Executive functioning skills include aspects such as managing emotions, behaviors, focusing your attention, and thinking flexibility. This skillset helps with several important tasks, including handling changes, shifting between tasks, and filtering out distractions. These life skills are crucial, and they are associated with things like health, economic status, and higher achievement. So, how can they be improved? An article provided by J. Stuart Ablon Ph.D. for Psychology Today describes how.
Similar to many other skills, executive functioning (EF) skills get better the more you practice. However, if you stop practicing, you might lose the things you previously learned. Research has proven that practice must be challenging in order to keep the capabilities fine-tuned, and relying on external rewards to motivate yourself to practice actually causes a decline in EF performance.
Unfortunately, executive functioning skills do not generalize very easily. This means that when you are practicing these skills in artificial circumstances, they might not transfer over to real life scenarios. However, life typically does give us plenty of practice at solving complex problems. Skill-building is changing the brain, so repetition is necessary, without hammering away too much or the brain will stop responding. Using issues as they arise in your life as practice for building skills allows for new opportunities spaced through the day or week.
Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is a very beneficial way to practice EF. It helps by allowing you to use EF skills through natural attempts at problem-solving in your own life. Teachers, mentors, managers, and parents can use the three components of the CPS process to tackle problems throughout the day. When you are using CPS, resist using motivators to solve problems. If someone is struggling to handle a situation well, the issue is likely skill instead of will. Incentives do not teach skills, but problem-solving practice does.
Previous research illustrates that CPS builds neurocognitive skills, especially EF skills. Youth Villages, led by Drs. Lu Wang and Alisha Pollastri, decided to put this notion to the empirical test in a study. The goal was to observe whether in-home CPS improved EF skills over time by looking at reports given by youth, caregiver, and staff reports and administering objective, talent-based neuropsychological tests.
CPS was associated with building young people’s overall EF skills, especially flexible thinking, working memory skills, and attention. This team also wanted to understand which factors could predict the observed changes, and they discovered that the more caretakers embraced the philosophy of CPS, the more skill growth thrived, which resulted in better behaviors.
These discoveries gave empirical validation of the theory of change behind the CPS approach. Behavior is determined by skill, not will. Shift your thinking to understand this and focus on the idea of problem-solving instead of relying on incentive. As EF skills improve, better behavior emerges.