Our Services
Our Services
CONNECTION
COMMITMENT
GUIDANCE
SUPPORT
Our Approach:
At North Shore Executive Functioning, we provide customized and comprehensive support for both students and adults. Our private, online sessions are completely individualized and confidential. We have been working virtually through a secure online server for many years (pre-pandemic!) and have found that the virtual 1:1 model is an effective modality for EF skill-building. As trained EF professionals, we help adult clients with EF challenges understand how the management of cognitive processes affects their ability to set goals, break down projects, and maintain consistent levels of productivity. For students (elementary through college), NSEF coaches help provide tools for young people who struggle with planning, time management, flexible thinking, and inhibitory control. We specialize in helping clients of all ages with ADHD and emotional regulation challenges.
Our Model:
At NSEF, we believe that helping adults and young adults reach their goals starts by understanding and meeting each client where they are right now. This philosophy is woven into our operational model based on behavioral change that is guided by compassionate, cooperative problem-solving. Coaches work on-one-one through a secure, online portal with clients to develop individualized EF development plans that are both practical and applicable.
Our Clients
Elementary
NSEF coaches specialized in elementary education provide one-on-one executive functioning support for children ages 5-10. By focusing on EF skill acquisition in addition to the fundamentals of reading, writing and math, coaches ensure that students successfully reach academic developmental benchmarks. For elementary students, EF coaching sessions are highly interactive and often incorporate games & play to keep kids engaged. The goal of coaching at this age is to lay a solid foundation for healthy executive functioning development, including building skills like flexible thinking, frustration tolerance, sustained attention, and inhibitory control.
MIDDLE SCHOOL
Executive functioning weaknesses often reveal themselves when students reach middle school. Whereas in the younger grade levels, smart students are able to mask executive functioning deficits by relying on their intelligence, by middle school, those who have not yet developed the EF skills of planning, goal-directed persistence, and effective time management begin to struggle. Without an integrated system for prioritizing and scheduling tasks, students begin to find that they are no longer able to “show up” and “skate by.” For some kids, the added pressure of mastering more complex material is the problem. But for most students with EF challenges, it’s not the academic material itself, but rather the management of all the moving parts — keeping up with different teachers’ expectations, timelines, rules, due dates and homework systems.
Accustomed to keeping it all in their head (rarely writing things down, setting alarms, using a calendar, making a timeline, or creating a concrete plan in advance), highly intelligent and capable kids start to hit a wall. They find they can no longer keep up without a clear idea of how to operate.
No matter how smart and capable, middle school students with lagging executive functioning skills don’t yet have the tools to know how to make the invisible turn visible because they’ve never had to practice creating plans with explicit, actionable steps on a timeline. As a result, students with weak executive function often get overwhelmed and will either shut down or avoid doing tasks —even those that they are fully capable of executing successfully.
Coaching at this stage consists of helping students develop the executive functioning skills needed to keep track of deadlines, break down large assignments, slow down if they tend to rush through things, and/or set time limits if they tend to linger unnecessarily. Developing the executive functions of emotional regulation and sustained attention — particularly around non-preferred tasks — is a critical part of EF coaching for middle school students.
HIGH SCHOOL
Teens can be reluctant to listen to their parents’ counsel when it comes to how to set goals, create plans, begin projects and follow through on commitments. For teenagers with executive functioning deficits, this can be a particularly tricky situation. On the one hand, EFD teens don’t want their parents’ help. On the other hand, they may have come to rely on their parents’ assistance over the years and aren’t able to function yet on their own.
In an effort to seek independence and form stronger bonds with their peers, teens with EF weaknesses will often claim that they’ve “got everything under control” and will go out of their way to get parents and teachers off of their backs — even when it’s clear that they are struggling and need pointed support.
NSEF coaches specialized in secondary education are trained to help teenagers succeed in both academic and social situations. Adolescent clients not only learn how to effectively prioritize, schedule, and create effective study plans at school, but also gain the life skills necessary to understand how to advocate for what they want and need in pressure-filled social settings.
EF coaches help high school students learn to recognize when stress, fear and/or overwhelm lead them towards unhealthy habits and teach teens how to identify and respond to reactive coping mechanisms they may be using like procrastination, avoidance, and addictive behaviors.
By both listening and leading, coaches work one-on-one with high school students to hold space for their concerns while simultaneously inviting them to stay accountable for their actions. The teenage years can be a challenging, tumultuous time. Building the cognitive and emotional skills necessary to create systems which help teens to face the many pressures of adolescence provides a safe harbor, particularly for teens who struggle with low self-esteem
NSEF coaches serve as trusted partners on the path to acquiring new skills and tools that promote confidence, success, and the formation of healthy habits.
COllege
Landing in a new environment with new systems, new expectations, and new schedules offers a new level of independence and opportunity for growth. However, for young adults with executive functioning challenges, the lack of traditional academic structure and parent-led household expectations can be disorienting and overwhelming.
Students with weaknesses in the areas of sustained attention, inhibitory control, working memory, and task initiation are in particular need of the one-on-one coaching model provided by NSEF. Without an accountability system to regularly check in and help keep them on track, these students often find themselves sleeping in rather than going to class, partying rather than attending lectures, cramming rather than following a study plan, and avoiding responsibilities rather than capitalizing on the newfound freedoms of college life.
NSEF coaches specialized in working with college students know how to help emerging adults manage their schedules, prioritize their daily tasks, and strike a healthy balance between the need for socialization and the need to study. Executive functioning skills are not just study skills; these are life skills necessary for daily functioning.
Adult
NSEF coaches are trained to help adult clients who find it challenging to stay focused and meet the demands required by complex daily schedules. Personalized, professional coaching assists adult clients by assessing their individual EF profile in order to identify which executive functions have become more dominant over time and which skills have been left underdeveloped. Drawing from the latest research in neuroscience and behavioral change theories, executive functioning coaching helps clients understand how the management of cognitive processes affects their ability to plan, monitor, and assess their performance.
As we often say to our clients, “The neurons that fire together, wire together.” When faced with a challenge, what is our brain’s default neural pathway? Is it to panic? To procrastinate? To get upset? To blame?
When things get complicated, consider how your brain responds. Does it pause to assess the situation and make a plan of action to move forward, or does it flood with negative self-talk and retreat into survival mode? This is the essence of executive function skill-building: to identify and evaluate our cognitive and behavioral patterns so that we can modify those which no longer serve us.
As dozens of our adult clients can confirm, it IS indeed possible to change our brain’s neural pathways and to develop robust executive functioning skills into adulthood. If it feels like you are stuck in a pattern of frantically rushing to meet deadlines or on-going cycles of procrastination and avoidance, it’s time to stop beating yourself up.
Executive functioning has nothing to do with intelligence or willpower. Indeed, some of our smartest clients have hidden executive dysfunction for many years, masked by overcompensation in other areas of strengths. Executive functions are skills built through routine, targeted practice. Like a muscle that needs exercise to get stronger, we must target our EF skill weaknesses in order to slowly build them. We can’t just think, “Today I’ll convince my bicep to grow” any more than we can tell ourselves, “Today I’ll get better at time management.” Executive functioning development involves targeted practice and disciplined training.
With compassionate, one-on-one coaching, our clients learn how to hold themselves accountable for the systems they use and learn how to avoid common reactionary behaviors like procrastination, distraction, anger, and avoidance. Clients learn to take control of their schedules, break down complex goals into manageable steps, and maintain more consistent levels of productivity to promote healthy executive functions.
Get in touch
Presentations:
Looking to book a call to discuss our presentations? Check out our Presentation information and book a call:
Exploration Call:
Would you like to book a free 10-minute Exploration Call to learn more about our 1:1 coaching services?