Executive Functioning Season: What is executive functioning and ideation?

Time for our next season! Where we dive into all things executive functioning! “Go get ready” sounds simple, until you watch a child pause, drift, or bounce between ten half-finished steps. That moment isn’t always defiance or laziness. Sometimes, it’s executive functioning difficulties, the hidden set of thinking skills that helps us plan, start, navigate distractions, adapt when things change, and finish what we began.

In this episode we break down what executive functioning actually is and why it can impact almost every functional activity across the day, from morning routines, time management to homework , and organising belongings. We look at the skills and building blocks for executive functioning are like attention, impulse control, working memory, problem solving, and cognitive flexibility.

Then we zoom in on ideation: the creative spark of “what could I do?” that underpins play, self-directed time and organising our bodies for activities. With some practical actives to try at home that build ideas and confidence without pressure.

If you want clearer language, better routines, and simple occupational therapy strategies that support independence over time, hit play. Subscribe, share with a parent or teacher who needs this, and leave a rating or review so more families can find the show. If you would like to donate and support the podcast - https://studio.buymeacoffee.com/dashboard 

DISCLAIMER:
Whilst I will always make evert effort to share correct information as at the date of the podcast, research is constantly happening and as a profession we learn more everyday. One therapist may have a different way of doing things to another, and every child's needs are unique. By listening to this podcast, you agree not to use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or others. Consult your child's paediatrician or therapist for any recommendations for your child.

Transcript

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Hello everybody, and welcome back to Bell's OT's Corner. And welcome to our newest season. This season we're going to be diving into all things executive functioning. What are our executive functioning skills? How do they work? How do they impact on each other? And what do they mean for how we can do our functional activities across our day? How is it that our executive functioning skills can impact on our getting ready in the morning, going to school, doing homework in the afternoon, remembering what I have to do in the day, organizing my belongings? The list is endless. And over the next, I think it's about five episodes at the moment from my plan, but over the next five episodes, we're going to break it all down. And in today's episodes, we're going to jump into a bit of an overview of what is executive functioning and also what is ideation. Now, you might remember back in our motor skills season when we talked about motor planning. I did talk a little bit about ideation then, so feel free to jump back and have a listen to some of those episodes. But we are going to cover it again today, so no stress. So when we think about executive functioning, and it's not a term that's commonly known, and there's lots of different parts to executive functioning, but essentially our executive functioning can impact on everything that we do because it's all of the thinking and processes that happen in our brain to enable us to make a plan or decide what we're going to do or make a decision, figure out how I'm going to do that, and then actually follow through with doing it, whilst also making sure that I'm managing everything else in my environment, i.e. distractions, or if something goes wrong, that I can figure out either a new plan if I need to completely abandon what I was doing, or how I can adjust my plan so that I can still be successful. And then how can I review how everything went to figure out did I actually achieve my goal or not? Sounds in some respects quite simple, but in other respects it can be a really, really complex process that has many, many different skill building blocks essentially that all can interact and interplay with each other to help us either be successful in our executive functioning or it can make it really challenging as well. And when we think about our executive functioning skills, there are many, many different parts to this, and that's what we're going to break down over this season. But it's also really important to remember that our executive functioning continues to develop well into our adulthood. So all of your executive functioning comes from your prefrontal cortex in your brain, and that part of your brain as a child starts developing and it continues to develop all through your childhood, all through your teens, and all into your young adult years as well. And so I think what's really important when we look at this season is we're gonna be talking through strategies that we can help for our kids to build some of these skills, or if you're starting to go, oh, I just I told them what to do 15,000 times and they just aren't listening, or you know, I ask them to go and get ready for school and they just I have to prompt them so many times. We're gonna look at either strategies of how we can phrase things differently so that it's easier for the kids that we're working with, or your own children, but also looking at how we might be able to do some fun games or some little activities to help them work with their brains to figure things out for themselves and ultimately start to build a little bit of that independence. As always, across this season, guys, this podcast just aims to give you some ideas into and some understanding of some of the things that are going on behind the scenes for the children in your life or the children that you work with. If you do have particular concerns about a certain area of a child's life, I do recommend you go and reach out to an occupational therapist and they'll be able to help and assist you in this. So, as I mentioned before, it's gonna be a nice short and sweet episode where we're gonna break down a little bit of what is executive functioning as a bit of an overview. I'll let you guys into kind of what we'll be covering over the next episodes, and also we'll talk a little bit on ideation as well. But to start off with, what are some of the bits that come into our executive functioning skills? So it's things like maintaining and sustaining our attention. Now, in order to maintain and sustain our attention, there's elements of impulse control or filtering that goes on so that I can ignore distractions around me as well. It's things like problem solving. So when something goes wrong, how am I going to navigate this problem that I wasn't planning for? We've got flexible thinking or cognitive flexibility. So if I can't do my plan the way that I wanted to do my plan, what's next? Or if I need to all of a sudden adapt my plan because I need to account for somebody else that wants to join my activity or join my game, well, how am I gonna do that? Or if, for example, we had planned to go to the shops today or go to the playground and then all of a sudden it's raining outside, and so mum said we can't go to the playground, but now what am I gonna do instead? Those bits all come under like that flexible thinking, problem solving. Also in our executive functioning skills, we've got things like our working memory. And so this is if I've got my plan and I've figured out my plan, can I retain what my plan is and the steps of my plan until I've finished the plan? If we think about this in terms of a classroom activity, if the teacher said, Right, we're gonna do maths today, so I need you to go and get your maths resources and then come back to your table and start a new page. Well, actually, if we think about the steps that are involved in that, okay, so I need to remember it's maths. Right now, I need to remember what I need for maths because the teacher said maths resources. Okay, so if I need for maths, let's say I need my maths book, a ruler, a pencil, you know, maybe it is that we're doing uh geometry, and so maybe I need a protractor, and then I need to remember where those things are in the classroom so I can go and collect them, and then I need to remember to come back to my table and get all that set up and then write my name or start the new work page, but I need to remember what the teacher expects when I start the new work page. And there's lots of little steps in there that require either recalling information from what's been immediately told to me, i.e., what the teacher told, but also accessing some of my memories from what did we do last time, i.e., where are the maths resources stored? What maths resources do I need for these maths lessons? So you can start to see how the level of complexity can build and build in really subtle ways that we don't always understand. And I do this all the time. I might ask what I think is a you know simple question or simple instruction for getting all of the little steps that our brains have to go through because as adults, there's a lot that we aren't aware of the processing that our brains do. And so it's really important when we're looking at supporting the children in our lives that we're helping them, if we're noticing they're getting stuck, helping them go through the problem solving is okay, which piece? Okay, like I work with some uh children and we do activities where it's like, okay, I want you to go back inside your brain and think about where we were when I told you this. Okay, we were standing there and I said I was gonna tell you three things, and that said I was gonna, and then all of a sudden they can tell, oh you know, you said this, this, and this. And so it's helping them access that memory so that they can then come back and go, right now I know what I'm doing. And I'm getting distracted as I frequently do. But working memory is definitely a part of our executive functioning skills. Some other areas of our executive functioning skills are what we call the initiation of tasks, and so this is where we've got the idea of okay, I've got my plan, but now I need to actually start. And I don't know if you guys have ever felt this as adults. I definitely can. I can tell you even today, as I was recording this podcast so far today, I have uh deep cleaned my dryer, um, home made some homemade dumplings from scratch because that was something that was on my list to do, um, cleaned the floor and I can't even remember, many other little jobs that were of not super high importance, all because I was putting off actually sitting down and starting my podcast. And there's many reasons for that. You know, I'm well aware that it's been a minute since I've been able to podcast for you guys, and the act of actually sitting down and starting and recording this podcast was definitely tricky today. Now, I was able to put my own strategies in place in the sense that literally before jumping on this podcast, I had a dance party because I knew that that would A get my body moving, give me a little bit of heavy work, if we go back to like some proprioceptive input, jump back to our sensory season if you want to hear some more about that. And moving my body just makes me feel good, so that then I'd be able to sit down and actually start and record this episode for you guys. But that whole piece of initiation and starting the task, I know that I have the knowledge to share with you guys. I know that I really enjoy doing this podcast, but for whatever reason today I just couldn't start it. So that's what we call initiation of tasks. Now it could be a bigger task or it could be a simple step, but it's the actual getting started on the activity. And then we've got the task completion. So once I've actually started on the activity, do I know what this looks like when it's finished? Do I know what it means to be able to keep myself going? Am I being able to do self-monitoring to be able to figure out when I am finished? Or how am I going to know when this is finished? So how am I going to keep sustaining myself till completion or till the activity is done? Now there are some tasks that are really easy that have a really natural completion, like getting dressed, for example. Well, yes and no. Simple steps of getting dressed can have a nice completion if we think about it in terms of getting dressed for the day, you're going to put on your underwear, your trousers or your pants, your tops, and you're good. But then what about when you have to get dressed to leave the house? Well then I need socks and shoes. Or what if I need to get dressed for the weather? Well then there's an extra step of either needing to look outside and check the weather or checking the weather on my app or my phone or whatever it might be. And then I need to figure out, well, what jacket matches that weather and why. And so you can see there are some bits of it that are really quite boundaried in like our basic getting dressed for the day. Simple sequence. I know when that's done because my body is clothed. But it can get more complex the older we get, and the more we start to take on with increasing amounts of independence as well. And then another part of our executive functioning skills is our planning. So, how can I organize and know what steps to do in what order? But also how can I go, well, that didn't work, so what am I going to do this time? And we come back to our problem solving. So you can see how a lot of our executive functioning skills can be really interlinked, and there's many, many others. Um, but I've kind of picked out the main ones that I noticed that can be challenging for kids, but also can be ones that simple shifts for us as adults can help children to develop their confidence to have a go and their confidence to get things wrong and figure things out and try again and start to think about the why. And so these are kind of the ones that we're gonna break down a little bit together over the next season. So the kind of upcoming episodes, so we're gonna have an entire episode on initiation, we're gonna have some episodes on like attention and working memory, we're gonna have an episode on like planning and prioritization and sequencing. Um, we're gonna have an episode on problem solving and persistence. You guys know that a little bit of persistence and problem solving is one of my favorite things to talk about. I think in almost every season we've done so far, there's been eight episode building and problem solving into it. Um, and then we're gonna do an episode on like self-monitoring and that idea of how do I know when I'm done or how do I know if something needs to change. Um, but that is the rough plan. As you guys know, I love to make a plan and then I slightly adjust the plan as we go along. Um, and if you have any questions on this topic, you know, send them my way. I can always adjust the plan for the season to include bits of information that you guys are gonna find relevant or want some more information on. So by all means, you can always send me a message on Instagram at BelzoT Corner, or you can drop me an email at belzotcorner at gmail.com. Totally, totally fine. I'm more than happy to build in answers to any questions you guys have. So that's kind of some of the skills within executive functioning. And so, what happens if we're having difficulties with our executive functioning? Like, what could that look like? It might be a child's having difficulties with planning, it might be that a child's having difficulties with prioritization. So you might say, you know, go and let's say you've got a high school um teenager and you've asked them to do their homework and they've gone away and they've done their homework for an hour and a half, and then they come out and you go, Okay, so your homework's done that's due tomorrow, and they go, No, I did my homework that's due on Friday, and you go, Why? Why did you do your homework that's due on Friday when you have homework that's due tomorrow? Um, and they go, But I did the homework, I did the activity that was sucks to me, and that piece around prioritization of tasks and managing time frames and all of those things. You might see a child that's got difficulties with organization, so they might be the kid that's always, you know, forgetting or losing belongings that you know you always having to remind, like, have you got this? Do you have that? Where's your shoes? Where's your socks gone? You know, do you have your hat? Whatever the bits might be that they need to get organized, or if it's school belongings and it's the pencils that's always lost, and they're always having to ask the teacher to borrow a pencil. I'm sure you guys can think of many, many others. We can also see hand uh see handwriting, see executive functioning skills have impact on other skills like handwriting. And if we think about handwriting, and again, I'm gonna give you guys lots of different examples to break down kind of the hidden cognitive load of some of these tasks. And handwriting's a really great one because if we think about handwriting when we're first learning handwriting, we're copying shapes. And we're copying shapes, and we're learning that the copying of these shapes means that these shapes have values because these shapes, when we write them in this way, meet make them letters, and the letters have value, and then we remember how then we figure out how to put letters together to make words. Okay, so then we add spelling into the mix. So then if I'm writing, I have to remember the how the letters are formed and remember how to spell the word. Okay, then if I'm copying from the board, it's a little bit easier because I can just copy the shapes and copy the letters, and I don't have to think as much about the spelling. But as I get older, I need to be able to read the word that's on the read the sentence, for example, that's on the board, hold that in my memory, remember the sentence as I'm writing it out, but also remember the spelling for each individual word within that sentence, and remember the letter formations for each of those letters within the word within the sentence, and you can start to see how it gets more complex. And then we add in self-generated writing, in which case I need to actually think of what I want to say or think of what my answer is going to be, keep that sentence in my head, or that you know, paragraph in my head, and then actually remember what the individual words are and what the spelling of those individual words are and where I'm up to within the sentence that's in my head to write the answer for the question that I've been asked. And so you can see how something that you know we might take for granted is quickly writing something down, or even if it's typing, it's the same idea. You know, yes, I'm not doing letter formations, but it's where is that letter on my keyboard and which finger do I use to press that key, and where's the next letter for the spelling component? So it makes some elements easier, but it's definitely still got lots of hidden thinking behind it that can sometimes be that working memory, that persistence, you know, that flexibility. Like what happens if I spell a word wrong? Okay, now I need to either scribble it out, get an eraser and rub it out, delete it off if I'm typing on my keyboard, all whilst remembering where I was in the sentence, you can start to see that it gets a little bit more complex. So we might see sometimes that actually we have learners that have difficulty with written output, and I'm not saying that all handwriting difficulties are executive functioning. There's many, many reasons that we might have some handwriting difficulties, but one sometimes that we're looking at and thinking about as OTs is well, how are we going with our executive functioning? Do we have some difficulties there? And as I kind of alluded to before, we might have someone who's got difficulties starting a task with that like task initiation piece. So if we think about overall what our executive functioning is, it is how we can manage the day-to-day tasks, monitor our progress, manage our safely, and get manage our safely, manage our safety and get things done across our day. So it could be for an adult, an example of our executive functioning is knowing, okay, what do I need to get today? Right, well, I know what I'm gonna make for lunch today, or I made my lunch last night, right? So I've got work today, I need to get up, need to get dressed, might need to get the kids sorted, or actually my partner's doing the kids this morning. I'm going off to the gym, so I need to make sure I take my clothes for the gym and my clothes for work. And then, oh, we've got, you know, I'm going to a friend's house tonight, so I need to make sure that I stop to get some wine or stop to get some flowers on my way to there. Those little bits, you know, and you might write them down to help you, you might do to-do lists, and again, we've got lots of strategies as adults to help us navigate all the thinking across our day. For a child, you know, their executive function could look like choosing what to do and going, I've got some free time, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that, or actually, I know that um I've got chores to do when I get home if we're talking to someone slightly older, and they might have chores at the house, or it might be that they've come home and you've asked them to clean up their room, or that you've gone, if you clean your room and do your homework, we can have some free time, and then in free time they've got to go, okay, so I've got to clean my room and do my homework. So to clean my room, I need to make sure that I, you know, put my clothes away, maybe. Maybe it's that I vacuum the floor, maybe it's that I try and make my bed. Okay, so I've done those bits, and then what was the other thing I had to do? Right, my homework. So to do my homework, I need to figure out what my homework is. Did I bring my homework home from school? Okay, where am I gonna do my homework? What things do I need to do my homework? Right, I need my actual homework, but I also need a pen or a pencil, or maybe I need to look something up on the computer. Okay, now I've got everything that I need for my homework, so now I'm gonna sit down and start my homework, but oh no, it's dinner time, okay. And so it looks different for everybody, but I'm just talking through some of the examples of what the thinking behind an activity might be for us as adults, but also for kids. So, what sort of things might OTs help with? So when we're looking at the strategies and the supports around executive functioning skills, and as I said, we'll probably go into these with some more detail in each of the next episodes, but it could be things like, well, how are we going to manage a morning routine? If we want to support the independence and we know that the thinking's really tricky, what are the things that we can put in place to make the thinking a bit easier? Sometimes it's things like, okay, well, let's make a game out of it, let's make a challenge out of it. Other times it's, well, let's have visuals to help us, or let's lay out the clothes together and then you can get dressed by yourself. Or how is it that we can set up the environment to help give us natural cues for what's coming next? You know, I had one child that I worked with where actually what we found the most effective strategy was was right next to where his uh shoes were, he put his toothbrush. Because he had to put his shoes on every day, and then he'd see his toothbrush and go, that's right, I've got to go and brush my teeth, go and brush his teeth, come back, put his shoes on, and off he went. And it worked. And it's looking at what are those little strategies that we can do to decrease a little bit the load. Otis might support with strategies around starting a task that may find difficult. I mean, you heard me talk about the fact that I had a dance routine and a little dance party before sitting down and recording this episode because that's what works for me, and that's what gave both my body and my brain what I needed to actually sit down and start this thing. And it's the same bit of investigation that we look at when we support children is okay, well, from what we know of their sensory systems, and jump back into the sensory season if you would like to. But what is their body going to need? What's going to be supportive for their brain? And what are the simple strategies that we can build in to help them be as independent as possible? It could be looking at how they manage their self directed time, and this is where it comes into ideation as well a little bit, which I'll talk about in a second. But it's okay, our self directed time in learning, or our self directed time within play, or our self directed time is leisure time when we start to look at young adults. But how do I know what to do? What I'm To choose to do and how I'm going to sustain my attention or build something creative into it. It could be managing group dynamics, and again, that could be group dynamics within a learning environment in school or group dynamics within play. You know, the number of times you see oh, the number of times teachers are incredible people, the number of times kids come in post-lunch or recess and they've just gone, I'm thinking more kind of primary school age, but definitely happens in high school as well, where it's like so-and-so did this, and then this happened, and then the conflict management and conflict resolution. And sometimes that can be because there was difficulties with cognitive flexibility and flexible thinking. You know, I was playing this game and then so-and-so added a different rule, but I didn't want that rule. This is how it had to be, you know, and again, we'll talk about these more in other episodes, but definitely when we look at you know, navigating change and navigating change in play or navigating change within groups can be really tricky for some people. And trust me, can be really tricky as adults as well. You know, sometimes I remember going through uni less so now, but going through uni at times when we had to do like group assignments and group projects, and it was that real sense of injustice if on your group there was someone who you didn't feel was pulling their weight, or but you just went, Oh, just do it, because then it's done. But then you just and you know, all of these dynamics when you're starting to look at the thinking involved behind how to navigate some of these dynamics can be really tricky. And we already talked a little bit about like organizing of our belongings, but a part of this as well is organizing of our body so I can organize my body to do the actions that I need to be able to do the activity that I want, and that talks more and leans more into our kind of motor planning piece, and you can jump back to that episode if you'd like as well. So if we think about ideation now, ideation is essentially the creative thought, the idea of how I think of what I could do with something and how I can think of how I can organize my body to be able to interact with an object. So it might be I've got an idea and I get stuck because I don't know how to do the idea, or it might be that I get stuck because I can't have the I can't think of the idea. And it's how we start to look at how we build play skills, how we build our motor planning skills, so many things come from this. And if I give a really simple example of this, if we think of playing with blocks, for example, and maybe you're watching a toddler as they're playing with blocks. Well, they might pick up the block, they might turn the block over in their hands, they might then go, I can drop the block, or they might explore how many blocks they can hold at one time, or they might start to, you know, move the blocks from one spot to another spot, or they might start to stack the blocks, and these are all different ideas of what I can do and how I can use my body to interact with the blocks in different ways, and sometimes I do this from watching other people, and we'll see someone else, and oh they're they're stacking blocks. That looks kind of fun. I I can do that too. Sometimes it happens from accidents. I was building a tower and it fell over, but hey, watching the towers fall, that was kind of fun. So I'm gonna make your tower fall now. Sometimes it can happen from you know, having an idea of what's something I could do that's different. Maybe I'm gonna bang the blocks together. And the process of ideation is where we're looking at how can I keep refining my ideas, and as we get older, how can I share my ideas to help have other people join in with me as well? So if we think about the parts of ideation, we've got the motor planning parts of ideation, which is the how can I organise my body to be able to do this activity that I want to do? You know, is it that I need to sit up nice and tall or maintain my posture so that I can reach my arm out, then I need to open my hand and close my fingers around this block to pick it up, and then I need to bring my arm back into my body to have it closer to me, and then maybe I'll turn my wrist a little bit to turn the block around, whatever it might be. But then also we've got to have the ideas of well, how am I gonna interact with this object in this case, the block? What could I do with this block? And as we get older, these ideas become more abstract. Blocks could start to become, you know, this is the tower, and these are the houses, and this I can make these blocks into a person, and this person's gonna be living over here, and we start to build in all these imaginative ideas where we're pulling ideas from different things around us or different things that we've known and starting to explore it within play. And so when we see difficulties with ideation, we often see kids who might pick up an object in the same way all the time, or might wait for adults to kind of show them what to do before they start to do it, or they might just kind of look and explore the toy, but they don't really play with the toy as such, or they get stuck with what to do next. Now, if we think of when we have difficulties coming up with ideas, well then if I'm gonna have difficulties organizing my day or organizing what I want to do or navigating, you know, play with my peers, that all of a sudden gets really tricky because I'm waiting for someone else to give me a clue on what's happening, or someone else to give me a clue on what to do, or if I know that I can play with this object in this way and someone plays with it in a different way, well that might be really hard to navigate. So when we start to think about some of the bits within ideation, what we're looking at supporting is how we can help them explore different ideas. How we can get them to move away from off you go, go play, what are you gonna do? I don't know. You can have some free time, off you go play, I don't know. What should I do? I don't know. What do you want to do? I don't know. Okay. How can we help come up with some ideas? Well we might have semi-structured time. We might have things where, you know, I had oh there's so many, there's so many different ones that you can do. But some of my favorite are just using completely, completely random stuff. Like literally whatever you've got. And saying, Hey, well we're gonna play a bit of a silly game. And let's say we've got some cardboard. And we're gonna see how many different things we can turn this cardboard into today. And you might start with looking around the room and saying, Oh, I reckon I can turn it into a chair. See that chair over there? I reckon we can make this cardboard a chair. And then maybe in the room there's I don't know, maybe you've got a cabinet in the room. Okay, now I reckon we can turn it into a cabinet. Or maybe there's a plant in the room. How could we turn this into a plant? Do we need to add something to it? And so you start with just helping bring attention to different things in the environment and expand different ideas of what we can do with this one cardboard box. And then maybe at the end we go, that was pretty cool, our cardboard box became like five different things. That's pretty fun. Or it could be as simple as if you're sitting there and playing with maybe your drawing. What are you gonna draw? Let's draw a house. Okay, we drew a house. What's in your house? Let's draw that. What else is in your house? Cool, let's draw that now. What does it look like? Can you think of a pitcher of it in your brain? Well, let's see if we can draw that. Could you tell me your story about who lives in this house? Where are they gonna go today? Well, they're gonna go to the park? What's your favourite park? Let's draw that. And so you help them start to explore how they can extend on and have different ideas. And it's the same when you can look at, right, let's make an obstacle course. Oh man, obstacle courses are my favourite. You can never go wrong with an obstacle course. There's so many benefits to an obstacle course. Because you can have the what same one object and maybe go a challenge. For you know, our obstacle course down the hallway today, we're gonna only be able to use a chair and a ball. So how are we gonna build our obstacle course? Okay, well maybe we need to crawl under the chair first. And then what else could we do with the chair? And they say sit on it. Okay, I'll sit on the chair. And maybe while you're sitting on the chair, and this is where you can add little ideas, but help them explore other ways or other things they can do with that same singular object. And over time it helps and it starts to build because we go, oh look, I can do all these other things with the same object. And maybe we could do something similar with a table, or maybe we could do something similar with an exercise ball if I've done it with an you know smaller ball. Or maybe I can do it with a smaller ball if I've done it with an exercise ball, and maybe I can hit it with my hand, or maybe I could use a bracket to hit it, and you can start to see all the ideas start to come on. And so what I would say around the ideation piece is if you find your child's always going, I don't know what to do, what should I do, I don't know what to play, have some time to sit down and just go, I don't know either. Let's figure something out together. And again, you guys know I love talking about problem solving, but looking at the well, what could we do? Hmm. What did we play yesterday? Oh, that's right, we played that really fun game. Could do that again. No, I don't want to do that. Okay. Let's see, what can I see? I can see we've got some paper. I can see we've got maybe you've got a board game. Or you I can see we've got a blanket. What can we do with a blanket? And then maybe you're all of a sudden building a fort. Or maybe you're using the blanket to become pirates and it's the sail that you're blowing around, or you know, if you've got older children and then they're really stuck on what to do, and you know, maybe they've had their computer time for the day, or maybe they've just got some free time and they don't know what to do. And you go, okay, well, you can help with things around the kitchen, like they could help with cooking and they go, I don't know what to cook. Well, you like what would you feel like cooking? Would you like to cook dinner or not? Or if they go, I really don't know what to do and I don't know what I want to play, or then you can help them to go, is it a board game? Is it cards? Is it a different hobby that they could start to explore and enjoy? Is it drawing? Is it you know, endless, endless hobbies? But helping them start to go, these are the ones that I like, these are the ones that I don't like, this is how I try something that I don't know if I'm gonna like it or not like it. And I could go on for ages with examples. But when we're thinking about bringing it back to executive functioning quickly, it's not always to say that ideation is going to be the issue, as I talked about earlier. There's so many different parts to our executive functioning skills, there's so many different components to it. But I do find that ideation is one that's often overlooked, and sometimes if we just slow it down a little bit and help them come up with the idea and have that bit of ownership and control over what the idea was, we start to see this lovely little snowball of confidence and then coming in and like, I did this, fantastic. I love that you thought I thought of that all by yourself and came up with the whole plan. And look at that, you've done it. Absolutely fantastic. And that's what we want to see. We want to support our kids to start to feel more confident and start to have the independence to make these ideas, to have these ideas, make these plans, have the confidence to follow through with the plans, do the bit of problem solving that's needed, if there is any, and then feel really proud of what they've been able to accomplish. So, overall, if we look at ideation and look at some of these executive functioning skills, and as I said, we'll go into like more specifics later in later episodes. But if we look at kind of what supports the development of some of these skills, things like learning from our mistakes, making mistakes, adults modeling mistakes, and how we can problem solve through mistakes and go, oh, remember the last time we did this and something went wrong? What was it? Oh, that's right, this is what went wrong. So let's not do that again. What are we gonna do differently this time? It's doing risk taking and safe risk taking and doing all that fun exploring through play and bits of imaginative play like we talked about before. For older kids, things like sports can be a really nice way to start to navigate some of these different problem-solving pieces and working as a part of a team or you know, even if it's individual sport that they're doing. And where possible the elements of like starting to have kids take ownership over planning. And as I said, we'll talk through more specific examples in all the episodes to come. But really, it's about even if it takes a little bit longer, where are the times in our day that we can hand over bits of more independence and little bits of more autonomy and do it together so that it's not that we're expecting the child to do it all by themselves, but we're helping them build their confidence in the particular skill. But we will touch on all of that a bit more in our next episode, which is going to be all on initiation, which will be with you guys in two weeks, maybe less. I might drop it a little bit earlier because I know it's been a minute since I've posted, but it'll definitely in two weeks at the latest. But otherwise, I hope you guys have an absolutely lovely rest of your week. I hope you have some time to yourselves in the week as well. And as always, if there is anyone that you think would like the podcast or would benefit from having a listen to the podcast, send it their way, give it a rate or a review, guys. It makes a world of difference on my side. And as always, I don't make any money from this podcast. Um, but if you would like to donate, there's the link to buy me a coffee um website. Uh, I think it should be in the uh podcast notes. If not, it's definitely linked on my Instagram page, and any donations are always appreciated because it just helps me keep the podcast running. But that's it for me now, guys. I hope you have a fantastic week and I will see you all soon. Bye.