Some coaches teach you how to lead a team, but Lynda Hoffman teaches you how to lead your own brain first, then everything else follows. Based in Montreal and working with clients around the world, Lynda is an ICF Master Certified Coach who has built her practice around a simple but often overlooked idea: high performance is not about willpower or strategy, it’s about how your mind processes, plans, and executes. For senior leaders who feel like they are working harder than ever and still falling short of their own expectations, that perspective can change everything.
What Lynda Hoffman Does for Executive Leaders
Lynda’s executive coaching practice centers on what she calls executive functioning, the brain-based skills that translate intention into action. She works with C-suite executives, senior professionals, and business owners who are technically excellent at their jobs but sense a gap between what they know and what they consistently do.
A significant part of her practice is dedicated to ADHD coaching for executives, an area where she has become a recognized voice. She holds a Certified Brain Coach credential and is a member in good standing of the Canadian ADHD Awareness Alliance (CADDRA). She has been invited to speak at international conferences on the topic, and she recently ran a paid workshop, Protect Your Thinking Time, for lawyers with ADHD, showing how specifically she tailors her expertise to high-stakes professions.
Her coaching is delivered virtually, through structured six-month and one-year packages. Both include three sessions a month, unlimited email support between sessions, and a personalized Success Plan clients use to track their progress. Clients enrolled in the one-year package also receive access to her twelve-part ADHD master class. It is a format built for people who want rigor and accountability, not just a friendly weekly chat.
A Career Built on Understanding How the Mind Works
Lynda did not arrive at coaching by accident. She holds a political science degree from McGill University, earned with distinction, and she has said she still lights up recalling the hours she spent studying constitutional law, advocacy, and human rights. Before coaching, she served as a Director at a private college in Montreal, where she built policies and procedures to support students at high risk of academic failure and personally recruited, trained, and supervised a team of learning coaches using a clinical framework, according to her About page.
That early work with struggling students planted the seed for everything that followed. Her formal coach training began at Concordia University in Montreal and has continued for years with senior coaches across the US and Canada. She has completed the Immunity to Change program at Harvard, studied mindfulness under Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, and earned a certification as an educational kinesiologist, credentials she has gathered specifically to serve her clients on a deeper level.
Her connection to ADHD coaching is not only professional. She has parented children with ADHD, advocated for them with schools and doctors who did not always understand how to help, and supported her spouse of forty years through his own late-in-life ADHD diagnosis, as described on her ADHD coaching page. She has also spent fifteen years being coached herself by senior coaches, an experience she says changed her life when nothing else could. That lived experience, layered on top of her clinical and academic training, is part of what makes her so credible to the executives who show up doubting themselves. She writes plainly about that shared ground on her homepage: she knows what it feels like to engage with herself in new ways and see herself “doing what I never thought I could do.”
On her About page, she puts it even more directly: “I know what it’s like to feel lost.” That single sentence does a lot of work. It tells prospective clients she is not coaching from a theoretical distance. She has been in the wobble herself, and she built a career out of finding her way through it.
Her Coaching Philosophy: Love, Curiosity, and the Courage to Look Inward
Lynda’s coaching style is best described as evidence-based and data-informed, but delivered through warm, conversational dialogue rather than rigid frameworks. Her Leadership Coach Directory profile categorizes her decision-making approach as communal and collective, and her growth philosophy as focused on the long term rather than quick fixes. That combination shows up clearly in her writing and in how she describes the work itself.
On her executive coaching page, she is candid about what the work actually requires: “Executive coaching is vulnerable work.” She goes on to explain that she knows this from personal experience, not just observation. Clients reach into who they think they are, who they want to be, and who they actually discover themselves to be along the way.
That vulnerability is only useful, in her view, if it happens inside a relationship built on genuine care. In one of her most personal essays, on the importance of love in executive coaching, she names the core belief driving her entire practice: “the most transformative force in leadership is love.” She defines that love as a deep commitment to a client’s well-being as a whole person, not just their output. In the same piece, she describes her actual practice: spending significant time with a prospective client before agreeing to work together, listening without judgment for what is said and unsaid, offering unwavering support, and delivering honest feedback with empathy rather than avoidance. It is a philosophy that rejects the old-school, tough-love model of executive coaching in favor of something more human, without losing any of the rigor.
The Skill Behind Every Other Leadership Skill
If there is one idea Lynda returns to again and again, it is metacognition, or thinking about your own thinking. In a recent piece on her blog, she opens with a moment from a real coaching session. An executive client with ADHD had made a costly decision, one that cost his company money and damaged its reputation. When Lynda asked what questions he had asked himself before making the call, he told her: “Questions? I don’t ask myself questions. Should I?”
That exchange, detailed in her article Metacognition: The Skill that Changes Everything for Executives with ADHD, became the anchor for one of her core methodologies. She argues that before a leader can prioritize, delegate, or make a strong strategic call, they first need awareness of how they are thinking in the moment, not just what they are thinking about. Weak metacognition, she explains, tends to sound like statements: “The team has 30 days to complete this project.” Strong metacognition sounds like questions: “What does the team need to complete this project in 30 days?” She trains clients to catch themselves mid-statement and convert it into a question, creating a small pause between impulse and action.
She backs this up with a story about a client who rated her time management at zero out of ten when they started working together. The client could not bring herself to follow up with valuable contacts and would avoid them entirely, then feel ashamed about it. Her breakthrough came when she stopped treating her planner as a chore and started treating it as a tool, asking herself simple questions before every task: when she wanted to follow up, what might get in her way, and what she would need to get started easily. By the end of their year together, she rated her own time management a perfect ten. It is a small, specific story, and that specificity is exactly why it lands with the high-achieving, skeptical executives Lynda tends to attract.
Whole Person Coaching for Lasting Change
Lynda calls her broader approach holistic executive coaching, and she is explicit that it goes beyond typical leadership training. In a recent article, she describes coaching the mind, body, and spirit together rather than isolating career goals from mental clarity, emotional health, and physical well-being. As she puts it, everything about a client becomes the material for the work: “Everything about you becomes the curriculum.”
This is where her academic training in Immunity to Change and her mindfulness study under Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield clearly show up in practice. She does not separate a leader’s inner calm from their outer performance. In her framing, an executive who learns to manage stress and self-doubt does not just feel better personally; they make sharper decisions, communicate more clearly, and build stronger relationships with their teams. It is a long game by design, matching the long-term growth orientation reflected in her coaching profile.
What Clients Say
The proof, as always, is in the outcomes clients describe. One client, a director, said she had felt like she was drowning in procrastination, poor time management, and imposter syndrome before working with Lynda, and now uses her time fully instead of feeling like it works against her, according to testimonials on Lynda’s website. Another, a lawyer, called the experience a game changer and said Lynda gave her tools she never received growing up with undiagnosed ADHD. A business owner described Lynda’s knowledge base as profound and said he consistently left sessions feeling truly seen, something he noted is rare for adults who discover their ADHD later in life.
One especially memorable line of praise comes from Patricia Regan, Director of Strategic Alignment, who summed up Lynda’s style this way: “Lynda is like a business analyst for the soul!” It is a fitting description. Lynda pairs analytical rigor with genuine emotional depth, a combination that shows up in her professional community as well. In a LinkedIn post reflecting on peer coaching groups she facilitates through TEC Canada, she wrote about what makes honest feedback possible in the first place: “Without safety, feedback stays polite.” It is a small line, but it captures how she thinks about leadership development at every level, whether it is a one-on-one client relationship or a room full of CEOs.
How to Work With Lynda Hoffman
Executives who recognize themselves in this profile, the high performers who sense a gap between what they know and what they consistently execute, can reach Lynda Hoffman directly through the following channels:
- Lynda Hoffman’s Leadership Coach Directory Profile
- Coaching Website
- Book a 15-Minute Information Call
- Email: info@lyndahoffman.com
