Achieving peak mental performance is something that we all strive for on a daily basis. We all want to go through life ready to take on any challenge that may come our way. It doesn’t always work out that way though, and we all struggle with finding motivation or feeling ready to take on new challenges from time to time. These feelings are managed by a stack of 3 bundles of skills & mental processes: executive functioning, confidence, and a broad set of high-performance coping skills.

Executive functioning skills, also known as self-regulatory skills, form the base of the mental performance stack. The three primary executive functions, working memory, flexible thinking, and inhibitory control, are critical to managing our day-to-day lives. But, unless your child receives special services related to an ADHD or similar diagnosis, there wont be much explicit instruction in these skills - it’s just assumed that they’ll figure these things out on their own. If your child struggles with paying attention, taking initiative, or staying organized, this is where we’ll start. With activities centered around reflection & self-awareness, we’ll try to establish some habits to help put these skills into practice until they become automatic.

The middle of the stack is made of your child’s confidence in themselves. There are 2 parts to what most people call confidence - self-esteem, and self-efficacy. Self-esteem is how you, in general, feel about your ability to be successful and achieve goals. Self-efficacy is more situational - it’s how confident you feel about you and your specific skills & abilities being able to overcome a specific challenge that you encounter. The two are related, but not entirely dependent on each other. It’s entirely possible to have healthy self-esteem, but low self-efficacy in certain situations. It’s also possible for a person with generally low self-esteem to encounter scenarios where their self-efficacy is high - they know they can do this one specific thing, but they don’t like or believe in themselves in general. The key to building your child’s confidence is by finding appropriate challenges - something that they’re motivated to tackle, isn’t too easy, but also isn’t hard enough that there’s no way they’ll be able to succeed - and letting them go! Again, reflection is key here. I can help your child look back at past performances and figure out how to handle new challenges & what they can do better in the future.

The stack is topped off by high-performance coping skills. Life is full of stress, and we all develop ways to cope - but some methods are more effective than others. Many people naturally develop some of these skills naturally as they face challenging moments throughout their lives, but few people ever receive any explicit training to develop these skills outside of top-tier athletes, performers, or corporate executives. Much like the goal of executive functioning training is to make those basic skills habitual and automatic, through techniques like imagery and finding flow states I can help your child turn excellence into habit too.

If you’re ready to bring me on board to help your child reach the next level toward their peak performance, let’s get a session scheduled!