Episode 87: Become the Expert on Your Challenge

Below you can view or listen to Episode 87 of The Personal Brain Trainer Podcast.

In this episode of the Executive Function Brain Trainer Podcast, hosts Darius Namdaran and Dr. Erica Warren discuss the importance of becoming an expert on one's challenges and strengths. They explore the intersection of executive functions with conditions like dyslexia, ADHD, and autism, emphasizing the need to self-advocate and accommodate personal needs. The conversation touches on the significance of understanding processing styles, such as kinesthetic, interactive, and sequential, and utilizing tools like AI and Google Keep to optimize learning and productivity. Additionally, they share insightful anecdotes and practical strategies for enhancing self-awareness and leveraging individual strengths.

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#87: Become the Expert on your Challenge

Erica: Welcome to the Executive Function Brain trainer podcast. I'm Dr. Erica Warren.

Darius: And I'm Darius Namdaran. And we're your hosts, sponsored by ivvi. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. Well, try Ivy for free now at ivvi.app. That's ivvi.

Erica: Sponsored by learningspecialistscourses.com courses and resources that support educators and coaches. Hey, Darius, Great to see you today.

Darius: Hey, Erika. Nice to be back.

Erica: So today I thought it might be fun for us to do something that's not, in fact, organized at all. We're just going to speak off the cuff about how to become an expert on your challenge and why that's important.

Darius: Yes. And it's something that we've been talking about quite a bit because often if you've got. We've all got challenges and we're talking. Our focus is executive function. And often dyslexia affects the executive function. Adhd, autism, just plain old creativity, whatever it is. Lots of different things can affect your executive functions and your ability to be the executive of your life and your work. And often we are concentrated on what makes sorting out our weaknesses and then we don't play to our strengths. And I think often the way to play to your strengths is to understand your challenges and become an expert in it so that you can make sure you're playing to your strengths and rather than always being pulled down by your weaknesses.

Erica: Yeah, well, so we're really looking at two sides of the coin, you know, really being aware of what you're good at, also being aware of your challenge and I think knowing enough about both that you can self-advocate.

Darius: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it was. We stumbled across this as a talking point because I went into hospital and I was sick and I had this realization in hospital that, oh, my goodness, you don't just need to take responsibility for your health, you need to be take responsibility for your sickness. You know, often you go into hospital, and you think, oh, well, the doctor will take responsibility for my sickness. And there's a subconscious thing going on. They're the expert. I'm the person who's sick. I'm not my in the headspace, I'm out of it, I just trusting them, etc. And then you realize after a few days, hold on a minute. Or after a few weeks, hold on a minute. This was dropped. That was dropped. Oh, people don't understand this about me, etc. And then you start to realize, I've actually got to completely understand my condition so that I can advocate for myself.

Erica: That's right. Not only advocate for yourself but accommodate yourself.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Love yourself. There's so much to understanding yourself. You know, you can't expect others to understand you if you don't understand yourself.

Darius: Absolutely. And it applies to all sorts of different realms. I mean, this doesn't mean that you stop respecting experts and authority and so on. It. What it means is that you kind of need to have a PhD in your condition, especially if you have a chronic illness. I heard this guy on the Internet talking about AI, and he was saying, you know, if you've got a chronic illness, you really need to get a PhD in your condition to overcome it, because it's not just going to be dealt with by medical authorities because they just don't have the time and head space to do it.

Erica: Well, think about how long it takes an individual to really understand their own condition. It takes a lifetime to understand yourself. It takes a lifetime to understand what you're good at, what you're not good at. And we have to put a lot of conscious energy into that. And to expect somebody to just waltz into a room and to know what to do with our bodies and our system is, we're not all the same.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: And if you look at executive functioning or dyslexia or any of these things, again, even though you have a label, not all people with a label manifest it in a similar way. We all have our own nuances. So if we expect everybody else to be an expert on us, it's going to lead us to some places that aren't so great.

Darius: Is my sense of, yeah, we're going to be feel very disappointed. We're going to feel like we're in a feedback

00:05:00

Darius: loop, a repeating cycle of, oh, my goodness, again, I'm sorting this out. Oh, my goodness, again, I'm being tripped up by this sickness, this challenge, whatever it is. And today in our podcast, we're really going to zoom in on executive functions and understanding your challenges within that realm. And once you start to understand those challenges, it's so strategic, because I think in the realm of AI and the future that's ahead of us, although it's not fully come yet, it's growing. AI is growing, and AI's impact on our work is growing, and we are going to have to become the executives of our lives a lot more, and the executives of AI a lot more. I was reading an article today on LinkedIn, and the title, it's being heralded by lots of different people as A very significant article this month. It's an employee of OpenAI and he's written this article called the era of something like the era of the AI conductor. And basically the rarest skill that is going to be valued going forward is going to be the person that can conduct groups of AI as if they're freelancers. And if you can't do that, then the AI will be able to do your job, more or less. And the world of expertise and execution will really be covered by AI. But if you take a third e, the world of expertise, execution and then the executive, we will need to become the executive. And if we understand our executive function, we can strengthen that. And the payoff of that is massive because it's leveraged up by AI massively.

Erica: Yeah, well, you know, and it's so funny we're calling this expert on your challenge, but it's makes me really think that we just need to be experts on ourselves. What, whatever it is. Because even if we have a medical condition, I have ulcerative colitis and, and that does impact every other aspect of my life. So really becoming an expert on yourself and all of those little pieces and parts, whether it is a medical condition or whether it is a learning disability, whether it is dietary restrictions, you know, all of these things, and how it impacts our vehicle, our body. Because however it affects our vehicle, and our body also affects our cognition. Our cognition, our head is attached to our body. Whatever feeds the bloodstream, feeds the brain. You know, we are connected beings. I like to say that we're all organisms on a planet doing the best we can. But yeah, yes, we have to become experts on our challenges. But yeah, we have to also become experts on ourselves.

Darius: That's true. And I think also since we set this title and I've been pondering on it; we also need to be pretty good at understanding our strengths. I think sometimes when you do have a particular challenge, especially when it comes to executive functions. Okay, so let's just zoom straight into executive functions, shall we?

Erica: Yeah.

Darius: This overlap between. Let's take dyslexia and ADHD as a case study, because that's where I work most. The overlap between dyslexia and ADHD is often working memory. And you know, a lot of people with dyslexia have working memory co-occurring difficulties and a lot of people with ADHD also have working memory co difficulties. And I've seen so many people, once they understand working memory, they start noticing, oh, gosh, I've got a challenge when it comes to Working memory. My wakeup call was when I went out to the shops, and I got food for my wife. I would have three items in my head. I'd be going out to the shop, my wife would say, oh, just get the bananas and the coffee as well. I'd go out with five items, and I'd come back with seven. And only two of them are the right ones because my working memory had dropped the ball. And so I started to learn that if she did give me something else, I would say to her, text it to me once I get to the shop and I'll have it written down so I could hold the three that I've got. But she had to write the three, the two that she had, and we'd get it done. And so in a way, because I knew that small thing could sometimes trip me up, I find an intentional strategy to stop me tripping me up, that's just a

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Darius: very small thing. But that comes from understanding your challenge.

Erica: Yep. Understanding your challenge and also understanding what works. So I think you're right. I think it's, you know, it's both sides of that coin. You really do have to understand your challenge and you have to understand your strength because we are learning to accommodate our capacity ourselves.

Darius: Absolutely ourselves.

Erica: Ourselves. And finding that balance because it's very frustrating when there is an imbalance. You don't want to be living, you know, in a. Living in a way that you are constantly butting your head up against your challenges.

Darius: I, I love Dr. Brock and Fernette ID's thesis in dyslexic advantage, where they say dyslexia is a tradeoff. It's not a deficit; it's a tradeoff where you might be less capable in one procedural element but often comes at a heightened ability at another. And I, I think this is a, if you take that premise, you have a specialized mind rather than a generalized mind. And there are some people who have much more specialized minds rather than generalized minds. And it takes all sorts. Now, with regard to the strengths we've talked about, the weaknesses of working memory, it's actually really easy to fixate on your challenges. And you've talked about this so much. When it comes to, for example, teaching a child with dyslexia to read, they can be a very visual child, a very creative imaginary child, but when they read, they've got so little energy left over to initiate those abilities that they're not actually imagining the story because they're done, you know. And so I think sometimes we need to allow ourselves enough energy to focus in on our strengths. And I suppose this is kind of ironically veering away from being an expert on your challenges, but actually, we should really maybe title this, being an expert on your challenges and strengths, because once you understand your strengths, so many people just assume their strengths are normal. But once you realize a strength is something that is not normal, it's you're a little bit stronger in this ability than other people, then you owe it to yourself, not just to compensate for your challenges, but to also double down on your strengths.

Erica: Yes. So what this gets back to for me is I am a firm believer that it's extremely important when I meet students and I'm trying to help them that I assess. I want to know, say, if we're looking, if I'm. Maybe someone's just been referred to me with executive functioning challenges, maybe their son or daughter, maybe themselves, and I like to give them an assessment. And I have two assessments, my executive functioning coaching assessment, and also for younger individuals, my executive functioning remedial assessment. And that gives me an idea of what their blueprint looks like within executive functioning. And although you said, well, most of them have working memory, I would say I was kind of like, not really. Some of them focus primarily on inhibitory control, because attention is inhibitory control.

Darius: And then what I meant was the common overlap between ADHD and ADHD is often working memory. That's my observation. Often that's the overlap, but not always.

Erica: I mean, sometimes it is inhibitory control, sometimes it's cognitive flexibility. And that's the thing is we have to be so careful not to generalize to let people be who they are and really see them. And the assessments that bubble that up, we might find that they have a strength in working memory and a deficit in cognitive flexibility. It could be any combination thereof. But allowing those assessments to spotlight, because it's very easy to misinterpret someone, they might look like they have an auditory processing problem, when in fact they have. They can't hear. They're just literally not hearing, and it's not auditory processing. So we can jump to conclusions that aren't necessarily true. So offering those assessments. And then of course, you know that I have my spy. And I have to say that that really makes such a huge difference. In all of my sessions, I give all of my students a spy because it really enables me to figure out their strengths. Right. So I can figure out, oh, so, so this is how you process. So then it enables me, as an expert, to accommodate their way of processing.

Darius: It's been A while since we talked about it. Remind me, did you go and put your spy on a bit of software where people can go and do the test themselves and find their strengths and weaknesses?

Erica: Yeah, so I. I have a one. I forget what age it starts. I think it starts at like maybe three third grade. That would be what, about nine? Eight or nine. And then I have an older one for middle school and high school. And then I also have one for adults called the Yippee. Your Personal Processing Inventory. Or professional. I think maybe it is. The idea is that, you know, whenever we relate to other people, we always process through our own reality. So if you're helping your daughter with something or the typical, you're going to say, oh, well, it really helps me to take notes, so let me show them how to take notes. Oh, it really helps me to take a kinesthetic break. So I'm going to encourage my daughter to do that, or I'm going to encourage my son to do that, or I can't think unless things are really organized. So I'm going to help them get organized. How can we possibly imagine anything else? Because that's our reality. Well, the interesting thing is there doesn't seem to be commonalities within families occasionally, but it's more of a coincidence or. I mean, I get families all the time with very opposing ways of processing, and it creates a lot of conflict in the family. And once you start to understand that people process differently and that you can accommodate their different ways of processing, and all of a sudden it completely changes the energy of your relationship with them. It's really fascinating. But it's been great for me because when I meet someone, if I have them take the assessment before I meet them, I already kind of know a lot about them. And they're always amazed at how much I know from this. But it also gives me the blueprint of how to connect with them. If they're a verbal processor, then I need to ask them a lot of questions and help them to think out loud. If they're a kinesthetic processor, the last thing I want to do is say sit still. It's fascinating to see, but when you start to see what their highest numbers are, you know exactly how to accommodate them. And what I'm discovering is, and this is something that we're going to talk about in a latter session probably next time, is that there are these different tech tools out there that can allow you to reprocess information in a way that. That perhaps someone didn't present it to you. And that's the power of AI. And we'll get more into that. But to bring it back around, just being that expert. I become the expert on my students by giving them this processing inventory. But when they start to become their own expert on the way that they process and the ways that they don't process, then they can advocate. They can advocate with family members. They can tell people what they need. They can show them the profile. I often have to have the parents take the profile too. Or they just don't buy it. They can't imagine it. And then when you look at a family profile and you can see how wildly different people are, these light bulbs go off. Oh, that's why Mom's always telling me to organize my room. It's not really for me, it's for her. And perhaps I will do it for her and just say, hey, mom, okay, I'm doing it for you because I love you. Versus but it's very difficult when someone says, this is going to work for you. And when it doesn't, we get very defensive. So having a deep understanding of how we process reality, what our challenges are, so that we can self-advocate for ourselves, whether it's with a teacher and understanding that if we just go to a teacher and say, I have dyslexia, they're not going to understand us because they may have a misconception of what dyslexia is. And there are multiple types of dyslexia. And that's another one of my assessments where I look at the different types of dyslexia. I can remember going to a teacher and saying that when I was in college and. And I said, you know, I have dyslexia. He was a philosophy teacher, and he was always using P's and Q's in his examples. And I said, can you pick other letters? Because I'm getting a little bit confused. I have dyslexia. And he's like, oh, that's right, you can't see. I'm like, what do you mean I can't see? No, you just see everything backwards. And that's. That was his only understanding of what dyslexia was, and it wasn't really correct. But even then,

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Erica: if I can work with a reading specialist who believes that all individuals with dyslexia have auditory phonological dyslexia, and that's the only way they remediate them. And they probably work for the vast majority of students, but there are going to be some that they don't work for at all. And it's because not all individuals have auditory phonological dyslexia. Some have visual perceptual dyslexia or rapid automatic naming dyslexia. So, you know, we have to go deeper than the diagnosis.

Darius: Yes. So understanding your processing profile is a perfect example of understanding your strengths and weakness, your challenges and strengths and working with them, you know.

Erica: Yeah.

Darius: And around them. Yeah. Fantastic. I love it. And it's so true. I got a call. I think this whole understanding your processing style is really important, especially in adulthood. I think it's important all the way through, you know, I mean, what you've just modeled is it's really important for the coach, the teacher to understand the child's processing profile and style. But then we've got to sort of internalize it, become aware of it, and then take responsibility for it in our adulthood as well, rather than keep falling over.

Erica: Right. And we have to learn to accommodate ourselves. So if we're very kinesthetic and we know we're going to be sitting in a two-hour long lecture, we have to bring things along with us that can help to accommodate that need. We might need to bring something like a rubber band that we can toy with in our hands or some way to be able to, you know, maybe we'll, we'll sit so that our legs are under a table, so people don't see us jogging our knees. Or maybe we find a place in the back of the room where there's a swivel chair and we can move. But the more we can learn to accommodate ourselves, the more we're also being our best self. And we all want to put our best foot forward. But it's interesting when we're in a situation where we're not able to accommodate our ways of processing, we're not our best self. If you are a kinesthetic person and you don't have anything to keep yourself still. I can remember being in church, I was a nightmare in church because I was always told to sit still. And then you start to have behavioral problems because you're jumping out of your skin. Skin. Right. So, you know.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: We want others to accommodate us, but we also want to accommodate ourselves.

Darius: Absolutely. Let's take, let's do a thought experiment. Right. Let's get super practical here since you're on a flow. I'm a student and I'm going into lectures. Okay. And I'm going to do. Well, let's just say I'm a student and let's just go through the processing profile. The different Styles of processing and go through different ways I can accommodate myself in that setting. That would be fascinating. Are you up to just going through some of those styles and let's apply.

Erica: It to executive functioning.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: So we can pick different qualities of executive functioning and how we can accommodate that either in a classroom or internally as the person, the student themselves accommodating themselves, and externally, maybe perhaps the teacher in the environment, accommodating.

Darius: I would rather take the personal.

Erica: All right let's go with the personal.

Darius: There's something powerful about the personal, because if you know what the person can do personally, you as a teacher, then can help them achieve what they can do personally. Do you know what I mean? Because I was a teacher is to bring a person into a responsible citizen, an independent learner, et cetera. So let's take it from the personal perspective, shall we?

Erica: Absolutely. Because that brings it right back to our title, being an expert on your challenge. So I. I welcome that. I welcome that. Yeah. So throw some at me and I will give you some strategies for each of the different ways of processing.

Darius: Okay, so I'm a student. I walk into a lecture, and you've talked about the kinesthetic. Okay, so with the kinesthetic, if I know I'm a kinesthetic learner, I'm going to go to the back of the class where there's a chair in the corner beside the window, and I can swing backwards and forwards, and I've got the window to hold onto in case I slow.

Erica: But what if there is no window and there is no but.

Darius: But I'll figure out some sort of strategy so I can move.

Erica: Okay, but, but let's. What's something that you could take your pocket with you?

Darius: Well, I've got a pen, and often, you know, people clip

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Darius: lids on and off pens or they spin them and so on. And often with that strategy in mind for myself, because I'm one of those people. I just got my ADHD diagnosis last week, by the way. Erica. Wow. I'm going to start taking some drugs next week and see how it is. But I've always been swinging and moving and so on and lessons.

Erica: So let me. Let me give you some other. Some other tools that you could take with you. So they have these rings that have spinners on them. I have a pen, which I am in, totally in love with, that has a spinner on it. So I can kind of spin the pen.

Darius: Is it quiet?

Erica: It is, it is. Now, the other thing is I, you know, I've never seen this before. But what if someone made like a. A bracelet? Maybe it doesn't necessarily spin, but you can kind of turn it. I know. I just got an iWatch and I just play with a magnet on it all the time.

Darius: The magnet.

Erica: There's a little magnet that holds it to the metal. That holds it to the metal.

Darius: You play with the strap and are constantly flicking it.

Erica: Yeah, flicking it. But, you know, sometimes people need something bigger. Now they have these things called wiggle seats. They're like a cushion that you blow up, and if you sit on it, it creates a lot of mobility for your hips. So you can do that but finding appropriate ways. You can get rubber bands that you can put between the legs of your chairs so that you can bounce your feet on them.

Darius: Right, right.

Erica: There are all sorts of things, and a lot of it is just getting clever. If you want to be more subtle, you can have things in your pockets. You can have things like marbles that you could be rolling in your hands. I mean, again, that's more of a fine motor movement. But even jogging your leg, we all know that one, and there are plenty of us that do that. But being honest with yourself and trying different things and finding something that will satisfy that need for movement. But the other thing is, nobody's going to get upset at you. If you shuffle around in your seat a little bit, if you stretch, you can usually stand up. If you're quiet about it, just maybe be on the side. Instead of being in the middle of the class, you could be on the side, and you could stand for a little while. They have standing desks. They even have standing desks with swings. So you could have your foot on a swing and swinging back and forth. I've even seen these desks that have bicycles underneath them or different things that you can do with your feet. So, like elliptical type things. So there are all sorts of possibilities. For a while, I had a treadmill in my office with a desk on it. That didn't work for me. It was just too much movement. Yeah, but everybody's different. Or going for, like, if you and I lived near each other, which we don't, we could essentially do a podcast and take a walk at the same time.

Darius: Yes. You know, Steve Jobs was famous for doing his most important meetings walking. Well, if you went for a walk with Steve Jobs, you were either going to get fired or you were going to get hired and promoted. One or the other.

Erica: It was like, that's funny. So that's the. That that's accommodating the kinesthetic. Learner, how they. Let's go on to themselves. And. And it's very important that if you're working with a kinesthetic learner that you coach them into finding their own strategy. If they're really stuck, you can give them some options but encourage them to come up with something that's theirs. Because if people come up with their own strategies, they're more likely to use them.

Darius: Yes. I think of it as if you understand the principle, you will find the correct application. And there's a lot of people with ADHD and dyslexia, I've kind of noticed, are not rule followers. They don't like following rules, and it's a generalization, but often it's not because they don't like rules. It's often because they can't remember them or they're not very good at the process or whatever. But what they can remember is the principles and they rebuild the rules. You know, the. Rebuild the process or the actions from those principles. Often, it's exactly the same process, but if circumstances change, the principle stays the same, but the circumstances change, the process needs to change. And that's where that creativity and adaptability comes from. But kinesthetic learners. Well, the one thing I would say is we really need to find something that's quiet and doesn't disturb other people. Like, if you're going to click a pen backwards and forwards, you know, make sure it's a plastic one like I'm doing at the moment, and not a metal one that goes click every time. Or, you know, the classic one is clicking the top of a biro pen. Click, click, click,

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Darius: click, click, click. And until someone goes, look, I'm really sorry, D, but could you just stop that? It's driving me nuts, you know, so find something that is social.

Erica: Right. That's not. It's not distracting to others.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: And someone else was doing it and be distracted to them. But because they're doing it, they don't even hear it.

Darius: That's right, yeah.

Erica: They don't even notice it. It's more of a. It's soothed, it's soothing.

Darius: Oh, I have to tell you a funny story about that. I was coaching a lawyer with dyslexia, and he actually has a very expensive pen that he takes into the court case with him and he opens it and shuts it when the opposition is doing a speech to distract them.

Erica: Oh, isn't that interesting? All right, so he's got a loud.

Darius: Click and so he just unclicks his pen, writes something Clicks it again. Oh, unclicks it, Writes something. Clicks it again. So it's innocuous, but it's this. It disturbs the opposition so much that it knocks them off their game.

Erica: That's really funny. That's very funny.

Darius: His problem was. You must hear the story. It's Troy Hansen in the Dyslexia Explorer podcast. He tells his story brilliantly. But the. The. The reason it's an issue in the strategy coaching. It was like we did the session on losing things. You know, a lot of people, dyslexia, just lose things all the time. Important things like their keys. And for him, an important thing was the pen. You know, he really needed to remember the pen to take to court because it's one of his core strategies. But he would forget the pen. And so we had to find a strategy to make sure he remembered the pen.

Erica: His distraction pen.

Darius: Yeah, his distraction pen. Yeah. Yeah.

Erica: That's a very funny story. That's great. But so give me some other ways of processing that we can.

Darius: Another way of processing.

Erica: Well, let me give you some challenging ones.

Darius: Just give the listeners a quick rundown of what the different processing styles you screen for are.

Erica: There's sensory, visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic. Then we have information processing, which gets into sequential. Okay, simultaneous, which has to do kind of organization. And Howard Gardeners, I bring in some of his verbal, reflective, logical, verbal. I said that. Interactive. And then I also bring in direct experience, indirect experience, and rhythmic, melodic.

Darius: Let's take interactive. Okay. You're in a lecture. I say, yes. Yes. Is it. You're in a lecture, and you know that you're an interactive learner. Okay. But there are 60 other students in the lecture. Okay, what do you do?

Erica: Okay, well, I was just working with a student just like this, and she's really struggling. She was struggling in her chemistry class because it wasn't interactive at all. And she was. She had an eight, which is a high score. You can get on interactive on the assessment. And she had that same question, what do I do? And I said, well, sometimes you're not able to make the lecture interactive in the moment, but that doesn't mean that you can't make it interactive later. And she looked at me, and I introduced her to NoteBookLM and said, In NoteBookLM, you can interact with the content as much as you want. You can enter in your teacher's lecture notes, you could enter in a YouTube video, you can enter in your own notes. And once that's all in there, you can generate a podcast, and it sticks to just the content that you've given it, and it will generate a podcast which is outstanding. You cannot tell they're not real people and they're two people that are riffing on whatever you choose for them to riff on. So even though you've added that content, you could say, I want them to focus the podcast on, because you can customize the podcast on this one area of the lecture that you were a little bit lost in. You didn't really fully grasp the idea, and you can ask them to riff on that. Now, once the podcast has been created, you can hit a button which allows you to interact with the podcasters. So all of a sudden, you can actually have a discussion with the knowledge base from all of the intellectual creation, the intellectual creation of your teacher. So you really have their content. And now you can process with these podcasters about this content. I've also been exploring with it lately. You can actually ask it to test you. The interesting thing is what they do when they create a podcast, and you ask them to test you. They give you the question and then they give you the answer. But if you interrupt them right

00:35:00

Erica: after the question, you can answer it yourself, and then they'll respond to your answer. But it allows you to interact as much as you want with it. There are a couple other strategies you could use. So you could create study groups right after the class where you're able to process these things. You can meet with the teacher and process it with the teacher. You can process it with any AI platform like ChatGPT. You can process it with your parent. But the interactive piece, you could even ask the teacher if they would be willing to change the format of the class and allow either of them to entertain questions or to create little breakouts for students. But it's rare. Even in a lecture, if you're really losing it and you're really a little bit lost within the content and not fully understanding it, raise your hand, raise your hand and ask a question. Then you are interacting and that will meet that need for a set period of time. You can also ask your questions in your notes so that you can interact with it later.

Darius: Absolutely. I think in simple terms, if you're an interactive person and you need interaction to process information, and you know it, then when the lecturer says, any questions, you make sure you ask a question, you know, because often people go, oh, I'll leave it to someone else. It should be them. It should be. But a lot of people are not interactive. They want someone who is interactive to ask the question that then Helps them. And I've always been that person asks the stupid question that everyone else wanted to ask and be answered. It always feels like a stupid question.

Erica: When you ask it, but it's actually what everybody wants. You're right. Right. But the other thing is, is perhaps all you do instead of taking notes, maybe you download your teacher's slides and maybe all you do is ask questions in the margins because now you are interacting with it. And anytime there is an opportunity, you have the questions already lined up. Or you can meet with the teacher after class because you have everything lined up. Or you take it to AI and say, here are all my notes and here are all my questions. Let's riff on this.

Darius: I love it. You know, Cornell notes, their structure is you draw a line just for the readers. If you imagine a piece of paper in front of you, the bottom quarter of the page has a line horizontally across it to reserve that at the bottom. And then the 2/3 at the top is divided one third to the left with a line. So you've got 1/3 column on the left and then a 2/3 column on your right. And the Cornell process is you start from the right; you write bullet points on the right and then on the left-hand side column you write in questions. And then once you've done all of that, you at the bottom do a summary of what you got from the questions and the bullet points. That's their kind of ideal way.

Erica: That's a very interactive accommodation because you're interacting with the notes in a way that even if you are in a classroom, for example, where it is not interactive, you are interacting with yourself and you're interacting with the notes.

Darius: And that makes me think about mind mapping. You know, like when I'm a student in the lecture, I remember the difference in law school from taking list notes versus mind map notes instead of listing, trying to transcribe or write bullet points and so on. Drawing a mind map and creating that mind map for me was like interacting with the information. And I'm quite interactive, you know, I.

Erica: Mean, but interactive typically is between people.

Darius: Between people. Okay.

Erica: It is typically between people. It might be somewhat helpful to be interacting, but really when you're interacting with the notes, it's really more reflective logical because then it gets you, it gets those metacognitive.

Darius: I see. So that's another processing style, that reflective, logical style. I've got you. So let's stay on the interactive. The other thing that people are doing is they're actually conversing with ChatGPT during the lecture, right.

Erica: Or even with Ivy, your app, you are. And that's again, moving over more to reflective, logical. Yeah, it's more of an internal metacognitive process versus an interactive meaning,

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Erica: interacting between people. Because those kids really like the company of others.

Darius: So here's an interesting story. So a lot of people now, you know, in the old days, well, not the old days, when I went to University the second time, which was about 15, 20 years ago, the lecturers used to always bemoan the fact that people were searching on the Internet what the person was saying or they were looking up on Wikipedia or they were looking up a reference or whatever. They were kind of following the leads in situ. They weren't just sitting there and listening and absorbing it, they were following up. Now what I'm noticing students doing and people in meetings doing is they will have a running conversation with ChatGPT during the meeting on that subject. So they can't necessarily speak to the lecturer, but they'll say, is it true that such and such. And they'll have this backwards and forwards conversation going on while the lecturer is talking. And an interesting example of this, not in a lecture, was one of the people that I was coaching, his boss tends to talk a lot, okay? And his boss can be on a monologue for a good, I don't know, half hour at a time before he asks him a question on the phone. So his boss will call him up on the phone. So what he did was he started to have a conversation with ChatGPT during the monologue as to what he should do with his boss, because he had a goal with his boss. And ChatGPT already knew what his strategy with the boss. He needed to negotiate something with his boss, and he didn't get the chance to speak with his boss that often. So he kind of prepared it and had been talking it through with ChatGPT beforehand. And while he was on the call, he thought to himself, oh my goodness, I've got time to actually speak to ChatGPT. So he's on the call and he starts talking to ChatGPT and he says, I'm on the phone with my boss, remember what we chat about before? And ChatGPT's oh, wow, that's great. I'm so glad you managed to finally get a time with him. And then he said, oh, the boss is really talking quite a lot. I don't know what to do to introduce the subject. And ChatGPT said, well, you know, remember you just have to let him talk, do not interrupt him. And he was like, gosh, yes, because he's always tempted to interrupt him. And you see his boss has got dyslexia and doesn't know the effects of it. So what he tends to do, the boss talks round and round in circles because his working memory is so poor. He's just talking and talking and talking. And it's like he's sort of spinning plates and trying to keep them all going and catching this and catching that and keeping them all going. And if you interrupt him while all of the plates drop and he has to start all over again because he's lost his place, he doesn't realize this, but that is what's going on. And so because this, the employee realizes that this is the case now he's just letting his boss doing the talking. And then his boss actually introduces the subject that his employee was wanting to have raised, which is a massive development in the company and a whole reorganization and creating this whole new department and so on. And he didn't need to bring it up, his boss did. And he's chatting to ChatGPT while this is all going on, saying, I really want to be saying this, I really want to be saying that. And ChatGPT is giving answers, saying, remember, you need to put all these together and you need to focus in on this one thing that you said. You just wanted to focus in on this. And so he's actually have a conversation with three entities at once. Him, his boss, and ChatGPT. Gracie.

Erica: Yeah, you have to be really split attention. Like that is really. Well, because you're right, his boss could have been talking about exactly what he wanted to talk about, and he could have missed that opportunity because he was.

Darius: Had split attention is that you can't do that all the time. There's no way you could do that all the time. But people are doing it when they feel that they're not interacting and engaging with the information sufficiently. Yeah, okay, like take an interactive person. They're like, gosh, this is just going past me. I need to have some interactive element. Often a lecturer or a teacher or person will go on about one particular subject way longer than you need them to because you've got it.

Erica: And I think it's going to be better to do that if you are recording the lecture. Like if you're using Ivy app, right, and it's recording the whole lecture for you. So that if you are going down a rabbit hole, so to speak, by interacting with AI, you're not losing something valuable. That's the biggest problem is, and I See that happen to kids all the time with ADHD where the teacher's being kind of boring and then they, they disengage and start thinking about something else and then they miss something important.

Darius: Yes. So,

00:45:00

Darius: so true.

Erica: And that happens to me too because I'm sometimes in a workshop where they're going on and on and I know that, so I start doing something else and then I come back and I'm like, oh my God, I love what they're talking about, and I just miss it. And now I can't ask a question because I wasn't engaging and that's, that's my bad.

Darius: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's where Ivy Notes comes in, where I is recording whole audio, transcribing it and turning it into a map. At that point I would normally be turning to the person beside me and saying like my wife and saying what did they just say? And. But you can't always do that. In effect, you're going to Ivy and saying what did they just say? And you can just read back two sentences from the transcript and say, but.

Erica: We have to be careful that we don't use that as an excuse to not attend in the moment because most people don't have the time to re listen to a whole lecture. I mean, that's the other great thing about AI is that if you have a transcript, you can always ask questions by dropping that transcript into something like NoteBookLM. You can ask questions about it and then you can then riff on it because sometimes you're right. There are those people that are very long winded, and we just don't have the attention to listen to them think out loud in these roundabout plates spinning ways that just don't work for us.

Darius: Yeah, and if they're your boss, you really have to stay and listen. But what another thing that came up from that conversation is it is very important to get the transcript. For many people there's so many valuable things you can get from a transcript of any meeting. It's just phenomenal.

Erica: Oh, it is. Particularly if you, if you're using AI to process it because you can just say, can you help me find this? Or I didn't understand this. It can be a game changer. But let's bring it back to the expert on your challenge. So give me another possible processing way and I'll tell you how we could personally accommodate it. What about something like sequential? We haven't done sequential. That's a good one.

Darius: Yes. I suppose I'm asking all the ones that are mine and I'M not a sequential processor. I'm a scientist.

Erica: I'm not either. I'm not either. I actually get very uncomfortable by sequential processing. I don't even like being in libraries because they're so sequential. Although I've really come over the years from working with people that are highly sequential, I've really come to see the beauty in it. And now that I've done it so much with people that I've kind of developed that sense in myself. But being able to help them break things down into a sequence and timelines. Now, a timeline is going to speak to you because it's simultaneous, and I know you're a simultaneous visual processor. So in a way, it's accommodating multiple ways of processing. It's both sequential and simultaneous. And visual. If you add imagery to it or color coding but being able to break things down into a sequence of steps. First, you do this. Second, you do this. Third, you do this. I, in fact, I was just meeting with a group of people that. That I meet with on a monthly basis that take my executive functioning course. And they bring in their difficult cases and we brainstorm them as a group. And one of them was a little girl with severe dyscalculia. And this woman had reached out to me and said, how do I best work with her? And I said, give her the spy and I'll let you know. So she gave her the spy, and she had a lot of capacity to learn, but the number one thing was sequential processing.

Darius: Okay.

Erica: And I was like, okay, so we've got to break all math into a process, a sequential process of steps.

Darius: And you for a moment, though, because if you're breaking things down into sequential process steps, okay, surely that is the default way that the education system works. So you don't really need to do much about that because everything seems to be sequential within the education system.

Erica: Not necessarily.

Darius: Okay, That's.

Erica: I'm just not necessarily. And now a teacher. The other thing is they may not be explicit, and they need explicit. So first you do this. Now, one teacher might even say first, second, third. But maybe there might be three processes in first. You know, being like super clear about this is a single step. This is the second step. This is the third step. This is the fourth step. Color coding them, integrating memory strategies, maybe an acronym that walks them through the steps. So they need a lot of support to stay in those steps. But, yeah, sometimes they just say, this is how you do it. But they're not really breaking it into clean enough steps. Steps.

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Darius: Okay? So these people really love it when they're given a really nice, juicy sequential piece of information. Is that what you're saying?

Erica: That's how they process sometimes, sometimes they like to put it into the sequence themselves. They typically do really, really well if their teachers are really sequenced. And when you have an assignment, if the teacher says, first you do this, second you do this, but they might need it explicit enough is first you put your name on top of the page, then you put the title, then you write a topic sentence, you know, so that you just really break. And even when you're editing an editing checklist that's sequenced so that they get into the habit of following the same sequence every time.

Darius: So in a way, if you're an adult and you know this and you're a sequential thinker, then what you would need to be doing is, let's say you've got a bit of a random boss who's very simultaneous, very verbal, very interactive, conversational in the way he's teaching. And maybe all the processes aren't given in the right order, but it's all there.

Erica: Yeah, maybe he has ADHD and he's just all over the place.

Darius: That's right. It's frustrating, but you know, since your style is sequential, that your mission is not just to take everything they take in their order, but to find the order while you're talking or learning and create a sequence.

Erica: It could be that it could be that you, you hear this lecture, and you're lost. You could drop it into Notebook LM and say, sequence this for me.

Darius: Okay, so what I would do in that setting, that's interesting, this is.

Erica: But also know that Notebook LM has a whole button that you can press that will create a timeline. So it has a timeline button. It also has a mind mapping button. And there's then mind mapping, there is sequential processing.

Darius: The problem with that though is I love the mind mapping function within Notebook Alarm. So glad that Google is, finally, you know, bringing mind mapping to the general public in this way. It's fantastic and I hope more people do that because it's going to be really helpful. But if you. I'm imagining if you're a person that's sequential and you're using Ivy, for example, or on any other mind mapping app. The beauty of mind mapping is often to rearrange branch order to get the right sequence of information. You know, because often with text based, even copying a whole sentence is a bit awkward to copy and paste it and move it up. And even though you've got that function, there's lots of movements, whereas if you've got them as branches, you just drag it up and do. And you can create section one, section two, section three with step ABC in each. Etc. There's something I find deeply satisfying about that process of reordering into the right sequence. You know, visually, for me, it's. It's about that reordering.

Erica: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well. And one of the. One of the tools that I love to teach all of my students is how to use Google Keep. And I use Google Keep for writing because Google Keep does something that no word processor does, that if you write each sentence as a checkbox bullet, you can reorganize your sentences with ease and then you can get into a Google Doc.

Darius: Yeah, I mean, I am really a number of my clients, for many years, all I taught was Apple Assistive Technology. And a few clients I've reluctantly taken on who don't have a Mac, but they've got like an iPhone and they're like, Darius, I really need you to teach me these strategies. My friend recommended you. He's raving about it. Just take me on. And I'm like, okay. But I don't know PC, I don't know these things. And so what we've ended up doing is often going to Google and the Google ecosystem of Google Keep. I have to say, you know, Google Keep's come on a step in terms of its speed, you know, so Google keeps, in terms of weighing up against Apple Notes. There's a few frustrating elements within Google Keep against Apple Notes, but there are some major, major upsides with Google Keep. There are actually. As a student, especially as a student.

Erica: I go, I go, I go back and forth between the two. And I also am really starting to get into Google Tasks within Google Calendar because you can drop your tasks into your calendar.

Darius: Have you discovered that you can. I agree, but have you discovered this amazing function in Google Docs? Okay. If you create a document and you turn

00:55:00

Darius: one of the tasks, let's say you've got a set of bullet points that are tasks to do. Maybe you're doing a project, and you put it all into a doc. Okay? There's a bunch of bullet points. If you highlight the. Turn the bullets into tasks check boxes. Okay. You can click to the side of the checkbox, assign it to a person, and it goes onto their Google Task list, okay. Which they can put into their calendar. Boom.

Erica: Google Tasks is starting to blow my mind. It really is. And I also like the fact that within Google Tasks, you can assign. Well, you can create. How do they call. I don't know what they call it, but you can create different folders within Tasks so that you could name. So you could name all of your classes and then you could have all of your classes. You could put all of your assignments in there but then you can also drag them into your calendar so that you're able to time block the way that Tasks is working with Google Calendar is really beautiful. Yes, I'm starting to really dig that. And in some ways, that's better than Google keep because you can drag it into your calendar for the time blocking piece.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: So yeah, there's some.

Darius: Switch it off. You know, you can tick the. Because it's segmented in your calendar view as like another calendar, you can uncheck it. So all your tasks disappear, and you just got your events.

Erica: That's right. And they. Now it used to be that you could only look at your tasks in the right-hand column. They now if you have no, haven't noticed there's a little a button along the top and if you click that you get a full page of all of your tasks and so that you can, you can have like Google keep. You can have like multiple task lists that you can look at.

Darius: Do you think sequential thinkers really like, like task lists and calendars and things?

Erica: As long as it's sequenced? I mean what they're. What you're going to want to do if they're a sequential processor is make sure that they're sequencing it in some way that makes sense to them. It could be sequenced as a priority. They can bring a sequence into it however they choose where they could assign it to days of the week or calendar days or as I said, priorities. But you always want to get the sequential processor, and you want to ask them that question. How can we sequence this? Yes, because that's what's going on. SPEAKS THEIR LANGUAGE so the bottom line is no matter how we're processing with our clients, by looking at how they process, if they're visual, we want to integrate images but also get them to be visualizing.

Darius: I think the important thing here is if we change the language into how can I be sequencing this? How can I be visualizing this? How can I make this.

Erica: Well, initially you're going to offer that scaffolding and you're going to be showing and then you want to pull that scaffolding away so that they can ask those vital questions for themselves.

Darius: If they're a child. If they're a child and They've got that support. If you're an adult listening to this and you don't have that support, you've got to kind of be both of those inside of yourself. You've got to be that sort of coach that is saying, how can you sequence this, how can you verbalize this?

Erica: Or you can work with one of us or an executive functioning coach, because sometimes you have to do that discovery process of taking some assessments, figuring out what are your best ways of processing, figuring out what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses. You know, compensatory strategies are all about using your strengths to accommodate your weaknesses. But we also want to strengthen our weaknesses. It just comes right back to being an expert on your strengths and your weaknesses.

Darius: I had a funny, had a funny call from one of our listeners. He called up and he said, can you do coaching for me? And so on. And I said, yeah, yeah, I've got some space. And so we started the coaching, and he was like, I just can't believe. This is just so amazing, you know, going through the whole process of, of it. And he also said, I'm just amazed that you've got time and space to do this. I'm so thankful, etc. And it just struck me that sometimes when you listen to people on a podcast, you think, oh, there's no way they'll have time for me, or whatever. But I would encourage you, if you are listening to this podcast, please do reach out to Erica and I and see if we've got.

Erica: Yeah, we love it. I love working with adults. I love working with all ages. College students are a blast.

Darius: And I love it even more because if you're listening to

01:00:00

Darius: this podcast and you want coaching; I would much rather coach you than someone who hasn't listened to the podcast.

Erica: Right on.

Darius: Because you've got the context. I don't need to repeat lots of stuff. You know, often people come and they're like, oh, yeah, I've been listening to this, and I've been listening to that. And they've got the lingo. They understand the basics about some working memory. They understand the best basics about inhibitory control or cognitive flexibility or whatever we're talking about. Oh, it was the AI talk that this guy really loved and got onto. Anyway, so just saying that we're very accessible not to pitch our services, but to make it good for you. If you're listening, you know, please do. If this is something that would really help you, please do get in touch and don't hold back for your own sake.

Erica: And know that sometimes it's only one or two sessions that can just completely transform. I mean, I've been working with a couple high school students. I think I've had two or three sessions. And the first student I started to work with, I've worked with her three times. And she came back. The first week she was. We had a consultation, she was failing, and the second week, she was failing in one particular subject. And the second week, she was so excited because she got a C. Oh, wow, great. And then we kept working. And the third week she came back, she said, you'll never believe it. I got an A. So, I mean. And that was three weeks. Yes, three weeks, three sessions. And we reprocess the way that she needs to process. And I taught her these strategies, and she did them independently on her own, but just needed to understand how she processed and how she can reprocess them. And it just. Boom. And just to see her face and to see the success she was having, it was worth a million bucks.

Darius: And, you know, that's brilliant. That's so lovely. And I forget, I sometimes think that coaching people about executive function strategies is like cheating. You know, being an executive function coach, it feels like it's cheating because you do one session and the person's like, oh, my goodness, this has completely transformed my way of taking notes or my working memory or whatever it is you're doing in that session. Whereas they're comparing it to, oh, I've done this many therapy sessions for 20 hours, and I've started to get some breakthroughs. You know, it's kind of like, you know, they're not used to just one session and they have a breakthrough, and then you do another session, you have a breakthrough. And it's not because of our coaching prowess or whatever. It's just that executive function strategies are such a core function or failure in your mind and your life that when you get it right, it goes so right. When you get it wrong, it goes so wrong that you can flip from one extreme to the other so straightforwardly. It's shocking to me, you know?

Erica: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think this was a really great podcast, and I appreciate it, and I think it will bring it right back to the title. So be an expert on your challenge and be an expert on your strength and be an expert about yourself so that you can put your best self out there. Because isn't that what we're all trying to do anyway?

Darius: Absolutely, yes.

Erica: All right, well, thank you for joining us. Until next time.

Darius: Until next time. Sponsored by ivvi. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. It's ideal for students and managers with dyslexia or adhd. Try ivvi for free now at ivvi App.

Erica: That's ivvi app sponsored by the Executive Functioning Coaching Assessment, a quick online assessment that uncovers challenges and develops personalized strategies for success.

Darius: Thank you for joining us at the Executive Function Brain Trainer podcast.

Erica: Check out our show notes for links and resources and follow us on social media

Episode 87: Become the Expert on Your Challenge

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