
Horwitz-Zusman Child & Family Staff
Executive Functioning Coaching
Marlena Reese, Ed.D. Executive Functioning Coach
Executive Functioning skills help us focus, plan, prioritize, and work towards goals. They help us self-regulate behaviors and emotions, and adapt to new and unexpected situations. These skills develop at different rates in children and with windows of growth and opportunities for intervention. Challenges with these skills can impact school, home, and family life.
Executive Functioning skills include working memory, attention, time management, organization, meta cognition, task management, response inhibition, thinking before talking, emotional control, self-regulation, persistence, flexible thinking, and frustration-tolerance.
Kids that have challenges with these skills appear lazy, unmotivated, or uninterested in learning, when they need help to build executive functioning skills.
How Can an Executive Functioning Coach Help My Child?
An executive functioning professional coaches your student in new ways to plan, organize, set goals, and manage their workload. They can help them to develop skills such as stress management, mindfulness, and self-awareness, and how to build their executive functioning skills over time.
We will discuss what they think is preventing them from either starting, moving through or completing a task, and what external conditions could be challenging them as well as internal conditions such as negative self-talk. From there, we can work on building a plan to help them when they get stuck.
We can also build skills to support better, sustained attention. I can help them learn who you are, how their brain works, and what accommodations they need to succeed.Negative self-talk around tasks connects with other abilities to perform tasks. It can feel like a reflection on who you are. I often must undo negative messaging that schooling has put on their understanding of who they are. Ultimately, our goal is for the student to understand themselves differently, and to advocate for themselves, put a lot of guardrails in place, so they can show how smart they really are.
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