Three models, a quick way to see how they fit together, and what a first session actually looks like.
Most coaching descriptions are vague on purpose — “we’ll explore your goals together” could mean almost anything. This is the specific version: the three models this practice actually draws on, how they differ, and what a first session actually follows — before you ever book a call.
Three Models, Three Different Jobs
Each model here is suited to a different kind of session. Which one fits — or which combination — is worked out together, at the start. You don’t need to arrive already knowing.
GROW
Four stages: Goal, Reality, Options, Will. This is the right structure when you already know the direction and the real work is planning how to actually get there. It starts with the goal because the goal is already clear — the session focuses on closing the gap between knowing it and doing it.
Issue in a Nutshell
Six steps: what’s not working, what you want instead, generating real options, choosing one, working out what you need, and the specific action steps. This is the right structure when something feels stuck or unclear and needs to be properly surfaced before deciding what to do about it. It starts with the issue itself, because the issue is often the hardest part to see clearly.
The Exploration Model
This model is different in kind from the other two — built specifically for late-diagnosed, self-identified, and exploring neurodivergent women, rather than adapted from a general coaching framework. It moves through three phases across the course of the engagement:
The Correct Explanation — rereading your history with the right map finally in hand.
The Actual Inventory — an honest picture of who you actually are, genuine strengths and real patterns included.
The Forward Shape — practical decisions built from that accurate self-knowledge, not the constructed version of you.
Every session inside this model runs on the same rhythm — settle and orient, the actual work, landing what you’re taking with you, a clean close — and every prompt is shaped by how your particular brain works: ADHD, autism, AuDHD, giftedness, or a combination. It exists because the same underlying mechanism — the wrong explanation, the constructed self, the cost of masking, the relief of finally being seen accurately — holds true across all of those profiles, even though it shows up differently in each.
How the three differ
GROW and Issue in a Nutshell are tools for a specific, nameable thing — a goal to plan toward, or a problem to untangle. Either can structure a single session on its own, and a session can move between them if what looked like a clear goal turns out to need more diagnostic work first.
The Exploration Model is a different kind of tool for a different kind of work: not a single problem or goal, but the ongoing work of understanding who you actually are, distinct from who you learned to perform. It’s not something you pick for one session — it’s the frame for the whole engagement.
How Your Own Wiring Shapes a Session
You don’t need a formal diagnosis for this — a good sense of your own patterns is enough to start with, and the first session will sharpen it further either way. Broadly:
- If predictability, clarity, and sensory environment matter a great deal to you, and ambiguity is a genuine obstacle rather than a minor inconvenience — sessions lean on structure and consistency.
- If your attention runs on interest more than importance, and the hardest part is usually follow-through and admin — sessions lean toward naming the smallest possible next step, not the whole plan.
- If both of the above are true, and they sometimes pull in opposite directions — wanting things predictable, and also finding too much predictability deadening — that tension is often named directly and worked with, not resolved away.
- If depth, meaning, and being genuinely challenged are central for you, with under-use of your actual capability as a recurring theme — sessions make room for that depth rather than rushing past it.
These aren’t boxes to sort yourself into before you arrive. They’re a rough sense of what shapes the conversation — confirmed together, not assumed, and revisited as often as it needs to be.
Business Coaching or Personal Coaching
All three models work for either. A business-focused session weighs business impact and business stakes at each step — what a decision costs or gains the business specifically. A personal or life-focused session uses the same model and the same attention to how your brain works, with the stakes being personal — a relationship, a daily pattern, a decision about disclosure, rather than a business outcome. The model that fits doesn’t change; what changes is which stakes the session is actually weighing.
What a First Session Actually Looks Like
- A brief check-in on energy and how you’re arriving today — because this genuinely affects what kind of session is possible, and skipping it produces a worse session, not a faster one.
- Naming which model fits, together — confirmed, not assumed.
- Working through the actual steps of that model, at your pace, with room to go deep where it matters and move quickly where it doesn’t.
- Leaving with something concrete: a specific, small next action, a defined completion marker, and a realistic timeline — not a vague sense of having “talked it through.”
You don’t need to have this figured out before reaching out. The first conversation is where the actual fit gets confirmed — not something you need to arrive with already solved.
Not Better. Not Broken. Just Different. And that is okay.
Not Broken, Just Different is a coaching practice for late-diagnosed, self-identified, and exploring neurodivergent women — because understanding changes everything. If this sounds like what you’re looking for, get in touch.
