Anyone in Australia can call themselves an ADHD coach. There is no licence, no register, no minimum training standard. The title is free to take and plenty of people have taken it. Some of them are excellent. Some finished a weekend course last month. From the outside, their websites look nearly identical.
So if you are looking for an ADHD coach in Perth, the useful skill is knowing what to ask, because the industry has no built-in quality signal and you have to run the quality check yourself. These are the questions I would ask if I were hiring a coach for someone I cared about, and what each answer actually tells you.
Ask what their coach training was, specifically
Vague answers are the tell. “I’ve done extensive training” means nothing. You want two pieces of information: their general coach training and their ADHD-specific training. They are different things and you need both.
For general training, the closest thing coaching has to an engineering standard is the International Coaching Federation. ICF credentials come in three levels. ACC requires at least 60 hours of accredited training and 100 hours of client work. PCC requires 125 hours of training and 500 client hours. MCC requires 200 hours and 2,500 client hours. At every level, recorded sessions are assessed against a defined competency framework and there is an exam. A coach can be good without an ICF credential, but the credential is verifiable evidence that someone independent has watched them coach and judged the work competent. You can check any coach’s credential on the ICF’s public register.
ADHD-specific training is the second layer, and it matters for a mechanical reason. Generic life coaching assumes a roughly neurotypical relationship between intention and action: you clarify the goal, you commit, you follow through, and the coach holds you accountable. ADHD breaks the middle of that chain. A coach without ADHD training watches the follow-through fail and reaches for the only tool they have, which is more commitment. That is how clients end up feeling like they failed coaching on top of everything else. Ask where they trained in ADHD specifically. Programs like ADDCA in the US run for a year or more and are ICF-accredited. A weekend certificate is a different product wearing the same label.
For transparency: I hold a PCC and trained at ADDCA, where I now teach and mentor other ADHD coaches. But the point of this section is the question, not my answers to it. There are other properly trained coaches in Perth and around Australia, and the questions will find them too.
Ask whether they work with people who are not diagnosed
Coaching does not require a diagnosis, and any coach who implies otherwise is confused about what coaching is. Diagnosis gates medication and certain formal supports. It does not gate working on the patterns that brought you here. Many of my clients arrived while still on a waitlist, or after deciding assessment was not worth the cost to them.
The reason to ask this question is what the answer reveals about the coach’s model. A coach who works only with diagnosed clients may be treating coaching as a downstream medical service, which it is not. A coach who waves the question away entirely may not know where their scope ends. The answer you want acknowledges both halves: the patterns matter more than the paperwork, and there are situations where a clinician is the right next step and the coach should say so.
Ask what a session actually involves
Coaching has a reputation problem here, and the fix is to make the coach describe an ordinary Tuesday session in concrete terms. What happens in the first ten minutes. Who sets the agenda. What happens between sessions. How progress gets tracked.
The answers vary legitimately between coaches, and that is fine. What you are listening for is whether there is a structure at all. My own sessions usually start with what happened since last time, not as a compliance check but because the gap between what you planned and what occurred is where the useful data lives. From there we work on one thing properly rather than five things vaguely, and you leave with something specific to try, sized so that a bad week does not sink it. If you want the longer version, the services page describes how I structure the work. Other coaches structure it differently, and their description should be just as concrete.
Be cautious of a coach who answers this question with outcomes instead of process. “You’ll leave feeling clear and motivated” describes a mood, not a method.
Ask what it costs and what the money buys
Prices for ADHD coaching in Australia mostly sit between roughly $120 and $300 a session, with packages common because the work compounds over months rather than resolving in one conversation. Anyone charging well below that range is usually new, which is not automatically bad, and anyone well above it should be able to explain exactly why.
Two follow-up questions earn their keep. First, ask what a typical engagement length looks like and how you will both know when it is done. Open-ended coaching with no review point is a design flaw. Second, if you are employed, ask whether they have taken clients through the Employment Assistance Fund, which can fund workplace-focused ADHD coaching for eligible employees. The rules shift, so verify current details, but a coach who works with Australian professionals should at least know the scheme exists. I keep current pricing and common questions on the FAQ page so you can compare like with like.
Ask what coaching will not fix
This is the integrity question. A good coach names their limits without being pushed. Coaching does not diagnose anything, does not treat anything, and does not replace a psychologist or psychiatrist when one is needed. If you are dealing with significant depression, anxiety that has you housebound, or trauma that keeps surfacing, coaching may have a place later, but it is the wrong first tool.
Ask the coach directly: who do you not work with, and what do you do when you realise partway through that a client needs something else? A coach with no answer has not thought about it, and a coach who has never referred anyone out has either had a statistically remarkable client list or has not been watching closely.
Then ask yourself the fit question
Once the minimum bar is cleared, fit does more work than credentials. You will be telling this person about the unopened mail and the job that nearly came apart. If something in the discovery call makes you guard yourself, believe that signal, whatever the qualifications say.
The discovery call runs both directions. You are interviewing them, and a decent coach is honestly assessing whether they can help you. I have ended discovery calls by pointing someone at a different coach because the fit was wrong or the need sat outside what I do, and any coach worth hiring has done the same.
The next step
Take these questions into two or three discovery calls, including with other coaches, and compare the answers side by side. Most of us offer these calls free precisely so this comparison can happen. If one of those calls ends up being with me, come with the hard questions first. The coaches who welcome them are the ones worth shortlisting.
