TEEN / SELF-HELP z n s t a n t h e l p s o l u t i o n s

6 super skills for executive functioning

6 super

6 super
simple skills Do you have trouble paying attention
to help you in school? Do you forget homework
assignments or miss important deadlines? Do
stay focused you ever feel “scattered” or unorganized? You’re
& reach your not alone. Between friend drama, social media,
goals! dating, smartphones, and a changing body and
brain, most teens need a little extra help staying
focused. The good news is there are real skills you can learn now to
skills for
executive
help you stay on track—in school and in life.

In this fun and easy guide, you’ll discover six powerful “super skills”
to help you pay attention, stay organized, and get stuff done—so
you can be your very best. You’ll learn how to focus on your gifts
and strengths, and break big goals down into small and manageable
steps—a process called “chunking.” You’ll also find tools to help
functioning
you stay motivated, and tips for dealing with distracting thoughts
and intense emotions. Once you practice these skills, you’ll feel
empowered to conquer any task, no matter how big. So, why not
start learning them today? tools to help teens
“Once again, Lara Honos-Webb has brilliantly put together an improve focus,
actionable and inspiring book … this time written to teens.” Q
—MARY ILLIONS WILDE, MD, integrative pediatrician
stay organized &
LARA HONOS-WEBB, P h D , is a clinical psychologist, international HONOS-WEBB
attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) expert, and author of The Gift reach their goals
of ADHD, The Gift of ADHD Activity Book, and The ADHD Workbook for Teens,
among others. Learn more at www.addisagift.com.

Cover photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash

An Imprint of New Harbinger Publications

www.newharbinger.com LARA HONOS-WEBB, PhD
FOREWORD BY NEIL D. BROWN, LCSW
“Teenagers need to be able to set and achieve goals, but their execu-
tive functioning often isn’t fully developed. Drawing on the latest
neuroscience, Lara Honos-Webb provides a road map for mastering
these skills—which will set up teens for success not only in high
school, but throughout their lives.”

—Daniel H. Pink, author of When and Drive

“Lara Honos-Webb has done it again. With 6 Super Skills for Executive
Functioning, she has created a road map for teens and their parents
to improve executive function and motivation to change related
maladaptive habits—and to do so in a positive (re)frame. Her deep
knowledge and experience working successfully with teens who
have executive function issues is demonstrated in each suggestion
she offers.”

—Robin S. Rosenberg, PhD, ABPP, CEO and founder of

Live in Their World; adjunct clinical faculty at University
of California, San Francisco; and coauthor of Abnormal
Psychology and Introducing Psychology

“‘How can I envision, set, and achieve my goals in life?’ Lara Honos-
Webb breaks down this question for teens and young adults in a
simple, step-by-step manner that is easy to follow for any reader.
This book teaches big dreamers how to think S.M.A.R.T, deal with
life’s challenges, and achieve ambitions with grit.”

—Grace Friedman, advocate, speaker, founder of

www.addyteen.com, and coauthor of Winning with ADHD
“Another informative and inspiring book by Lara Honos-Webb. This
book is full of action-oriented tools that guide teenagers to learn the
skills they need to stay focused, set goals, manage stress, stop nega-
tive thinking habits, and ultimately chart a course of positive think-
ing. Lara writes with compassion, acceptance, and optimism—as she
encourages teenagers to shift their mind-set, and move to a place of
self-empowerment.”

—Robin Goldstein, PhD, instructor of child and

adolescent psychology at University of Maryland,
Baltimore County (UMBC)

“While reading Lara Honos-Webb’s clear and encouraging guide,

my thoughts turned to the many people who go through life never
believing in their own competence. She wants each teen to know
that their minds can practice and grow important skills they might
believe are impossible. She offers not only hope, but reassurance that
they can build self-discipline and discover its gift—the freedom to
choose.”

—Margaret Robinson Rutherford, PhD, clinical psychologist,

and author of Perfectly Hidden Depression

“A great continuation of BRAIN HACKS. Lara Honos-Webb is the best

specialist in executive functions for all inhabitants of the neurodi-
versity planet: neurotypicals and neurodivergents. In these times of
‘electronality,’ where virtuality re-signifies our life, we must relearn
how to develop each mind into the gift that it must become. 6 Super
Skills for Executive Functioning teaches us how.”

—Ernesto Reaño, psychologist, linguist,

and author of The Return to the Village
“Lara Honos-Webb has created a beautiful guide to self-­mastery for
youth who are struggling with executive function challenges that is
accessible and straightforward. Backed by the latest research, it is
chock-full of helpful tips to create positive shifts in mind-set that will
empower any youth who practices these skills. This is definitely on
my list of favorites to share with the neurodiverse kids I work with,
and their parents.”

—Shawn V. Giammattei, PhD, professor of clinical

psychology at Alliant International University, and
founder and director of the Gender Health Training
Institute and Quest Family Therapy

“Once again, Lara Honos-Webb has brilliantly put together an action-

able and inspiring book for those with attention deficit/hyperactiv-
ity disorder (ADHD)—this time written to teens. The ‘super skills’
she shares in this book, synthesized through years of her own clini-
cal research, are transformative tools that will be a true gift to each
reader who applies them. The book’s content is well researched and
peppered with illustrative stories to make it an enjoyable and acces-
sible read.”

—Mary Illions Wilde, MD, integrative pediatrician, and

owner of Imagine Pediatrics Behavioral Health and Wellness

“As a person with ADHD, I wish I had this book as a teenager. Lara
Honos-Webb combines real science and real talk to help us under-
stand our minds and achieve our goals. Most importantly, this book
provides a road map for self-discovery—helping teens tune into their
gifts, identify their strengths, and build confidence along the way.”
—Margaux Joffe, founder of Kaleidoscope Society for women
with ADHD, and corporate social responsibility leader
th e z n s t a n t h e l p
so l ut i o ns s e r i e s
Young people today need mental health resources more
than ever. That’s why New Harbinger created the Instant
Help Solutions Series especially for teens. Written by
leading psychologists, physicians, and professionals,
these evidence-based self-help books offer practical
tips and strategies for dealing with a variety of mental
health issues and life challenges teens face, such as
depression, anxiety, bullying, eating disorders, trauma,
and self-esteem problems.

Studies have shown that young people who learn healthy

coping skills early on are better able to navigate problems
later in life. Engaging and easy-to-use, these books
provide teens with the tools they need to thrive—at
home, at school, and on into adulthood.

This series is part of the New Harbinger Instant Help

Books imprint, founded by renowned child psychologist
Lawrence Shapiro. For a complete list of books in this
series, visit newharbinger.com.
6 super skills
for executive
functioning
tools to help teens improve
focus, stay organized
& reach their goals

LARA HONOS-WEBB, P h D

Instant Help Books

An Imprint of New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
Publisher’s Note
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard
to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not
engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If
expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should
be sought.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

Copyright © 2020 by L
ara Honos-Webb
New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
5674 Shattuck Avenue
Oakland, CA 94609
www.newharbinger.com

Cover design by Amy Shoup; Acquired by Tesilya Hanauer;

Edited by Karen Schader

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Honos-Webb, Lara, author. | Brown, Neil D, author.
Title: Six super skills for executive functioning : tools to help teens improve focus, stay
organized, and reach their goals / Lara Honos-Webb, Neil D Brown.
Other titles: 6 super skills for executive functioning
Description: Oakland : New Harbinger Publications, 2020. | Includes bibliographical
references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020019873 (print) | LCCN 2020019874 (ebook) | ISBN 9781684035335
(trade paperback) | ISBN 9781684035342 (pdf) | ISBN 9781684035359 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Teenagers--Time management--Juvenile literature. | Study skills--Juvenile
literature. | Attention--Juvenile literature.
Classification: LCC BF637.T5 H66 2020 (print) | LCC BF637.T5 (ebook) | DDC
155.5/19--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019873
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019874

Printed in the United States of America

22   21   20

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1 First Printing
This book is dedicated to my two teens who wouldn’t
want to have their names in their embarrassing mom’s
book. I hope someday you will read this and know
it’s a love letter to both of you.
Contents

Forewordvii

Introduction1

Chapter 1 Goal Getting9

Chapter 2 Finding Gifts29

Chapter 3 Setting Goals47

Chapter 4 Chunking67

Chapter 5 Boosting Motivation83

Chapter 6 Managing Mood105

Chapter 7 Finding Focus123

Chapter 8 uper Skills: The Mind Builder’s

S
Guide to Your Brain141

References and Resources153

Foreword

The challenges of being a teenager and raising a teenager are

well known. Parents struggle with getting their teenagers to
manage responsibilities and stay out of trouble. Teenagers find
themselves buried by the many responsibilities they face while
seeking social acceptance and independence. Teens often feel
that what’s being asked of them is beyond them. Many of the
youth I’ve worked with, although intellectually capable or even
gifted, are neurologically challenged to succeed in a classroom
environment. Differences such as ADHD, autism spectrum
disorder, or dyslexia put teens and their parents at odds, often
building control battles that invite youth resistance and frus-
trate and leave parents in a state of burnout. Even without a
diagnosable condition, youth grow in different ways and at
different rates, and simply lacking maturation in an area will
frustrate many youth and their families.
As a family therapist who works with teenagers, I’ve helped
countless families end their control battles and align adoles-
cent and parental efforts for teenagers to grow, mature, and
experience happiness and success along the way. And while I
have done my best to help young people develop healthy self-
valuing habits and do their best, the therapeutic community,
myself included, has been short on tools to offer teenagers to
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

get them past their stuck spots. Procrastination, low motiva-

tion, low interest, poor organization, and ubiquitous connected
device distraction are just some of the challenges that teenag-
ers and their parents, as well as therapists and educators who
want to help them, are facing.
For too long, these issues have been used to blame and label
teenagers in ways that add to their feelings of frustration, inad-
equacy, and futility. Now in her groundbreaking new book,
Dr. Honos-Webb utilizes the emerging knowledge of adoles-
cent neural development and provides a road map for teens
to grow and develop their executive function skills. She takes
the mystery out of procrastination, fear of failure, low moti-
vation, low self-confidence, and underperformance and brings
youth the hope, optimism, and skills that lead to both immedi-
ate relief and improvement, as well as lasting growth to serve
a lifetime.
Honos-Webb does not talk down to teenagers; she doesn’t
simply give personal advice. Rather, she brings real science and
cites studies and research to help them understand the roots of
their behavior as well as evidence-based ways to change. With
her six super skills, she brings a powerful and engaging way
for teenagers to build their executive functioning. Each of the
skills improves several areas of the five executive functions:
planning and organization, focus, flexible thinking, emotion
regulation, and impulse control. As adolescents apply these
skills, they improve their own neurological development. Just
as running more will make them faster, applying Honos-Webb’s

viii
Foreword

super skills will build brain strength, literally creating neural

pathways that make work easier.
Throughout the book and in each of the six super skills,
Honos-Webb offers ways to replace negative self-talk with pos-
itive self-talk. This theme of seeing oneself in a positive light
begins with the first super skill, finding gifts, and is reinforced
throughout the book. Honos-Webb uses this positive view of
self, along with science-based actionable solutions to common
and normal challenges, and invites and challenges youth to
utilize these skills for self-empowerment, take charge of their
lives, and set and accomplish personal goals. The result is a
book that will change lives.
As a child enters middle school and their teen years,
responsible parents and educators prepare them with sex
education, explaining the maturational transformation their
bodies are going through. Six Super Skills for Executive Func-
tioning provides that same vital education to teens and their
parents in the area of neurological transformation. As middle
schoolers experience the normal struggles of managing their
work, behaviors, and emotions, this book that will help them
and their parents understand and address the challenges.
Six Super Skills will benefit not only young teen; it is also a
perfect resource for young adults looking for ways to improve
their college performance. For teenagers of any age experienc-
ing mild to serious problems in their functioning, Six Super
Skills offers powerful tools to reclaim their lives.
It’s not a book to read and put on the shelf when you’re
done. It’s a book to read, reread, mark up, consult with, and

ix
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

put into action. This is not a book to hand a teenager and

walk away. This book will help not only teenagers but also
the parents, therapists, and educators working to guide them
toward success. It provides a long needed road map they can
use together to address problems and maximize potential.
—Neil Brown,
author of Ending the Parent–Teen Control Battle

x
Introduction

We can all get caught in the trap of comparing our darkest

moments to others’ greatest wins. We are surrounded by social
media images of the happiest, most filtered, flattering, proud-
est moments of those in our social circle. The path to being
happy in a world that offers many reasons for dissatisfaction is
to choose what you focus on. That choice will determine your
emotions.
One teen could take a vacation to Hawaii and sulk about
their parents taking their phone away. Another person could
be sidelined from soccer season due to an injury and redirect
their attention to their childhood passion of journaling and feel
that their world has opened up. You can see from the contrast
that you can choose your reaction to life events.
This book is a guide to self-mastery. The ability to control
your thoughts and feelings and actions will greatly impact
your mental health and also your ability to get your goals. It
is the discipline to get those goals that gives you the liberty
to go where you want to go. So instead of thinking of disci-
pline as limiting your freedom, see that it is discipline that
gives you a license to choose. You, like most teens, want to be
independent, to govern your own life, and the most straight­
forward path to that is through self-command. Research
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

shows that self-discipline predicts your grades twice as much

as IQ (Duckworth and Seligman 2005). There’s just one catch
for you—your brain has not completely finished developing.
Imagine being in a home where every week there were
new contractors doing construction on three different projects
while you were trying to live there. That’s what it’s like to be a
teenager. Your hormones are changing, your body is changing,
and so is your brain.
This book is about executive functioning—the ability to
plan, take action rather than procrastinate, consider multiple
possibilities to help you solve problems, and stay focused.
Executive functioning involves your “will,” defined as deter-
mination, insistence, persistence, or willfulness. Synonyms
for “will” include power, resolve, intention, decisiveness, and
self-restraint.
The term “executive function” is an umbrella term that
includes many interrelated functions that allow you to control
your thoughts, feelings, and behavior. You will learn about the
five core components of executive functioning:

• attention

• planning

• flexible thinking

• emotion regulation

• impulse control

2
Introduction

Your executive functioning is still under construction, and

it will likely be fully developed closer to age twenty-five.
The good news is that the earlier you start taking charge
of your thoughts, the more you are strengthening control over
your brain. Neuropsychologists talk about neural pathways
that strengthen the more you use them and diminish the less
you use them; this capacity is called neuroplasticity and is often
summed up as “the neurons that fire together wire together.”
The more you use the six super skills covered in this book to
build executive functioning, the easier these will become. The
less you give in to procrastination and negative thoughts, the
weaker these negative aspects will be.
This book will throw dozens of tools at you. Some of these
tools will work for you, and some may not. If you find a handful
of tools that work for you, you can begin to see progress, which
itself will motivate you.

Crisis in Cognition
Not only are teens challenged by having executive functioning
that is still a work in progress, but also experts are warning
that adults are facing a crisis in cognition caused by the ever-
present, never-ending distraction of technology, especially
our smartphones (Gazzaley 2018). Research shows that having
a phone present even if you aren’t using it reduces cognitive
capacity (Ward et al. 2017).

3
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

Cognition means the thinking process itself. Multitasking is

damaging to cognition; it has been found to increase stress and
create cognitive losses more serious than does smoking weed
(Levitin 2015). The crisis of cognition is more of a challenge
for teens because of the close scrutiny you’re under in every
class, on every sports field, and at home. Because your brain is
still developing, you are more likely to take missteps that are
met with criticism, correction, or consequences. I expect that
you wish the well-meaning adults in your life could have X-ray
vision and see all the construction going on in your brain and
body, how hard you are trying, and at times how hard you are
on yourself trying to juggle high standards, close monitoring,
and fear of failure.
Why are we in a crisis now? Think of a special occasion
when you went to a brunch buffet. There may have been hun-
dreds of options, including your favorite breakfast and lunch
items, from pancakes and bacon to prime rib and chocolate-
covered strawberries. In this metaphor, eating carrot sticks
is like finding focus. They get lost in all the more attractive
options. When it comes to entertainment, social connections,
and gaming, there are many more distractions than you could
ever consume. And they are addictive.
Ten years ago, the term “executive functioning” was mostly
used by neuropsychologists. But in part because of the crisis of
cognition created by technology, it is now a mainstream word.

4
Introduction

Self-Discovery
I hope this book can become a guide for you to chart a path from
goal setting to goal getting. This process goes beyond self-help
to self-discovery, the essential value of the lifelong process of
gaining self-knowledge through a loving curiosity about this
creature—your essential you—that you are the caretaker of.
While the skills you learn are backed by science, connecting
to your essential self is the poetry of your soul. Your dreams,
imagination, and desires can be your most potent guides.
My second hope for you is that even if you take away only
one or two new habits from this book, over the course of your
lifetime you will enjoy seeing your dreams come true. If you
had a penny and doubled it every day for thirty days, how
much money do you think you would have? The answer is
$5,368,709.12! If you make small investments in yourself every
day and build on those, incredible things can happen.
I wish I could tell you this is simple and easy. The truth is
that it takes work. You won’t change overnight, but you will
be constantly evolving. Here’s the good news: you are the one
who benefits from all the work. Think about the penny that
doubled every day to make more than 5 million dollars in one
month. Remember, doing the work gives you more freedom to
get what you want and ultimately to be independent.

5
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

Be an Encourager
I’m certain that you sometimes get the message that it’s all
about competition, that you have to be better than someone
else. Let’s switch that around and believe that we have to be
our best so our contribution can make another person a better
person. Your contribution can make a better world, and the
other person’s contribution will also make a better world. You
want other people to get their goals too. They will help create
a better world for you and your loved ones to live in. Be an
encourager, to yourself and to others.

How to Read This Book

As you go through this book, scan a few pages, identify your
questions, reread to try to answer those questions—and be
patient. An important point to remember is that each executive
function skill is related to the others; it will take the whole book
to get a very clear picture of that. It’s like studying anatomy:
you’ll learn each term as you study it, but the overall interrela-
tions will begin to take shape only after repetition. As you dig
deeper in each chapter, the relationship between super skills and
the executive functions will slowly become more and more clear.
A journal can help you navigate through this book, so you
can see the progress you make as you follow each step. You
can also use Notes on an iPhone or Microsoft OneNotes on an
Android. You can create a folder for this book where you will jot
down answers to questions and responses to guided exercises.

6
Introduction

Tell Yourself
Take a deep breath, and try to have fun with this. It will pay
off! Tell yourself, Listen, you are far more capable than you ever
thought, let alone dreamed of. You are a champ; you got this. Go get
’em!
You’re the owner of your brain. But it goes deeper than that;
you’re the owner of the “you.” There isn’t another you. There
never has been and never will be. Relish that. Cherish it. Use it
as motivation to become whatever you want to become.

7
CHAPTER 1

Goal Getting

Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in

which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must
vigorously act. There is no other route to success.
—Pablo Picasso

Let me guess. A parent handed you this book. And that only
proves how embarrassing and clueless they really are ().
Or maybe it was a school counselor or therapist who recom-
mended you learn more about executive functioning. Perhaps
the word “executive” reminds you of the CEO of a company,
and you are wondering what it has to do with you. One way to
think of executive functioning is being the boss of your brain,
making decisions that help you get your goals. Improving your
executive functioning simply means increasing your ability to
set goals and get goals.
As we review the basics in this chapter, remember that
goal getting is the outcome of executive functioning and super
skills. It’s important to keep at the top of your mind the ben-
efits of getting your goals. Think of a time when you achieved
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

a goal. It may have been running the mile in eight minutes for
PE class or getting a 5 on your AP Biology test. You likely felt
a happy fullness and a sense of contentment and completion.
The harder you worked for it, the greater the joy.
Each goal you achieve gives you a sense of confidence
to begin the cycle for setting a new goal. You can savor that
feeling, and even say to yourself, I’m living the dream come true
when you achieve a goal. Even just the act of planning a new
goal can make you feel hopeful, challenged, and ambitious.
One of my mottos is “Do hard things with low stakes so you
can do hard things when the stakes are high.” Even small goals
will increase your capacity to do hard things that will serve
your highest-stake goals.
This book will give you a guide for how to be an ambitious
teen. Sometimes people are shy to call themselves ambitious—
maybe they won’t live up to all their ambition and will then
feel silly. Some teens don’t think it’s cool to be ambitious, but
as you build confidence you won’t worry so much about what
other people think, or play small to please someone else.

Are You Tied Too Tightly to

Your Phone?
You may have a smartphone, a tablet, a computer connected
to the internet, a TV with multiple streaming services, a
gaming console. Through these devices, you have access to

10
Goal Getting

social media, powerful search engines, entertainment, news—

in short, endless distractions. Screen time is associated with
harmful health outcomes, including depressive symptoms and
quality of life (Stiglic and Viner 2019). About 25 percent of chil-
dren and teens show a pattern of smartphone use that looks
like an addiction labeled as “problematic smartphone use.”
This pattern of use predicts depression, anxiety, stress, and
poor sleep (Sohn et al. 2019).
How many times a day do you think you touch your phone?
Pause here and make a guess.
If you are like a typical American, you touch your phone
eighty times a day—that is, every twelve minutes (SWNS 2017).
Research has shown that just the presence of your phone drains
your brain’s ability to pay attention (Ward et al. 2017).
Many experts are warning of a cognition crisis that is only
getting worse. In a 2018 article, Dr. Adam Gazzaley warns that
“our constant engagement with technology interferes with the
pursuit of other behaviors critical for maintaining a healthy
mind, such as nature exposure, physical movement, face-to-
face contact, and restorative sleep.” He continues: “Its nega-
tive influence on empathy, compassion, cooperation, and social
bonding are just beginning to be understood.”
The prime suspect in this cognition crisis is that phone in
your hands. Make no mistake, that phone can increase pro-
ductivity—that’s why it was made! You can have a calendar,
some artificial intelligence capability to deliver reminders, and
freedom from having to remember people’s phone numbers
because your contacts are right on the phone.

11
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

A big drawback of that phone is the effect of spending so

much time on the entertainment it offers you. You can stream
TV shows and movies, watch YouTube all day, play video
games, and spend hours on Instagram and Snapchat. Even kids
who are more academic than social can get lost in Reddit feeds,
special interest news sites, or strategy-based video games, such
as Hearthstone. The phone can become a major distraction from
staying on target with your goals.
The challenge for you will be to maximize the capacity for
a phone to take over some specific tasks that require focused
attention, such as remembering phone numbers, accessing
dates of important events, and programming reminders of
tests and homework assignments.
You will also have to find ways to limit your use of the
endless entertainment of movies, TV shows, video games,
social media, and more. Apple has introduced screen time
monitoring that provides feedback about how much time you
are spending on specific apps and allows you to limit access
to those same apps. The screen time function is not enough.
You will also need to learn to remind yourself of what you are
missing out on that could enhance your life, as you spend more
than two or three hours on your phone a day. For example, that
time on Snapchat could be replacing time exercising, socializ-
ing face-to-face, or planning the week ahead.
This book will help you strengthen your ability to manage
your attention, including your phone, and give you ideas for
how to use the smartphone effectively to take over direct atten-
tion tasks and increase your productivity.

12
Goal Getting

Positive Self-Talk
Ask yourself, What are the benefits of this time on technology?
What am I missing out on by spending time on technology now?

The Big Five Components of

Executive Functioning
In order to achieve your goals, you will need to strengthen your
(1) attention, (2) planning, (3) flexible thinking, (4) emotion reg-
ulation, and (5) impulse control. Like playing the piano or per-
fecting your baseball pitch, practice in one area will increase
your skill level in all these areas.

Attention
Have you noticed that sometimes you can easily pay atten-
tion and other times you just can’t get yourself to stay tuned in?
Our attention is often driven by motivation and interest. If you
are interested in math but not biology, you will find it easier to
pay attention in math class and harder in biology class. There
is a great deal of research on what you can do to increase your
attention—even toward things you don’t find all that interest-
ing—and what the major disrupters of attention are. Chapter
7 will give you an overview of what you can do to help your
attention and what harms it.

13
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

Planning
Goal setting is the most important element of planning. You
can practice setting daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals to
build your capacity to take charge of where you’re going in your
life. If you have a goal to spend a semester abroad when you go
away to college, you will more likely get that goal if you start
planning now. You might plan to get good grades in Spanish
and to save up money so you can help pay for the costs. When
you think this far ahead, you can start looking for part-time
jobs. If you want to get those good grades in Spanish, you have
to make sure you have a command center for your schoolwork.
Do you know where your books and folders are? Do you have
index cards so you can make flash cards? Should you down-
load the app Duo Lingo, which can make review fast and easy?
Should you schedule chunks of time to drill yourself on vocabu-
lary? Once you have a goal, you need a strategy to help with
planning.

Flexible Thinking
Being a teen means you have a lot to figure out. You often
have to try a lot of things out to get clear about what you really
want in life and what’s actually going to work. For example,
you may think that if you don’t get all As you will never be
successful. This thought may create intense anxiety that makes
it even harder to pay attention. You can set a goal to get all As,
and also use flexible thinking to manage your anxiety about

14
Goal Getting

what’s at stake if you don’t get all As. You can use flexible
thinking so that you can feel confident in yourself and your
future even if you don’t get all your goals.

Emotion Regulation
As you work toward your goals, it’s important to avoid the
pitfalls of too much anxiety and getting so discouraged after
setbacks that you fail to bounce back. You can also get derailed
from your goals by emotional upsets caused by drama in your
friendships, feeling left out, teachers who are unfair, parents
who don’t understand, and much more. Some teens try to
regulate their emotions through bad habits, numbing them-
selves with video games, unhealthy food, alcohol, or drugs. If
you learn how you can improve your own mood, how to use
emotions as signals to yourself from yourself about yourself,
you will protect yourself from using technology, food, or sub-
stances to try to feel good or numb intense feelings.

Impulse Control
Impulsiveness is acting before thinking. In order to achieve
your goals, you need to avoid checking your phone every
twelve minutes or saying yes to every invitation to get frozen
yogurt. One of the most important tools for managing impul-
siveness is to practice pausing before acting; for example, if

15
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

you feel the urge to play an addictive video game, you can tell
yourself, Not now. I can always play later.
This tool is also called delayed gratification. The longer
you can delay gratification, the more time you can devote to
working toward your goals by planning, engaging in healthy
pleasures that regulate your mood, and getting started on
what you need to do. One way to practice being more deliber-
ate about your choices is to simply start asking yourself what
the benefits and costs of a certain action are. Doing this can
increase your ability to stay on target with goal-directed activi-
ties, rather than giving in to distracting impulses.

The Six Super Skills

This book will show you six super skills, the tools you will
need to turn your dreams into reality. Think of your favorite
video game. You have to learn skills to advance to mastery of
the game. Just as you get to try on roles in video games, each
of these super skills allows you to imagine yourself with a new
superpower. The more tools you unlock, the better you get at
fighting off the opponents or being the last man standing in
Fortnite. The benefit of each super skill is listed in terms of the
executive functioning components it builds.

16
Goal Getting

1. Finding gifts will increase emotion regulation,

flexible thinking, and planning.

2. Setting goals will increase planning and

emotion regulation, and help manage
impulsiveness.

3. Chunking (breaking big goals down into

small, manageable chunks) will increase
attention, planning, and flexible thinking.

4. Boosting motivation will increase flexible

thinking, impulse control, and emotion
regulation.

5. Managing mood will increase emotion

regulation, attention, and planning.

6. Finding focus will increase attention,

planning, and impulse control.

17
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

These tools can be logically sequenced, and this is the

sequence the book will follow. Finding gifts precedes setting
goals because you want to focus on your innate talents, inter-
ests, and past successes to make sure that self-doubt doesn’t
lead you to set your goals too small. Chunking allows you to
break goals into small elements that feel easily manageable.
When you get to that point where you just don’t feel like taking
the next step, boosting motivation will get you through the fog
of resistance. Managing mood will prevent you from getting
derailed by impulses and other emotional upsets. And finally,
finding focus will allow you to stay focused for longer periods
of time, like increasing the battery life of your flashlight.
When you wonder how you will get from your goal to
making your dream come true, try to think of it not as a chore
but rather as a tournament testing your wits. You can use these
tools in sequence to solve specific problems or combine them in
response to the demands of a specific goal.
The most pressing and common goal for many teens is
related to schoolwork. Because most teens struggle with the
question of how to prioritize schoolwork, let’s start with how
one teen, Daniel, used two super skills—setting goals and
chunking—to tackle that problem with a weekly strategy.

18
Goal Getting

On Monday, Daniel created a list of what he has to do and

by when:

What By When

Study for math quiz Quiz on Wednesday

Read and annotate online Due Friday
article for extra credit
in government (optional)
Study for bio test Test on Thursday
Write outline for Eng lish Due Tuesday
paper
Read 1 chapter of book for Due Wednesday
Eng lish for class discussion
History worksheet Due Tuesday
Math problems Due Wednesday

That’s a lot of things to think about doing at once. Should

Daniel go ahead and do them in order of their due dates? He
could, but then he might not be using his time well. He has
extra time on Tuesday but no time on Wednesday, so Tuesday
is when he should study for his biology test and Wednesday is
when he can do the optional extra credit assignment for gov-
ernment. Or maybe because he’s doing fantastically in gov-
ernment he doesn’t need to even think about the extra credit
assignment.

19
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

Speaking of testing your wits, if you would like to try this

out for yourself, go ahead and look at your schoolwork for the
next week in terms of due dates and the time available for you
to do each assignment. To help you prioritize school-related
tasks, ask yourself these questions:

• What is my current grade in each class?

• Which classes need more/less attention because I am not

or am doing well?

• What are the due dates for each task?

• How much studying do I need to do based upon the mate-

rial being tested?

• What will take the most time? The least time?

• Is there anything I will need extra help on?

• If yes, who can provide that help (for example, a friend,

a teacher)?

TRY IT Using your journal or Notes app, write down

the dates of all your tests. and due dates for assignments for
the next week of school. Then create a schedule of dates for
you to complete your work.

By combining goal setting and chunking to create a strat-

egy to finish homework and study for tests, you can prioritize

20
Goal Getting

what needs to happen and when. This will in turn increase

your attention because you won’t be stressing about when you
need to do what, and you will be focused in on the task at hand.
If you’re an ambitious teen determined to improve your
executive functioning, there is truly nothing better than cross-
ing a “to do” off the list, and nothing better than finishing
that last “to do”! This is an example of how the goal setting
and chunking super skills can be combined to help you work
toward specific goals.

Why You Need to Beef Up Your

Executive Functioning
Building your executive functioning by using the six super
skills in this book is preventive medicine. For example, it is
common to feel anxiety before a big test or a big game. The
problem is that anxiety interferes with attention—one of the
big five components of executive functioning. Anxiety can
become a vicious cycle. The more anxious you are, the less you
can concentrate, and then you really start to lose focus. If you
can use some of the mood-managing tools to manage your
anxiety, you can stay calm and confident. A simple example
of taking charge of overwhelming emotions is to breathe out
deeply a few times and say positive messages to yourself, such
as You can do this. Stay focused.
As you’re reading, you might start to stress out trying to
figure out the six super skills and the five core components of

21
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

executive functioning and how they all relate to each other.

This would be a good chance to try out some encouraging
self-talk.

Positive Self-Talk
Tell yourself, I don’t have to memorize any of this for a test! I’ll just
relax and focus on helpful tips that I can take action on.

Or: The more I read, the more it will make sense. These things take
time. I can always reread, skim, or review selected parts as needed.

Using Self-Talk to Manage Stress

and Stop Bad Habits
The super skills are like medicine, and self-talk is the delivery
method that creates lasting change rather than a small dose of
inspirational feeling. Self-talk challenges negative thinking by
replacing it with conscious, more positive thoughts. Think of it
as being a coach or cheerleader to yourself.
Managing stress will help you access the super skills. If
your brain is hijacked by stress, you may forget to use these
skills. You may want to create an index card with a list of the
six super skills so that if you feel overwhelmed in the moment,
you can choose a skill to chart a new course, rather than getting
more and more anxious and feeling like the world is closing in

22
Goal Getting

on you. You can say a positive statement silently or out loud.

You can create a reminder for yourself by writing down your
self-talk statement and putting it in a place where you will see
it easily.
Many teens use nicotine, alcohol, and other drugs in an
effort to feel better, concentrate more, and manage their moods
(in other words, to manage a few of the main components of
executive functioning). If you’re using any of these substances
to cope with stress, you can stop these bad habits by using the
tools in this book to manage your stress. You can begin to see
that using substances to control your brain is really a lack of
finding other solutions to get the results you want. For example,
if you need to calm down to focus, nicotine or weed should not
be your first choice due to the risk they pose for your health
and the potential for addiction. Tools like breathing exercises,
positive self-talk, and mindfulness meditation (which we will
get to in chapter 7) all have calming and focusing effects, and
no downside. This book will give you lots of possible ways to
feel better and stay focused.

Positive Self-Talk
Tell yourself, Using drugs and alcohol to manage my mood is a
treacherous path to take. I’ll use super skills instead!

23
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

Dr. Lara Says

A simple way to avoid nicotine and weed is to ask
yourself, How can I feel better or focus more? You can
even create a list for yourself, such as taking a break,
taking a few deep breaths, doing some stretches,
getting some exercise, or listening to music.

Some teens use video games or social media to numb their

real-world anxieties. These habits can take up so much time
that they prevent you from doing what needs to be done to
solve real- world problems. If you typically spend two hours
a day on video games, think how much more prepared you
could be for those nerve-wracking tests if you used those hours
to study calmly rather than at the last minute. Or think about
your health and fitness goals. Think how many healthy choices
you could make in those two hours you are spending on video
games, streaming TV shows, or social media.

Getting Real About the Costs

of Distractions
Think how much better your grades could be if you cut out one
hour of mindless distraction, be it social media or watching
your favorite YouTuber, and used that extra hour to prepare,
plan, and study for your hardest class. You could take the

24
Goal Getting

biggest stressor in your life and feel like a champ by achieving

mastery in one extra hour a day.
Research has shown that on average teens spend seven
hours and twenty-two minutes a day on screens using media
that doesn’t involve schoolwork (Rideout and Robb 2019). These
activities include social media, video games, watching online
videos, watching TV, browsing websites, and listening to music.
If you are doing much better than that, think of everything
else you can achieve in just three hours a day:

• You could train in a new skill, such as playing an

instrument.

• You could take a class that would open up new

opportunities, such as computer coding.

• You could get a job and start saving money to support

some of your long-term goals or save for college.

• You could get more involved in organizations you

belong to, whether it be a religious institution,
special-­interest group, or volunteer organization.

• You could spend time in meal preparation and exer-

cising to help you achieve your health and fitness
goals.

• You could take breaks and do more self-care!

Activities like rest, napping, meditation, listening
to music, and spending time in nature are highly
restorative.

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Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

You can start small and see major progress by turning

one hour of distraction into one hour of goal-directed activ-
ity. You don’t have to take major risks. You can make shifts in
low-stakes areas and see the freedom that comes in these more
controlled experiments.
When you are streaming the first episode of Gilmore Girls
on Netflix it might be easy to think, I had a hard day at school, and
I deserve a break. However, by the time you are binge-watching
your third episode, it gets hard to find any realistic benefits.

Positive Self-Talk
Ask yourself, What are the benefits of this distraction?

What Is Executive Dysfunction

Anyway?
Some big terms used in talking about executive function-
ing include “impulse inhibition,” “decision making,” and
“self-monitoring.” Your executive functioning is like a parent
nagging you to stop playing video games, get your homework
done, and notice when you are talking too loud or being mean
to your sister.
Executive functioning involves the prefrontal cortex, the
brain structure that is close to your forehead. Because the
human brain does not fully develop until the age of twenty-five,

26
Goal Getting

executive function skills can be even harder for teens; they may
struggle more with the steps of setting a goal, breaking it down
into steps, taking action, staying focused, and getting organized.
Before we delve much further into boosting executive func-
tioning, you might want to know a bit more about executive dys-
function. Executive dysfunction is an impairment in thought,
emotion regulation, or behavior that makes it difficult to get
from goal setting to goal getting. Executive dysfunction is like
a fever—it is a sign that something is wrong but doesn’t give us
any information about what is causing the dysfunction. When
you have a fever, it is important to determine its cause. Is it a
virus, a bacterial infection, inflammation, or something more
serious? Similarly, there are many possible causes of executive
dysfunction: ADHD, autism, sensory processing disorders,
mood disorders, and traumatic brain injuries, among others.
Not all teens will have an executive dysfunction. Whether
you have a diagnosis or not, any of these behaviors can be
improved using the skills taught in this book:

• disorganization

• interrupting others

• anger outbursts

• being late getting assignments in

• not following directions

• being late for class and other events

27
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

You don’t have to have a dysfunction to benefit from this

book. All of us have some of these problems from time to time.
This book is not meant only for teens with executive dys-
function; it also will help anyone who wants to find productiv-
ity hacks or brain hacks. Every teen needs to set goals to get
where they want to go, so this isn’t about patching up weak-
nesses. Every teen has a prefrontal cortex that is still develop-
ing until around the age of twenty-five. This book will help
you take a growth mind-set toward your attention, planning,
flexible thinking, emotion regulation, and impulse control.

28
CHAPTER 2

Finding Gifts

The purpose of life is to discover your gift.

The work of life is to develop it.
The meaning of life is to give your gift away.
—David S. Viscott

You want to build your confidence before you set your goals so
you feel capable of stepping outside your comfort zone. Finding
positives will increase your determination—that means the
chance that you will keep going when the going gets tough.
Confidence will also increase your motivation, which affects
the likelihood that you will actually just get started. Research
has shown that if teachers were told that students were super-
stars, those students—even though they were not actually
higher in intelligence—improved their IQ at the end of the
year. This has been called the self-fulfilling prophecy effect. A
positive self-concept will allow you to develop your talents and
interests. By finding your strengths, interests, and talents, you
can develop notable mastery of something, rather than think-
ing only in terms of patching up your weaknesses.
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

Your gifts can include:

• interests such as sports or helping children

• talents such as being good at math or creative

writing

• personality leanings such as extraversion or

introversion

• values such as hard work or helping others

Finding Your Own Strengths

To be your own strength finder, you can get started by writing
down ten of your biggest past successes in your journal or
smartphone Notes app. Your list might include a good grade
on a test, making a new friend at camp, or scoring a goal in a
championship game, among many other possibilities.
As you read through the list, what can you figure out about
your gifts? Are you a good problem solver? Do you make
friends easily? Are you creative? Are you a strong leader? Are
you great at math and science?
Here are three different ways to go about figuring out your
strengths:

• Write down three adjectives that summarize your

pattern of success.

30
Finding Gifts

• Choose five people you trust and ask them to tell

you what they see as your three biggest strengths.
Think of yourself as doing research.

• In your journal or Notes app, write down five inter-

ests you have.

Abilities take practice and time to develop, so you may find

you have interests in arenas where you don’t have obvious abil-
ities. If that’s true for you, consider taking lessons or classes.
For example, you may love to look at art but haven’t taken any
courses or practice in drawing or painting. You can test out
that interest by searching out tutorials on YouTube.
The more you focus on your past successes and seek feed-
back on your strengths, the more you are likely to believe
that if you try something, you have what it takes to succeed.
You will be willing to work harder and adopt a growth mind-
set—the idea that the harder you try, the more likely you are
to succeed. For example, thinking, I am disorganized reflects a
fixed mind-set and makes it harder for you to improve in that
area. If instead you think, The harder I try, the more organized I
will be—a growth mind-set—you are likely to make improve-
ments in this area.
Your ability to achieve your goals will likely depend pri-
marily on persistence. How hard are you willing to work?
When you get frustrated that something is too hard or is taking
too long, will you keep going?

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Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

That’s why we focus on finding gifts and building confi-

dence—because that will keep you going when you are faced
with challenges.

Creating an Emergency Rescue Kit

for Self-Doubt
Self-doubt is a lack of confidence that you can succeed at goals
you have for yourself. It creates hesitation, a tendency to make
excuses, and a failure to assert yourself in the service of achiev-
ing your goals. Shakespeare probably expressed it best in his
play Measure for Measure when he said, “Our doubts are trai-
tors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing
to attempt.” Artist Vincent Van Gogh offered us one of the best
solutions to self-doubt: “If you hear a voice within you say ‘You
cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be
silenced.”
Self-doubt is often caused by specific failures we have had.
The irony is that it is a distorted thought to think that failure is
… actually a failure. If people were self-aware, they would talk
about failure as itself a stepping-stone to success. People talk
about their successes but they don’t talk about their failures, so
we mistakenly think that failure is final.

32
Finding Gifts

• Susan’s Story
Susan had ADHD, and she didn’t have a lot of success in high
school. She did poorly on the SAT and was filled with self-
doubt. She went to a community college, where she reached
out for support, and with fewer classes and more time than
she had had in high school, she got good grades. She took an
SAT preparation class and began using Khan Academy’s free
SAT practice program to boost her scores. She raised her score
by 200 points and was able to transfer to a state university.
At the university, she realized that she wanted to be a
therapist working with children. She applied to a graduate
program in counseling and was accepted.

Some people with ADHD find success in school when they

find an area of study they are enthusiastic about. Failure in
high school was not final for Susan. She went on to a career in
counseling children, and she was able to encourage them with
her own story about struggles in school.
Notice when you feel self-doubt, and label it “self-doubt.”
Think of what you would say to a best friend who was doubt-
ing themselves. Say it to yourself. Create an “emergency rescue
kit” for yourself—and use it!

33
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

TRY IT Research has shown that being happy

increases success and productivity. Write a list of your past
successes and a list of your five happiest memories. Keep
this emergency rescue kit on your Notes app on your phone
or take a photo of your list in a journal and keep it on your
phone. You can create a folder called “Super Skills.”

Remember that every point of failure can be the beginning

of a hero’s journey. Think of the story line of many movies: a
person goes after a big dream and has a major defeat. What
happens next? It wouldn’t be a satisfying movie if the hero
decided they were unlucky or untalented and just went back
to life before the big goal. Here are some other ways you can
handle defeat:

• You can practice having compassion for yourself as

you would for a friend who had a failure experience.

• You can ask yourself, Who can help me?

• You can ask yourself, What are some possible solutions?

• You can ask yourself, What kind of courses do I need to

take to get better?

• You can read an inspirational book to increase moti-

vation and determination. Consider using this book
as a mind builder’s guide to your brain.

34
Finding Gifts

Reviewing your emergency rescue kit will help you restore

a sense of self-efficacy—the belief that you are capable of
accomplishing your goals and solving problems that arise as
you move forward. A guiding sense of your strengths and
capabilities will put your problems in perspective and give you
a sense of control for managing your emotions.
Finding gifts will help you feel good, which will help you
focus. It’s important to remember that as you build each super
skill you are positively impacting other super skills too—in
this case, attention management.

Owning Your Interest and Talents

It’s important to own your interests and talents because of the
tendency to compare ourselves to others. If you know someone
who is a great athlete, you may feel you are lacking something
unless you can remind yourself of everything you are talented
at. You can think of talents as the different types of classes,
such as math, literature, science, and languages. You can also
think of categories, such as artistic, musical, athletic, entertain-
ing, academic, technology wiz, and more.

TRY IT Write down five of your interests and talents

in your journal or Notes app. You can label the folder in the
notes section “Super Skills.” What are five reasons you can
be successful at each?

35
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

Job Description: Teenager

If being a teenager were a job, it would require certain mind-
sets. The explorer, elite competitor, evolver, and investigator are
different archetypes you can use to discover your strengths to
set goals. You will want to try out each of these mind-sets; each
might lead to finding a different strength. An explorer will
find new interests, an elite competitor will find new talents, an
evolver can develop new personality traits, and an investigator
will find what they value.
You may have realized from the previous exercise that you
need to explore the world more to find more interests. Addi-
tionally, you can’t really know if something is really a talent
unless you actually test yourself through hard work—wanting
to be an elite competitor. You have to want to evolve to stretch
out your personality traits. And finally, how are you going to
find what you value if you are not willing to investigate?
You’re not supposed to have it figured out. Finding your
interests, talents, personality traits, and values is a journey you
are just setting out on! Discovering these are part of your job
description as a teenager.

Wanted: Explorer
To be an explorer is to discover new roles, new classes,
new interests, new aspects of yourself. To explore means to try
things outside your comfort zone. An adventure means going
into the unknown, such as going to explore a meditation group

36
Finding Gifts

or a worship service even if your family isn’t religious. It could

mean going on a trip with your friend’s family and seeing what
other families are like. It could mean taking a guitar class in
high school even though you’ve never played an instrument. It
could also mean reaching out to people who are in a different
social circle than you. It could mean joining the robotics club
even though you’re more the literary type. Being an explorer
could mean accepting invitations you might otherwise turn
down.

Wanted: Elite Competitor

Take your game to a new level—you may have to upgrade
to thrive. You don’t really know what your skills, talents, and
abilities are until you put the pedal to the metal, or really give
it your all.
When you upgrade in life, just as when you upgrade
your phone’s operating system, it takes time to adjust to all
the changes. If you decide to try something new, remember
that every new skill, talent, and ability comes with a learning
curve. In the beginning, you will put in a lot of effort to get
little results. There may come a point of maximum frustra-
tion where you think, I’m working so hard, but I’m just not good
at it. Don’t quit at that point! On the learning curve, you will
eventually turn the corner and feel some level of skill, and the
more you practice, the more capable you will feel. Every time
you devote yourself to learning a new skill or ability, remind

37
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

yourself there is a necessary learning curve before thinking

this is not your cup of tea.

Wanted: Evolver
Evolve into a more resilient, resourceful, stronger person.
Being a teenager is challenging. Your executive functioning
will not finish developing until you reach the age of twenty-
five, and yet the demands on you are immense. One way to
protect yourself from getting depressed about the many pres-
sures is to think of each challenge as an opportunity to build
strength in focusing, planning, and emotional resilience. The
tools in this book will show you how to meet these challenges.
Every time you predict an obstacle and create a plan B,
you are building the path to being unstoppable. Each time
you feel overwhelmed that you have two tests to study for and
you decide to break your evening up into fifteen-minute study
periods with breaks in between and rewards at the end of each
hour, you are learning how to increase motivation and sustain
attention. To evolve means to expand your outlook beyond
your comfort zone.

Wanted: Investigator
Investigation is the process of getting curious and being
willing to test things out to see what really fits for you and find
your values. For example, if you realize that you value learning

38
Finding Gifts

new things, you can develop hobbies that have nothing to do

with getting good grades. Learning becomes a value in itself,
not just a means to an end. You may join an astronomy club
not because you want to be an astronomer but because you
love learning about space. In addition, your love of learning
becomes a powerful tool for regulating your emotions. It may
be that your interest in looking at the stars at night gives you
such a sense of awe that it puts your personal challenges in
perspective. The idea here is to try out new things to gain self-
knowledge about your own values.
Now that you have some mind-sets for expanding and
finding your interests, talents, and gifts, where do you want
to go?

There Are Benefits to Unfocus

You might be happy to learn that science shows us there is a
gift in unfocus. Research is finding that the part of the brain
that is devoted to unfocus—the default mode network—is the
source for many talents and abilities, including creativity. And
as important as it is to develop executive functioning, creativ-
ity is also important. As you focus on strengths, don’t rule it
out! In my books The Gift of ADHD (Honos-Webb 2008) and
The ADHD Workbook for Teens (Honos-Webb 2011), I describe
five gifts of ADHD—creativity, empathy, emotional sensitivity,
exuberance, and being nature smart. Which of these gifts do
you think you have?

39
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

Recent research has shown that ADHD students are better

than non-ADHD students at divergent thinking and creat-
ing new inventions (White 2019). The state of unfocus may be
required to think outside the box. The phrases “sit on it” and
“sleep on it” reflect this deep understanding that we have to
give our brain a rest to make a breakthrough. In fact, the word
“incubation” part of our common language as being essen-
tial for creativity. It requires us to turn attention away from a
problem we are trying to solve in order to solve it. The primary
definition of incubation includes an animal sitting on an egg
waiting for it to hatch. So too with an idea—something new
and creative will hatch if we “sit on it.”
One way of understanding the relationship between
unfocus and incubation and inspiration is through the legend-
ary stories of inventor Thomas Edison, who some argue is a
model of the distractible brain (Hartmann 2015). The prevail-
ing image of Edison is that he worked on dozens of projects at
the same time, focusing on one project until he got bored, then
switching to another, and then to another. To switch from one
project to another is consistent with the idea of incubation as a
stage of creativity. Like the duck that sits on an egg waiting for
it to hatch, so our creative inspiration requires this unfocused
patience until the eureka moment when an answer seemingly
magically presents itself.
So as you define your strengths and begin to build your
executive functioning, don’t rule out the importance of nurtur-
ing your creativity and giving yourself time to be unfocused.

40
Finding Gifts

In the Flow
Your natural talents and interests are usually activities that acti-
vate a sense of flow. Flow, being “in the zone” or fully engaged
in an activity, makes time pass by like it is nothing, as if you
aren’t “working” at all. Because your mind is fully devoted
to a certain activity and is using nearly all its concentration
powers, it does not worry about things that are not pertinent to
that activity (for example, time, birds chirping outside, a radio
playing in the background). Rather than giving your attention
to distractions, you become fully invested in the task or tasks
at hand.
We pay more attention to what is interesting to us. Notice
where you are in flow, and you will likely be finding a natural
gift of yours. As you go through your week, notice which activ-
ities, classes, or events create this sense of being able to pay
attention easily without effort. For the sake of this challenge,
exclude video games and social media. Our goal here is to help
you find healthy pleasures, possible career directions, areas of
study, and talents to develop.

Competition: Its Benefits and Costs

Once you figure out what gets you in flow, you still have
another obstacle to confront: competition. High school can
make it complicated to find what your true interests are. It’s
easy to see what other people think is most important and to
be influenced by that.

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Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

Maybe the highlight of your week is band practice, but

other kids don’t think it’s cool. You don’t want to leave your
teen years realizing that almost every choice you made was
driven not by who you really are, what you are really good at,
and what you really wanted, but instead by what everybody
else thought was cool or important. It doesn’t matter whether
someone else is better than you in sports if you’re not inter-
ested in sports. You can overcome competitiveness by valuing
the talents you do have.

Benefits of Competition
One benefit of competition is that it can be a huge motiva-
tor. If competition is a driving force for you, you want to have a
sense of balance. Some people appear to have competitiveness
as a personality trait, and it would be unwise to devalue that
natural aspect of their personality. A competitive spirit can
foster team spirit, but it also can lead to injuries if being the
best comes at all costs. While competition can boost motivation,
compare those benefits with the powerhouse boost that comes
from working in your flow state, at something that comes easily
to you. In fact, one might say that competition itself is not bad if
you are already working in your area of strength.

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Finding Gifts

Costs of Competition
Competition with others can be a trap. It’s too easy to try to
compete with others rather than doing the work of figuring out
what you really value yourself. Competition can provide enor-
mous drive, but it can derail you from what you really love. Com-
petition can keep you narrowly focused on doing better than
someone else rather than developing your talents and investing
in yourself and your unique profile of gifts. It’s possible to get
addicted to competition and focus on being better than others
instead of discovering who you are. Competition can lead you to
feel dissatisfied even when you are excelling. There will always
be people ahead of you and people behind you.
The drive to be better can create a lot of stress, which can
interfere with optimal performance. Competition can become
toxic when it takes you away from figuring out your own areas
of real interest and flow.

Finding Those Who “Get“ You

Finding validation for your gifts may mean focusing on the
people who are paying close enough attention to “get” you. You
may need only one or two people who really appreciate your
unique talents, but the more people you can find to support
you, the more you will value your own interests and talents.
As you start to focus on developing your gifts, keep your
eyes trained on those who support you, and put blinders on
those who are unthinkingly negative. Like a teen who focuses

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only on their friends’ smiling faces in a crowd at a talent show,

you too can block out discouraging and distracting voices.
Even if you are really good at something, some people will feel
jealous and challenge you even more. I wish I could tell you
this happens only in high school, but many people, fueled by
their own self-doubt, find it difficult to encourage others.
One of the best ways to find people who get you is to reach
out to new people. Make it a goal to talk to one new person
at school every day. Set a goal to talk to someone who is in a
different crowd than you are. If you play a sport, ask a team
member you haven’t spent time with to go out for a smoothie
after practice. You can never predict where you will find the
person who gets you.

Overcoming Bad Feelings from

Past Failures
Finding your strengths means getting over previous failures.
It’s all too common for teens and even adults to let previous fail-
ures prevent them from moving forward. Being failure phobic
can lead to avoiding risk, which is necessary for success. The
best way to get over any fear is by exposing yourself to it; the
more you do something you are afraid of, the easier it gets to
do. Fear of failure impairs many people, keeping them stuck
in small lives because they are afraid of breaking their con-
stant state of approving nods from their environment. When
you lose your fear of failure, you gain the power to experiment

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Finding Gifts

in life and work, to try things outside your comfort zone and
expertise. Experimentation leads to innovation and discovery,
and you can become unstoppable. As you try out new skills
and test your strengths, don’t be afraid to fail.
After a failure, you will need to choose positive think-
ing and to challenge negative thinking. Negative thinking
involves negative thoughts that hold us back from success. This
can mean thinking you failed because of who you are rather
than thinking you need a different strategy. Positive thinking
means defining yourself by your gifts and talents rather than
setbacks and weaknesses.
If you think of yourself as one of a kind, you can open to
the idea that your talents may be different from others’. It may
be that you find only a few people who really get you and rec-
ognize your talents. Pay attention to those people! Give your-
self permission to experiment with goals, learn about yourself,
and feed that learning back into new goals.

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CHAPTER 3

Setting Goals

People who set goals are more likely to succeed than people
who do not. Having explicit objectives that are challenging
and specific—with clear timeline[s] and performance
criteria—leads to better performance.
—Tal Ben-Shahar

Now that you have found your gifts, you will be choosing your
goals. Goal setting starts with taking the time to think of all
the accomplishments you want to achieve in your own life.
This chapter guides you through setting goals that are mean-
ingful to you and are a bit of a stretch so you gain a sense of
mastery. The combination of autonomy, purpose, and mastery
are fuel to create motivation and drive (Pink 2009).
Many people think of goal setting as something you do
once a year, perhaps on New Year’s Eve or at the beginning of
the school year. The new year starts off as a seemingly fresh
slate, inviting us to decide that this year will be different.
This once-a-year excitement is a bit silly, because planning is
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

a fundamental component of our executive functioning; we

should be using it every day—in fact, every hour!
If you have ADHD, planning can be a particular challenge.
For example, people with ADHD:

• struggle with time management

• struggle with overcoming resistance to take action

on future goals

• are more impulsive

• may not pay attention to consequences that will

occur in the distant future

Those who struggle with executive dysfunction may think

only as far as the next hour or day, whereas others can plan for
a week, month, or year ahead. This is why goal setting is so
helpful—it is setting time aside to plan.
Let’s start with a common goal many teenagers have—
getting good grades. Once you set the goal, it gives you a sense
of purpose that narrows your focus. The more focused you
are, the more clarity you will have in understanding material
and your communications with other people. Once you decide
to get good grades, the decision shifts your priorities and
helps you figure out what is a distraction and what is not. For
example, if you want to get a good grade on your Spanish test,
what becomes a higher priority—finishing season five of your
favorite show or finding a partner to practice your Spanish
with before the test?

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Setting Goals

With a targeted goal, your priorities suddenly become

clear. Goal setting will help you figure out what to prioritize
and what to say no to. You might find that spending time on
mindless streaming of entertainment, social media, and video
games will have to take a back seat. As you think about getting
a good grade on your Spanish test, you might start by writing
a list of friends who may be able to study with you. Next, you
could look at your schedule and create a list of best times to
connect with a friend, and then you can text friends with times
you have available and determine who has a match.

Benefits of Goal Setting

A goal directs activity, increases motivation, and gives you a
purpose—all of which help you focus more throughout the
day. That focus will empower you to solve problems and make
clear decisions. A goal motivates you, because once you set it,
a certain need to prove to yourself that you can do it kicks in.
Think of a goal in the literal sense on a hockey rink, or foot-
ball or soccer field. What if you played those sports, but there
was no scoring, and therefore no winner or loser? That could
be fun and a good way to get exercise, but how focused would
you be with no actual goal? If you didn’t care about scoring
goals, would you ever come up with a playbook or a strategy?
Probably not. The goal drives you to practice your drills of
passing and scoring.

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Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

When we have goals, we usually have to upgrade all areas

of our lives in order to achieve them. Even if we don’t get a spe-
cific goal or win a game, we are most likely going to develop
new skills in the pursuit of the goal. The bottom line is this:
when you have a goal, you try harder.
Trying harder will include taking the time to organize your-
self before you start working. When you sit down to do your
homework, you may have many papers in your backpack, half-
read books that need to be completed, folders, and a calendar.
If your goal is to get good grades, you will try harder to plan
your strategy for that evening. While doing your homework in
the moment may not feel good, if you see it as a stepping-stone
to your goal of good grades, your motivation will be enhanced.
Goals also boost your mood. One researcher found that the
process of striving for goals is an essential component of hap-
piness (Ben-Shahar 2007). Achieving a goal also increases your
sense of self-efficacy—your feeling of confidence to achieve
specific tasks (Locke and Latham 2002).
A goal allows you to feel optimistic that the future can be
different from where you are now. If you set a small goal and
attain it, you get a sense of satisfaction. If you set a daily goal
to limit social media, you may feel a sense of accomplishment
every time you resist picking up your phone to check Snapchat.
Attaining longer-term goals can change your self-image.
If you successfully achieve a goal of getting an A in a class
that previously felt out of reach, you can begin to think more
broadly of your own capacity to succeed. Setting goals can help
you manage anxiety by giving you a sense of control over a

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Setting Goals

situation. Rather than fearing you will get a bad grade, you
realize you can affect the outcome. Your grade on your next
test doesn’t depend on how smart you are but on how hard you
work.
Goals allow you to act more intentionally and promote a
growth mind-set (Dweck 2007). This is in contrast to the fixed
mind-set—here, the belief that some people are smart and
others are not as smart. The growth mind-set will transform
your fear of failure into a commitment to work harder and
challenge yourself.
Former president John F. Kennedy’s speech launching the
United States into the space race offers an example of how we
ourselves are transformed by goals: “We choose to go to the
moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they
are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve
to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,
because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one
we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win,
and the others, too.” This goal is a great example of something
that seemed almost impossible at the time, yet has led to a long
history of space travel, and many private space industry com-
panies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin that are taking us into a
future that is starting to look like a lot of science fiction.
Goals are great tools for managing the impulsive behav-
ior that comes with ADHD and other executive functioning
difficulties. Goals essentially redirect your attention away
from the resistance you feel in the moment and toward a posi-
tive outcome. For example, you can set a goal to reduce your

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Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

smartphone use. Setting this goal will keep you from being
distracted and serve as a reminder to stay on track. When you
think of your goal, it may help you pause and delay picking up
that phone that can turn into a brain drain. Goals can be aids to
mindfulness. They set a momentary barrier between impulse
and action, allowing us to act more intentionally.
Francine shares her story of overcoming the obstacle of
doing something that feels too hard.

• Francine’s Story: Pushing Back Against

the Impossible
Sometimes it’s hard to set a goal because you don’t really feel
it’s possible. I have a friend who traveled to Europe several
times a year to visit family. She invited me to visit her in
Europe for sightseeing and adventure. I always said, “yeah
sure, someday,” but mostly I said that to get her off my back.
For me, to take a trip to Europe seemed impossible. I was
worried about money, and I was afraid of flying and what
could go wrong with so many unknowns.
One day she said to me, “I think the problem is you really
think it’s impossible.” I didn’t hesitate to say that was exactly
what it seemed to me. There were so many stressors in my
life of competing needs that planning and paying for a trip to
Europe did seem impossible. She told me, “It’s not impossible.
It’s just one plane flight and next thing you know you’re in
Europe; it’s really not a big deal.” I wasn’t convinced but I did

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Setting Goals

set a goal to go to Europe. I realized that if I saved money over

the summer it would seem sort of manageable.
With the goal in mind, I worked some odd jobs scooping
ice cream and some retail sales. As I approached graduation,
some friends were planning a trip to Europe, and I said I
wanted to make it happen. With a little planning, I was able to
buy a plane ticket to London to visit my friend.

Dr. Lara Says

One lesson from Francine’s story is straightforward:
If there’s something you want to accomplish but it
seems impossible, find someone who already does
that. Talk to them and learn how to break it down
into manageable steps.

SMART Goals
Before we get deeper into goal setting, let’s talk about SMART
goals. When you create your goals, you want to make sure they
are concrete enough for you to achieve them and know when
you have achieved them.
Below is a formula and an example for creating goals that
will motivate you and increase your chances of success.

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Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

S—Specific
When Michael was going to a new high school where most of
the kids would know everybody, he said he wanted to make
new friends. I helped him set up two specific goals: (1) I will
talk to one person in each class the first week I start school and
(2) I will join clubs as a way to meet people who share interests
with me.

M—Measurable
Michael decided to create a checklist of all his classes for the
first week of school. Each time he gathered the courage to talk
to someone in a class, he could check off that class. He decided
he would test out three different clubs: the Homework Club,
the Chess Club, and the Gay-Straight Alliance Club. After
trying out all three clubs, he would choose one to commit to.

A—Attainable
Talking to one person in every class was attainable; Michael
had control over it and the courage to take a risk. His goal was
to join a chess club, not to win a national chess title. He doesn’t
have control over the team’s performance. His motivation was
to find friends with shared interests, and he did not have the
skill level to win a national title.

R—Relevant
Making new friends is relevant because Michael’s level of sat-
isfaction at his new high school will be increased by feeling

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Setting Goals

socially connected. A sense of belonging is one of the most

important needs of any teenager.

T—Time Bound
Michael chose the time frame of talking to people in the first
week of class because he realized that he would have his best
chance of meeting other new people before cliques started to
form, and he would gain confidence by starting out strong.

In summary, SMART goals allow you to monitor your

progress toward your goal, to know if you are on track. You
can check off elements, such as introducing yourself to a new
person. SMART goals also help you figure out what you have
control over and what you do not have control over. You can
control how many people you reach out to. You cannot control
if they like you, or even if they do, whether that will make you
popular. You gain a sense of control over your life by clarifying
what you can do and taking small steps in the right direction.

Writing Down Your Goals

Research has shown that writing down your goals will increase
your chances of success. One study found that 70 percent of
those who wrote down their goals reported progress in goal
achievement, compared to 35 percent who didn’t write down
their goals (Matthews 2007). It may be that writing down a goal
makes it go from a thought in your mind to a concrete reality
you are now accountable for.

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Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

Every day we have wants, desires, and goals that go through

our minds and are immediately followed by worries, concerns,
and immediate demands in the real world. Our goals can be
like fireworks, impressive but fading quickly from memory. In
the constant stream of thoughts and feelings, our most impor-
tant goals can easily get lost. Writing them down makes us
take our goals seriously. It also forces us to think more clearly
about the scale and scope of our goals.

Areas for Goal Setting

To get started setting goals, let’s look at four important areas
for goal setting: school, relationships, health and fitness, and
bucket lists. We’ll dig deeper into school goals because those
tend to be the area of greatest importance and therefore stress
for many teens.

School
It’s necessary, as always with goals, to focus on the purpose.
Ideally, your goals will have more to do with your values than
with your ability. We often forget that the purpose of an edu-
cation is not to chase grades—although striving to achieve
the best grade possible will transition into other areas of your
life—but to be educated, to learn. Some teens may aspire to
getting all As or Bs; for others, the goal may be to avoid getting

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Setting Goals

Ds. You might pick subjects you are already interested in and
focus on excelling in those classes.
Some examples of goals in an academic setting include:

• graduating

• achieving a certain grade on a specific test

• not missing any homework in a week (or month or

quarter, or perhaps a year)

• studying x number of nights per week (or per month)

• scoring an A (or B or C) on a specific test (or paper

or project)

In addition to grades, which is where the majority of goals

will likely be set, are more intrinsic goals. We go to school for
years in order to learn more about the outside world, but also
to learn more about the inside world—ourselves. In order to
figure out what you want to do, where you want to be, and who
you want to be, you have to figure out what you don’t want to
do, where you don’t want to be, and who you don’t want to be.

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Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

TRY IT Take out your journal or the Notes app on

your phone, and write down a mission statement for your
education. Your mission statement should include your goal,
the purpose of your goal, and one action step. For example:

ƒ I want to get good grades and my ultimate purpose is

to increase the opportunities I will have. I will create a
study schedule and stick to it.

ƒ I want to get a summer job at the Space and Science

Center. The purpose is to prepare me to work in the
private space industry. I will google the center and ask
for more information.

ƒ I want to work with animals. The purpose of my educa-

tion is to prepare me to work in wildlife and environmental
conservation. I will ask my family and teachers if they
know someone who works in this field.

Remember to base your statement on a SMART goal—

specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound.
List one thing you will do in pursuit of the goal.

SEEK OUTSIDE SUPPORT

In working toward your school goals, you may need extra
help. Many schools have resources for peer tutors, and many
local libraries also offer peer tutoring services.

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Setting Goals

You could also consider seeing a school counselor or ther-

apist. Some therapists are trained to help you manage atten-
tion problems and address test-taking anxiety that can directly
impact your grades. And just having someone to talk to can
also help your grades because the things that bother you on
a day-to-day basis can interfere with your attention and moti-
vation. If, for example, your parents are getting a divorce or
a family member is ill or struggling with an addiction, these
can weigh heavily on you and distract you from your own
goals. The phrase “just getting it off your chest” can be appli-
cable—even if your problems don’t magically go away, you
will have more energy available for taking on your classwork.
Talking with a therapist can help you learn tools for changing
the channel to happy memories to replace worry, challenging
self-defeating thoughts, and getting referrals to other support
systems in your community.

Positive Self-Talk
Tell yourself, I have to feel it to heal it. If I don’t talk it out, I may act
it out.

SEEK ACCOMMODATIONS
If you have a diagnosis such as ADHD, autism, or a specific
learning disorder, you may be able to receive specific accom-
modations to help you with your schoolwork. These accommo-
dations can include having a note taker in classes, getting to

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Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

take tests in private rooms, or being allowed more time. Some

students will be allowed to use speech-to-text technologies to
do their schoolwork. There are also technologies, such as the
C-PEN, that can be used to scan text and read it aloud to stu-
dents who are wearing headphones.

Relationships
Although some teens value school goals more than rela-
tionship goals, research has consistently shown that happy
people have one thing in common: they have strong social
relationships. That is why super skill number one is finding
gifts. You can build self-confidence that will help you make
and keep friends.
First and foremost, in order to set relationship goals, you
need to decide what you want. Do you want to have great
friends and be a great friend? Do you want people to expand
your world by showing you other families, other activities,
other ways of understanding the world? Friends can make our
world bigger and more interesting. Friends can support us and
give us a broader perspective on life. Building connections
with friends will help you in romantic relationships when you
are ready for that. Having friends increases flexible thinking;
when you realize they have different values, skills, and inter-
ests, the world can open up to you. You can also add great value
to your friends’ lives. You can inspire friends with your love of
reading books or finding hidden gems of movies to watch.

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Setting Goals

TRY IT Think about the value you can add to a

friend’s life by being a friend as much as you benefit from
having a friend. Using your journal or Notes app, write a list of
five ways you can be a friend to someone else.

As you can start to see, there are a million reasons why

people need social connections. For you, there may be just one,
a few, or many. There can be a primary purpose, as well as sec-
ondary ones. You may change your purpose along the way to
achieving that goal. No matter what happens, though, always
keep in mind some sort of “why.” Think of it like a rope that
you’re holding on to for dear life. If you let go of the “why”
of your goal, your dream, it can lose meaning. You may still
achieve it, but it likely won’t mean anything to you anymore.
And life is all about meaning.

TRY IT Write down three relationship goals in your

journal or the Notes app on your phone—for example, to
talk to one new person every week at school so you keep
expanding your social circle; to find friends who share similar
interests; or to find a caring dating relationship. Include the
purpose of the goal, the ultimate “why?” Some people’s
social goals may be a means to an end—for example, they
want to have friends so they have something to do on Satur-
day night. For other people, social goals are more abstract;
they simply find being connected to others emotionally fulfill-
ing in itself.

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Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

• Dwayne’s Story
Dwayne wanted to be a nurse when he grew up, and he was
frustrated that he didn’t currently have anyone to share
his interests or help him figure out how he could build his
interest. He decided to join a club at high school for students
interested in health careers. Through this club, he made
friends with similar interests and learned about many exciting
opportunities. He also took a class in administering CPR
where he got to meet more people who were motivated to be
helpers in the medical field. Through these social relationships,
he gained vital information for directing his future. He found
a local hospital that offered volunteer programs for high
school students, and he set a goal to apply over the summer.
He learned that when he was eighteen he could enroll in a
certified nursing assistant program in his area. These actions
and goals increased his motivation and gave him confidence
for his long-term career goal. Equally important, this process
built his social network and friendships. These friendships
were easier because everyone’s shared interests in health
careers gave them so much to talk about.

Health and Fitness

Health and fitness goals can include, for example, having
a healthy diet, setting up a regular exercise plan, or playing
basketball in college. Setting a goal allows you to figure out

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Setting Goals

whether you’re on track, and if not, to find a strategy to get

there.
Let’s say you decide you want to run a marathon. Your
primary purpose may be to prove to yourself that you can be
disciplined. Your secondary purpose may be that you want to
get healthier, be in better shape, eat better, or quit smoking. To
help you decide the “why,” ask yourself: Do I want to get in
better shape? Is setting the goal of running a marathon a way
to help me do that? Is it something to focus on to help me run?
Do I just want to run more?

• Olivia’s Story
Olivia set a goal to run a half marathon. Her purpose was
to create a lifelong habit of running to stay fit and help
her manage her emotions. She had noticed that when she
got stressed out, she would spend time on Snapchat and
Instagram, hoping they would distract her from her stress.
Instead, she often found herself more stressed. Sometimes she
saw a group of her friends hanging out without her. She felt
ignored and rejected. She found that if she went for a run she
would get a more balanced reaction to put social media in
perspective.
Olivia thought running would have many healthy side
effects and wouldn’t create more angst for her, as social media
did. She set daily running goals with scheduled breaks so she
could recover or nurse injuries. She committed to running
regularly and started out walking and running until she could

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Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

run greater distances. She found friends to run with her. She
monitored her thought process and disciplined herself to keep
her thoughts encouraging. She found that remembering her
purpose helped her keep motivated. She did achieve her goal
and found that running helped her put in perspective the ups
and downs of the daily social drama in high school.

One way to start tackling health and fitness is to set ninety-

day goals. With a ninety-day goal, you will not have to wait too
long to see progress or goal completion. Seeing that progress
builds motivation to keep setting goals. The momentum you
gain can help you avoid procrastination and build confidence.
Research has found that making a public commitment,
such as sending your goal to a parent or friend, increases goal
progress (Matthews 2007). Being accountable to others allows
you to get support, encouragement, and helpful guidance from
them. One way to do this is to send weekly progress reports to
the people you made a public commitment to.

TRY IT Write down three of your own health and

fitness goals in your journal or Notes app, and include the
purpose or bigger “why.” Use the SMART goal formula to
increase your level of success and ability to monitor your
progress. Write down one actionable step you will take this
week. Send an email to a friend or family member telling
them about this step you will take.

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Setting Goals

Bucket List Goals

Even if your goals are not about what you’re going to do
with your life, the pursuit of bucket list goals can shape your
answer to that question and clarify what you are capable of.
Bucket list goals tend to involve travel, adventure, and experi-
ences, rather than self-improvement.
In 100 Things: What’s on Your List?, author Sebastian Terry
described the hundred items he wanted to accomplish, includ-
ing running with the bulls and delivering a baby. While he
fulfilled many of his goals, it was a simple one that trans-
formed his life, giving him a vocation. That goal was to help
a stranger. He helped a paralyzed man accomplish his dream
of running a marathon by pushing him to the finish line. The
sense of satisfaction he got from that experience led to his true
dream of helping others by creating Kindsum.com, a platform
where people could ask for help or give help. He began to travel
around the world speaking. He was transformed by the goals
he set to create his own happiness.

TRY IT Write down three of your bucket list goals in

your journal or Notes app, and include the purpose or bigger
“why.” Use the SMART goal formula to increase your level
of success and ability to monitor your progress. Write down
one actionable step you will take this week.

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Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

• Coretta’s Story
Coretta loved dogs but her parents wouldn’t let her get one.
Her bucket list goal was to spend a lot of time with dogs.
Her first idea was to offer to walk the neighbors’ dogs. She
realized that she would have to sign up for a class on how to
take care of dogs. She googled “teen classes to help dogs” and
found a local Animal Rescue Foundation that offered classes,
opportunities to be a teen counselor at summer camps, and
lots of volunteer activities. She realized that she had more
than enough opportunities to meet her bucket list goal. She
made her ninety-day goal to complete a training on how to
care for dogs and become an advocate for their welfare.

I hope this story inspires you to see that goals can trans-
form not only your life but also your own confidence in your-
self and your ability to stretch yourself. You have to step out of
your everyday life to reach rewards that will test and increase
your own skills and courage. Every time you step out of your
comfort zone, which is required to achieve your goals, you get
more and more able to expand that zone. Goals give you the
sense that you are a creator of your life. Your life is not like a
movie you have to sit down and watch unfold—you are the
movie director, the screenwriter, and the actor.

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CHAPTER 4

Chunking

Anyone can carry his burden, however heavy, until nightfall.

Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone
can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun
goes down. And this is all that life really means.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

Chunking—breaking big projects into smaller steps—can be

the most powerful super skill for immediate results. It is also
the simplest to learn and use instantly. Think of a messy desk
you have to clean or laundry you have to do. You may feel
resistance to it because it feels like a huge hassle. Now think
of setting a timer for five minutes and telling yourself you
will clean for five minutes and then stop even if you have not
finished the job. Most people would be willing to get started
because the project doesn’t seem so big.
For many people, this simple tool creates change quickly.
What if instead of piling up garbage in your car, you spent two
minutes every day cleaning it out? The car would be clean, you
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

wouldn’t be embarrassed to drive your friends around, and you

could find needed items quickly. Most people feel encouraged
by their progress and gain momentum. One barrier to getting
started can be the pressure to get it just right the first time. The
desire to be perfect is in some ways the opposite of chunking.
Psychologists often tell their clients that perfectionism can be
self-defeating when it creates anxiety rather than progress.

• Fernando’s Story
Fernando described himself as “an all-or-nothing guy.” He
didn’t like the inbetween. When he worked out, he liked to go
all out at the gym; if he couldn’t do that, he wouldn’t work out
at all. When he made his lunch to take to school, he liked to
imitate his favorite TV chef; if he couldn’t do that, he would
just bring money to buy lunch.
Because of his all-or-nothing style, he created a plan to
work on his senior project only on weekends when he could
spend from three to five hours at a time doing research,
coming up with ideas, and devoting a significant amount of
time to valuable work, all within one sitting.
The problem with that approach was that on the weekend
he felt a great deal of resistance to getting started on spending
such a long amount of time on focused work.
When I suggested to him that he spread out the work
across the week in small chunks, he gave it a try. He still felt
resistance and was tempted to tell himself that if he watched
Netflix instead he could procrastinate until the weekend.

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When he was able to get started, even if only for a half hour,
and see some progress, he felt more accomplished and more
satisfied.

In this case, Fernando was impacted by his own self-talk.

He told himself that he could do a half hour on weekdays and
it would all add up (helpful). But then he told himself that if he
did it all on the weekend he could watch Netflix and get imme-
diate gratification (unhelpful).
All of us have these helpful and unhelpful voices. There are
some solutions that can get you to focus on the helpful, positive
self-talk. For example, Fernando could say:

• I can just write for ten minutes, and at least I will see
some progress.

• I might enjoy Netflix more without the guilty feeling of

the senior project hanging over my head.

• What’s the smallest amount of time I am willing to put in

now? (This can help him recognize that maybe one
hour is too long. He describes himself as “an all-
or-nothing guy,” so he may need to learn there are
many options other than doing zero work during
the week.)

• Do I really want to let my resistance win again? (This

allows him to engage his determination to be the
boss of his brain and not let his resistance win yet
again.)

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He could also think of someone who has a lot of strength,

maybe the Rock (Dwayne Johnson). He could follow him on
Instagram to seek inspiration for his ideal of being strong
and to realize the benefits of hard work—in this case, lifting
weights.

Decreasing Resistance Through

Chunking
Think of each chunk as a stepping-stone on the path to your
final destination. Stepping-stones decrease the level of resis-
tance to getting started by making a job smaller. There are two
different categories for chunking: routine and rhythm.

Routine Chunking
Routine can get boring, but it is steady, reliable, and simpler.
People with inattentive ADHD may prefer routine because
there is less distraction, making focus easier. With routine,
you don’t have to take up mental bandwidth to shift gears
and figure out what’s next. A routine is fixed, with prescribed
amounts of time for work and prescribed amounts of time for
breaks. If you think of stepping-stones, it would be equidistant
stones in which all the stones were identical.
A simple example of routine chunking for doing your
homework could include these stepping-stones:

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Chunking

• Finish your homework for one class.

• Take a break.

• Start homework for another class.

• Take a break.

• Repeat until you get to your reward, which is one

hour of video games.

Some routine-oriented chunking methods have gained

popularity; one example is the Pomodoro method. This strat-
egy involves working for twenty-five minutes, then taking a
break for five minutes. You would repeat four sets, then take
a longer break. This strategy has the benefit of having a lot of
accessories that go with it—an app, hourglasses you can flip
over to measure the work and break time, and more.
Some people with executive function challenges need to
find the right ratio of work to break time. It might be twenty
minutes work to ten minutes break. Those with more severe
challenges might even need fifteen minutes work to twenty
minutes break. Although it is not the most efficient strategy,
for some, it might be the only strategy that is motivating.

Rhythm Chunking
In contrast, rhythm chunking allows for responsive changes
to meet your current needs and preferences. Times and breaks
are not fixed. In the example of the stepping-stones, each stone

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can be different from the others; you could change your mind
about how long you will work, how long you will rest, what
kind of work you will do, and what rest time means.
While routine is fixed and stable, rhythm is changing, like
the seasons of the year. Rhythm makes life interesting—in
some parts of the country, just when the autumn leaves have
finished falling, you get winter’s first snow. Change is fun, but
it is also work. You have to rake the leaves and then get out the
snow shovel. It takes flexibility to adapt to the rhythm of life.
People with impulsive/hyperactive ADHD may prefer rhythm
because it is constantly changing and more stimulating.
Rhythm chunking could look like this:

• Have a snack.

• Study for an hour.

• Go for a fifteen-minute walk.

• Study for a half hour.

• Eat dinner.

• Study for a half hour.

• Check social media for fifteen minutes.

• Study for an hour.

• Watch Netflix for an hour before going to bed.

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While this is not as strict as a routine-oriented Pomodoro-

type study method, it far surpasses the free-for-all of coming
home from school without a plan and watching TV, then pro-
crastinating and opening up your books after dinner. For some
teens with executive function challenges, just moving from
this free-for-all to a rhythm-based structure can make a big
difference.
When using rhythm chunking, you can recharge your
brain by filling your breaks with activities that restore atten-
tion. Research has also shown that remembering happy times
boosts mood and attention (Ben-Shahar 2007). The next activity
allows you to access happy memories to boost attention.

TRY IT On your phone or laptop, create a photo

folder labeled “Happy.” Choose from twenty-five to fifty
photos of your happiest memories, and put them in this
folder. These may include photos of people you love, great
times with friends, landmark sights you’ve been to, breath-
taking scenery you’ve visited, or other things that make you
smile or bring to mind some of the best times of your life.
You can include happy memories that are selfies, but that
shouldn’t be the focus. The idea is to find times where you
were emotionally connected or filled with positive feelings—
not just flattering photos of yourself.

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One of the other benefits of using a happy-photo file is that

it can help you avoid the addictive trap of of social media. Not
only can social media be addictive (in fact, it’s designed to be
so), but it can also create negative emotions, whether it be fear
of missing out on what other people are doing or jealousy of
what other people have. Boosting mood has been shown to
increase productivity, so creating your own happy file gives
you access to a customized attention-boosting tool.

TRY IT Using your journal or Notes app, write down

your current after-school rhythm, including eating, home-
work, exercise, and screen time. Review your list and see
where you could add more productivity or tweak it so that
you add more variety, like changes in the seasons. Do you
need more color, more movement, more fun, or more mood
brightening?

• Moriah’s Story
Moriah had two big problems that kept her from getting
the grades she wanted. One was social media, and the other
was YouTube. She kept her phone near her while she did
her homework and had alerts on from all her social media
channels and texts from her friends and her swim team. She
started to fix this by creating a routine of forty-five minutes
studying followed by thirty-minute breaks. Her phone
would be in another room during work times, so she was

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more efficient. She would allow herself to watch YouTube

videos only during break times, and instead of becoming a
distraction, it became a reward. She earned the reward only
after she completed the forty-five-minute study period. After
Moriah made these changes and got positive results, including
improved grades, she realized she had been fooling herself by
thinking that she could study and watch videos or track social
media at the same time.

Advanced Chunking Strategies

Some people find that they don’t want to even think about
homework because the idea of opening their precalculus (or
history or science) book is overwhelming. They don’t start on
anything because they are avoiding the mental quicksand they
fall into thinking about their hardest subject. The point is that
without creating a plan, your mind can turn homework into a
monster lurking under the bed.
These advanced chunking strategies can help you handle
the tasks you have the most resistance to.

Eating the Frog

The phrase “eat the frog” comes from the idea that if
someone told you that you had to eat a frog you might waste
a whole day thinking about how terrible that would be, rather
than just getting it over with as soon as possible so you can

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enjoy the rest of your day (Tracy 2017). By doing your hardest
homework first, you know that the rest of the homework will
be easier. The relief of having the hardest thing done can be its
own reward.

Deciding on Chunk Size

Break the hardest course into the smallest chunks. For
example, if your worst class is Spanish, make a point of study-
ing for a half hour on Saturdays and Sundays so you can do
smaller chunks during the busier weekdays. You may have to
create a rhythm that has more restoration time—activities that
allow you to restore your brain—compared to your study time.
It might be fifteen minutes study Spanish, twenty minutes
listen to music. That’s not efficient, but if that’s what it takes to
get going, it’s worth a try.
Another way to facilitate chunking is to rate the level of
resistance you have to certain tasks. The higher the resistance,
the smaller the chunks you may need to feel motivated to get
started. The level of resistance you feel may be a guide to cre-
ating a rhythm rather than a routine. For example, in plan-
ning an evening of study, you may want your first task to be
a shortened time of study for your hardest class. The reward
for overcoming the resistance may be a longer break time. If
the resistance is overwhelming, ask yourself, What is the small-
est possible chunk I can do? Most people will be able to dive in
for ten minutes. If that’s what you have to tell yourself to get
started, give it a try.

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Getting Started
Sometimes a task feels so overwhelming that you might not
realize that some parts are harder than others, and that the
first step is not the hardest. For example, if you have to study
for a test, you may have to write out flash cards to study. You
might realize that you don’t mind writing out the flash cards—
you can use colorful markers and have some fun with it—but
it’s the memorization that’s hard. This question can help you
get started and gain momentum. The process of making the
flash cards adds variation to your study time, so there are ben-
efits that exceed just borrowing someone else’s flash cards.
Even using pictures can help you by giving you more varia-
tion, which can be more stimulating.
Try to think of steps that move you forward and are more
fun. For example, making flash cards may be more fun if you
use markers with scents. You could read vocabulary words
into your voice recorder on your phone and then listen to the
recording before a big test to get in some review. You could
have fun recording vocabulary words by using funny voices or
singing them to the tune of your favorite song. Explaining the
material you are learning to someone else is a great way to test
out how well you have learned it.

SQR3
SQR3 is a study method that involves chunking studying
into (S) scanning material; (Q) asking yourself questions; and

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(R3) reading, reciting, and reviewing. Scanning means looking

over chapter headings, skimming where you’re interested, and
getting a sense of what you will be covering. By asking ques-
tions, you prepare your mind to look for answers. You can
think of any questions your teacher may have asked you to
think about as you do the assignment. In addition to reading,
reciting (or speaking out loud) as if you were teaching someone
else can create a rhythm for studying. After doing all that, one
final review can increase your retention.
It can be hard to start studying because you feel like you
have to somehow get all the material from a chapter into your
brain in one try. SQR3 offers you five different ways, some
easier than others, to absorb the material.

One Thing at a Time

You can super boost the superpower of stepping-stones by fol-
lowing the slogan “One thing at a time.” Many people think
they’re great at multitasking, but they are fooling themselves.
Researchers have found that multitasking increases the amount
of time it takes to get something done and also increases mis-
takes. Try to be honest with yourself. As much as you try
to slog through your homework by having Netflix on in the
background as a distraction, if you’re honest, you’ll notice it is
exactly that—a distraction.
Chunking is an alternative to pointless distraction. You can
use a TV show as a reward for completing a chunk that you feel

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Chunking

motivated to do. It is likely you will get more done in fifteen

minutes of focused work than in a longer time of distracted
work. More important are the habits you are forming as you
practice chunking. Switching tasks (homework and TV) creates
anxiety and brain fog, and can become addictive because the
novelty boosts your level of the brain chemical dopamine
(Levitin 2015). Multitasking leads to lower quality work and
over time depletes working memory.
“One thing at a time” offers a different quality of life. Your
life is made up of a sequence of moments that pass by quickly,
and when you are present in each moment, you enhance the
quality of your life. You can choose to be fully present for your
life or to go through life mindlessly.

• Christopher’s Story
It was Monday, and Christopher had a paper on The Great
Gatsby due the next Monday. He had known about the
assignment since the beginning of the semester and hadn’t
even bought the book yet. When he realized the paper was due
in one week, he took the next step and downloaded the book
on his Kindle. Every time he read for forty minutes, he would
allow himself to play one game of League of Legends.
As Christopher read, he would sometimes wonder
what was going on. He would text his classmates who were
also working on their papers and they talked about their
respective ideas. They started a group text where they could
ask questions, and they supported each other in trying to

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understand the themes of the book. Not only did he get new
perspectives but also the support energized him to keep going.
It turned out he wasn’t the only one who had waited to the
last week to start this assignment.
Christopher did finish his paper on Sunday evening,
but he reflected on how stressful it was to spend his whole
weekend doing a project that would have been a lot easier if he
had started when he got the assignment, not one week before
it was due.

Challenging Resistance
When I described goal setting in chapter 3, you learned that one
of your greatest enemies can be called resistance. Quite simply,
this is that feeling of “I don’t feel like doing it now” or “I can
do this later.” Resistance is to be planned for and expected; you
encounter it every single day. Chunking is one of your greatest
allies in challenging resistance. The quickest way to challenge
resistance is to figure out what the first step is. Then you set
your goal as just that one simple step.

TRY IT Think about the project you have the most

resistance to. Take out your journal or Notes app, and write
down what the first step is. Make this step the smallest pos-
sible chunk.

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Dr. Lara Says

One simple strategy for success in school is to start
on an assignment when you get it. This strategy has
the benefit of allowing you to work in smaller chunks.
You can do a little over longer time so you will not
have so much resistance to getting started. Stress
interferes with attention, making it harder to focus.
By working on a long-term project in small chunks
over a lot of time, you won’t feel so much stress and
pressure. Starting early and working in small chunks
is a win-win.

Whenever you don’t feel like doing something, ask your-

self, What’s the first step I can take? or What’s the smallest step I
can take right now? Even if that first step is just writing out a list
of what items you need to get started, you have already made
your job a lot easier.

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CHAPTER 5

Boosting Motivation

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading

it today.
—Abraham Lincoln

Many people with ADHD and executive dysfunction believe

that their lack of motivation is an unchanging quality of who
they are. You may feel surprise and shock that there are things
you can do to increase your motivation, and there are things
you may be doing that decrease your motivation. One of the
most common hurdles to motivation is a negative view of
yourself, the idea that you are unmotivated because there’s just
something wrong with you. However, the good news is that
motivation is a super skill, which means that it can be learned.
In fact, thinking of motivation as a super skill can defeat these
negative, internal, persistent beliefs about who you are and
what you are capable of.
Think about it this way: if you were a baseball player, the
more times you practiced hitting the ball, the better you would
get at batting. So too with practicing the super skills: the more
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

you practice, the better you will get. This may seem like common
sense, but there’s also a scientific explanation. One of the reasons
you get better with practice is because of the brain’s neuroplasti-
city. Think back to “the neurons that fire together wire together.”
In short, if you practice something every day, those skills become
part of the structure and function of your brain.
Replacing negative thoughts with a positive self-concept
will lead to more positive outcomes. You will also have the
added benefits of a growth mind-set, the understanding that
the more you apply these skills, the more motivation you can
unleash. On a very fundamental level, the idea that you can
boost your motivation empowers you to keep looking for solu-
tions to get to your goals. Some of these tools may work for
you, some may not. The outcomes you get are dependent on
your one-of-a-kind personality. If you find a handful of tools
that work for you, you can begin to see progress, which itself
will motivate you.

Dr. Lara Says

The label “unmotivated” can become like a virus
that disrupts a computer’s performance and causes
crashes. For teens who have a diagnosis such as
ADHD or another executive dysfunction, these nega-
tive labels can impact their sense of identity and all
the different actions that they’re willing to take or
not willing to take. Motivation is a super skill you
can build—new skills create new neural connections.

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Boosting Motivation

Positive Self-Talk
Tell yourself, I can increase my motivation by being encouraging
rather than discouraging to myself.

Motivational Enhancement—Finding
Your Own Inner Compass
Deep down you know you want to make some changes. Barri-
ers to that change may be fear that you don’t have what it takes,
or an attitude of “Why try?” that can result from discourage-
ment. There is a science to increasing motivation, and beyond
that science is the poetry of your dreams, imagination, and
desires. These can be your most potent guides to the lifelong
process of self-discovery.
Psychologists William Miller and Stephen Rollnick (2012)
developed an effective set of tools to help increase motiva-
tion by finding your own inner compass. These tools include
(1) developing discrepancy, (2) supporting self-efficacy,
(3) rolling with resistance, and (4) self-compassion. We’ll cover
all four in this chapter so that you can develop your super skill
of motivation.

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Developing Discrepancy
One way to increase motivation is to develop discrepancy,
which means paying attention to the conflicts between what
you are doing and what you want for yourself. What’s impor-
tant here is that you’re not making changes because someone
told you to; you are doing it because you want change for your-
self. It is important to understand that it is absolutely not self-
criticism. It is the opposite—a gentle approach to reminding
yourself what you really want and realizing that your behav-
iors may be hurting you.
Developing discrepancy means noticing that a bad thing is
a bad thing. If you walked into a room and saw a pile of garbage,
you probably wouldn’t think, That garbage adds a little something
special to the atmosphere. You would hopefully be motivated to
get rid of the garbage. It is easier to fool ourselves about our
own habits than about something as obvious as garbage.
Developing discrepancy means getting real and knowing
when something is good for you and when it’s not. A simple
example is that maybe getting notifications on your phone all
day from every social media platform, app, text, and email is
actually … wait for it … garbage. If you call it what it is, you
can take control and go to your settings to limit how many
notifications you get on your phone.
One way to think of developing discrepancy is to stop
fooling yourself about the costs of certain behaviors, such as
vaping. The risks of vaping have made headlines for a lung
disease that has resulted in deaths. Other risks include poten-
tial for addiction and creating conflict with your parents that

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Boosting Motivation

will lead to consequences and restrictions on your freedom. It

may seem that there are benefits to bonding with others or the
high that results, but that same high from tobacco or marijuana
may create a habit that is hard to break. Any use of a substance
to manage mood or find focus limits your freedom, given the
risk of becoming dependent on that substance. The six super
skills can also solve some of the problems of managing mood
and finding focus. The best way to stop fooling yourself is to
make a list of all of the costs of a behavior, including its risks.
We will look closely at the example of procrastination
because that is one of the biggest pain points, with the pressure
many teens feel to do well in school. Procrastination may be a
form of self-sabotage that prevents you from finding your true
gifts. If you procrastinate on your writing assignments, your
main focus becomes getting them done. If you allow yourself
more time, you have the chance to develop your writing skills
and discover a talent. Many people who discovered a talent
for writing later in life were surprised because their procras-
tination habits in school had led them to think of writing as
a punishing activity. Under stress, they weren’t able to show
their true capacity and get the encouragement they might have
found if they had put in the time.

Action vs. Procrastination

Taking action and procrastination are two different paths
that take you to two different end points. Instead of telling

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yourself, I can always do this later, you want to get real about the
goals you will not attain if you procrastinate.
Procrastination in any area, whether it be extracurricular
activities or sports, leads to worse results than action. Moti-
vation is the fuel generated by increasing your awareness
of the massive gap between the outcomes of action versus
procrastination.

• Riya’s Story
Riya wanted to get a role in the next high school performance.
She considered signing up for an improv class to help her
with the audition and build her comfort on stage. She thought
about how nervous she would be in an improv class and
started to back out. When she realized that she would be more
likely to get the part if she took the class, she compared the
disappointment of not getting a role and feeling left out by her
friends who had parts to the exhilaration of being in the play
and letting her talent shine. She decided to take the class.

The Costs of Procrastination

If you had a senior project due in one month and you started
today and finished it early, you would not have to worry about
it for twenty-nine days. If you procrastinated, you would be
worrying about it every day that you did not do it. The cost
here is constant worry.

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Boosting Motivation

We have only so much bandwidth to handle all our differ-

ent demands. If some of that bandwidth is taken up by worry-
ing about things that you could start but choose not to, you are
decreasing your efficiency. Think about doing focused work on
your computer when you have one tab up compared to having
fifteen tabs up. Focus comes easier without the pull of so many
options in plain view. Spending a big chunk of your time wor-
rying about all the projects hanging over your head interferes
with your focus and attention. Completing one project will
free you up to turn your attention to other goals or the next
step in one goal. Procrastination can also cause you to miss
opportunities.

TRY IT Think of a project that is weighing on your

mind. Take out your journal or Notes app, and list all the pros
and cons of procrastination you can think of for a specific
project. As an example of a pro, some people think that pro-
crastination shows you what your priorities are in the sense
that if you really cared about something you would do it; one
of the cons of procrastination is having to stress about your
project for all the time you do not get started. What other
pros and cons can you think of?

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Stress: A Major Cost of Procrastination

Procrastination keeps you from the things you want
because it is an indefinite drain on your mental bandwidth.
If you procrastinate enough, taking action can become doubly
difficult because of stress.
The longer you put something off, the more stressful the
task becomes as the deadline looms. Your body releases stress
hormones that make it harder to pay attention to the work at
hand. Your heart may be racing, your breathing shallow, your
muscles tense, all interfering with concentration. All this can
be avoided by starting a project when you get an assignment,
even if only to write a time-line for completion.

• Vince’s Story
As a serious astronomy geek, Vince was very excited about
the upcoming total solar eclipse. The eclipse would be visible
across a span of the United States from coast to coast. He
knew he had to purchase a pair of viewing glasses because
he could damage his eyes if he looked at the eclipse directly.
Unfortunately, he waited until a few days before the eclipse
and was unable to buy any viewing glasses. All the local
stores were sold out, and he couldn’t get any delivered in time.
For Vince, the day of the eclipse was darkened by the stress
caused by how to view it without the appropriate eye gear.

Have you ever missed an incredible opportunity because

you procrastinated?

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Boosting Motivation

Focus on the Benefits of Completion

We have to do our absolute best to visualize the rewards of
completion. Why are we doing what we’re doing? What’s the
point? It goes back to the purpose of the goal. Is it a feeling? Is
it something physical? Tangible?
Think of something you have been putting off. What feel-
ings do you get when you visualize the rewards of completing
this project? Will you get an overwhelming sense of relief or
pride? Will you get something tangible, like a paycheck if you
get yourself a summer job? Will you gain physical fitness if you
check off going to the gym for the day?
The main idea here is that you can increase motivation by
developing discrepancy between taking action and procrasti-
nation. The result of looking at benefits and costs of procrasti-
nation is that you can call yourself out for fooling yourself that
whatever you have to do will be easier at a later time.

Self-Efficacy
Self-efficacy is the belief that you are capable of succeeding at
specific tasks with effort. It can be a guiding image of who you
are that is positive, capable, and resilient. Self-efficacy has been
shown to improve grades, physical activity, health outcomes,
and overall satisfaction with life. Self-efficacy can protect
against depression, which is defined by a persistent, internal,
global negative view of the self.

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Imagine you are a football player in the state championship

game. It is fourth down, and you have inches to move the ball
to get a first down. Your coach tells you to go for the first down.
You have been here before, and you know what you have to do.
It’s not easy. Remembering all the times you have gotten that
first down helps you stay focused and determined. You block
out self-doubt—and you get your first down!

NEWS FLASH! We interrupt this book for a public service

announcement: concussions in football may pose risks
to executive functioning.

Beyond the potential risk, what this example shows is that

focusing on previous successes is a formula for increasing task-
specific confidence.
One of the biggest barriers to being motivated is self-doubt.
We know we should get around to doing what we should be
doing. So why do we wait? What holds us back? If it’s good for
us, why don’t we just go do it? Sometimes you are afraid you
just won’t measure up. Notice how unmotivated you feel if you
say to yourself, Why should I prepare for this speech when I’m not
going to be good at it and I might get some bad feedback that I don’t
really want to hear?
The importance of managing self-doubt is why the first
super skill is finding gifts. When you begin to be filled with
doubt, you need to remember your track record. Life isn’t going
to be a graph of constant growth. You may grow for a while,

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but you can’t grow forever. No company stays on top forever.

No athlete. No country. Just look at a stock ticker. Pick any
great company you see or hear about on the news. Amazon.
Google. Apple. You name it, that company has had ups, and
that company has had downs. Why did investors continue
to put their faith in these companies? Because they saw their
track records of previous successes. So when you’re down in
the dumps, fall back on your past successes. Remind yourself
that you’ve come this far, and that you can go a little further.
And hey, quit being so hard on yourself!

TRY IT Using your Notes app or journal, create a list

of your past successes. Ask friends and family for remind-
ers of successes. Review this list any time you are filled with
self-doubt.

One time at a book signing, a young woman came up to

me crying. She told me that it had taken her many years to dis-
cover the theme of one of my books—that ADHD can be a gift.
She had struggled with many school failures. Her story was
ultimately a success story. She did eventually graduate with a
degree from a university. The secret to her transformation was
that she learned that the further she went in her education, the
more she could take classes that were really interesting to her.
She learned that she had a special talent for generating origi-
nal perspectives. Whereas in high school she had to be a good
studier, in college she could get good grades on opinion papers

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where her originality stood out. She had to shift her self-con-
cept from believing that ADHD meant she couldn’t be a good
student to knowing that she had many talents and interests
that could fuel her success.
So, the easiest way to create a sense of self-efficacy is to just
list your past successes! This will remind you of how capable
you truly are, which is motivating.

Rolling with Resistance

Resistance is that sense of “not feeling like it.” Rolling with
resistance means that you stay nonjudgmental and accept-
ing of yourself even when you feel unmotivated. If you feel
backed into a corner when you feel pressure to get started,
rolling with resistance will give you a choice. You can remind
yourself that you are free to choose to start now or to plan to
start in a half hour. Just for fun, when you don’t feel like doing
your homework, ask yourself, What are the benefits of not doing
my homework? Rather than getting defensive, you are honoring
your feeling and are open to the idea that there are reasons for
that feeling. It’s kind of funny only because in most cases there
are few benefits to avoiding homework, but the willingness to
explore benefits can create an openness to move forward.
When we find ourselves not wanting to study for a test or
practice piano or just get up off the couch, our resistance can
feel like a wall that seems immovable or too high to get over.
Many of us have an automatic response to resistance: we let

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it win! It can be a learned behavior, a neuropathway we have

traveled too many times, but it is also one we can change. Part
of rolling with resistance is to notice it and label it without
giving in to it. Think of a positive vision of you being moti-
vated and driven. Imagine a cheerleader reminding you that
you have what it takes.
You can change the message you give yourself about resis-
tance. Think of motivation as an exotic flower that has to be cul-
tivated. Under harsh conditions, it will fade. Trying to steamroll
your resistance—for example, by telling yourself you’re lazy or
raising the bar higher and higher—will decrease your motiva-
tion. Negative labels can become self-fulfilling, and they can
bring down your mood, which interferes with attention.

Positive Self-Talk
Tell yourself, I can do this. Just get started and I’ll gain some
momentum.

Or: I have everything it takes to get my goals.

Rolling with Resistance Means

Getting Real
Instead of beating yourself up when you feel tempted to
procrastinate, try telling yourself to get real. Procrastination is

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so tempting because it is immediately rewarded. If you have to

do something hard and you let yourself off the hook, you are
immediately rewarded with the relief of not having to focus
hard, dig into math problems, or put on your jogging shoes.
Because it’s so easy to fool ourselves that we will get it done
“sometime, just not now,” we do not always see that there are
high costs to procrastination.

Positive Self-Talk
Tell yourself, I am not going to fool myself that avoiding this hard task
makes life easier. In the long run, it makes life harder.

Feel the Resistance and Do It Anyway

When you feel resistance to studying for your exams, start-
ing that science project, or running the mile, you don’t need
to psychoanalyze yourself to figure out why. The answer is
actually really simple. These things are all very hard, so of
course there’s a part of you that wants to put them off! Instead
of trying to figure out why you resist, start a habit where you
say to yourself, Every time I say I don’t feel like it, I postpone goal
getting. It’s as simple as that.
Think of feeling the resistance and doing it anyway as like
lifting weights; just because it’s hard to do doesn’t mean you
don’t do it. This same tough attitude is required for military

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training where the expression “embrace the suck” is used as a

reminder that hard things aren’t a signal to run away, but rather
a challenge to you to rise to the occasion. Imagine two pathways
that are open to you in that moment when you are tempted to
delay getting started on your homework to check out Snapchat:
you can (1) think about how much easier it would be to pick up
your phone, or (2) use the temptation to fuel your determination
to defeat your own resistance and get started.

Positive Self-Talk
Tell yourself, I can do hard things.

Or: I will review my goal list as a reminder of how important this is

to me.

Self-Compassion
You can also decrease resistance by talking to yourself the way
you would talk to your best friend, with kindness, encourage-
ment, and self-compassion, the fourth tool to help increase
motivation.
Self-compassion may mean admitting that there are many
paths to success, and your path may not look like everyone
else’s. Not everyone has to get straight As to accomplish their
goals. For those with more severe challenges, just graduating

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from high school is a significant accomplishment, and they will

need to call on many of the super skills to achieve this.
Self-compassion can help you be easier on yourself if you
set realistic goals. Maybe you’re being too hard on yourself.
By stepping outside of your life, your shell, your current situa-
tion, you can gain new perspective. Maybe you do this through
taking a break, meditating, or talking to someone who cares
about you. Whatever you do to gain new perspective on your
experience, keep in mind a goal of gaining a better grasp of
your current state.

Think Differently about Thinking

Differently: Neurodiversity
One idea that strengthens self-compassion is the idea of
neurodiversity; instead of thinking of executive dysfunction as a
brain disorder, think of it as a brain difference. Neurodiversity
means that our brain differences are predictable variations and
are part of all that makes us unique human beings. Just as we
differ in race, culture, height, and religion, so too do we differ
in in how our brains work. School systems may not go far
enough to address the reality that there are all kinds of minds.
Being a human can be painful, and we are all so different, yet
we all want to feel like we belong. Self-compassion can stop a
cycle of increasing self-doubt.
It’s common for students to get sent to the principal’s office
for talking too much in class. Self-compassion in that case

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means realizing that the “gift of gab” may create problems in

school but in many career choices will be a major asset. Areas
such as social media marketing, sales, customer service, poli-
tics, or teaching offer jobs where the gift of gab can make people
feel welcome and relaxed. The compassion may be to recognize
that the very same natural talents that can lead to success are
not appreciated in school settings and to hold out for the time
where you can use them as necessary skills.

How Can You Make This More Fun?

While you can get in trouble for trying to have some fun in
the classroom, another tool for increasing motivation is to find
ways to make things more fun! Ironic, isn’t it?
Fun is the opposite of resistance. Fun makes us chase after
activities with anticipation. Fun will allow you to tap into the
enjoyment aspect of setting goals. Fun shifts your focus to
the process, as opposed to the goal itself. You can make the
journey to the goal as fun as possible. The more fun you make
the journey, the more motivated you will be. For example, there
are many different routes you could take to the mall. You could
just hop on the highway and go the quickest way, but that may
be the most boring. What about the scenic route? Yes, it may be
slower, but you’re going to enjoy the process a whole lot more.
When it comes to goals, enjoy the process. Life isn’t all
about goals. Most of the time, it’s about the process.

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Ninety-nine percent of the process of achieving goals

occurs during the part when we are not actually celebrating
having achieved the goal. Let’s say you take AP Chemistry
because you want to be a doctor. How can that be fun? You are
part of a greater ecosystem of purpose, whether you know it or
not. You have value, just as studying for that chemistry test has
value. It will propel you to becoming a doctor, to diagnosing
patients and helping them feel better, or conducting research
that will change lives.
You might look back and think, I wish I had enjoyed the ride a
little more. If you get too caught up in the end result, you’ll miss
all the great things happening along the way.
One great way to make things more fun is to find social
support. Finding a group can create a lot of motivation and
momentum. For example, to make exercise more fun, Elena
tells herself, I pay more for scheduled fitness classes, but at least I
tend to procrastinate less about going because I’m “in the trenches”
with other people, bonding through hardship and making friends.

Value Rest and Play

Another way to maintain a steady level of motivation is to value
rest and play. Rest is different from procrastination because it
is in the service of restoration, not delay. Play can also restore
a positive mood, bringing a sense of refreshment that will help
increase energy to take on your work. Unlike rest and play,

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procrastination can create tension because you know you are

avoiding doing something that needs to be done.
There are times when that sense of “I just don’t feel like it”
is a reflection of being burned out or depleted. If you feel that
way, you’re not alone. Stress is taking a major toll on teenag-
ers these days. Often the demands are too intense, and many
parents and teens have lost perspective on the balance that is
required for mental and physical health.
You may have signed up for three leadership positions to
try to boost your college application, but this may be a win-lose
situation. If you make so many commitments that you don’t get
enough sleep, and a balance of social activities and downtime,
you can be setting yourself up for depression or anxiety.
Rest is important not only for mental and physical health
but also for recharging the brain. You are not a machine; if you
keep pushing yourself, you create stress, tense muscles, and
loss of perspective. Rest can range from napping, lying at the
pool, “doing nothing,” or puttering around with no goal in
mind. Other restorative activities include wandering in natural
settings, coloring books (not just for kids anymore), drawing,
or playing with your pet. Even a daily practice of appreciating
what is can restore energy.
Play is different from rest in that it involves activity for the
purpose of recreation, whereas rest is taking a break from activ-
ity. Play means activity that can involve imagination and by
definition is not high stakes or stressful. Rest can restore your
mind and body, whereas play can boost your mood, help you

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feel more connected to others, improve your sense of humor,

and energize you. Some examples of play include:

• playing pick-up sports (whether you play to win or

just to enjoy good friends) or actively cheering for
your favorite team

• taking on the dungeon master role in Dungeons

and Dragons

• hosting a group to sample your favorite salsas and

chips

• dancing to music in your own room

TRY IT Using your journal or Notes app, write down

a list of five activities that feel like play for you.

Look at How Far You Have Come

Imagine you are climbing up a huge mountain and you always
notice how far you have to go, but you never turn around and
look at how far you’ve come. That can make it hard to stay moti-
vated. Now imagine you take a look back and see how far you
have already come. For many people, that increases motivation
because they see how their hard work has paid off. Seeing how
far you’ve come requires flexible thinking. It is all-or-nothing
thinking to look at a challenge and only notice the parts of

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it that are hard or the parts of yourself that are lacking. For
every challenge, there are also parts that are easy and specific
strengths that prepare you for the challenge.

Seek Progress, Not Perfection

Some psychologists say that perfectionism can turn into self-
abuse, if no matter how much you achieve it’s never good
enough. What’s worse, it often backfires. For example, one
study found that “perfectionism is strongly and consistently
related to numerous ‘detrimental’ work and nonwork out-
comes, including higher levels of burnout, stress, workahol-
ism, anxiety, and depression” (Swider et al. 2018). Perfectionism
looks for the gap between where you are and how far you have
to go to get to perfection—a state that is not realistically attain-
able. The problem is that it overlooks all the progress that can
be a source of motivation to keep going. Looking at progress is
encouraging and keeps you going for the long haul.
Perfectionism may also look at others who are ahead of
you and create deep insecurities and unrelenting pressure to
be the best. I hope you don’t take that to mean you should set
small goals or lose confidence in yourself. The problem with
perfectionism is that it tends to skip over the super skills of
finding gifts, setting goals, and chunking those goals down
into smaller steps. Even when you have set a landmark ahead
and have noticed how far you have come, you can still remem-
ber to enjoy the ride.

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• Anne’s Story
Anne walked out of her geometry final feeling totally
wrecked. She had studied hard and knew math was not her
strength, but she didn’t expect to do so poorly on it. She cried
at the frustration she felt for having tried so hard and still
struggling so much. She started to think, Why should I even
study if it doesn’t pay off?
When she talked with her dad about it, he said, “Everyone
has an Achilles’ heel.” As usual, Anne rolled her eyes at her
dad’s weird remarks. He went on to explain that Achilles was
a mythological Greek god whose mother made him immortal
by dipping him into a river. Because she was holding him by
the heels, that was the only place he could be killed. Her dad
said that everyone has a weak spot, and while Anne might
consider using the student tutoring center, she shouldn’t let
her confidence and motivation be crushed by a hard test in an
area that was especially challenging for her.

Motivation is like any skill—the more you practice, the

better you get. If you practice shooting, passing, and dribbling
every day, you get better at playing basketball. Or think of
bodybuilders. If they go to the gym every day, they can look
strong even if they have naturally small builds. So too the
super skill of motivation can become part of the function and
structure of your brain; you can become a mind builder and
create strength in motivation.

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CHAPTER 6

Managing Mood

Tell the negative committee that meets inside your head to sit
down and shut up.
—Ann Bradford

The Buddha says, “Life is suffering,” but we are surrounded by

social media images that suggest otherwise. A positive reframe
of Buddha’s wisdom is not that life is suffering, but rather that
“work is life,” which offers the hope that the work of executive
functioning can spare you some suffering. This doesn’t mean
work is more important than relationships or having fun, but
that both fun and good relationships require work. It requires
work not to criticize those we love but rather to pause to think
of an encouraging comment.
We humans evolved to survive, not to have fun. Over time,
we developed systems that help us survive by reducing sur-
prise and predicting possible encounters with threats (Mobbs
et al. 2015). One way to reduce surprise is to constantly predict
bad things that can happen and mentally rehearse strategies to
increase life expectancy. In short, evolution supported fearful
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

reactions and negative rehearsal; our nervous systems evolved

to be nervous.
Distressing emotions capture your attention, derailing
you from focus. This may be why 33 percent of children with
ADHD have an anxiety disorder and 17 percent struggle with
depression (Danielson et al. 2018). Because having an impair-
ment in attention (ADHD) makes it harder for you to control
your negative emotions, this super skill is so important; man-
aging your mood will improve your attention.
This chapter will give you a set of tools to turn the dial
toward happiness. If you’ve been paying attention, you will
know by now that how you talk to yourself is going to be a big
part of how you can manage your mood.

Flexible Thinking
It’s easy to get caught up in your own thoughts. Just as our
minds can be infinitely candid, they can be equally deceptive.
Our perception of reality is concocted in our minds and our
minds alone. In difficult situations, you can choose to look for
the positives. Doing this is hard work and easier said than done,
but it is worth it. We all know people who manage to keep their
heads up when having a hard time, as well as other people who
seem to have it all, yet still find a lot to complain about. We all
have good and bad things in our lives; a lot of how we respond,
and how we feel, comes down to where we choose to focus our
attention. Sometimes our minds play tricks on us. They tell us

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that we can’t go on. That we should give up. There are many
pathways to not letting our minds drag us down.
Flexible thinking is a powerful tool you can use to regu-
late your emotions and learn to focus on positive self-talk. Self-
talk is like having a helpful coach or a supportive cheerleader
inside your own mind. By coaching yourself, you can create
stable confidence that doesn’t move wildly depending on the
predictable ups and downs of life. For example, if you saw your
friends posting party photos on Instagram and you were not
invited, it would be easy to spiral down into self-doubt and
think things like, They don’t like me or I don’t have any friends.

Dr. Lara Says

Flexible thinking means looking for many different
ways of seeing a situation that are not going to cause
you to think there is something wrong with you. Flex-
ible thinking allows you to stay less reactive through
all the drama of the teenage years. It also helps you
stay confident in the face of challenging situations.

If you find yourself feeling left out, here are some things
you can think about:

• Are these my only friends? Who else am I friends with?

• Have they included me in past events?

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• Are there reasons I wasn’t invited that have nothing to

do with them rejecting me? (For example, did they all
finish studying for a class they take together and
go out afterward without inviting people who were
not in the class?)

• I know some people in that group are jealous of me. Maybe

that’s why I wasn’t invited, but that doesn’t mean there’s
something wrong with me.

• I know some people think I’m too bossy, but I have other
friends who like that I take charge. I can’t change my
main attributes, but I can try to be more flexible.

• How can I make new friends?

TRY IT Think of additional responses to this situation

of feeling left out and write them in your journal or Notes app
section on super skills.

The opposite of flexible thinking is catastrophic thinking—

narrowing in on the worst possible explanation for events.
When you find yourself catastrophizing, label the thought
“catastrophizing” so you don’t buy into it. Then you can go
through the questions above and practice flexible thinking,
finding more positive thoughts and courses of action. By label-
ing the catastrophic thinking, you can gain distance from it
and not take it so seriously. Once you have labeled it, you can

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ask yourself, Is it true? You will often find that you are using
all-or nothing thinking: you think you weren’t invited because
people don’t like you, but more often they were caught up in
the moment. Search for reasons to help you manage the situa-
tion. You can tell yourself, I am more than capable of finding solu-
tions. Be creative by thinking of ways that a disappointment is
not the end of the story. Be as kind to yourself as you would be
to a friend you cared about.

Pausing
Another powerful tool to help you regulate your emotions is
the power of the pause. We all get caught up in the swing of
things. We’re going so fast and so hard that we forget where
we are. When this happens, it’s easy to get carried away by
our emotions. As in the earlier example, if you see your friends
posting on Instagram and you feel left out, you might let your
mind go to darker and darker places, like believing that you
were left out because you have so many flaws that no one could
possibly want to be your friend.
In situations when you are tempted to take impulsive action
or go down dark mental alleys, you can tell yourself, Pause. In
that moment, you can try these approaches:

• Put your feelings into words. The more precise the

language you can find, the easier it will be to find a
solution to what’s troubling you.

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• Redirect your behavior to get some space from the

situation and your thoughts and feelings. It could
be as simple as calling someone who cares about
you or going for a walk.

• Focus on your personal goals for the future. Review-

ing your goals can pull you out of the immediate
emotional pain to find hope. Focusing on your goals
reminds you that you can control your life.

It’s important to note that pausing is completely different

from stopping. Pausing helps you get a handle on your emo-
tional reactions before acting, whereas stopping means sweep-
ing your emotions under the rug. When we pause, we’re just
taking a siesta, or a brief hiatus to refocus. Perhaps we physi-
cally, mentally, or emotionally need a break, or maybe we need
to reevaluate why we’re doing what we’re doing. The point is
that a pause should have purpose.
Some teens might feel like they need to turn to drugs or
alcohol to take a break. Using drugs and alcohol are impul-
sive behaviors themselves and also encourage other impulsive
behavior. Over time, impulsive behavior can become mind-
less or automatic. You reach for a harmful substance instead
of learning to soothe yourself. Putting a pause in between
craving and an impulsive action allows you to think of other
super skills that will help you not just avoid an impulsive reac-
tion but also respond in a way that actually makes a situation
better.

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There’s a Super Skill for That!

Let’s take a quick look back (and ahead):

• Have you had a blow to your confidence? Did you

get a C in a class you expected to get a B in? Using
the super skill finding gifts, remind yourself of your
enduring talents. Write down a list of times you felt
appreciated in the last week.

• Are you overwhelmed by a large project that is cre-

ating a lot of anxiety? Think about chunking. What’s
the smallest piece of it that seems manageable? Get
started, and create a plan with a time for work and
a time for a break.

• Do you feel unmotivated to get started on study-

ing for your SAT? Remind yourself of the costs of
not studying and the benefits of studying. That’s the
super skill of boosting motivation in chapter 5.

• You want to relax? Okay, there’s a super skill for

that—finding focus. A powerful way to calm your-
self down is through deep breathing. You’ll learn
more about that in the next chapter.

You can see how simply taking a pause and adding some
positive self-talk can help you manage your emotions through
using all the other super skills.

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The Language of Emotions

Here’s a fun fact: the more precise the language you use to
describe your emotions, the less likely you are to use a substance
to manage your emotions (Kashdan et al. 2010). So the next time
you are struggling with a negative emotion, name the feeling,
google synonyms for it, and review the list of alternate words.
Select the one that best matches your feelings and situation. For
example, the Merriam-Webster dictionary offers the following
for synonyms of “sad”: blue, brokenhearted, cast down, crest-
fallen, dejected, depressed, despondent, disconsolate, doleful,
down, downcast, downhearted, down in the mouth, droopy,
forlorn, gloomy, glum, hangdog, heartbroken, heartsick, heart-
sore, heavyhearted, inconsolable, joyless, low, low-spirited,
melancholic, melancholy, miserable, mournful, saddened, sor-
rowful, sorry, unhappy, woebegone, woeful, wretched.
Instead of trying to get rid of the feeling of sadness, be willing
to experience it. Be willing to be curious about it and explore
what words more precisely describe what you are going through.
Failure and disappointments are going to be part of life, and
managing mood is the process of getting back up. Emotions are
communications to ourselves, from ourselves, about ourselves.
Managing mood does not mean getting rid of painful emotions.
There are many costs to repressing emotions. Research shows us
that it’s not easy to avoid emotions, and it creates tension to try
to do so. Avoiding emotions also creates relationship problems
(Johnson 2010). Emotions can guide our communication with
others about how their behavior impacts us.

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• Jack’s Story
Jack went to a party and sat next to a girl he had a crush on.
He tried to get her attention, but she walked away soon after
he sat down. He felt humiliated. Instead of drinking away
his feeling of humiliation with alcohol, he let himself feel the
sting of rejection. He realized that she hadn’t even smiled at
him, and that although she may have wanted to get away from
him, she was a person who couldn’t even be friendly. He told
himself he wouldn’t be interested in someone who wasn’t kind
anyway. Noticing some friends across the room, he moved on
to talk with them. He was able to give himself credit for taking
the risk of approaching her and remembered what his father
liked to say: “If you ask ten girls out for Saturday night and
only one says yes, you still have a date on Saturday night.”

Managing Anger
Anger is one of the most potent and therefore difficult-to-­
manage emotions. You will want to try pausing and flexible
thinking when managing your anger. It’s also important to
admit when you’re angry and to communicate that in healthy
ways. If you suppress your anger, it can become a landmine.
As psychologists like to say, “If you don’t talk about it, you’re
going to act it out.” Being able to identify anger, manage it, and
communicate assertively when appropriate are vital life skills.

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These two additional ideas can help you manage your

anger:

• Admit when you’re angry. Anger may mean there is

a deeper conflict you have to sort out. Anger is sig-
naling you—pause, pay attention, don’t move past
this too quickly.

• Imagine a wand moving very slowly from the top

of your head down to your toes, looking for any hot
spots of anger, physical tension, or pain. When you
find a hot spot, describe the physical sensation you
are experiencing. You can be creative and come up
with a vivid image. Does it feel like a fire, a stabbing
pain, an unmovable rock? Describe the sensation as
carefully as you can. This process allows you to get
a handle on the emotion.

When you feel angry, it’s important to pause and think

carefully about whether it’s appropriate to communicate your
anger with the person who has made you angry. One strategy
that a lot of people use is to find a neutral person to talk to
and get their perspective and advice. In addition to helping
you cool down, this strategy can help you rehearse what you
want to say beforehand to make sure that you will share your
feelings in a way the other person can understand.
If you decide to have a conversation with the person, one of
the most important tips for success is to use I-messages rather
than you-messages. As an example, you would say, “I am hurt

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and angry that you made fun of my stuttering when I gave

my talk in class,” rather than, “You purposely embarrassed me
in class by making fun of me.” When you use an I-message,
you accept responsibility for your role. In contrast, using a you-
message means you are creating an explanation for a motive
that you can’t really know for sure. You will also want to give
the other person a chance to respond, and be sure to listen as
closely as you can. If you want, you can let them know you
hear them, even if that means “parroting” or repeating back to
them what you heard. The strategy of repeating what the other
person said involves both a pause and flexible thinking. In the
time it takes to repeat back what you heard, you are gaining
some time to collect yourself, and by taking seriously the other
person’s perspective, you are using flexible thinking.

Positive Self-Talk
When you feel angry, tell yourself, I am calm. I am focused.

Or: I can take a few deep breaths before I take action.

Or: I can find someone to talk to before I take action.

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Dr. Lara Says

Some people may be given the message that they need
to be cheerful all the time. What we know about
managing mood is that unexpressed and unheard
anger can lead to depression. What you are feeling
has important information for you.
When you feel angry, the simplest step you can
take is to label the feeling “anger.” Just by putting a
label on it, you gain some distance and more control
over your behavior. This one simple step is a game
changer—it allows you to have the emotion rather
than to be the emotion.

• Brandie’s Story
Brandie worried a lot about her dad. Often, when she came
home from school, she could tell he had been smoking weed.
She was angry that her dad wouldn’t stop smoking. One of her
friends told her that when her dad drove them to the movies
last weekend, she smelled weed in the car. Her friend told
her mom, who said she couldn’t drive with Brandie anymore.
Not only was Brandie worried about her dad but she also felt
ashamed that her friends could smell the weed in the car.
Brandie set up an appointment to ask the school counselor
for help. The counselor asked her to write down all her

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feelings about her dad. She listed the feelings of worry, shame,
and anger. Her counselor told her, “You can’t control or cure
your dad’s smoking, and you are not the cause of it.”
When Brandie went home after the session, she practiced
the mindfulness tool her therapist had given her: staying with
one feeling at a time and focusing on her breath while she
labeled the feeling. Brandie was still really mad at her dad, but
after practicing the writing and mindfulness, she was able to
focus on getting her schoolwork done. She found a way to feel
the anger, but not let it distract her from her goals.

Translating Complaints into Requests

Another mood management tool is to turn a complaint into a
request. Whenever you come to a roadblock, don’t complain
that it’s there. Rather, try to do everything within your power
and abilities to overcome it. You may need help. If you do,
figure out exactly what the problem is, identify the best person
or people to help you overcome it, and then ask for the help
you need.
To help you figure out what specific request you want to
make, you first need to identify the underlying feeling within
the complaint. For example, if your complaint is that your
parents nag you to take care of chores when you get home from
school, you may be feeling overwhelmed by all the different
things you have to do. In this case, instead of complaining that
they won’t get off your back, you can calmly give some of the

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good reasons you need to take a break between school and

starting homework. In person or by text, you can request that
there be a “no nagging” time the first hour after school because
you have a lot on your mind and need to decompress.
If you want to get even better at translating complaints into
requests, you can practice using an I-message with a parent.
You could say something like, “It increases my anxiety to have
you worry so much. I need to figure this out for myself. I’m
going to be going away to college in two years.” You could even
request that a parent listen to what you’re worried about rather
than sharing their own worries, which adds fuel to the fire. You
might also ask to have time together that is just for bonding,
with no talk about grades or college or chores that need to be
done around the house.
Every time you notice yourself with a complaint about a
teacher, a friend, a parent, or a coach, try to identify the feeling
underneath it and ask yourself what specific request you can
make to that person. You can request that the person listen to
what you’re feeling rather than trying to solve the problem for
you. You can request that a friend not tell others about your
family problems. Making specific requests is not only a way to
manage your moods but also a way to solve specific problems.

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Reducing Stress by Taking a

Broader Perspective
We lose control of our emotions when we lose perspective on
a situation. Imagine yourself in a plane at thirty thousand feet
or zooming out the camera lens; you’re able to notice things
that you may have not been able to notice before. Imagine a
current situation as a camera lens. If you zoom out, you’ll see
that there is so much more in the picture frame than you ini-
tially thought.
Stress was not meant to be a chronic mode of operation,
particularly for developing brains. Toxic stress disrupts physi-
cal and mental health, and the earlier that chronic stress hits
the developing brain, the greater the risks to long-term health.
Tolerable stress is comparatively infrequent, allowing the brain
to recover. Frequent prolonged stress can negatively impact
the architecture of the brain, creating lifelong mental health
risks (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child
2005/2014).
Recent research has led to the conclusion that there is “an
urgent need to help students reduce their experience of over-
whelming levels of stress during college” (Liu et al. 2019). This
study found that:

• Stress exposure was strongly associated with mental

health diagnoses, self-harm, and suicidality.

• Twenty-five percent of students reported being

diagnosed with or treated for a mental health disor-
der in the prior year.

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• Twenty percent of all students surveyed had thought

about suicide, with 9 percent reporting having
attempted suicide and nearly 20 percent reporting
self-injury.

With a broader perspective, you can learn to regulate your

emotions and moderate toxic stress.

Detachment: Taking the Passenger

Seat in Your College Search
One of the biggest issues where it is easy to lose perspective—
and increase stress as a result—is in planning for college. For
example, applying to a dozen or more schools, while expecting
catastrophe if you don’t get into an elite school, is a formula
for chronic stress. Every quiz, test, and project will affect your
brain in the same way an attacking lion geared up our ances-
tors’ brains to escape.
For college seekers, the first step is to take a broader perspec-
tive and increase detachment in college choice. Detachment is
by definition a way to take the emotion out of a situation. It
does not imply lowering one’s standards, but rather attaining
nonreactivity about the outcome—recognizing that whatever
college you attend, there will be advantages and disadvan-
tages. The more selective a college is, the more resources and
elite network you will have access to, but also the more compe-
tition and stress you will face.

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Think of the difference between driving a car and being

a passenger. When you’re driving, you have to stay narrowly
focused on the road ahead and may miss the bigger picture:
the beautiful Rocky Mountains, for example. You may scream
at other drivers because you’re navigating a treacherous curve.
You’ve got your feet switching back and forth between the
brake and the gas pedal, your eyes are looking for cars ahead
and behind, and simultaneously you’re keeping the car in its
lane. As a passenger, however, you don’t have much to worry
about. Picture yourself in the passenger seat, able to take in
the snow-covered peaks of the Rockies or the mountain goats
scaling the cliffs above you. You can observe these details
because you are not preoccupied by driving the car.
A broader perspective also allows you to look around and
see how fortunate you are to have so many choices for college,
and to be grateful for how far you have come. In college, you
will have more opportunity to pursue coursework in your
special interests. The increased relevance of your classes will
boost your motivation. And you will likely have more time to
yourself than in high school, because you will be spending less
time in the classroom.
Perhaps your dream school means your competition will be
tougher, so you will be more stressed and may lose confidence.
You may also have to take out more student loans. Your safe
school may have less access to an elite network but give you
a chance to build your confidence by having less competition.
Even your fallback school may have many benefits, including

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decreased stress once you are a student, or a particular special-

ization or professor you are eager to do research with.

TRY IT Using your Notes app or journal, list your

dream school, your safe school, and a fallback school. Write
down the benefits and costs of each option.

You don’t have to have 100 percent positive self-talk to be

happy. Negative emotions are healthy reactions to real life
challenges and often contain guidance for you. You simply
have to take some of the negative emotions and use these tools
to create an increased balance of positive emotions to negative
emotions.

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CHAPTER 7

Finding Focus

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

—Mary Oliver

When most people think of attention spans in today’s digitized

age, they think of how shortened they are, and the incredible
number of distractions that are available to us each and every
day, most of which come from the supercomputers that live in
the depths of our pockets, purses, and handbags. Think about
just how many notifications you receive every day, from texts
to calls to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat to email.
Some of you are so used to receiving texts and notifica-
tions that your brain is trained to think you should check your
phone every five minutes, even if just to light up the screen to
see that another five minutes has passed and that you didn’t
miss a message by mistake.
Controlling your attention is a practice. In addition to
choosing what to focus on, you have to choose what to filter
out. Once you have chosen where to put your attention, your
task is to concentrate on the single task at hand. This task may
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

have multiple pieces, come in different parts, and be completed

over the course of different time spans. The most important
thing to note is that your concentration is on this specific task,
not the one before, not the one after.
It’s also significant to note the effect of distractions on atten-
tion. Perhaps we are inclined to move away from our current
objectives because we know that another one is easier, or we
start to put it off, thinking that we can do it later. Tuning out
distractions is as important as dialing in on the chosen task.
This chapter will give you eight research-backed tools for
boosting your attention. You can also remember that the super
skill of chunking can help you select one small task at a time
and goal setting can help you figure out what is a priority.
You don’t have to memorize or master all eight tools. Choose
three that are the easiest for you to experiment with, and give
them a try. Many of these tools have multiple benefits, includ-
ing for your physical health, managing mood, and confidence.
The idea that attention can be improved by lifestyle choices
can help you develop a growth mind-set toward attention. The
harder you try, the more of these attention boosters you use,
the more you can increase your attention.

Exercise
In his book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and
the Brain, John Ratey emphasizes the point that exercise has
one of the most powerful abilities to increase attention. In his

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2018 TEDX Talk, he said that exercise has the same effect on the
brain as a bit of Adderall and a bit of Prozac. It both increases
attention and improves mood.
An important point to remember is that simple exercises
that boost your brain don’t need to be of the same duration and
intensity that it takes to get in physical shape. Short walks and
bouncing a ball against a wall can boost attention, but it would
likely take more exercise to get physically fit. Research has
shown that even just fidgeting improved accuracy for students
with ADHD (Hartanto et al. 2016). Hyperactivity—while con-
sidered a symptom—serves a purposeful function to increase
cognitive performance.
A review of the research on exercise and the brain shows
not only temporary boosts in attention but also brain changes
over time. “Many studies have suggested that the parts of the
brain that control thinking and memory (the prefrontal cortex
and medial temporal cortex) have greater volume in people
who exercise versus people who don’t” (Godman 2018).
A 2015 study found that physical activity before school
improved attention (Hoza et al. 2015). This finding leads to a
simple recommendation about how you get to school. Is your
school close enough to walk or bike to? If a parent has the time
in the morning, a bike ride with your parent could be a fun
bonding time while boosting your brain. Or what if you got
dropped off at a place that required you to walk for five or ten
minutes to get to school? You could avoid all the traffic heading
to school and boost your brain at the same time.

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Another way to apply this approach is when you’re doing

your homework. When your attention is drifting, you can find
something that’s five minutes away, and walk there and back.
Two other simple options for getting exercise include finding
a YouTube exercise video and working out for fifteen minutes,
and walking to a favorite hangout place such as a library or
coffee shop after school to do homework there. The second
option might also offer a benefit of mixing up your homework
routine to make it less boring. Walking to the place you choose,
studying for an hour, then walking home can create a routine
or rhythm for your remaining assignments.

Breaks: Attention Restoration

Take a break, take a breather, or just pause for a second. These
are all suggestions that people offer in an effort to help someone
who is overworked, stressed out, tired, or perhaps just lost. Just
as you take breaks between reps of lifting weights, so too does
your attention need to restore itself.
In Daniel Pink’s book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect
Timing (2018), he notes the power of a ten- to twenty-minute
nap for increasing productivity. He also reports that one of the
most powerful brain hacks is drinking a cup of coffee before
you take a fifteen-minute nap. That might seem counterintui-
tive; perhaps you’re thinking, Well, that caffeine is not going to
let me take a nap, but it will take about fifteen minutes for the
caffeine to get into your system. So you’ll get a boost from the

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nap, but you’ll get a double jolt because the caffeine will kick
in right as you wake up. A general recommendation is that you
not drink caffeine in the afternoon or later in the day because
it can disrupt sleep.
You may be thinking, How do I take a nap in the middle of
the school day? One teen weighs in on this dilemma: “Twenty
minutes of me sleeping on my arm in the library seemed to do
wonders. Anything longer, and I felt groggy afterward. Any-
thing shorter, and I didn’t feel fully rested and would need to
put my head back down.”
As you do your homework in the evenings or on the week-
ends, you will want to create a pattern of studying and taking
breaks. This means that you want to find out how long you can
work efficiently. You may want to figure out what is a high-
resistance and a low resistance task.
For example, someone who has to do some reading might
find that they don’t mind doing that for longer than if they
have to memorize Spanish conjugations. Imagine the differ-
ence between doing something that comes the hardest to you
versus something that you enjoy a lot more, such as a specific
subject. For some people, it might be working fifteen minutes
on high-resistance tasks and thirty minutes on low-resistance
tasks. The more resistance you have to getting started, the more
you can sustain your attention by creating a smaller chunk.
People have to find the best timing for themselves. You can
experiment with trying out different study doses. Can you pay
attention for twenty minutes? A half hour? An hour?

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One of the tools that many teens find the most effective is
to start by saying, I’m just going to do this for two minutes. This is
a bit of a trick because many people will keep going once they
get started. And that’s the idea of task initiation in executive
functioning: sometimes just getting started is the hardest part.
Even keeping at a task for only two minutes can all add
up, leading to a sense of progress and boosting your mood by
being able to tell yourself, Well, I got something done. Experiment
with different strategies. For example, some people who have
a half-hour project can start with a fifteen-minute dose, take
a break or enjoy some sort of reward, and then put in another
fifteen minutes.

Sleep
One of the biggest disrupters of executive functioning is getting
less sleep than needed; for teens, this means nine hours each
night. Neuropsychologists tell us that “scientists have uncov-
ered amazing evidence that what your brain learns during the
day is consolidated during sleep. That means that the more
sleep you get, the better your brain will remember and under-
stand what you learned that day” (Deak and Deak 2013).
Gabe, a sophomore in high school, learned this the hard
way: “Sometimes you have to go on a little sleep, because some-
times life happens. Deadlines are moved, priorities change,
emergencies happen. But, if it’s possible to get a good night’s
sleep, do it. I used to think I could run on five to six hours a

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night and be just fine. I was, until I wasn’t. I was overworked,

exhausted, and constantly searching for the next cup of coffee,
the next place I could take a ten-minute power nap. My school,
as well as my relationships, and most importantly, my mental
health, suffered from this. Think about sleep this way.”

Positive Self-Talk
Tell yourself, The biggest brain builder is sleep. Stay strong, put your
technology away, and get some sleep!

Sleep is also essential for being able to pay attention during

the day. According to the Harvard Medical School Division of
Sleep Medicine (2007), “Sleep deprivation negatively impacts
our mood, our ability to focus, and our ability to access higher-
level cognitive functions. The combination of these factors is
what we generally refer to as mental performance.”
Technology can disrupt sleep. We have had an explosion
of technology in recent years, beginning with the invention of
the iPhone. The ability to watch TV shows and movies, and to
access social media on our phones, can be addictive—and is
also disruptive to sleep. It is recommended that you not read or
watch TV in your bed to help you associate your bed with sleep
and not other activities.
One recommended tool for helping you get to sleep is to
dim bright lights an hour before bedtime—that means no tech-
nology one hour before bed. Our brains evolved to go to sleep

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when the sun went down, and since the invention of the light
bulb and now smartphones, our natural biological processes
for sleep have been disrupted.
One of the most powerful tools you can use to help you
sleep is stress management before bedtime. That is also the
next tool for increasing attention, so this serves double duty in
helping you sleep at night and focus during the day.

Stress Management
Stress management can improve your attention. Simply stated,
stress interferes with your attention, and the more you manage
it, the more you have control over your own attention. Research
has shown that stress negatively impacts working memory
(Luethi, Meier, and Sandi 2008).
Let’s quickly review two of the simplest stress management
strategies: (1) mindfulness and (2) deep breathing.

Mindfulness
Mindfulness isn’t about blocking out the bad, the chaotic,
and the difficult. It’s about acknowledging it, and then choos-
ing how you react to it. When you are being mindful, you are
more in control of your attention and your energy.
Many meditation teachers have used the metaphor of the
ocean to help you understand mindfulness. Think of a boat on
the high seas. On the surface, there may be storms and waves

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and all sorts of commotion. Without mindfulness, that is your

attention. Ideas and topics and things that move and break
your attention are the waves. They crash into your boat, rock
it, move it, splash water into it. Your mind is all over the place.
You can’t manage anything.
Now, imagine if your attention is not a boat on top of the
water, but a submarine deep, deep below it. The waves would
cease to exist. The water would be calm and still. The crashing
and twisting and churning would still be going on, but they
wouldn’t affect you.

TRY IT Set aside fifteen minutes to practice mindful-

ness. During that time, if you find yourself thinking, label it
“thinking.” That’s the simplest way to get started. If you start
to think you are not good at mindfulness, label that thought
“judgment.” That’s it for now. The directions are easy, but the
practice is not. This is just a way to start, and there are many
wonderful apps out there to give you guidance. If you want
to dive deeper on this tool, check out the apps Calm and
Headspace.

Breathing
Many professional athletes are trained in breathing as a
way of enhancing their performance. Don’t be fooled by how
simple this sounds; the results can be powerful. Simply put,

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deeper breathing is more healthy than shallow breathing.

Breathing from your belly, called diaphragmatic breathing,
sets off a cascade of positive health benefits. To give you an
idea, shallow breathing has been associated with headaches,
stomachaches, and difficulty paying attention.
The research about the effect of breathing on health and
attention is well established. Its effects on health are so pro-
found and so well replicated that it should be common sense
that our breath represents our state of mind in so many ways.
When we’re anxious, our breath gets short, and when we’re
happy or relaxed, we breathe more deeply.
Here’s a simple visualization to give this a whirl. Pretend
you’re going to blow out a birthday candle; inhale for five
seconds and then extend your exhale to five seconds to blow
out the candles.
There are many, many different strategies for stress man-
agement, including guided imagery and music. Set a goal to
explore and experiment with some new stress management
tools.

Time in Nature
Every human being desires a connection to nature, whether
they know it or not. There’s a reason why we sometimes need
to “unplug” and go for a hike, camp out, or just take a walk
around the block. Being in nature is in our instincts; it gives
us a fresh start because it brings us back to our foundation.

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As human beings, we were made to spend time in nature. We

went from hunting and fishing to farming to creating houses
and buildings and concrete jungles. We weren’t designed to
spend all of our days inside.
Naturalist John Muir wrote in a letter to his sisters in 1873:
“The mountains are calling, and I must go.” The mountains
didn’t physically give John Muir a call on his iPhone or send
him a Snapchat. He felt connected to the mountains in a spiri-
tual way. They revitalized him, motivating him to preserve the
mountains and nature. They made him more productive in his
writing, advocacy, and, most likely, many other aspects of his
life.
Anything that allows you to take a step back, get outside of
the box figuratively (or literally by just getting out of your box
of a building or house), and disconnect from everything else
going on will allow you to be more attentive when you reenter
whatever you were doing before.
Research has shown that even pictures of nature or a
window with a view to nature can improve attention. One
study found that looking at cute pictures of puppies could
increase attention, narrow focus, and promote careful behav-
ior (Nittono et al. 2012). And if videos of cute animals can boost
your attention, think of what a super boost it would be to take
a walk in nature.

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Happiness
Happiness increases attention and focus. One study found
that students who were asked to think about a happy memory
before taking a standardized math test did better than those
who were not primed for happiness (Bryan and Bryan 1991).
Humor increases memory and attention. One time I had
to remember to pick up Aspen animal bedding for my guinea
pig, Cookie. I pictured Cookie skiing on the slopes in Aspen,
Colorado, and I remembered to get the bedding. This effect
suggests that educational policy should take a different atti-
tude toward class clowns. Instead of sending them to the prin-
cipal, maybe they should stand beside the teacher like a sign
language expert and translate the learning material into funny
jokes! Seriously, though, when you study, you could take ideas
that need to be memorized and create funny unexpected visual
images, like I did to remember to get bedding for Cookie.
It’s not just that getting good grades will make you happy
but also that being happy can get you good grades. As research
studies have shown, boosting happiness can take small things,
like thinking about a happy memory or allowing yourself a
small treat.

TRY IT One of the most powerful tools documented

to boost happiness is gratefulness. When you need a boost,
take out your journal or Notes app and write about three
things you are grateful for.

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Finding Focus

Dr. Lara Says

Throughout the book, you’ve read many examples of
positive self-talk. If happiness improves attention,
then we can infer that these tools will not only boost
your mood but also increase your attention and per-
formance overall. A simple way to remember this is
to choose being encouraging to yourself rather than
discouraging.

Talking Out Loud

Positive thinking can go a long, long way in any situation
life throws at you. For those of you who get stuck in your own
head, positive thinking may not be enough. That’s why when
you read “positive self-talk,” you could actually take it liter-
ally, and talk out loud. You may think you sound crazy at first,
but sometimes the crazier option is to keep your voice in your
head, bottled up with all your other emotions, self-doubts, and
whatever else is attempting to drag you down to the bottom of
the sea of failure. When you speak out loud, you can physically
hear yourself.
Talking to yourself is all good. First, it improves your selec-
tive attention. Think about it—when you are talking out loud,
you can’t think about anything else, so your focus is very
narrow. Pro tip: Speaking your own name instead of saying “I”

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gives you a broader perspective; it takes you out of the I and

can help limit self-criticism (Wong 2017).
If you are in a tough spot or in the middle of a dark time,
talking out loud, specifically as a form of positive reinforce-
ment or encouragement, can help your thinking process and
overall mental health.

Using a Talent
In his 2018 book The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor
shows that one way to boost happiness is to use a talent, skill,
or character strength. He writes, “Studies have shown that the
more you use your signature strengths in daily life, the happier
you become.” The takeaway here is that you have control over
your happiness and that you can use super skill number one,
finding gifts, to boost your happiness, which then boosts your
attention!

TRY IT List three activities that use one of your gifts.

For example, if you are a talented artist, you can (1) draw a
picture on a card to give to someone, (2) hang one of your
paintings on your wall, or (3) draw cheerful pictures and bring
them to a children’s hospital.

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Finding Focus

Interest
By definition, interest involves attention. According to Merriam-­
Webster, synonyms for “interest” include “attentiveness, undi-
vided attention, absorption, engrossment, notice, and scrutiny.”
The noun definition is the state of wanting to know or learn
about something or someone. You may not be interested in
some of the material you are learning in American history, but
what if you went to see the play Hamilton? You would likely be
delighted because of how contemporary and wildly entertain-
ing it is … and you would learn a lot of history.
One study asked workers to categorize their work as a job,
a career, or a calling. The people who had a calling worked
harder and longer, and they found their work more rewarding
(Wrzesniewski et al. 1997).
Think of your attention as a jet stream, which is a scientific
term for fast-flowing air currents. These currents take a plane
where it’s going faster and with less effort, and save on the cost
of fuel. If you’re flying with a jet stream, you speed up, and if
you fly against it, you slow down. Any person’s interest will
intensify their attention.
From the beginning of your education and throughout
your career, any way you can find to make something more
interesting is going to increase attention. You can also apply
the idea to trying to make tasks more fun or finding ways you
can gamify them. For example, someone who is a coffee barista
might find it hard to think about working a long shift and may
not be interested in the activity, but they can choose to gamify
it, or create a challenge out of it. They might create a challenge:

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“I want to see how many customers I can serve today” or “I

want to get so good at making drinks that I know how to make
every one without looking at the ingredients list.”
If you decide to take a different approach, you will gain
interest in the task at hand, and therefore will most likely
engage in flow, and be less distracted as a result. Starbucks
hires teens at age sixteen. Starbucks also offers free tuition for
Arizona State University and access to online courses. Some-
thing to think about to help save money for college!

Limiting Technology
Limiting social media is a key component to increasing your
attention. Multitasking is a myth; rather than increasing pro-
ductivity, it leads to taking more time to get things done and
making more errors (Crenshaw 2008). If you can’t limit your-
self when it comes to how often or how long you look at Face-
book, Instagram, or Snapchat, reconsider your options. Write a
pro versus con list of each application. Are they worth it? Does
the three or more hours you spend scrolling and liking and
commenting and sharing every day outweigh what you would
otherwise be doing? Do the pros outweigh the cons? Can you
use technology responsibly?

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Finding Focus

TRY IT Challenge yourself to limit yourself to under

an hour of screen time for one day. Create a reward system
for doing so. After trying this experiment, what do you notice?
Write the pros and cons in your Notes app or journal, and
look at it each time you feel tempted. Answer this question in
the same notes page: Why do I want to log onto Facebook
(or Instagram or Snapchat)? Is it to feel connected? To stay in
the loop?
If something does distract you, ask yourself, Can I come
back to that when I finish what I am doing? If so, jot it down.
This gets the distraction off your mind and you can follow up
later without getting off track.

Positive Self-Talk
When you feel distracted by social media, tell yourself, I can take
control of my phone instead of my phone taking control of me.

Or: I don’t have to be automatic and respond to what’s happening

on my phone.

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Technology might be responsible for what people are

calling the “crisis of cognition.” These simple strategies are not
the solution to the crisis of cognition, but they can help:

• Put your phone on sleep mode when you need to

focus on a task.

• Turn off notifications.

• Put your phone in another room when you sleep.

You may have noticed that lots of other teens are up late,
pinging you with texts all through the night. This takes us right
back to the importance of sleep. Sleep is a foundation of atten-
tion, and your phone pinging you throughout the night will
disrupt sleep and your ability to pay attention the next day.
When you are doing your homework, it can be as simple as
putting your phone in another room and then having access to
it at specified breaks. You should use time on your phone as a
reward for completing a task rather than as a distraction from
getting started.
You can benefit from knowing that you have control over
your attention. Even if you have ADHD or executive dysfunc-
tion, these practices are ways to keep growing and know that
you can find focus. Try to experiment with each of these tech-
niques and find the ones that are the easiest for you to use and
have the most effect.

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CHAPTER 8

Super Skills:
The Mind Builder’s
Guide to Your Brain

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an

act, but a habit.
—Aristotle

Whew! You made it to the final chapter. This book empowers

you to regulate your own brain. Whether you have skimmed
or thoroughly read through it, you have elevated your game
in life. Give yourself a pat on the back. Seriously, try it now.
Raise your arm, bend it at the elbow, and pat your back. Do
this many times a day when you notice yourself overcoming
resistance and making progress.
A mind builder is a teen who cares for their own mental
health like a bodybuilder at a gym. Just as you can build
physical strength, so too can you build mental strength. This
book gives you six super skills to prepare you for adventures,
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

challenges, stressors, setbacks, standardized tests, and dream-

ing it and doing it. Just as the cover of the book The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy featured in the book of the same name by
Douglas Adams has the words “Don’t Panic!” so too can you
take this advice as you set out on your journey with confidence
and calm. Let me give you a challenge: take full ownership of
your life. That’s the essential outcome of executive functioning.
You may feel it’s unfair to ask you to take ownership of your
own life when you’re not even an adult yet and your brain won’t
even finish developing until you are twenty-five. You may feel
like you’ve been dealt a poor hand of cards with an executive
dysfunction. These are justifiable complaints.

Dr. Lara Says

You cannot control the cards you are dealt, but you
can control how you play the game of life. The more
skills you have, the more chance you have of achiev-
ing your highest potential.

There’s a chance that your challenges with executive

functioning are related to your genes—for example, the gene
DRD4-7R (sounds like a droid, doesn’t it?) is associated with
ADHD and risk taking (Eisenberg et al. 2010). The message
here is that you should work with what you’ve got, but there
are many positive sides I write about in The Gift of ADHD (2010)
and The ADHD Workbook for Teens (2011). These positives include

142
Super Skills: The Mind Builder’s Guide to Your Brain

creativity, empathy, intuition, exuberance, and being nature

smart. Using the super skill of finding gifts, you can find your
own unique gifts in addition to these. By taking ownership of
your life and finding positives in your challenges, you can be
prepared to take on the obstacles that life will inevitably throw
your way.
Jocko Willink, a Navy Seal and author, says that discipline
equals freedom (2017). Perhaps you associate the word “disci-
pline” with being taken away from what you would rather be
doing, or punished for not doing what you are supposed to.
Internalizing these three words—discipline equals freedom—
can free you from any negative associations. This amazing
reframe suggests the opposite: that discipline allows you to get
what you want.

Dr. Lara Says

It’s time to think of discipline not as a burden,
not only as a thing related to school but also as a
pathway to freedom. You can achieve your goals
despite the uncontrollable realities of nature and
nurture. If you are disciplined, you can become the
hero of your own journey.
When these six super skills become not just a
means to achieve one goal but actual habits, think of
what you are capable of doing!

143
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

Turning the Super Skills into Habits

Once you achieve your goals, you will want to keep the habits
that got you to those goals. Let’s say you wanted to get a good
score on the SAT and used all six super skills to get that goal.
The idea isn’t to throw away the super skills at that point; the
benefits go beyond the goal.
If you used the super skill of chunking to create a habit of
studying for the SAT for one hour every Saturday morning,
after you complete the SAT, you can use that habit to begin
writing your essays for college. This will allow you to avoid
panic the week before applications are due.
It’s not about specific acts, but about how the culmination
of many acts over time come together to produce a result. If
you can take these super skills into days, weeks, months, and
years, you can achieve your goals. You can become a more effi-
cient, disciplined teen, able to challenge the overwhelming
number of distractions you face each day. Don’t quit sharpen-
ing your knife; be a lifelong learner. Build on top of your skills.
The more you practice them, the easier they will become, and
the faster you will be able to use them.
It takes at least two months, and sometimes up to eight
months, to form a habit, but research suggests that missing a
few days of practicing your habit doesn’t affect the habit forma-
tion process (Lally et al. 2010). You don’t have to be perfect. Just
keep making progress.

144
Super Skills: The Mind Builder’s Guide to Your Brain

Visual Reminders
What inspires you to keep going? What will you see that will
make you think, Oh, I should (should not) do this? Post-it notes?
Google Calendar? Google Tasks?
Figure out what works best for you. What will keep you
motivated? Who or what will hold you accountable? As you
read through the suggestions that follow, write down one
action step to increase your use of visual reminders.

• Index Cards
Write down your top three priorities each day on an
index card. You can carry it with you as a reminder.
If you have a long, overwhelming list of tasks, the
process of determining the top three priorities each
day will keep you on target.

• Vision Board
Find images of your goals, your dreams come true.
These may include schools you want to go to, fitness
goals, places you want to visit, experiences you want
to have—there is no limit. Print out these images
from the internet or cut them out of magazines. You
can even draw your own pictures. The same poster
board you use for your presentations in school can
be used to display your goals in vivid graphics and
photos.

145
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

• Post-it Notes
These are probably the most visual reminders
you’re going to see—at your desk, on your fridge,
or even on your wall. They are front and center and
in your face. You can use colorful Post-it notes of
any size and colorful markers. You can use them to
help with planning by writing down due dates of
high-priority projects or just remembering to feed
your dog. You can use them to keep motivational
quotes close at hand. You can write down a compli-
ment you received and post it in a place where you
will see it often. You can write down your top three
goals to help you prioritize.

Pep Talk: Keeping It Going

Imagine that you’ve mastered all six skills. Then what? Look at
where you are, then look at where you want to go. The more you
can learn about yourself, about who you are, what you do, what
you like, what you don’t like, what you believe in, and what
you don’t believe in, the better you will be able to live your life
in terms of efficiency, happiness, and inspiring others. Keep
the habits going. In this process, you will gain self-knowledge
that will improve your ability to find direction in life.
Stay hungry. Are you going to fall off the wagon? Yes. Does
that mean you have to stay off? No. Hop back on. Embrace

146
Super Skills: The Mind Builder’s Guide to Your Brain

failure. It’s only through failing that we learn and adapt and
become better. Habits take work. All good things come with
time. You have to be willing to act daily and think yearly. It’s
the day in and day out grind that will produce the most results,
but they won’t be able to be seen immediately. You need to have
faith. To trust the process.
Think about planting a fruit tree. This process starts with
digging a hole, putting in a seed, covering that seed, and then
returning to water it daily. There are also other factors to take
into consideration, such as the quality of the soil, the need for
fertilizer, the amount of sunlight, and keeping away harmful
bugs or pesky critters looking for a quick meal. It’s not easy
to raise a tree, but with the proper habits and skills, you can
achieve your goals and reap the fruits of your labor.
Your ability to apply your skills and good habits in other
areas of your life will be a key factor in determining your ulti-
mate success, so choose goals in a variety of areas. Maybe the
first is school related. Maybe the next has to do with a hobby.
Then it’s a relationship. Think about cross-training. By mixing
up your workout and exercise routines, you are likely to stay
with it longer. Cross-training will allow you to build different
muscle groups. So too as you build super skills across many
goals, you will strengthen your self-discipline and build confi-
dence and flexible thinking.

147
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

What You Can Control and What

You Cannot
Here’s a hot take on how to gain wisdom—figure out what
you can control and what you cannot. You may not be able to
control that you got the strictest geometry teacher, but you can
control how hard you study for the class. You can control how
many times you practice shooting hoops, but you can’t control
whether you get chosen for the varsity team. You can control
how you manage your mood, but you can’t control the curve-
balls life will throw at you.
Life is filled with bumps in the road, being dealt bad hands,
and, at times, disasters. The second law of thermodynam-
ics states that in a closed system the universe tends toward
“entropy.” What this essentially means is that disorder and
randomness are basic givens of life. These are not “bad things
happening to me” but rather predictable experiences of being
human. You might wonder whether these experiences serve a
function.
I think the answer is yes. Physical chemist Ilya Prigogine
was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for his dis-
covery of dissipative structures—that is, structures that are out
of balance. He found that in chaos a system will fall apart for
the purpose of reorganizing at a higher level.

148
Super Skills: The Mind Builder’s Guide to Your Brain

Dr. Lara Says

In those moments when things do fall apart, there
can be opportunity. The more you can apply your
super skills in chaotic times, the more you will evolve
toward a higher level of functioning. Chaos can lead
to a higher order. When bad things happen, find
support for your grief. Don’t jump over the loss or
expect renewal to happen instantly. It may take time,
but knowing you can find meaning at some point in
the future can be a comfort in your challenges.

Positive Self-Talk
Tell yourself, I can use the super skills to create order out of chaos.

If you know what you can control and what you cannot,
you will not waste your time, resources, and energy on things,
people, and places that are not in your control in the first place.
As a result, you will actually become more efficient. You will
be able to direct your energy to things that truly matter, that
are important to you as well as others.
It’s the wisdom to know the difference that is the hardest
part. What is in our control, and what’s not? I don’t think we’ll
ever be able to know 100 percent, but the more we meditate on
our decisions, actions, and abilities, the more we can come to
understand who we are and what we are capable of.

149
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

A Call to Action
Executive functioning includes practicing self-control to set
and get your goals. It can help you realize your true capabili-
ties and show you how far you can go. Think about how good
it would feel if you worked out every day for a month, or actu-
ally sat down to study for the SAT for at least one hour every
week. You build determination every time you use your inner
strength.
Maybe you told yourself you wouldn’t eat sugar for a
month, or that you would volunteer once a week this year. As
human beings, it’s hard to practice willpower. Period. Regard-
less of the activity. Think about how many New Year’s resolu-
tions don’t stick. Why is that?
Self-control, like anything else in life that you want to
become good at, takes practice. And like anything else that you
want to become good at, you need to do it over and over again
until it becomes a habit.
It takes grit and guts to get out when you feel stuck in a
negative routine, a negative habit, a negative rhythm. But keep
your eye on the prize. Just as Obi-Wan Kenobi said, “Use the
force, Luke,” I’m telling you to use the super skills.
There is no one else out there like you. Remember that. You
are unique. You have the courage and the capacity to make a
difference in yourself, as well as a difference in others, either
directly or indirectly. Dig deep and figure out what works
for you. When you fall down or find yourself in the dumps,
pick yourself back up. If you can’t pick yourself back up, make

150
Super Skills: The Mind Builder’s Guide to Your Brain

sure you have a support system that is willing to give you a

helping hand.

TRY IT Write a letter to yourself to open one year

from now. Include:

ƒ the three most important goals you plan to accomplish

in the upcoming year,

ƒ the three most helpful lessons you learned from reading

this book,

ƒ what you are most hopeful for, and

ƒ what you are most worried about.

Acting as your own coach or cheerleader, add an inspi-

rational message to yourself.
After you write the letter, put it in a safe place. Set a
reminder on your smartphone for the same date one year from
now with directions to open the letter and where to find it.

As human beings, we are constantly in flux. We are forever

adapting to the world around us. But remember that we are also
forever changing the world. It’s a push-pull effect. A two-way
street. A combination of our inner selves interacting with the
external world. It’s a balancing act that will continue for all
our lives. If we fail to adapt to the world around us, we will
struggle. If we fail to be unique, to be ourselves, to leave our

151
Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning

own imprint on the world, the world will lose our gifts to it.
Ultimately, finding our own gifts benefits the world we live in.

Be a Mind Builder
Before we end, I’ll let you in on one more secret. These super
skills can become superpowers and make you a hero. These
skills will build your executive functioning. Think of body-
builders: they don’t simply maintain their health; they inspire
others with a constant dedication to strength and fitness. If you
practice the super skills like an Olympic athlete in training, you
will do more than you dreamed possible and inspire others.
You can be a mind builder. You can encourage yourself
and others like Oprah Winfrey, plan and strategize like former
president Dwight D. Eisenhower, get results one step at a time
like astronaut Neil Armstrong, be motivating through hard
times like poet Maya Angelou, stay calm in chaos like a Zen
monk, and focus like chess Grandmaster Maurice Ashley.
When you set a goal, you aren’t just patching up weak-
nesses, you are setting out on a hero’s journey. You will depart
from your ordinary world, confront crises, overcome ordeals,
and then return to your starting place transformed. It is in the
depths of being tested that you will forge your determination.
You’re the owner of your brain, but it goes deeper than that.
You’re the owner of the “you.” There isn’t another you. There
never has been and never will be. Relish that. Cherish it. Use
it as motivation to become whatever it is you want to become.

152
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Lara Honos-Webb, PhD, is a worldwide attention deficit/
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) expert, and offers ADHD
coaching. She is a clinical psychologist, and author of The Gift
of ADHD, The Gift of ADHD Activity Book, The Gift of Adult ADD,
The ADHD Workbook for Teens, and Listening to Depression. She
has also published more than twenty-five scholarly articles.
Learn more about her work at www.addisagift.com.

Foreword writer Neil D. Brown, LCSW, is author of Ending The

Parent-Teen Control Battle and host of the Healthy Family Connec-
tions Podcast. Brown is a therapist, speaker, trainer, and behav-
ioral health consultant. Learn more about his work at www
.neildbrown.com.
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6 super skills for executive functioning

6 super

6 super
simple skills Do you have trouble paying attention
to help you in school? Do you forget homework
assignments or miss important deadlines? Do
stay focused you ever feel “scattered” or unorganized? You’re
& reach your not alone. Between friend drama, social media,
goals! dating, smartphones, and a changing body and
brain, most teens need a little extra help staying
focused. The good news is there are real skills you can learn now to
skills for
executive
help you stay on track—in school and in life.

In this fun and easy guide, you’ll discover six powerful “super skills”
to help you pay attention, stay organized, and get stuff done—so
you can be your very best. You’ll learn how to focus on your gifts
and strengths, and break big goals down into small and manageable
steps—a process called “chunking.” You’ll also find tools to help
functioning
you stay motivated, and tips for dealing with distracting thoughts
and intense emotions. Once you practice these skills, you’ll feel
empowered to conquer any task, no matter how big. So, why not
start learning them today? tools to help teens
“Once again, Lara Honos-Webb has brilliantly put together an improve focus,
actionable and inspiring book … this time written to teens.” Q
—MARY ILLIONS WILDE, MD, integrative pediatrician
stay organized &
LARA HONOS-WEBB, P h D , is a clinical psychologist, international HONOS-WEBB
attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) expert, and author of The Gift reach their goals
of ADHD, The Gift of ADHD Activity Book, and The ADHD Workbook for Teens,
among others. Learn more at www.addisagift.com.

Cover photo by David Pisnoy on Unsplash

An Imprint of New Harbinger Publications

www.newharbinger.com LARA HONOS-WEBB, PhD
FOREWORD BY NEIL D. BROWN, LCSW