Episode 31 Goal Setting and Executive Functioning

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Goal Setting and Executive Functioning

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Links:

- Alan Baddeley’s Model of Working Memory: https://bit.ly/3xFRAW3
- 50 first dates movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_First_Dates
- The Drama Triangle: https://tinyurl.com/yckx4k9k
- Tiktok algorithm: https://tinyurl.com/4v4jtzc3
- Vision boards: https://tinyurl.com/66dxb8zn
- Metacognition: https://tinyurl.com/4dbtc8cw
- Working Memory: https://tinyurl.com/working-memory
- Inhibitory Control: https://tinyurl.com/inhibitory-control
- Visualization: https://tinyurl.com/use-visualization
- Inner Voice: https://tinyurl.com/inner-voices
- Cognitive Flexibility: https://tinyurl.com/cognitive-flexibility
- BulletMap Academy: https://bulletmapacademy.com/
- Learning Specialist Courses:https://www.learningspecialistcourses.com/
- Executive functions and Study Skills Course: https://tinyurl.com/n86mf2bx
- Good Sensory Learning: https://goodsensorylearning.com/
- Dyslexia at Work: www.dyslexiawork.com

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Good Sensory Learning (http://www.goodsensorylearning.com/)
Learning Specialist Courses (http://www.learningspecialistcourses....)
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Dyslexia at Work: www.dyslexiawork.com

Transcript:

Welcome to the Personal Brain Trainer Podcast.

I'm Dr. Erica Warren and I'm Darius Namdaran and we're your hosts. Join us on an adventure to translate the scientific jargon and brain research into simple metaphors and stories for everyday life. We explore executive functions and learning strategies that help turbocharge the mind. Come learn how to steer around the invisible barriers so that you can achieve your goals. This podcast is ideal for parents, educators, and learners of all ages.

This podcast is brought to you by Bullet Map Academy. We have free dyslexia screener app called dyslexia quiz. It's a fun, engaging and interactive app. Try it now. Just search for dyslexia quiz on the app store and see how your score differs from your friends and family.

This podcast is brought to you by www.goodsensorylearning.com where you can find educational and occupational therapy lessons and remedial materials that bring delight to learning.

Finally, you can find Dr Warren's many courses at www.learningspecialistcourses.com. Come check out our newest course on developing executive functions and study strategies.

Hey Darius, great to see you today.

We are going to be doing an episode on goal setting and executive functioning.

Yeah, this is my choice.

I'm looking forward to talking about goal setting and executive function.

I'm really intrigued to hear your take on it as well because you've got quite a lot of interesting thoughts on this that aren't necessarily what I would automatically go for, right?

So let's look at the relationship of goals to executive functioning and talk a little bit about how to execute them and I think that we all know the importance of goal setting, but it would also be really intriguing and meaningful to see how executive functioning skills can both help and hinder us in achieving our goals.

I thought that'd be a fun way to look at it.

What are your thoughts on that?

Well I want to dive straight in and talk about working memory and goal setting.

It's something that's really live for me right now okay, because when you said to go, you're setting a target of what you really want in life, what you think is really important and executive function is all about being the executive of your life and guiding your life towards what you think is important, fundamentally getting things done, staying on focus.

So if you think about three hours of executive function, working memory is there to filter through all the information coming through to identify what's important.

Put it into our memory and interaction and assistance with our inhibitory control which is focusing in on what we think is important and then cognitive flexibility is about how to take what we think is important and adapt it to the world round about us and changing circumstances in order to achieve what we want to achieve or serve in the way we want to serve or deliver.

So we've got these three steps of capture focus and deliver as it were that kind of trap those three stages of executive function.

Now if we're thinking about goal setting, working memory can actually affect working towards our goal.

So for example, I've been experiencing this myself in the mornings or during the day I sometimes your working memory gets filled with all sorts of information and you can actually forget what your goals are, forget what you're working towards.

I suppose that could be part of inhibitory control, that you should be kind of filtering stuff out and really focusing in on something.

But I'm intrigued to just explore how working memory might affect goal setting and goal achieving and so on.

What are your thoughts?

Well, you know, it's really funny because whenever we try to pull executive functioning apart into three distinct categories, I start to say like, oh it doesn't really work because really what executive functioning is kind of an interplay, It's like and even you were when you were trying to pull working memory part, you're like inhibitory control popped in and I think that as much as we like to make those distinctions of those three, I like to think of them as characters.

They are so intermeshed with each other, and they rely on each other and although you could have a deficit and working memory, not the other two, it's like a three wheeled car without a third wheel wouldn't really travel very far, it's Like it's a three-legged stool, it's like you're relying on all three pillars.

That's right, keep it standing.

Yes, that's right.

But it's interesting when you think of working memory as capture, that's a piece of it but when you're trying to retrieve information.

Oh yeah right that's more than capture because you're actually going back and looking at what you captured and pulling that out of long-term memory.

So you know as soon as we try to like to peg them as a kind of metaphor, I think of a way that yeah that works for part of it.

But it's so interesting.

I mean I guess the bottom line is executive functioning really is this interplay between these three pieces and they all rely on each other, and they all play with each other, and they all intertwine with each other.

So it's really a woven web, you can't really pull one string out because then it pulls the other ones out to type thing just as a metaphor.

But you know I think one thing that we can dive into that would be really interesting is how to make a goal.

Yeah.

Okay.

Can I just share something that you just brought up before we get onto that with regard to working memory is you know how you're saying working memory is not just putting things into your memory but pulling things out and retrieving it.

I have to make a little confession here.

Okay, so I started writing myself a little letter.

Okay, a little note to myself for the morning.

Okay so in the morning now I wake up and I press this note to myself, and I've even recorded it and I press play and it sends Darius remember today this is what your goals are for this next six months, This next year.

This is what you really want out of life.

And I sent it back to myself, remember you really want to be doing these kinds of courses, you really want to be working with this community, you really want to be this for your child, you really want this for your income or whatever.

And I have to remind myself actually actively because if I don't sort of remind myself in the morning, I can drift a bit.

I get stuff done.

But I it's really weird.

Tell me what you think about this, right?

Because you know those movies where someone's got amnesia and what was that famous movie, what was it 40 Letter 40 Days or what was that letter where he fell in love with that girl who could only remember something for a day, and he ended up taking a video at the end of every day and he would play it in the morning.

Oh well it's this amazing film okay with Adam Sandler in it and he's a bit of a player and he sees this girl in a cafe and he really takes to her and falls in love with her in that cafe for that day and they go out and they have a good time and they really get close and then the next morning goes to the cafe and she doesn't remember him at all and he doesn't understand this.

So it kind of works with it a little bit and maybe as she's being stand up and they kind of go through the process again.

And then after two or three days, the people in the cafe start speaking to him and saying, look you've got to be careful not to hurt this girl.

And they explained to her that she was in a car crash and that she something happened to her memory, and she can only remember one day, and she's caught in this loop where all she remembers is the day after the car crash.

And so everything gets wiped and reset to the beginning of that day.

And so what he does is he determines to help her remember that they love one another.

And so he ends up taking a little video at the end of every day about them together.

And he plays, at the moment she wakes up, he presses play and he shows her the video she's like, who are you, what are you doing here etcetera?

And she he says, just watch this, just watch this.

And she sees herself and she's jumping and laughing and kissing him and sending a message saying, remember this, remember that?

And she's like, really?

And she's like, you know, and then gradually, and I won't spoil the end of the story, but basically, they carry on going through this and she ends up having a relationship with him and there are people who are like that in a very extreme way.

And there's also people that are like that, I'm not like that, but there's parts of me that are a bit like that, that I can forget what's important for me, important to me, the business of life can overwhelm that.

And that's what goal setting is about.

It's about setting, what's important to you and not forgetting what's important.

So it's about remembering everything important, and the essence of a goal is about identifying what's important, clarifying it and remembering it, that's really a goal, identify, clarify, and remember.

Yeah.

So I've set myself this little quirky thing to do that to myself, to send a message to my future self, to say Darius remember, don't forget this.

I'm like, oh, thanks for reminding me about Darius.

That's really funny, Darius, but let me tell you a little bit about what you're doing is what you're doing is you're creating a conscious moment in the morning because you're right, we all go into repeated habits and if you are setting a goal, it means that you're looking for change, right?

So by having that conscious decision to remind yourself, you're taking yourself out of old patterns and you're trying to create a new way of moving so that you can achieve that goal.

And I also love the idea that what you're doing is instead of setting up visual blinkers, we've talked about blinkers, you know, that's something they use for horses to keep them focused.

So we have been using that as kind of a metaphor of focus, but you not only use visual blinkers, but this is an example of a verbal blinker, which is really interesting.

So you're verbally focusing yourself, you're verbally inhibiting all the other stuff that's coming up, like perhaps social media, perhaps distractions.

It could be other things that you're used to doing that don't really serve you and that we just go through and do automatically because it's our normal or was programmed in us even as long ago as childhood.

So yeah, in order to achieve a new goal, we have to blaze a new path.

Right?

So let's move on to setting a goal.

I think I learned how to set goals when I was 20 after reading a number of books like studying Brian Tracy and things like that.

And one of the things that really stuck with me that I'd like to share is the power of writing goals in the past tense.

Now this sounds strange to people when they first hear it if you've not heard this, what I mean by that is instead of saying I want to make 20 for classes for an online course.

Okay, that could be a goal and that is one of my goals to create 24 lessons for an executive function course.

If you write it in such way that you say On 23 November, 2023, I have produced 12 lessons for my executive function course, it does something inside of yourself when you write it down, even if you write it down and put it away and never say it to yourself again, you shove it in a book and you forget about it and then you come across that book a year later or maybe even two years later, you flick through and you can see, oh I created 12 lessons for my executive function course on the 23rd of November 2023 you look at it and go, gosh, that's weird because I did do that and there's something about that, I mean it doesn't always happen like that, that's why it's important to remind yourself of your goals, but there is something very powerful of just doing it even once and writing it down in the past tense because of what it does to your subconscious mind to sort of engage it and create this dissonance because your subconscious mind goes, oh we haven't made those 12 lessons and Darius says we have and it's kind of like we better start making those lessons because you want to close that loop, it's like you want to see the end of that episode or that series, you got to finish it and there's something about that, if you got any thoughts on I do because it's very interesting.

I mean you're tapping into something that's quite fascinating to me because we've talked about vision boards in the past and just as I was saying that we've talked about blinkers that we can create these visual blinkers and you're talking about now here's an auditory blinker, you're doing the same thing instead of a vision board, you're creating a verbal board like a verbal and instead of having maybe a vision board in front of you that reminds you visually what you want to achieve, you're kind of setting these verbal flags for the future that give you something to work towards.

And I think it's really fascinating.

This is the beauty of it is what you're doing is you're using the two tools in your working memory help you to achieve your goals.

One is visualization, right?

Or even specialization and maybe that's something we should talk about.

How can we use specialization to achieve a goal.

But you're also using your inner voice or your outer voice or your written voice right to help get things and establish things so that you can achieve those long-term goals.

So what we're doing is we're really figuring out how we can utilize our working memory in a conscious way to change our future.

Yes, which is really fascinating to me.

So we're using our working memory to assist our inhibitory control to stay focused in on what's important to us, right?

And we're also tapping into our cognitive flexibility because we're trying to let go of old patterns and establish something new.

So we are having to be flexible in the sense that we have to let go of those old patterns and flex into something new.

Oh I like that.

So let me just follow that a little bit.

So a goal is you saying I want something to change.

And it's also you are looking at the world round about you and saying I am seeing what I've been doing in the past or what I've got right now, not quite matching the world, I've got the reality of my life right now I wanted to change into something else but not something a fantasy but into something that will really ground in reality.

And you're being cognitively flexible enough to adapt to reality.

The outside reality and the inside reality of your desire matches.

So there's this cognitive flexibility and then it's working with your working memory that uses that phonological and visual loop to keep telling yourself.

Remember this is what you want to do and then showing yourself this is what you want to have visualize happening.

And then that informs your inhibitory control that says right let's really focus in on this.

Let's chunk this down into certain things smaller goals that we can really zoom in on and grasp and it integrates the episodic buffer which we've talked about.

We've used Alan Baddeley’s model which is really your consciousness and it's that stage, right?

It's the spotlight of being conscious and being able to manage which gets right back to that's executive functioning.

We’re being a functioning executive instead of a dysfunction.

Executive we're taking the reins or taking control of our executive functioning so that we can shift and achieve new goals.

We don't want to be the same, we want to be growing so growth means that we have to embrace all three of those players and allow them to work together.

It's really fascinating, isn't it?

Oh can I just go, and I've just had a very random connection about twitter.

Okay, so it's fascinating listening to Elon musk talk about the digital world.

So I don't know the fancy words for this.

I know you do but there's two parts to our brain is the sort of animal parts which is a lot of the monkey brain as it were amygdala, amygdala, that's right and then there's much more conscious part of the brain that controls them That what's that called again?

And I'm thinking of like meta cognition which is again happens in the frontal lobe that's part of executive functioning.

Yes.

So really these ties in with executive function where you've got this animal side of you the animal brain and then you've got the more intentional human aspect of you, and both are working with one another.

And so executive function is very much about taking control over yourself as a human being and your animal nature and your drives and passions and so watch and directing them to the human being that you really are rather than a default driver.

So what's fascinating here though is if you look at the digital network of things that are being built round about us, we're using them as tools, and we think they're dialing into our conscious mind are intentional mind of getting information connecting with people.

But actually a lot of it is also tying into our amygdala which is the animal side of things which is you're seeing; it's amplifying a lot of the animal desires and reactions and responses and defensiveness and so on.

So the digital world is not just amplifying the higher levels of our humanity but it's also amplifying the animal levels of our humanity.

Okay now hold that in your mind for a moment.

Okay then you think about twitter and Facebook, okay now Facebook and these social media's have algorithms that are being trained to feed you information that you think is interesting or important.

Okay so it's kind of like a digital executive function algorithm for you.

It's feeding stuff to you that you are telling it you think is important.

However it's not just you that is telling it what's important.

It's also Facebook programming the algorithm to tell you what's important.

Now here's the kick musk with twitter in the future.

What algorithm for you to be able to choose what algorithm you want to be sending you information so that people, computer programmers and individuals can start designing their own algorithm and they can actually post it up on the internet and say I want Erica Warren's executive function algorithm brain, okay.

Because I like the way Erica thinks I like her working memory, what she pays attention to what she filters out what she thinks is important and I want that to be feeding me the information.

Okay.

And so this is an interesting development of social media where you, as an individual are allowed to choose your algorithm.

That's lovely because otherwise it's just going to feed you the same old stuff and in fact if you want to grow so yeah, I could say oh okay, I want to see what.

Andrew Huberman, yes, because I really respect him and he's a really great ophthalmologist and he's definitely an expert in neurology, I guess I should say.

Yeah, that sounds really, really lovely, I love that.

And that's another way to be able to set goals.

So you can set goals by helping or by allowing social media or those types of ai to help you to get out of your old patterns and establish new patterns which is really fascinating.

So now we're stepping out of our own working memory and we're asking artificial intelligence to help us get out of our old patterns, which is pretty, pretty fascinating.

And maybe send us information is directly relevant to our goals into our attention.

Rather than pulling us away from what our intention is.

And pulling our attention away with other things.

We're trying to put things in front of our brain that are consistent with our ultimate goals and so we can do that right now.

Also, for example, with TikTok, TikTok is probably the first platform that is actually doing this, and all the others are trying to play catch up.

And it's really weird.

TikTok is not just about people doing dance news and sing songs and so on anymore.

But the moment you start paying attention to one particular thing, TikTok doesn't want to show you what your friends are looking at.

It just wants to show you more of what you're paying more attention to and then you go to the next level.

If you follow someone in TikTok and you're very selective about who you follow, you follow that, it will go, oh, the other people who followed this person tended to look at this kind of information, and what it does is it starts to surface information.

And you've got this interesting dynamic where you've got one half of your feed, which is only what I'm following, and another half of your feed is suggested emerging possibilities and you can flip between the two.

And so I'm really intrigued by that.

Anyway, what I'm noticing is, TikTok is beginning to actually help me with some of my goals by raising to my attention, certain things that I hadn't noticed and it's pretty amazing what's been happening over the last month of using TikTok more intentionally as a way of discovering information visually and verbally.

So this phonological loop of hearing someone say something in a tight singular bundle and visually showing me something.

And often, because it's a TikTok that is like a minute long wherever it's often around one particular topic.

So it's enough for your working memory to grasp and decide is this important or not.

And if it is, it's often really quite useful and if it's not, you flick through.

So anyway, I just wanted to throw that out in terms of once you set your goals and you've got them written down in the past tense, you start looking for information, things that feed to your minds, the information that are consistent with your goals.

Yeah, I really, really like that.

And I think you can go give yourself these verbal reminders, but you can also do vision boards, so you can choose either way and actually I'm going to hit spatial later because I want to go somewhere a little bit different because what we're doing right now is we're saying, okay, we want you to establish your big picture, we want you to zoom out and see.

All right, where are you going now, What I want to do is I want to also get us to zoom in because in order to get to that ultimate goal, we can get completely overwhelmed because if you stay in that mindset of Oh my God, I have to do 12 episodes to get to that goal, you can overwhelm yourself.

And I see that happening all the time with my students, where they'll say like, oh I just, I couldn't even get started because I was too overwhelmed when I see the big picture, I just, I shut down.

So I think one of the most important things is once we have established what our ultimate goal is, we then have to zoom in and establish those micro goals or those mini goals because again, we don't want to become frozen by a sense of overwhelm and I think that's something that I work a lot with my students is when I see that sense of like, oh my gosh, there's no way I can get all of this done between now and the end of the school year, I have to say, okay, let go of it, let go of it, let's zoom in, let's establish a list of micro goals that will help you get to that point.

Once we've established the micro goals, I'll say, okay, now take it one step at a time, what's the first micro goal, once you've established that we cross it off so that you can see what you've accomplished, then you move on to the next micro goal and so forth and you can get it done, but without establishing those micro goals, I think for many people, the amygdala clicks in and says overwhelmed freeze and they freeze and so I have a lot of these students that have executive functioning difficulties that they'll say it's too much, can't handle it, the paper, oh my gosh, it's a five page paper and then you get the day before and they're like freaking out, they have a five page paper and they're up all night and that's just not good, it's not good for the body, it's not good for the brain.

And then what happens is I see that when kids get into the habit or even adults get into the habit of leaving something to the last minute, there's this huge adrenaline burst of like oh my gosh I have to get this done and then they get used to that level of adrenaline and that's what motivates them to get it done and then they get stuck in that pattern of needing that level of adrenaline in order to get something done and I have such a hard time getting kids out of that pattern, they can't get started on assignments until the last minute because it's the last minute that motivates them.

So I think it's really important to help Children not go there or not get to that point because establishing those micro goals so that they can manage it in little chunks is really, really important because for some reason when they start to get into the habit of leaving things to the last minute and finding that they just have a hard time breaking that pattern and they need the last minute to be motivated.

They're the hardest students that I have worked with.

And I find that my success rate is really relatively low with that population because it's really hard to recreate that level of motivation in micro goals.

That's fascinating.

So it reminds me, my wife is a life coach for executives, and she does these workshops on the Drama triangle and we've mentioned the drama triangle before, but this reminds me of the drama triangle.

So basically what happens is it creates a bit of a drama the night before, oh my goodness, this is going to be a crisis moment and it gets all the adrenaline going and so on.

And you need a drama to motivate you in effect and you're getting to that point where you're forcing yourself into a drama.

But the problem with the drama is often if you live in this drama scenario all the time, you end up in something called the drama triangle.

And I know you've heard it before, but for anyone who's listening, the drama triangle basically consists of three actors, the victim, the rescuer, and the persecutor.

Okay, so in that scenario the person feels like a victim where it's like, oh my goodness, tomorrow I've got this report to put in and it's just not fair because my teachers forced me into this and I only got given this three days ago and you're like well actually you only got reminded of it three days ago but it was assigned to you three weeks ago and they're like yeah but it just feels like I only got it three days ago and then you feel like a victim.

The teacher feels like a persecutor and then the parent feels like they have to be a rescuer and go in there and rescue.

And then the moment you get rescued as a victim often what happens is you end up feeling really bad about it.

And so you turn on the rescuer and you say you're persecuting me, you're forcing me to do this, you're doing this, I'm the rescuer becomes the victor and you become the persecutor and it just becomes this drama triangle where you're going round in circles and circles and circles, and it becomes this merry go round of emotions and dynamics.

And so what happens is it robs you of your dreams because you get stuck in either a victim mindset or into the rescuer role or the persecutor role and you're not wanting to be a persecutor, you may be wanting to be an encourager, you're not wanting to be a rescuer, you may be wanting to be a helper or a guide and you're not wanting to be a victim but you are wanting to be a an adventurer or an explorer or discoverer and make progress.

So you have to step out of this drama triangle and start looking at the good side of these roles rather than defaulting into the quick and easy side of these roles and I think sometimes having the drama adrenaline is a quick and easy way of getting the job done but it sucks you into this drama time, it does and unfortunately it becomes almost like an addiction.

I mean I see it those kids that really get stuck into that triangle and that pattern really get addicted, like they just can't find the motivation to start until the last minute it's really interesting.

So when I see kids starting to establish that pattern I try to break it as quickly as possible because once it's been really established I have had really a hard time getting kids out of those patterns, it's really, really tough because there's so many different players that are reinforcing it more than anything, it's a chemical addiction, it's that I can't get started until I have that adrenaline and I think you could get kids out of that you have to establish these mini goals, you have to establish those micro goals and say that it must be done by those times, so then maybe they can have those mini adrenaline boost and at least they're not having to do a five page paper but they're having to do a one page paper the night before or just one page.

So the teacher can say, okay the first pages do at this date, The second page is due at this date, The third page.

So sometimes if these kids can't establish the micro goals themselves, they really need either an executive functioning coach, but more than that they need the teacher to say it's due in these little mini chunks just get them through that that pattern that is really never going to serve them very well now to give these individuals what I am, one of those individuals there do, okay, there's an interesting working memory issue that can trigger this and can contribute to this.

It's very small but it can be quite significant.

So let's take for example in school or even in the family, you can often come up with a scenario where you say, oh remember you've got an assignment in three days’ time.

Okay.

The teacher will say that to the class and then the child will go, oh really three days’ time.

No one told me about that.

And then your friend says yes, they did.

She told us about this last week.

We were in the same class, and you heard it, and you said yes, and you were there, and that person will swear blindly.

No, I wasn't, I didn't hear her, she didn't say it and then the friend will go, what are you talking about?

You were right there.

Are you lying?

Why are you saying this?

And the interesting thing is they're not lying but they're also right because what happened is that often the person's working memory got so full at the end of that class that that information has come in but they're holding onto these three key bits of information or four key bits of information.

They've not it.

Yes, that's do but because it's so far away they're kind of like that's okay I'm just going to hold on to these things.

That's your subconscious mind in the working memory and it just drops that, and it actually doesn't enter your memory.

And so that person will swear blindly that they were never told it when there's all the evidence that they were, and they feel like there's something weird going on.

This even happens in families where you're around the dinner table and you say to your mom, I told you this a week ago and she's like no you didn't.

And all the kids go mom he did.

Well I'm not so sure about that.

I think you must be mistaken.

Their working memory was over filled and so it didn't get stored and so this is a contributing factor, or it could be that they weren't focusing, they were focusing on something else.

They were stuck on fire thoughts.

So it could be inhibitory control or maybe they were cognitively inflexible, and they didn't want to let go of what they Right, right goes right back to that trio, how they work together, and I know I don't have much more time.

So I said that I wanted to step into how specialization could help with setting goals and since I said that I've been micro thinking about that a little bit and I thought well you know one thing that we can do to help and use our specialization skills which is really our ability to imagine ourselves moving through space to help us to establish goals is you can feel what it would feel like in your body to achieve that goal and how you would move through your life perhaps and what that would feel like.

But we can also create a map, right?

So we could also create not just a vision board but a map of how we could get to point A to point B and point C.

And maybe even write out a map with our micro goals that help us to get from the first micro goal to the second to the third to the fourth to ultimately the finished product or the finished goal.

So I think you mean an actual physical map rather than explain what you mean by because you're talking very much about dialing into the spatial awareness, give us an example.

Okay, so instead of a bullet list right, which would be kind of just writing out your verbal ideas.

Actually drawing a map of perhaps the dots are all over the page and it's almost like connect the dots.

What's your pathway?

What are you going to have to be going through?

Or you could even map out the months, you could get a full calendar of the year and say, okay, so in this month I'm going to do this, this, and this.

But you could add imagery of the other things that you have to do, you could add imagery of the fall, the spring, the summer, the winter.

It could be really fun, but I'm just never thought about it really like this, but you could actually make a vision board that is a vision board that's really a map that really establishes the pathway.

Yes, I was another thing I was watching on TikTok was this guy.

And what he said was if with clients, they often like to have a route map of their success.

So there's some clear milestones, there’s a route map and in a way what you're describing is something like a route map.

So you can visually see the steps in the journey.

Like I'm just picturing your goal is to get to this castle on a mountain, but there's a valley to go down, there's a river to cross, there's a forest to go through.

There is a high climb, there's maybe a rock-climbing section and then there's a plateau and then there's the final climb to the house on the mountain.

And so there are clear seven stages in this process with and the defined goals.

It's not a repetition of the same thing etcetera.

Well, and it's the idea that each of those things like the river and the hill are all metaphors, metaphors for your life.

So you can say okay, yeah, I'm kind of feeling like I have a student that says, I really feel like there's a tsunami coming and I'll say, okay, what is the tsunami?

What's behind that feeling?

But it's nice to have creating that map and saying, yeah, I feel like it's going to be hard for me to get from micro goal a to micro goal be because of a tsunami.

But what is and then drawing that out and that way you're aware of what you're going to have to tackle so that you can prepare yourself for it.

Yeah, I love it.

I love that.

I'm going to do that this week.

Cool, I can't wait to hear about that.

But this was such an interesting discussion, Darius, what a great adventure.

Yes, I enjoyed it a lot.

I always I love bringing these ideas and as sort of chewing over them together.

There's such a great time to do that and it's just great to be able to share this with you as listeners.

Thank you all for listening in and feedback.

Yeah, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Okay, see you, bye.

Thank you for joining our conversation here at the personal brain trainer podcast.

This is dr Erica Warren and Darius Namdaran on check out the show notes for links to resources mentioned in the podcast, and please leave us a review and shares on social media until next time.

Bye.