Executive function (EF) is a set of brain skills. These 7 skills are what allow us to learn, work and experience life successfully. When someone struggles with EF skills, they may have difficulty staying organized, completing tasks and staying focused.
How does Executive Function Impact Your Life?
Executive functioning are skills the brain develops over time (through age 26!) through both life experience and teacher/adult support. These skills continue to get stronger, like every muscle in your body, the more you use them. Strategies exist to help certain learners who may have learning differences improve their EF skills by increasing their ability to organize, regulate and complete their work on time.
When in school, these EF skills are needed in a much more intense and increased way. Now, instead of needing only one skill for an interest-based activity, children need to apply these skills, at full force, in order to “do well” in school. So much of school success relies heavily on a child’s ability to execute these skills perfectly, long before they are fully developed.
With the help of a trained educational therapist, you can evaluate your EF skills and receive valuable support and strategies you can work on to improve your EF skills and become more successful in school and beyond.
What Are The 7 Executive Functioning Skills?
These 7 EF skills are not all or nothing. Everyone develops greater strengths in certain areas and they can change and shift over time. You do not need to have all of these skills mastered in order to be a successful student and more importantly a successful human being.
The 7 executive functioning skills are:
- Organizing, Planning, and Prioritizing
- Flexible Thinking
- Working Memory
- Emotional Regulation
- Self-Monitoring
- Self-Control
- Task Initiation
The 7 Executive Function Skills help us INTERACT!
IN – Planning, Organizing & Prioritizing
T – Thinking Flexibly
E – Memory
R – Regulate Emotions
A – Initiate Tasks
C – Control Ourselves
T – Monitor Our Behavior
Age is not a factor: some “functional adults” continue to struggle with certain EF skills well past college age, while some elementary children appear to be capable of “balancing it all” as it relates to schoolwork and behavior.
Our own life experience often helps to determine which skills are needed more than others. Some families have parents who are good at modeling and implementing routines and organizational systems, while other families can better model working memory skills and task initiation.
Evaluate Your EF Skills
As you read more about each skill, take a moment and ask yourself:
- Which skills do you feel strong and secure in?
- Which skills could you focus on and improve?
What is Organization, Planning and Prioritizing?
This skill refers to bringing order to your physical (room, house, office, etc) and mental (thoughts, ideas, dreams) space. It impacts both your school (or work) and home life. When you have order in both your physical and mental space, you feel calm and capable. Strength in these EF skills means you are able to find things you need, make a plan to complete a task or assignment, and decide what tasks are most important and in what order they need to be completed.
Prioritizing what things are most important takes practice and experience. There are a variety of strategies available to help people manage and grow in this area. Planning is something that develops through the support of a teacher or educational therapist to help you realize your own learning style and preferences to get tasks completed. Organization comes in many styles. It is important to remember color coding isn’t for everyone, and the more you can learn about yourself and your own lifestyle, the better organized you will become.
Regardless of your learning style, learning difference, or personality, everyone benefits from strengthening the skill of organizing, planning and prioritizing. It is a lifelong skill everyone continually strengthens and adapts throughout their life.
What is Flexible Thinking?
Flexible thinking can also be referred to as cognitive flexibility. It is about learning how to be more open and welcoming to thinking about a topic from different perspectives. It also refers to our ability to shift our thinking from one idea to another, even when we do not want to. The ability to transition from one task to another also relates to flexible thinking.
Oftentimes you will find yourself deeply engrossed in a topic, like ice fishing, and a few things can happen. First, you can develop a hyperfocus on the topic and being asked to take a break to complete something like a chore or homework, feels impossible. Second, you may have learned so much about ice fishing that you develop your own opinions about the best equipment and technique, that when you are discussing it with another person you begin to argue your points and feel unable to step back and take in their opinion as just as valid as your own. Third, you may struggle deeply to accept feedback from the teacher (or coach) because your thinking on the topic feels so true and solid. And finally, you struggle to find a solution as a problem arises, around your research or interactions, due to the false security you experience of holding tightly to your own thinking.
Improving flexible thinking takes time and practice. Being able to recognize your own struggles in this area of EF skills is a powerful first step. Remaining flexible is a practice you do over time. Educational therapy can help clients evaluate their own thinking and support them to become more willing to shift and open to other ideas as they arise.
What is Working Memory?
Working memory is the part of our short-term memory that can process and apply temporary information without losing track of the larger task we are trying to complete. For example, when we are reading a story our working memory has to remember what is happening in the story as we read and continually take in and apply new information, this is the foundation of reading comprehension. A person’s ability to follow multi-step directions (get out your book, turn to page 5, write a summary and answer question 2) is directly related to the strength of their working memory.
There are many creative and helpful strategies an educational therapist can provide to help children strengthen and adapt to any weakness they have with working memory. Problems with working memory tend to be more common in children with dyslexia and ADHD. To learn more about working memory click here.
What is Emotional Regulation?
Emotional regulation is the ability to feel your big feelings rise up in your body, acknowledge they are there, and wait until they come back down, before you react. This act of tolerating, managing, and accepting one’s feelings is a skill you work on over a lifetime.
Most people you encounter in your life, classroom, job, etc. struggle with this skill. Our society wants you to control your feelings, keep them to yourself but not take up time acknowledging them. So on the outside you look “controlled and regulated” but true regulation comes from tolerance and acceptance of one’s feelings. This takes practice and a great deal of patience and love for yourself.
Oftentimes the best support you can find to learn this skill is to bring your strong feelings to a trusted adult, or more regulated person, such as an educational therapist. The calm energy and regulated state they provide can help you to feel safe tolerating your feelings. You will also be more willing to accept your emotions and be more likely to talk afterwards, about how to problem solve the next steps. A regulated, trained person is like an anchor you can hold onto when your body and mind enters a storm of emotion.
Remember in your brain: The limbic system, which drives emotions, intensifies at puberty, but the prefrontal cortex, which controls impulses, does not mature until the 20s. This mismatch makes teens prone to risk taking but also allows them to adapt readily to their environment.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-amazing-teen-brain/
You are learning as you grow, although your brain is intensifying at different stages and making things more tricky, you are capable of practicing strategies to gain control and accept yourself as you are, because you are amazing! An educational therapist is a great person to work with to learn effective strategies to gain control and acceptance of yourself as you grow.
What is Self-Control?
Self-Control, sometimes called impulse control, is the ability to experience a desire to do something, but not acting on that desire. It is a powerful skill you learn to harness with age, experience and creative tools. Even though, as stated above, your brain is not mature in this area until the mid-20s, developing an awareness of the impulse, practicing strategies to become more mindful, and creating strategies helps tremendously.
Self-control is also a pillar in the development of other executive function skills, including self-monitoring.
What is Self-Monitoring?
Self-monitoring is the ability to observe your actions, evaluate their efficiency and purpose (do they serve you?) and then change them as needed. This is a learned skill that takes practice. In order to master this skill, a person must have a more developed working memory, flexible thinking and self-control.
Oftentimes you realize AFTER you have done something that perhaps you could have handled the situation differently. Your self-monitoring skill is that awareness. Sometimes it can be felt as that alarm that you feel in your body, maybe only for a moment, before you act on an impulse. As you age and gain awareness, you “tune in” to your body signals and develop strategies to check-in before you push a friend or blurt out in class.
An educational therapist is a great resource to work with. An educational therapist can work one-on-one with you to develop strategies to dramatically improve your self-monitoring and self-control skills, like a life coach who is trained in your learning difference and specific needs.
What is Task Initiation?
Task initiation is the ability to get started on a task, chore or assignment. The key factor of “successful task initiation” is the ability to get started on that task when you do not truly want to. This ability to start on a task that you don’t have interest in can be very difficult, especially for those with a more interest-based nervous system.
If you have interest in magic and fantasy, writing an essay about a book like Harry Potter would be something some-what interest-based. However if that same person has an assignment writing an essay about the American Revolution, that act of planning and organizing the essay and then beginning the full writing process can feel impossible.
As EF skills strengthen, one’s ability to start a task can feel more manageable. With tools and even some rewards, tasks that feel overwhelming can be accomplished with less resistance, argument and flat out refusal. Everyone struggles with needing to complete tasks they do not like throughout their life, however overtime you develop healthy strategies to make accomplishing those tasks feel much more manageable.
When you work with an educational therapist on strengthening a skill, like task initiation, you have consistent, reliable support to help you learn how to complete tasks you despise with success and good grades. It is not about the task itself, it is about learning to shift your mindset and understanding yourself as a learner that will improve your EF skills and overall life skills as you develop.
Which of These 7 EF Skills Do You Need Help With?
Remember, executive function skills are not a checklist. You do not need to have all of these perfected in order to be successful in school and life. Taking the time to check-in with yourself, you can start to understand your own strengths and weaknesses. Working with an educational therapist can help you evaluate what skills need improvement and how to find and implement strategies to strengthen them.
Contact Annika at Blume Educational Services to take an EF skills assessment and start strengthening your executive function skills today!
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