The Honest Zero: A Progress Measure ADHD Coaches Can Use Without a License

I went looking for a progress measure an ADHD coach could use without a license, and the best thing I found was built for stroke rehabilitation.

Search goal attainment scale template and you get a children’s therapy form from Canada, an Australian rehab blank, a speech-therapy blog. Thirty US searches a month, nothing about ADHD on the page.

Goal attainment scaling is a method rather than an instrument, which is why a coach can pick it up: nobody sells it, and nothing in it is off limits.

The measurement gap has a fix nobody in coaching reads

A 2026 survey of ADHD coaches put progress monitoring at 44.8%, and named no instrument any of them use.

I don’t read that as laziness. The good measures are locked. A screener gives you a symptom score and little else, and the functional scales that would do the job forbid the edits a coaching goal needs, so coaches fall back on asking how the month went, a decent question and a hopeless measure.

Goal attainment scaling escaped that by never being a product. Bard-Pondarré and colleagues, in the Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine, call it “a heterogeneous group of methodologies, including many variations and lack of consensus on high quality GAS,” which they mean as a warning to researchers and which reads, to a coach, as an invitation.

Before the work starts, you and the client pick a goal and write five outcomes for it: the result you expect, one step better and one much better, one step worse and one much worse. Each has to be concrete enough that a third party could tell which happened. At review you pick the line that matches; a published formula turns those picks into one score, and Berry’s 2023 version ships a calculator.

It is not exotic in ADHD research: a 2025 trial of brain stimulation in adults used it as the participant-centred outcome. It is exotic in coaching, where across 10,326 pieces of writing from 316 coaches I pulled last year, the phrase shows up once.

Zero means your prediction held

Google suggests a fourth question under that search: what does a score of zero mean?

Zero is not the starting line. It is the result you said you expected when you wrote the ladder, so a client who finishes at the middle rung did exactly what you forecast. That is a good week for your forecasting and says nothing about the coaching.

Which loads the method onto one line written months earlier, by you, in a hurry. Write that rung soft and every client clears it, the caseload glows, and the score means nothing. The literature worries about the same thing: the method inflates whenever the person writing the scale also scores it.

Call that middle line the honest zero: the rung you would show the client before the work starts, not the one you would defend afterwards. Write it with them, date it, leave it alone.

Where the number stops working

It does not travel between people, so averaging a caseload gives a number about nothing.

It settles nothing larger. No randomised trial shows that ADHD coaching works for adults, which is where the evidence runs thin, and a score on one goal is evidence about one person. Proven is only this: rehabilitation researchers publish systems for rating these scales’ quality. Plausible: levels written in advance beat a review run on memory. Unknown: whether it changes the client’s year.

One objection is serious: some neurodiversity-affirming practitioners hold that measuring a whole-first mind with part-first instruments is itself a harm, and every scale on the shelf has to answer that. This one answers it: the client writes the levels and can throw out any that insult them.

Write the ladder in the first session. The number twelve weeks later is worth exactly as much as the rung you were willing to call expected.