Lara Honos-Webb - Six Super Skills for Executive Functioning: Tools to Help Teens Improve Focus, Stay Organized, and Reach Their Goals

Teenagers need to be able to set and achieve goals, but their executive functioning often isnt fully developed. Drawing on the latest neuroscience, Lara Honos-Webb provides a road map for mastering these skillswhich will set up teens for success not only in high school, but throughout their lives.

Daniel H. Pink , author of When and Drive

Lara Honos-Webb has done it again. With 6 Super Skills for Executive Functioning , she has created a road map for teens and their parents to improve executive function and motivation to change related maladaptive habitsand to do so in a positive (re)frame. Her deep knowledge and experience working successfully with teens who have executive function issues is demonstrated in each suggestion she offers.

Robin S. Rosenberg, PhD, ABPP , CEO and founder of Live in Their World; adjunct clinical faculty at University of California, San Francisco; and coauthor of Abnormal Psychology and Introducing Psychology

How can I envision, set, and achieve my goals in life? Lara Honos-Webb breaks down this question for teens and young adults in a simple, step-by-step manner that is easy to follow for any reader. This book teaches big dreamers how to think S.M.A.R.T, deal with lifes challenges, and achieve ambitions with grit.

Grace Friedman, advocate, speaker, founder of www.addyteen.com, and coauthor of Winning with ADHD

Another informative and inspiring book by Lara Honos-Webb. This book is full of action-oriented tools that guide teenagers to learn the skills they need to stay focused, set goals, manage stress, stop negative thinking habits, and ultimately chart a course of positive thinking. Lara writes with compassion, acceptance, and optimismas she encourages teenagers to shift their mind-set, and move to a place of self-empowerment.

Robin Goldstein, PhD , instructor of child and adolescent psychology at University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)

While reading Lara Honos-Webbs clear and encouraging guide, my thoughts turned to the many people who go through life never believing in their own competence. She wants each teen to know that their minds can practice and grow important skills they might believe are impossible. She offers not only hope, but reassurance that they can build self-discipline and discover its giftthe freedom to choose.

Margaret Robinson Rutherford, PhD , clinical psychologist, and author of Perfectly Hidden Depression

A great continuation of BRAIN HACKS . Lara Honos-Webb is the best specialist in executive functions for all inhabitants of the neurodiversity planet: neurotypicals and neurodivergents. In these times of electronality, where virtuality re-signifies our life, we must relearn how to develop each mind into the gift that it must become. 6 Super Skills for Executive Functioning teaches us how.

Ernesto Reao , psychologist, linguist, and author of The Return to the Village

Lara Honos-Webb has created a beautiful guide to self-mastery for youth who are struggling with executive function challenges that is accessible and straightforward. Backed by the latest research, it is chock-full of helpful tips to create positive shifts in mind-set that will empower any youth who practices these skills. This is definitely on my list of favorites to share with the neurodiverse kids I work with, and their parents.

Shawn V. Giammattei, PhD , professor of clinical psychology at Alliant International University, and founder and director of the Gender Health Training Institute and Quest Family Therapy

Once again, Lara Honos-Webb has brilliantly put together an actionable and inspiring book for those with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)this time written to teens. The super skills she shares in this book, synthesized through years of her own clinical research, are transformative tools that will be a true gift to each reader who applies them. The books content is well researched and peppered with illustrative stories to make it an enjoyable and accessible read.

Mary Illions Wilde, MD , integrative pediatrician, and owner of Imagine Pediatrics Behavioral Health and Wellness

As a person with ADHD, I wish I had this book as a teenager. Lara Honos-Webb combines real science and real talk to help us understand our minds and achieve our goals. Most importantly, this book provides a road map for self-discoveryhelping teens tune into their gifts, identify their strengths, and build confidence along the way.

Margaux Joffe , founder of Kaleidoscope Society for women with ADHD, and corporate social responsibility leader

This book is dedicated to my two teens who wouldnt want to have their names in their embarrassing moms book. I hope someday you will read this and know its a love letter to both of you.

Contents

Foreword

The challenges of being a teenager and raising a teenager are well known. Parents struggle with getting their teenagers to manage responsibilities and stay out of trouble. Teenagers find themselves buried by the many responsibilities they face while seeking social acceptance and independence. Teens often feel that whats being asked of them is beyond them. Many of the youth Ive worked with, although intellectually capable or even gifted, are neurologically challenged to succeed in a classroom environment. Differences such as ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, or dyslexia put teens and their parents at odds, often building control battles that invite youth resistance and frustrate and leave parents in a state of burnout. Even without a diagnosable condition, youth grow in different ways and at different rates, and simply lacking maturation in an area will frustrate many youth and their families.

As a family therapist who works with teenagers, Ive helped countless families end their control battles and align adolescent and parental efforts for teenagers to grow, mature, and experience happiness and success along the way. And while I have done my best to help young people develop healthy self-valuing habits and do their best, the therapeutic community, myself included, has been short on tools to offer teenagers to get them past their stuck spots. Procrastination, low motivation, low interest, poor organization, and ubiquitous connected device distraction are just some of the challenges that teenagers and their parents, as well as therapists and educators who want to help them, are facing.

For too long, these issues have been used to blame and label teenagers in ways that add to their feelings of frustration, inadequacy, and futility. Now in her groundbreaking new book, Dr. Honos-Webb utilizes the emerging knowledge of adolescent neural development and provides a road map for teens to grow and develop their executive function skills. She takes the mystery out of procrastination, fear of failure, low motivation, low self-confidence, and underperformance and brings youth the hope, optimism, and skills that lead to both immediate relief and improvement, as well as lasting growth to serve a lifetime.

Honos-Webb does not talk down to teenagers; she doesnt simply give personal advice. Rather, she brings real science and cites studies and research to help them understand the roots of their behavior as well as evidence-based ways to change. With her six super skills, she brings a powerful and engaging way for teenagers to build their executive functioning. Each of the skills improves several areas of the five executive functions: planning and organization, focus, flexible thinking, emotion regulation, and impulse control. As adolescents apply these skills, they improve their own neurological development. Just as running more will make them faster, applying Honos-Webbs super skills will build brain strength, literally creating neural pathways that make work easier.