actions are small, specific, and chosen by you — not assigned. The close includes a brief reflection: what landed, what felt useful, what you are leaving with.
A note on how sessions feel
Sessions are warm and non-judgemental — but they are not soft. The work is real, and at times it will be challenging. What makes that safe is that the challenge always comes from a place of genuine understanding and care, not from pressure or expectation. You set the pace. You decide what we go into and how deep. The coach's job is to hold the space and ask the questions that help you think more clearly — not to tell you what to do.
The tone of the work
If you have spent years in environments that were high-pressure, judgemental, or simply not built for how your brain works, a coaching session can feel disorienting at first — in a good way. People frequently say that being understood so quickly was not what they expected.
Practical and action-oriented
Reflective and exploratory
The coaching conversation is not an extension of a diagnosis
If you have recently been through a clinical assessment process, you may have gained important clarity, language, or validation around experiences that previously felt difficult to explain. Coaching offers a different kind of space — one grounded in curiosity, reflection, and collaboration.
Rather than focusing on classification or measurement, coaching explores how you work, what matters to you, and what supports meaningful change in your life. The questions asked are not about defining who you are, but about helping you better understand yourself and move forward with greater awareness and agency.
You are approached as a whole person, not simply a case to be solved.
What clients say surprises them
How quickly they feel understood
Most clients arrive expecting to spend several sessions explaining themselves. The shared lived experience means that context arrives faster — and the work can begin sooner.
The practical alongside the emotional
ADHD coaching and therapy are different things — and for many people, complementary rather than alternatives. Coaching does not diagnose, treat, or work with trauma. What it does is work with where you are now and where you want to get to — practically, collaboratively, and without judgement. If you are working with a therapist or psychiatrist, coaching can sit alongside that work rather than replace it.
Permission to do things differently
Many clients have spent years trying to operate like everyone else and wondering why it costs so much. Coaching offers something different: a genuine invitation to build systems that actually fit.
That they are not alone in how they think
The experience of realising that the contradictions, the exhaustion, the gap between capability and cost — that these are shared, and that they have a name — is significant for many people. Sometimes that happens in the first session.
A block of six sessions
Sessions can be taken as an ongoing open-ended relationship, or structured as a block. A six-session block has a natural arc — a beginning, a middle, and a point of consolidation.
This is an illustration only
What follows is an example of how a block of six sessions may be structured — not a fixed programme or rigid script. Every coaching relationship is different. The focus, pace, and depth of every session are shaped entirely by the individual coachee and what they bring. This arc is a starting point, not a timetable.
Session one
Understanding your neurotype and how it shows up
The first session is about orientation — yours and mine. We explore how your ADHD neurotype manifests across your life: at work, in relationships, in the patterns you've noticed but perhaps never had language for. We begin building a shared understanding of what we're working with, and why it looks the way it does. This session often brings a significant sense of relief for clients — the recognition that the contradictions they've been carrying make sense.
Neurotype mapping
Pattern recognition
Goal setting
Session two
The inner critic — identifying the patterns and their origins
The inner critic is often the loudest voice in the room — and for many late-diagnosed adults, it has had decades of unchallenged material to work with. In this session we begin to name it: what it says, when it says it, where those messages came from. Understanding the critic is the first step to turning down its volume and starting to build something more useful in its place.
Inner critic
Narrative origins
Reframing
Session three
Reframing and the Brag Bag
With the critic identified, we begin actively challenging the stories it tells. This is where reframing becomes practical — replacing generalised self-criticism with specific, evidenced, honest alternatives. We build your Brag Bag: a living record of positive feedback, milestone moments, proof of progress, little wins, and lessons learned. Something to return to when the critic gets loud and you need evidence of who you actually are.
Brag Bag
Reframing
Inner champion
Session four
Executive function and practical strategies for work
This session gets practical. We look at the specific areas of executive function that most affect your working life — planning, task initiation, time perception, emotional regulation, follow-through — and we build personalised strategies around them. These are not generic productivity hacks. They are built around how you actually function, what your environment looks like, and what you are realistically trying to achieve.
Executive function
Task initiation
Time perception
Practical strategies
Session five
Burnout, energy, and sustainable patterns
Burnout and ADHD have a specific relationship that most performance conversations never name. This session addresses it directly: why burnout arrives even when things look successful on the outside, what the ADHD-specific pathways to exhaustion are, and how to build patterns of work and rest that account for how your nervous system actually operates — not the version that should theoretically cope with everything.
Burnout
Energy management
Masking cost
Sustainable routines
Session six
Reflection, consolidation, and what comes next
The final session of the block is a deliberate pause. We look back at what has shifted — in understanding, in behaviour, in how you are talking to yourself. We consolidate the tools that have been useful and set aside the ones that weren't. We look at your Brag Bag and read it together. And we consider what comes next: whether to continue with a second block, move to occasional sessions, or finish with a clear sense of what you are taking forward.
Reflection
Consolidation
Progress review
Next steps
A note on flexibility
This arc is a guide, not a guarantee. Real coaching is responsive — to what you bring each week, to what the work reveals, to what turns out to matter most. If session four needs to be spent on something that emerged in session three, that is what we do. The arc gives us direction. It does not give us a timetable we are obliged to follow.
What coaching is — and isn’t
Before or after a six-session block, clients sometimes ask for a clear, direct summary of how coaching differs from other kinds of support. This is it.
✓ ADHD coaching is
✗ ADHD coaching isn’t
Practical
Clinical therapy
Collaborative
Judgemental
Future-focused
Focused only on the past
Structured support
Generic productivity advice
ADHD-informed
“Just try harder” advice
Flexible systems
Perfectionism
Sustainable routines
Rigid one-size-fits-all methods
Accountability & experimentation
Shame or criticism
Strengths-based
Problem-focused only
Confidential
Shared without consent
How the coach shows up
Unconditional positive regard
You are accepted and valued as you are — regardless of how the week went or how much progress you feel you have made. There is no conditional acceptance based on performance or output.
Conditional on performance or progress
Client-led
You set the direction. The coach has no agenda for where you should get to — only a commitment to helping you get there on your own terms.
Curious, not diagnostic
You are approached with genuine curiosity, not categorisation. The coaching conversation is not an extension of your diagnosis. You are not a case to be solved.
Categorising or labelling
Coaching is unregulated in the UK. Beyond Linear is committed to working within recognised professional and ethical frameworks.
The goal of a six-session block is not to fix you. It is to leave you with a clearer, more honest, more useful account of who you are — and a set of tools built specifically for how you work.
Ready to find out if this is right for you?
An initial conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Tell me where you are and we'll work out together whether coaching is the right next step.
Start a conversation
