Life Skills Advocate - Executive Function Coaching

At Life Skills Advocate, we provide person-centred coaching for neurodivergent individuals ages 14 through adulthood, helping them develop essential executive functioning skills like time management, organization, and task prioritization.

Combining lived experience with professional expertise, our coaches create a supportive, judgment-free space where clients can also strengthen life skills such as self-advocacy and effective communication.

Whether navigating school, work, or life transitions, we’re here to help clients and families move from feeling overwhelmed to achieving meaningful, sustainable progress.

Life Skills Advocate is a US-based executive functioning coaching service, headquartered in the Seattle area but working with clients across the country and internationally through remote sessions. Coaching is aimed at neurodivergent teenagers from around age fourteen through to adults, and covers three connected areas of life: school, work, and daily living. Rather than teaching executive functioning as an abstract set of concepts, coaches work alongside clients through real, current challenges — a messy weekly schedule, an unstarted assignment, a stalled work task — using those moments to surface what is actually getting in the way and to build workable routines from there.

The organisation was founded in 2019 by Chris Hanson, a special educator with over a decade of classroom teaching experience and more than thirty years of his own lived experience of ADHD. Hanson has described wanting to build the kind of support he wished he had had earlier in life, having seen how unsupported executive functioning difficulties compound over time into problems at work, in relationships, and for mental health. That personal starting point shapes the way the service is pitched: coaching is framed as client-centred and shame-free, with an explicit focus on structure and predictability rather than on correcting or normalising behaviour. Hanson has since built out a wider team, and the practice also produces its own resources, including a workbook on executive functioning that the site says has sold several thousand copies.

The coaching model itself is built around the working relationship rather than a fixed curriculum. The site draws on the idea that the relationship between coach and client is one of the biggest drivers of change, and structures sessions accordingly — length and frequency are adapted to the person, which can mean short, frequent check-ins as easily as longer weekly sessions. Between sessions, clients can reach their coach by text or email for on-the-spot accountability, which the organisation presents as a standard part of the service rather than an add-on. Several of the coaches, including Hanson, describe their own neurodivergence as part of what informs their practice, positioning the coaching relationship as one built on recognition rather than observation from the outside.

A consistent thread through the site’s description of its own approach is an eventual move towards independence: coaches build a plan for gradually stepping back as a client’s own systems and self-understanding take hold, rather than fostering an open-ended dependency on the coach. This sits alongside a stated wariness of scaling the business at the expense of the people using it, which the organisation contrasts with a more conventional growth-first service model. In practice this shows up as flexible arrangements around billing and session structure, built around what a particular client needs rather than a single standard package.

Because Life Skills Advocate began as an in-person service in the Seattle area, it retains that local, in-home and community-based option for clients nearby, alongside the remote coaching that now makes up the bulk of its reach. UK readers should note that this is a US organisation, so anyone enquiring from the UK would be working with a remote coach across time zones and within a US-based practice, rather than a locally regulated coaching service. There is no indication on the site of any clinical, diagnostic, or behavioural-modification aim — the offer is coaching support for executive functioning skills, delivered by coaches who describe drawing on their own neurodivergent experience, working with clients on the practical, everyday mechanics of school, work, and life rather than on changing who they are.