Guest Article: What's a "Turbo Thinker" Anyway? Executive Function Skills Coaching for Self-Care and Growth
A Mind Coach NOLA client and friend, Kristin Sanders, recently wrote an article for The UAGC Chronicle and we’ve decided to feature it!
“In 2017, I began teaching part-time at UAGC while simultaneously teaching part-time at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and getting my freelance copywriting business off the ground. Balancing these three part-time jobs—as well as my creative writing—was difficult at first. I used to be the kind of teacher who would bring a pile of English papers home from an in-person class, then proceed to stare at the pile in increasing anguish as the week slid by. I'd grade a few papers here and there, but the pile never seemed any less daunting.
This precarious balance of grading, course prep, and life's other responsibilities is an experience I'm sure many of the UAGC faculty have had. It also echoes the experiences of our students, who struggle to balance the demands of work, family, personal lives, and school. I wanted to have a better toolkit for managing my time, holding myself accountable, reducing stress, and moving toward a fulfilling life aligned with my vision and values. By improving those skills—an act of service and self-care for myself—I would be better able to lead my students in the classroom and be the kind of teacher who offers practical advice for finding balance.
Enter Adela Baker of Mind Coach NOLA.
I spent the better part of 2018 working with a life coach specializing in ADHD coaching—and I do not have ADHD or ADD. Yet what Adela taught me was that, while I don't have ADHD or ADD, the skill set I was sometimes struggling with is called "executive function skills." These skills include time management, focusing on one task, meeting deadlines, organizing, planning, and prioritizing. We are all supposed to magically develop these skills throughout our early school years, without specific training or education! While we tend to think of executive function skills as something we're either great at or horrible at, really—in keeping with a growth mindset—these are skills we should continually brush up on. I had always thought of myself as a fabulously well-organized person who met all deadlines. And it was true; I did meet all grading deadlines and all client deadlines, but often to the detriment of my physical health, sleep, or creative pursuits. In working with a coach, I saw how I was getting in my way or wasting time.
We began in a life-coaching vein. I established my purpose, values, and a vision statement, guided by specific coaching questions: What path will help you arrive at the greatest manifestation of who you are, what you value, and what you're committed to achieving in your life? Who would you need to become to live every day as a result of your core values?
Once I had answers to those questions and some concrete goals in mind, Adela helped me hone my executive function skills. I began time blocking on Google Calendar, with one-, two-, or three-hour chunks for each activity in my day. Having been a lifelong procrastinator who used a looming deadline at the eleventh hour as the impetus to begin my grading or other work, I started a new practice of counting up the number of essays I had to grade, dividing by the number of days until my deadline, and meeting a minimum requirement each day. If I only needed to grade four papers per day, that felt much better than leaving twenty papers until the day before they were due and spending an entire Saturday on my laptop. When I needed to focus, I learned to put my phone and my laptop in airplane mode. These little steps made everything more manageable. Now, these steps are so much a part of my routine, I can hardly remember how unbalanced my life used to be.”