After two years of focusing full-time on growing my coach training program, I'm thinking about adding 1:1 student coaching back into my professional offerings. And when I imagine myself back in a Zoom room with a student, I can feel my stomach tighten a little alongside the thought: what if I can't actually help this student? What if I'm not good enough anymore?

Which led me to a slightly embarrassing realization: I've apparently been assessing myself based on a vague cocktail of anxiety, imposter syndrome, and vibes.

Not great, considering I literally built a rubric to help coaches do the opposite.

Here's the thing: "do I feel good enough?" is actually a terrible reflection question. It tells you how emotionally activated you are in a moment — but it doesn't tell you where your coaching skills actually are, or where you want to keep growing next.

The more useful question isn't "am I a good coach or not?" That framing goes nowhere. The better question is: where am I now, and what would intentional growth look like from here?

That's the question that led me to build a self-assessment rubric I'm calling Our Core Coaching Moves — and what I discovered when I finally used it on myself surprised me.

Think about what's happening in your working memory the moment an overwhelmed student sits down and downloads their stress to you. In the next few seconds you're simultaneously:

• Trying to figure out what they actually mean

• Deciding whether to ask a question or make an observation

• Scanning your mental library of tools

• Recalling what you know about this student's history

• Monitoring their body language

• Tracking what their parent told you in the email last week

• and more — always more

Without a structure to hold that complexity, your working memory is doing all the heavy lifting. And that's exhausting. And disorienting. And it can feel, from the inside, a lot like not being good enough.

"She had no inner wisdom about the most evidence-based study strategies waiting to be drawn out with the right empowering question. No. Instead, she had a gap. She was re-reading her textbook and calling it studying because no one had ever told her that re-reading is one of the least effective study strategies we know of. Powerful questions can't surface knowledge that isn't there yet."

Like a lot of models that come out of Western clinical psychology, the window of tolerance was developed primarily with white clients in mind. And for ADHD-wired students, a narrowed window isn't just about individual history or stress — it's about navigating a system that wasn't designed for their brain. This is what we keep asking in the Anti-Boring Learning Lab: what does the research actually say, and what do we need to update?

It happened on April 26, 2021 — the moment any coach dreams of. My student beat me to the finals conversation. Here's how 2.5 years of consistent, repeatable framework practice made that shift possible — and what it means for the students you're working with right now.

Working memory is one of the strongest predictors of academic success we have — often more so than IQ. And yet, most students are never taught how it works.

Here's the plot twist: you can't grow it. The "parking lot" is fixed.

But here's what is teachable: how to manage the traffic. One study found that students taught a single working memory strategy reached peak performance in just 2 sessions — while students who practiced harder took 40 sessions to get to the same place.

That changes everything about how — and when — we prepare students for finals.

The difference between academic coaching and executive function coaching isn't really about what happens in sessions. It's about two things: which skills are being named and intentionally developed, and the depth of scientific understanding behind those skills.

Consent in coaching isn’t about being polite or careful. It’s about capacity.

A student can be generally willing—and still not have the nervous system bandwidth for a specific strategy in a specific moment.

That’s why consent sometimes needs to be revisited, and sometimes doesn’t. The goal isn’t repetition. It’s alignment.

When consent is present, learning flows.
When it isn’t, even good ideas can land as pressure.