Executive Functioning: How I Think About It as a Coach

The rider, the elephant, and the path – an executive function coaching framework

Do you know what you should be doing, but find yourself not doing it anyway? Do you make plans that feel solid on Sunday night, but unravel by Tuesday? Do you wonder why some days flow easily while others feel like you’re pushing a boulder uphill?

If so, you’re not dealing with a character flaw. You may be dealing with an executive functioning challenge. That’s where executive function coaching can help.

What is executive functioning?

Executive functioning refers to a set of mental skills that allow us to control our thoughts, emotions, and actions in the service of our goals. Think of it as the brain’s management system — the part that helps you plan, prioritize, get started, stay on track, and adjust when things don’t go as planned. In other words, executive functioning enables successful self-regulation. 

Researchers generally organize executive functioning around three core mental processes:

Response inhibition — the capacity to pause before acting, resist impulses, and give yourself time to evaluate a situation before reacting to it.

Working memory — the ability to hold information in mind while performing complex tasks, and to draw on past experience to inform present decisions and future planning.

Cognitive flexibility — the ability to shift gears when circumstances change, revise plans in the face of obstacles, and recover from mistakes without getting stuck.

These three core skills, in turn, support a whole cluster of higher-order abilities: planning and prioritization, time management, task initiation, sustained attention, goal-directed persistence, self-awareness, emotional regulation, and stress tolerance. Together, they determine how well we can translate intentions into actions.

This is why executive functioning difficulties show up across such a wide range of situations — from procrastination and time blindness, to difficulty with transitions, to feeling overwhelmed by decisions, to struggling with follow-through. It is also why ADHD, which is at its core an executive functioning deficit, touches so many different areas of life, and presents itself so differently in different people.

A helpful metaphor: the rider, the elephant, and the path

Understanding executive functioning at the theoretical level is useful. However, in coaching, I need a framework that helps us quickly identify where a problem is actually coming from and what kind of intervention might help. For that, I love a metaphor introduced by psychologist Jonathan Haidt and further developed by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch:

Imagine a rider sitting on top of an elephant, traveling down a path.

The rider represents the rational, planning mind — the part of you that knows what you want to achieve, can think long-term, and makes deliberate decisions. The Rider can see further ahead than the Elephant and needs to give clear directions.

The elephant represents the emotional, habitual, instinctive part of the mind — the part that is driven by immediate rewards and discomfort, by feelings and physical states, by the pull of old habits. The Elephant is enormously powerful. Even when the Rider has a good plan, if the Elephant isn’t on board, the Elephant usually wins.

The path represents everything in the environment and context that makes the desired behavior easier or harder — the physical setup of your workspace, your schedule, your tools, the people around you, the structures and defaults you’ve put in place.

This maps remarkably well onto executive functioning. The Rider is the executive control system: planning, self-monitoring, reasoning. The Elephant is the motivational and emotional substrate that either powers the Rider’s goals or undermines them. The Path is the external scaffolding we can engineer to support the whole system.

When someone is stuck, I find it helpful to explore three questions:

• Does the Rider know exactly where to go?
• Is the Elephant motivated?
• Is the Path cleared and easy to follow?

The answers tell us where to focus.

How I use this in executive function coaching

What I appreciate about this framework is that it resists the temptation to put all the work on willpower, which is essentially asking the Rider to overpower the Elephant indefinitely. That strategy rarely works. Instead, the framework opens up three different levels at which we can intervene, and many different tools at each level.

Directing the rider

If the Rider is unclear or overwhelmed, we work on clarity and planning. This might include:

• Defining specific next steps (not vague intentions, but concrete actions)
• Writing implementation intentions: “When X happens, I will do Y”
• Keeping logs and journals to identify patterns: finding what already works, and doing more of it
• Testing assumptions about time (such as challenging chronic underestimation, which is extremely common in ADHD)

Motivating the elephant

If clarity isn’t the problem — you know what to do, you just can’t seem to make yourself do it — we work on motivation, emotion, and habit. This might include:

• Building in more frequent and immediate rewards for progress (not just at the finish line)
• Using mental contrasting and visualization of consequences (research by Gabriele Oettingen shows this is more effective than pure positive thinking)
• Building routines that eventually become automatic, so the Elephant doesn’t have to be re-persuaded every day
• Involving other people: accountability partners, body doubling, collaboration, shared documents

Shaping and clearing the path

Often the most powerful interventions are environmental ones. These are changes to your surroundings that make the desired behavior easier without requiring constant effort. This might include:

• Choice architecture: designing strong defaults so that doing the right thing requires the least friction
• Barrier analysis: identifying what is making the desired behavior difficult and systematically removing those obstacles
• Pre-commitment: constraining your future choices now, while motivation is high
• Habit stacking: attaching new behaviors to existing ones so they get carried along automatically
• Habit loop modification: working with the cue-routine-reward structure of existing habits rather than fighting them

Connecting rider and elephant — or targeting all three at once

Some of the most powerful interventions work at more than one level simultaneously. Clarifying your values and restating your goals as concrete actions helps connect the Rider’s abstract intentions to the Elephant’s emotional engagement. Motivational interviewing does the same. Mindfulness and acceptance-based exercises can reduce the resistance that often keeps the Rider and Elephant fighting each other.

And some practical tools — like a well-designed calendar with labeled reminders, or physical cues placed strategically in your environment — work on all three levels at once: they give the Rider direction, cue the Elephant into action, and clear the path simultaneously.

What this may look like: the troubleshooting process in practice

When a client comes to me struggling with procrastination, overwhelm, or difficulty following through, I don’t assume I already know where the problem is. A good troubleshooting process starts with an open question: is this a Rider problem, an Elephant problem, or a Path problem? Usually it’s some combination, and often it’s in a different place than we might first assume.

Someone who believes they “just need more discipline” might turn out to have a Path problem: their environment is set up in a way that makes distraction almost inevitable. Someone who believes they “just need a better system” might turn out to have an Elephant problem: the system is fine, but the emotional cost of starting feels too high. And someone who is unclear about what they want or why it matters may have a Rider problem — not laziness, but a lack of sufficiently clear direction and purpose.

But one of the most useful things this framework reveals is that the fix doesn’t have to be at the same level as the problem. In particular, a well-designed Path can compensate for a lack of motivation. If getting started on something requires very little effort — the materials are right there, the next step is obvious, distractions are out of sight — you may not need to feel motivated at all. You just begin. This is why environmental design is often more reliable than trying to generate enthusiasm on demand. Motivation is unpredictable; a cleared path is always there.

Once we identify some promising tactics on this basis, we experiment. I treat the whole process as data collection rather than pass/fail. If a strategy doesn’t work the first time, that’s useful information. It tells us something about what we might adjust.

This experimental approach is inherently non-judgmental and helps to quiet the inner critic. It’s harder to feel like a failure when you’re in the mindset of a curious scientist running an experiment.

A free handout you can download

I’ve put together a visual summary of this framework, including the full list of executive functioning skills, and concrete examples of interventions at each level. It’s a handout I often use with clients as a starting point for our work together.

[→ Download the Executive Functioning Framework Handout (PDF)]

The handout includes a selected sources and further reading list if you want to dig deeper into any of the underlying research.

Executive function coaching in Portland, OR and online

If you can relate to any of this — whether you’ve been diagnosed with ADHD, suspect you might have it, or simply want to optimize your executive functioning — I’d love to talk. Even if you’re a naturally strong self-regulator, there is always room for increased mastery, and the same tools apply.

My coaching draws on research in neuropsychology, behavioral economics, and habit research to develop strategies that are tailored to your specific profile, goals, and preferences. I work with adults in Portland, Oregon and online across the US.

→ Schedule a first session or reach out with questions

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR