Speaking and Communicating Podcast

When we're thinking about executive functioning, what we're really talking about are the mental processes that happen in your prefrontal cortex, being able to attend and focus to sustain attention to a task that might not be super exciting to you. Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally,
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this is the podcast you should be tuning into. Communication and soft skills are crucial in your career growth and leadership development. Whether you're about to speak in public, make presentations at work, pitch to investors, or are an entrepreneur looking to showcase your innovation to a wider audience, you would be glad you joined us. The Speaking and Communicating podcast is part of the Be Podcast Network.
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which is a centralized hub that helps listeners become their best selves at work and in life. To learn more about the Bee Podcast Network, go to beepodcastnetwork.com. Let's get communicating!
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As I mentioned earlier regarding the Be Podcast Network, my guest today is part of the network as she hosts the Defecto Leaders podcast. She is a specialist in the ad tech industry. She's a speech pathologist and an educator as well. Dr. Karen Dudek-Brennan is joining us today to talk about executive functioning.
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how it plays out in both at school environments and in the workplace. And before I go any further, please help me welcome her to the show. Hi, Dr. Karen. Hello, thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. Welcome to the show. And as I said again, thank you so much that we're part of the Bee Podcast Network and this is how we met. Yeah, yeah. Like I said, there's so many good shows on there and that really just cover.
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education and communication in so many different ways. Yes, and we're gonna talk so much about that, but before we do, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, so where do I start? So I started off in the schools. I was a speech pathologist for 14 years, and then I was also doing some adjunct work and other things on the side. So working at universities with some of that involved, working with
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people in education and healthcare who were going to be going into rehab situations where they're providing rehabilitation for people with traumatic brain injuries, different developmental disabilities. Then I also was working with people who were going to be therapists in the school setting. And then I also did some supervision of student teachers who were providing special ed services. So I was doing all of that.
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working on my doctorate, my area of expertise was in language, literacy, and executive functioning. And once I finished that, I started looking into opportunities in higher ed and school administration. But what I ended up doing was I had started to build some courses on the side as a self-employed person, focused on things like language and literacy, because that was something that was a challenge for me as a school speech pathologist, because
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Speech pathologists typically have more of a training in a medical background and then they have to figure out what their role is in the school setting. And so they're very involved in helping students who will, if they have challenges with learning, so for example, having a hard time comprehending what they're reading, if they have a difficult time following the directions and just understanding the whole classroom environment and keeping up with the work or just with a classroom that has a lot going on, as well as
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forming social relationships. So some of those other things that you have to do in the school setting or at an extracurricular activity where you have to figure out how to engage with your peers when there's a lot going on, you have to understand how to have a conversation. And so that's a lot of things that you have to address when it comes to communication. So I started creating programming, supporting the therapist who were helping kids in those areas because they're so big.
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there's not really one scripted curriculum that we had or a protocol. And I always thought that was really challenging as a therapist to try to piece it together on my own. So I wanted to create a program for the therapists that were supporting the kids. And so that's what I did. I started doing that, that was back in 2015. And so I built out a whole suite of programs to support those language and literacy professionals. And then
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Once I did that, I realized that there were all these other things from a programming standpoint that people in special education have to think about because when you're in the K-12 setting, you have to think about, all right, what am I doing now? And how is that going to impact, you know, these young people with whatever they do after high school? Are we preparing them for college? Are we preparing them to go into a trade or an internship or into the workforce?
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And are we giving them those other life skills that they need to be successful? So in addition to these academic skills, are we doing all these other things for them? And so I have been for the last couple of years, really focusing on the executive functioning component. I started out with a lot with the reading and the literacy and our kids able to decode words. And then I kind of branched out to executive functioning, which is much broader, which means that I'm not just helping the speech pathologist, I'm really helping the whole
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special ed team and really the whole school team, because this is something that really needs to be a team effort with all of the stakeholders involved, all the people on that team, the parents, even thinking about community engagement. And then when kids get older, thinking about what do we need to do with figuring out how to transition kids to adulthood. So that's what I've really been focusing on the last year or so.
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And so that kind of brings us up to speed with the work I'm doing now. So executive functioning, you mentioned quite a few things, but the one that I remember where you said, sometimes children don't know how to follow the instruction on what it is that they need to do. When I think about the last three years and the pandemic and how everything just went to, okay, now kids are gonna be on the computer and your teacher's gonna teach you through the computer.
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How do you think those children were able to fare in the classroom with that, in addition to just generally struggling? Obviously it wasn't good. And it's definitely not good for kids with executive functioning issues. I guess it would be helpful for me to define all the different pieces of executive functioning and then maybe explain why, if you're doing things online, why that's not the best setup.
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for kids with those particular issues. Primarily it's because when you're interacting with a person online, it's not the same as in person. I mean, there's so many different things going on. It's not giving you the same experience and practice with the same skills that you would get if you're having an in-person interaction. And if we want kids to build those social skills, they can't do everything online because they're going to miss out on some of those opportunities.
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to build those skills. So when we're thinking about executive functioning, what we're really talking about are the mental processes that happen in your prefrontal cortex. So it would be things like being able to attend and focus. So being able to sustain attention to a task that might not be super exciting to you, to be able to filter things out, also to be able to...
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go from one thing to another thing. So let's say you're in the middle of something that's really interesting or that you really like, and you have to put it down and go do something that is not super exciting. So think about a child who you have a screen where there's a lot of stimulation, and then they have to come over here and read a book that doesn't have all of that. So it can be challenging for that type of thing. And it's not just the kids, the adults are experiencing those things too. It's just...
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it looks a little different. You're not seeing as much of an emotional response in the adults because they do have more skills to be able to regulate some of those things, but we're seeing that with adults as well. And so the other thing too is just the emotional regulation piece. So if you're frustrated with something, how are you responding to that? Can you talk to yourself in your head and kind of talk yourself down if you're in the middle of a task and it's challenging and you need to tell yourself.
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Oh, I need to keep going. And then I get to go and do this other thing that I enjoy doing. So that self-regulation piece, really what we're talking about is the ability to think ahead to an end goal, visibly and in our head, see that end goal, see ourselves being successful based on our ability to think into the future. And then also think back to something that happened in the past.
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and use that information to plan for what we're doing in the future and also be able to see the steps that we need to take for this really challenging task that we have to do and then figure out what's my first step, what's my second step. And then along the way, be able to plan out as you're doing the task, do I need to shift? Do I need to adjust? Is my plan taking too long? Do I need to shift the time? So a lot of it is things like,
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time perception, being able to estimate how long things will take, being able to pay attention to the time while you're doing the task, and then also being able to attend to all of this information coming in and on the spot, be able to do something with it. And so that's why it impacts social skills because in a social situation, there's a lot going on. You have to be able to, when you're having a conversation with someone, think on the spot. You can't always predict how that conversation is going to go. You have to be able to
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pay attention to the cues from the other person and know what they mean, think about what might this other person be thinking and how do I show this person that I'm trying to get their attention or that I'm interested in what they're saying. So all of those kinds of things that require you to think on the spot and also regulate your own behavior in real time are going to be part of executive functioning. And so when you're thinking about doing things digitally,
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you don't get that same kind of experience with all of those skills. And so a lot of kids who spent a large amount of time especially in their education, like thinking about kids who maybe they were in second grade at the beginning of the pandemic and now they're in fifth grade, that's a major part of their educational experience where they could have been around their peers that they missed out on. So there's a lot to it. Right.
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Here's the thing and we usually do accuse the younger generation of shorter attention spans. Yeah. And the fact that they always need constant stimulation. If the TV is not on, if the video games are not on, they always need something. They become jittery sometimes, which the way you describe how those then affect the social skills, it has a really big impact on that. And then secondly, when you talk about talking yourself into something, even if it's
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we always talk about inner dialogue and how communication usually starts with yourself. Yeah. What are some of the tips that you share when it comes to talking yourself into doing something you don't like, especially if you're a kid. As adults, like you said, we just power through it. Well, and it's really interesting because, and I know that some of my colleagues who work at this space as well, like let's say they're a therapist and they're working with families supporting kids, they have a lot of parents who are like,
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I have a hard time with all of this stuff too. And like, nobody ever showed me how to do this when I was younger. So they're trying to help their kids and then they're also trying to do it themselves, whether it be managing their day-to-day life, managing their job, and then also trying to do this for their kids. So there's part of that as well. So all these things that I'm going to share, these can be things you can use for yourself if you are an adult, but they're also things that you can work on with kids. I think about self-talk.
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There's a number of ways that we use self-talk. So we use self-talk for strategic planning purposes. So for example, if I'm gonna go downstairs and I want to make a meal, as I'm sitting here talking to you, thinking about that, like I can see in my head, myself in the kitchen doing whatever it is that I need to do. So I'm kind of thinking to myself, all right, what am I gonna do? How long is this going to take? You know, I might think to myself, oh, well it's...
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I have 30 minutes, so let me go downstairs and what are the steps that I need to take? How long is this going to take? What do I need? I'm kind of asking myself these questions. And so I'm thinking about the steps and I'm putting it into language in my head. That process of going from visualizing in your head to using language is called encoding. So that kind of that back and forth process. So a lot of times kids who do struggle with language that can be difficult. That's why a lot of times kids who
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maybe have a hard time writing and even just formulating sentences also have executive functioning challenges. So that's a piece of it. So there's the self-talk for the strategic planning. And also when I'm going through the process, I might think about, hey, wait, how long has this taken me? What time is it? Do I need to maybe condense this a little bit? Oh, maybe I have extra time. Maybe I have time to go do something else. So you're kind of talking to yourself and as you're doing these things, afterwards you might be saying things sort of
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self-reflection type of things, like how did that go? Or, oh, you know what, that didn't work very well. I think I'm gonna do this differently next time. And so you're thinking about things for self-reflection purposes. I mean, if you think about something where it didn't go very well and it didn't go as planned, you may have visualized that whole experience in your head beforehand, but then afterwards, you might be thinking, how can I replay that in my head to make it different next time?
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So those are all those things that you're doing. So there's the visualizing and the self-talk. But then there's also the self-talk about how you feel about yourself and beliefs and how you can kind of encourage yourself and use evidence from the past to help yourself believe something for the future. So for example, the way that we go through situations that might cause a lot of anxiety for us is that...
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If it's unfamiliar, that's kind of a normal feeling. But if you have executive functioning issues and you don't have those abilities, that anxiety is going to be even more because you can't visualize in your head what it might be like. So you can't use that strategy to kind of minimize the anxiety a little bit. And again, we're not trying to completely minimize stress and discomfort, we're just trying to make it more manageable. So...
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I might be able to in a situation where I'm nervous about something or when I have to go plan and think about something, be able to think, okay, yesterday I did this this way. I planned the steps this way. Like I cooked the recipe this way and it took way too long or I stepped away and then I burnt something. So I'm going to do it differently next time. So even just thinking about little things like that or using evidence from the past thinking like if I were to use an athletic.
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event, for example, where I'm like, all right, I was a swimmer when I was younger and I'm used to going to races and now I'm going to go run a 5k and I've never run a 5k before, but I can think in the past, well, I was successful doing all of these things as a swimmer. So maybe I can talk about all of those things in my head and pull pieces of evidence and use it for this future situation. So the self-talk can be strategic. It can also be
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for self-esteem and building beliefs and building confidence and kind of talking yourself through that. And then also when it's hard, you can be reminding yourself, well, this is uncomfortable, but I can do it because I did it before. So there's a lot of ways you can use it. Again, it's if you do not have that ability to engage in that dialogue and go back to those past experiences, then you're gonna be a lot less resilient and more likely to quit and less likely to persist or even start those things.
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I absolutely love that. And the reason is, you know how a lot of the time we get told, oh, you must have a gratitude journal, gratitude journal, write down five things you're grateful for. Somebody said, I'd rather have an achievement journal to say, you know what today, this is what I accomplished. No matter how little think it is, did a recipe for the first time, just write it down. I achieved this. So, cause an achievement journal will do exactly what you just said, which is you go back and say,
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Hey, I've done this before and I succeeded. That means I'm capable. I can try this new thing. And then it lessens the anxiety as well. Even when we accomplish those things, we never take time to actually pat ourselves on the back and say, good job, baby. We are so programmed to just keep doing more and more and more. We never take even one minute to say, you know what? Good job today. You did well. And then...
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So you mentioned communication obviously and how it affects all of this that we're talking about. If this is not addressed, if kids have executive functioning challenges, how do you think they fare as they leave school and go to college and eventually to the workplace? So the two skills that really pop out to me, and a lot of times we'll say things like active listening, which is part of this, but in more of the clinical.
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world when we're thinking about executive functioning, the terms would be things like situational awareness and perspective taking. So situational awareness is just your ability to read the room and be able to kind of look around at what's going on and take those cues of whatever scene it is you're entering. So in the academic environment for kids, it might be.
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walking into your classroom at the beginning of the day and kind of looking around at your teacher, different cues in the classroom, seeing what all your peers are doing to figure out, all right, what am I supposed to be doing right now? What do I need to do to get ready? In a work environment, obviously there's going to be things like that as well. So you walk into the boardroom or some kind of a conference room and you're looking around the room, seeing what other people are doing. Again, now that things are online, that's a little bit different, especially if people have their cameras turned off.
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But there is still an element of situational awareness in there. You know, there's so many different things to this where it's, when we think about the advanced skills that we need in order to be successful in the workplace. I mean, think about if you have a new job and you're walking into this whole new setting, whether it's you're working in a school and you have to see what the culture is of that school, or it's a corporate setting and you have to see what the culture of your tech team is or whatever.
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Whatever the scenario is, you have to kind of go into this situation and figure out how it works, figure out people's communication styles, figure out just how they like to interact, how to fit it on that team and take those cues, whether it's sort of an ongoing cultural thing or whether it's just how you need to read the cues in this one particular meeting. So those types of things, how they show up for younger kids is they look like they're not on task, they're not paying attention.
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They present themselves as behavioral issues, like this kid's trying to be defiant. And a lot of times they're just not really able to read the cues and, and understand how to take that information and take it all in and then use strategic planning, but then for an adult, it might come across as low performance on that team, people might think they're rude. People might just think they're trying to get out of work and there's other ways that it can present itself. The other thing is perspective taking, which is you have to read the
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the room, but then also while you do that, you have to think about what are the other people potentially thinking and how are my behaviors coming across to these other people. And again, you have to kind of do some on the spot reading the situation while you're doing that. But it just the ability to be looking at other people's behavior and figuring out how to interpret that, how it comes across in kids. Sometimes kids think they're being bullied or they're being teased.
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or the other way around where they think somebody's that friends with them and then they are being teased. So those kinds of things, or maybe they don't realize that other kids think they're dominating the conversation and they don't realize that other kids might not want to hang around with them. Or maybe other way around where they don't ever go up and initiate interactions with peers and they think, oh, nobody wants to be my friend. And it's like, well, you're never showing them that they were interested in being friends with them. So those kinds of things happen for kids. But
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For adults, I'd say those same kind of things happen, but in a professional setting, a lot of times it's those communication breakdowns. One particular example that happened a lot with some of my dissertation students, for example, is that they would say, my advisor, you know, I emailed them and they didn't get back to me. And so I had to kind of do some digging on, well, how are you showing up to those interactions?
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If you email them and tell them paragraphs and paragraphs of your reasons why you didn't get the work done, and then you ask them for something at the end, how is that going to come across to them? They're helping you, and then you show up to a meeting and you haven't done the work that you said that you were going to do that's kind of coming across like you don't respect their time. So there's this element of perspective taking. And I think a big thing with networking is just realizing
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that when you reach out to someone for help, that you're not top of mind and it gets pushed out in their inbox and those kinds of things. So that's a big one that I have to talk people through. And again, we can do a lot of these things remote, but we are missing out on things when we're not doing things in person. And I think for adults who have both in-person interactions and online interactions, they at least have the skills. But for the kids who never had that experience, then they're going into the workforce without having built up those skills.
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It's funny when you quote the example of, you know, I wrote a whole paragraph of why I didn't do it and then they asked for help. That person, if you think of the opposite example, which is if I go straight to the topic, the pleasantries before the actual email, people think, am I gonna sound rude if I just say, hi, Karen, I didn't do my dissertation last week, here's what I need, or,
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The explanation is me trying to soften you up, you know what I mean? So as you say, it's how we communicate and therefore think, but I did my best in communicating in the way I thought was best and then they still ignored me. And then the other thing is when you talk about how sometimes children, this not reading the room is seen as behavioral issues, teachers are not trained. Are they in that particular aspect?
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Yeah, no. So I would say that no, that is not work on executive functioning and cognition and brain differences isn't typically part of teacher training programs. A lot of teachers have taken it upon themselves to learn about these things and a lot of them intuitively figure it out on the job, but we need to do a lot better job of giving teachers the tools to learn these things. And then even if they have the knowledge, they do need the support from just a staffing perspective of
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Even if they know what to do to be able to support a child, if they have 30 other kids that they need to help, it makes it hard. So there's that aspect as well, is that we need to give them the knowledge and the skills, but then we also need to give them the support to be able to use those knowledge and skills. I don't know if you remember this movie from way back when Michelle Pfeiffer, Dangerous Minds. Yeah. Yeah.
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Not everybody can do that. I mean, she had so much time to even go to these kids as families and neighbors. Oh, I know. Not every teacher can do that. They always do it in the movies. That doesn't happen. Thank you, that's not real life. Another thing I remember when I was growing up, my mom used to say, when you're at school, go out and befriend the kid that nobody's talking to. Actively training us to do that. Which means when you're an adult and you're at work and there's a new employee and then...
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Karen walks in and it's her first day in the boardroom. You say, oh, hey, Karen, come sit here by me, before the meeting starts. Do people in workspaces generally, do they do that? Has there any research been done on that? I don't know, but I do think, again, when we're thinking about executive functioning, this is something that I struggle with as well. When I was younger, I had a hard time making friends. And it's not that I couldn't do it.
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it's the initiation part of it. So I think it is important to be reinforcing that as early as possible because it's on the person who is experiencing that to go and show other people that they're interested in having an interaction to reach out to them. We need to do it that way as well. But another thing we can do is the other way help people to...
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you know, again, encouraging that reaching out and pulling that new person in and extending the olive branch. I do think it needs to go both ways. And I understand that people get really busy and they're not always thinking about, you know, all the other people there got their heads down doing their job. They're not thinking, Oh, here's this new person that came on my team. Maybe I should go and like reach out to them. And again, it's harder when it's all virtual. I remember when I first,
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started at the school, it's like, you see somebody new sitting in a teacher's lounge and you start having a conversation with them. And it just sort of, this opportunity presents itself. But when you're online and you know, you have somebody who's in another state, you don't really have those opportunities where you can just kind of have those organic conversations. You do have to take the extra steps to be like, hey, let's hop in a Zoom call or get to know each other and welcome to the team. And I do think it is something that teams
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need to be proactive about because it is easy to get stuck in the weeds and forget that like, hey, there's this new person here. It would be nice to reach out to them and make them feel welcome. And the reason I ask, this is a real example. So I have a friend, ever since she started this job, it's been over a year. It's all been virtual. All the members of SPRT all over. It has come to a point where sometimes you have a situation where...
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somebody will be judged on their performance based on how they not only look, but how they act on the Zoom screen. If you're an introverted, you don't say much unless called upon, they then come to the misguided conclusion that you don't know how to do the job or you fall short. It is impacting people's lives negatively. Because some people, whether they have a neurodiverse way of presenting themselves,
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At the end of the day, not all of us understand those things to that extent. And therefore we judge that not their productivity, but we judge their productivity based on that people are missing out on promotions or their performance reviews are not what they should be because this is not going to go away anytime soon. How do we curtail those challenges and those biases that we have on people?
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Yeah, it's hard because on one hand, you do want people to have more awareness of different ways of interacting. On the other hand, I have seen with the neurodiversity movement where it goes too far in the other direction. So, I mean, I guess I could give a couple examples. Let's say that you have executive functioning challenges and you struggle with time blindness. You know, maybe you don't show up to meetings on time. Maybe you don't complete projects on time. To me.
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like that is going to negatively impact a lot of other people. If you have a person who doesn't show up to meetings, you can't depend on them. There's a job that needs to be done, a mission in that company, and you're not going to be able to accomplish it if a person is not able to do those things. So to me, those are skills that you do need to build. You have to be able to do the job. But then there are other things from kind of a top-down perspective where
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The support and accommodations and the tools need to be there in order to help people build those skills. I don't know exactly how that looks, but I do think that having some flexibility about how we communicate or just even having an awareness of the way that we are using different project management tools and the way that we're communicating different meetings, you know, there's a lot going on in there.
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For people who have executive functioning challenges, when tools are digital and you can't see them all laid out, it's very hard to figure out like, where's my schedule when you can't see those blocks of time. So I do think it's good to have this awareness of when we're doing things like onboarding from a learning and development perspective to understand like all the tools that you're using and how to at least just
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have good onboarding procedures to show people where resources are, or to even have mentorship and regular feedback. So I like the concept of universal design for learning. So this is something that is an education term, something that I learned in my special ed administration training, but I think it can be also applied to the workplace. So basically what it is is that there are certain accommodations
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that need to be in place for people with disabilities to be able to access things. The basic things that we know about would be things like screen readers for people who are visually impaired, for example, or if you can have a texting feature for people who are deaf and hard of hearing. That's another example where there's an accessibility feature there. But those accessibility features, also some other people who might not need to use them, but maybe like to use them, could benefit from those things.
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So I think those types of things are an answer from the top. It's not that you're excusing behavior that is having a negative impact on the team. No. Because that's not gonna be in the best interest of that person either. It's to their benefit to learn those skills because it's not going to just impact the way that they show up to work. It's going to impact their relationships. Like what if you have a friend who never shows up to the, you know, a time when you meet them? Like...
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that's going to affect your relationship. So I don't think we need to necessarily excuse behaviors, but I do think we need to think about accessibility from the top and understand those brain differences. I think taking that element of universal design is an answer to that issue. When we talk about soft skills and what we need to do in relationships, we will say, first and foremost, businesses are there to make money because we want to get paid.
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And so we need to do what needs to be done in order for that to happen. So we're not excusing either low performance or not showing up on time. Those things are important to work in a team, but we wondering whether Zoom has had that negative impact in the sense that sometimes the biases come into play because we haven't met in person.
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Karen, you host the Defecto Leaders podcast. Would you like to tell us a little bit more about it? Oh, yes. So I did start off in the kind of the neurodiversity parenting space with the podcast. I was doing my trainings and programs for SLPs and literacy professionals when I started it back in 2021. So I do have a lot of the early content is about ADHD, autism, executive functioning.
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parenting type of things. And then it started to shift back towards clinical and education and really a focus on supporting the professionals, just because that was a lot of my listeners and a lot of the questions that I was getting and requests for different episodes. So I shifted back to that. And to be perfectly honest, that's really just always where my passion was to begin with. So the original title of the show was, Are They 18 Yet? So if you listen to any of the episodes before July of-
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2022, it's, are they 18 yet? And then it shifted over to de facto leaders in July. And since then I've taken the focus more from parenting, which of course parents are welcome to listen still, but it's more towards helping people who are in education and clinical roles to be better leaders. So whether they are in a position where they're directly supporting patients or students,
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or whether they are in a supervisor position or an administrator position, helping them to think about how they could be a good leader in that position, whether it's officially in their job title or whether they just want to evolve into that role and either just be a leader in that clinical or educational role or eventually level up and find some kind of a management or leadership position. I had somebody on who he is a retired accountant.
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And he decided that he really wanted to be involved in helping kids in the community. And he and his wife started these charity runs and started donating to local organizations in the community. And to me, that's an act of leadership. He was just kind of like, five of us are going for a run, let's throw money in a bucket and we're gonna donate it to this summer camp for kids. And that's really evolved into something. Or whether it be teachers who decide to open up a teachers pay teacher store and start selling products.
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or whether it be people who try to transition, maybe they're in a clinical role and they wanna transition to corporate or ed tech and actually make a career transition. And then also I talk about things relating to K-12 education, like school turnaround and some of those bigger education reform things that need to happen. Education reform, do we get politicians involved?
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Uh, I haven't yet. Oh, I don't know if I want to go there. I like to talk practically about just the real equity issues. And a lot of times the way that I approach it is I like to get a lot of different people's perspectives. And then also really it's about resources and good quality curriculum and training for people, so for the kids and for the adults as well, because to me, you can't build the skills and have access to opportunities if you don't have resources and opportunities. So.
36:19
That's where I focus a lot of my energy. That's absolutely true. No, I was just joking because you just gave an example of someone who took initiative. Like we always say, it only starts with us. It needs to be, it's up to us. It certainly is. Any last words of wisdom, Dr. Karen Duda Brennan on executive functioning and how, if you work with children, what are some of the things you feel like you can start to notice and read the room when they are there?
36:49
So the concept of scaffolding, so creating structure, kids might not be able to create that structure for themselves yet. So adults can come in and create some of that structure, like the time blocks during the day, encouraging them to get into the activities, but do it in a way that's kind of nudging them and creating some boundaries, but not hovering too much and doing too much of the problem solving for them. So finding that balance between guiding, but not doing for them to the extent that they become
37:19
to dependent on you. So that's what adults can do and also recognize that a lot of these things that happen, these internal mental processes, they're so automatic for you that they feel like they're not even happening and you take them for granted. And so a lot of times things that come across like lack of motivation, laziness or defiance in kids are due to executive functioning issues. It's not that we're excusing things, we still wanna teach kids to be accountable.
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but recognizing that those are skills, it's not personality traits. And the way that they're going to build the skills and be able to eventually be independent in adults is by providing them those opportunities. Certainly skills and not personality traits because that's when we end up with those labels or saying, you are this. Yeah, yeah. Words of wisdom from Dr. Karen Duda-Brennan, the speech pathologist educator.
38:13
and podcast host of the Defector Leaders podcast. This has been very, not only informational for me, but very eye-opening. There's so much that I'm now going to start to notice more based on what you shared with us today. So thank you very much for being on our show. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this stuff. Absolutely, my pleasure. Yes. And before you go, I believe you have a gift for us.
38:42
So I do have some other resources that I have created to really help define it. There's obviously the de facto leaders podcast. And then all of the episodes are published on my website at drkarindudakbrannan.com backslash blog. I do have an executive functioning implementation guide. This is something that I have created for school teams. I do think that if you are working with, let's say you're in an organization that is working with interns and you're thinking about.
39:12
young adults who are transitioning to their first job, it could be relevant for you as well. But it's my executive functioning implementation guide where I talk about all the different stakeholders who might be involved, all the different therapists and what they can do to support executive functioning as well as a definition of what it is. So to get that guide, you can go to drkarendudekbrannan.com backslash EF schools. And then I just recently released a
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webinar where I go through what executive functioning is and why a lot of the solutions for mental health in kids don't adequately address executive functioning and some of those topics relating to neurodiversity. So things like a lot of times people are referred to talk therapy or a lot of times people will do social skills groups or those sticker reinforcement behavior charts.
40:10
So those are a lot of the things being done. And I kind of talk about some of the challenges that happen with those particular models and how we really need to understand what executive functioning is and restructure some of the programming so that we can give kids good support and prepare them for adulthood. Excellent stuff. I will put all those details in the show notes. And then if we want to continue to have a conversation with you, where can we find you?
40:36
Well, I've been pretty active on LinkedIn lately, so you can connect with me on LinkedIn. Just search my name, Karen Judek-Branan, and you'll find my profile and send me a connection request and a message. We certainly will. Thank you so much for being on our show today. Thank you so much for having me. My absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining the Speaking and Communicating podcast once again. If you have a guest that you think would be a great fit for the show,
41:05
Please email me and my contact details are on the show notes. The Speaking and Communicating podcast is part of the Be Podcast Network, where there are many other podcasts that support you in being a better leader and becoming the change you want to see. To learn more about the Be Podcast Network, go to BePodcastNetwork.com. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify, and stay tuned!
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for more episodes to come.