Jess runs a team of twelve people. She can hold a sprawling, six-month project in her head, spot the flaw in a strategy before anyone else in the room, and calm a panicking client in five minutes flat.
She also hasn’t opened her mail in three months. Her car registration expired in August. There’s a stack of forms on her kitchen counter she walks past every morning with a small, familiar jolt of dread.
Jess (a composite of people I’ve met, and maybe of you) has done everything right. She bought the planner. She tried the app, then the other app, then the paper planner again because maybe screens were the problem. She’s time-blocked, Pomodoro’d, eaten the frog, and broken big tasks into tiny steps. She even hired an executive function coach.
And for a while, it worked. Two weeks, maybe three. Then the system slid off her life like a sticker that never quite stuck.
So she drew the conclusion almost everyone draws: the strategies work, so the problem must be me.
I want to offer a different conclusion.
Executive function coaching helps plenty of people. This essay is about the ones it keeps missing. For some of the most complex minds, the strategies weren’t built for the problem they actually have. Conventional coaching treats executive function as one thing, a skill you’re missing. But for many people, getting things done depends on a whole ecosystem: their senses, their surroundings, their body, their emotions, their attention, and their creativity. Coaching that works on only one of those is like tuning one string on a guitar and wondering why the song still sounds off.
Who I mean by “complex minds”
I’m not using “complex” as a compliment. I mean people with several things going on at once.
Maybe you’re ADHD and autistic. Maybe you’re gifted and also anxious. Maybe you have chronic pain, a trauma history, sensory sensitivities, long COVID, or a nervous system that goes into shutdown when the world gets loud. Maybe you can explain quantum entanglement at a dinner party but cannot, under any circumstances, make a dentist appointment.
Most EF coaching is designed for a single-variable problem: you lack a skill, so we’ll teach it. Complex minds rarely have a single-variable problem. They have several systems interacting, sometimes helping each other and sometimes colliding.
That’s why the standard advice so often lands as *“I know what to do. I just can’t make myself do it.” *That sentence isn’t a motivation problem. It’s a sign that something other than knowledge is in the way.
5 Dimensions Conventional Executive Functioning Coaching Misses
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