Transforming Your Life With Design Thinking

The strength of coaching is partnership -- working together, you and your coach can create custom solutions for you. To do this we get curious and creative and think like UX designers. We engage in design thinking.

Design thinking is “[A] non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.” It has 5 non-linear stages: empathize (or explore), define, ideate, prototype and test (or experiment).

Design thinking is great for ADHD coaching because it emphasizes flexibility and experimentation, allows you to exercise your divergent thinking strengths, and provides structure to make convergent thinking easier. Divergent thinking is brainstorming. It’s when we “think outside the box,” connect the dots, and generate many ideas. We use convergent thinking when we narrow those ideas, select an option, and create a plan.

The empathize stage is where designers learn about their users and their desires and needs. In coaching, you are the user and the designer. As your coach, I want to understand you and help you to understand yourself better, so we start from a place of curiosity. I start coaching engagements from this place, with a first session focused on learning about your strengths and your challenges. Each session also starts from here.

The define stage is where designers synthesize the information gathered in the empathize stage. In coaching, it’s where we decide what we’ll focus on during our coaching engagement and what we’ll focus on in a session. It’s also our first place of converging, as we look at which topic is most important for the next 50 minutes, what you hope to take away from our session, and what areas we’ll need to look at to get you there. And while we start to converge here, it’s also a place of further empathy and exploration -- we may flip back and forth between the two several times in the first 10 minutes of a session.

In ideation, we go back to divergent thinking as we look at all the different ways you could approach the problem. Here we might look at how you’ve addressed similar challenges, what you’ve tried, what you want to try, how you can apply your strengths to the challenge, and how you want to feel when you’ve solved it. We may also go back to the first two stages as we learn more about the challenge.

Prototyping is where we converge on an experiment to try. This is where you pick an approach and decide how you’ll test it. I like the idea of a prototype as a reminder that the solution doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s just a quick way to get more information. You can and will design experiments that don’t work -- and you can learn even more from them than the ones that succeed.

Testing is what happens between sessions. This is where you implement your prototype and run the experiment. It’s also where you gather more information about yourself, as you see what works and where you run into unexpected resistance. We then use that information to start the next session and keep iterating through the design thinking process.

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