The case for counting small wins
I start every coaching session the same way. I ask what's gone well since we last spoke. Big wins, small ones, funny ones. They all count.
Some people find this mildly irritating at first, and I get it. They've come to talk about the thing that's stuck, and here I am asking what went right. Fair enough. But for neurodivergent clients especially, it isn't a warm-up before the real work. It is the real work.
And no, before you ask, it's not just positive thinking in a nicer jumper. I'm not asking you to feel good about things that don't feel good. I'm asking you to notice the good things that actually happened, the ones you walked past without clocking. There are usually more of them than you'd think.
So why do they go unnoticed?
If you grew up neurodivergent, you were probably corrected a lot. Sit still. Focus. Why didn't you finish. The psychiatrist William Dodson reckons a child with ADHD hears around 20,000 more negative messages than their peers by the age of twelve. That's his estimate, not a controlled study, so take the exact number with a pinch of salt. But the direction is right, and the research on ADHD and self-esteem backs it up (Edbom et al., 2012). Spend years being told what's wrong with you and most people don't come out neutral. You come out fluent in your own faults and too often blank on your strengths. So many of my clients can list everything they got wrong this week, then go quiet when I ask what went well.
So naming wins isn't rose-tinting anything. It's fixing a scoreboard that's been rigged since primary school.
Here's the second reason, and honestly, it's the one I find fascinating, also looking at my own experience.
The usual motivational deal goes like this: grind now, feel great when it pays off in six months. For a lot of ADHD brains, that deal quietly falls apart. Not laziness. Wiring. There's a well-replicated finding called delay discounting, which is a fancy way of saying people with ADHD tend to pick a smaller reward now over a bigger one later, even when later is clearly the better bet (Marx et al., 2021). The likely culprit is dopamine. The signal that's meant to keep you pulling toward a far-off goal fades fast, so the goal loses its motivational power (Tripp and Wickens, 2008).
Sit with that for a second, because it might change how you think about motivation. A reward six months away, for this kind of brain, loses most of its pull. So small wins now aren't a consolation prize. They're the fuel. Catch one, name it, and you've handed the brain the exact thing it runs on, in the timeframe where it lands best.
There's a third thing too, quieter than the rest. Attention can be trained, and a lot of neurodivergent people have spent years training theirs to scan for the next problem. Which makes sense, if you've been caught out often enough. It's also exhausting, and it means the good stuff sails past unlogged. Asking about wins, every single time, slowly retrains that. Do it for long enough and people often start noticing in real time, not just in the room with their coach.
One client's best win one week wasn't work at all. It was a World Cup goalkeeper nobody rated keeping out one of the best teams in the world, and the lift that came with it in an otherwise tough week. Not productive. Not goal-shaped. Just a good thing, caught and kept.
And that's really the whole point. None of this is about looking on the bright side. It's about seeing the full board, when a couple of decades of correction have trained you to see half of it.
So we start with the wins. Even the small ones. Especially the small ones.
Sources
- Dodson, W. W. The "20,000 more negative messages" estimate, as cited by CHADD, Prioritize Praising Your Child with ADHD. A clinical estimate, widely quoted, not a controlled study.
- Edbom, T., Granlund, M., Lichtenstein, P., & Larsson, J. O. (2012). ADHD and self-esteem in children and adolescents. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 21(3), 141-150.
- Marx, I., Hacker, T., Yu, X., Cortese, S., & Sonuga-Barke, E. (2021). ADHD and the Choice of Small Immediate Over Larger Delayed Rewards: A Comparative Meta-Analysis. Journal of Attention Disorders.
- Tripp, G., & Wickens, J. R. (2008). Dopamine transfer deficit theory of ADHD.