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The Pediatric Speech Sister Show Podcast empowers speech-language pathologists and educators to build the foundation for culturally responsive practice. Join host, Melanie, a certified speech-language pathologist, certified mindset and abundance coach, and certified soul purpose coach, as she explores critical conversations around human rights, social justice, ethics, critical race theory, intercultural communication, and the nuances of linguistic diversity.
This show is your one-stop shop for expanding your cultural responsiveness. Expect a mix of solo deep dives and replays of live interviews with amazing guests. Want to see the full interviews? Head over to The Pediatric Speech Sister Network on Youtube!
Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting out, this show is for you. Let's work together to create a more inclusive and equitable world for all children.
You know, play the game or what whatever it is that you're doing. So you're doing that for kids when they're younger, and you're gradually fading it back so that when they're adults, they could do what I just described, which is now I know what I need to put in place for myself to stay accountable, in order to follow through with things. So really it's about, like, putting the support in place and fading it. And then when you're an adult, it's just it can still be there.
Melanie (Host):Welcome back to the pediatric speech to show podcast. This is the place where we build the foundation for culture responsive practice, empowering speech language pathologists and educators to serve multicultural populations with confidence. I'm your host, Melanie Evans. I am a certified speech language pathologist and certified sole purpose coach and abundance mindset coach. In each episode, we'll explore critical conversations around human rights, social justice, ethics, and so much more.
Melanie (Host):We'll unpack the nuances of linguistic diversity, delve into critical race theory, and equip you with the tools to navigate intercultural communication with ease. This show is a nice mix of solo episodes where I dive deep into specific topics topics and replays of our live interviews where we get real with amazing guests. If you want to see the full interviews, head over to the pediatric speech sister show network on YouTube. I'll put the link in the show note. Whether you're a seasoned free singers pathologist, a passionate educator, or simply someone who wants to make a difference, this show is for you.
Melanie (Host):Let's empower ourselves and each other to create a more inclusive and equitable world for our children and the people who we work with. Stay tuned.
Melanie (Host):Next to the pediatric youth leadership show, I am so excited to have our guests here. We have Doctor. Karen Dudek Brannen. She is going to be talking to us about a lot of things today, but what I'm most excited about is talking about how we can navigate executive functioning challenges from the elementary school level, all the way up to doctoral study. So if you were listening to this and if you've been listening for a while, you already know that I always say how I'm neurodivergent.
Melanie (Host):I have ADHD. And I think that actually, Karen, right before we went live, we were talking a lot about how people have really just worries even about joining the field. Mhmm. Might be introvert or we might have our own executive functioning challenges. So I'm really excited to have you on the show today to talk about that.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Melanie (Host):Yeah. So if you don't mind, I'm gonna go ahead and read your bio. If there's anything I missed, let me know, and I would love for you to clarify this for us. Okay? All right.
Melanie (Host):So Doctor. Karen Dudek Brannen is the founder and owner operator of Doctor. Karen LLC company focused on empowering therapists and educators to design interventions that support language, literacy, and executive functioning. She has a doctorate in special education and director of special education and deceptive technology credential from Illinois State University, as well as master's and bachelor's from Illinois State University in speech language pathology. She spent 14 years in the school systems and has held various roles in leadership and higher education teaching, mentoring clinicians and educators.
Melanie (Host):She is the host of the De Facto Leaders podcast, where she shares evidence based practices, her own experience in guest expert interviews on topics related to education and healthcare reform. What don't you do? I just wanna say that I've been a fan for a long time. And I always just see the content that you put out on Facebook about how we can be better therapists, especially on in the language realm. Is there anything that I missed with the bio?
Dr. Karen (Guest):No. But oh, there's I have a long list of things that I would like to be doing, and I just always have a constant state of FOMO because there's so many things. Oh, yeah. I know we're gonna get into some of those things today. So so, yeah, I'm excited to talk about it.
Melanie (Host):Yes. Yes. And I know you did tell me about some things that you're excited to get into. Yeah. That I love is that you are kind of pivoting into the education reform.
Melanie (Host):Yeah. Can you tell us about the pivot from how your business started and where it's going?
Dr. Karen (Guest):Yeah. So when I started in the schools, I was doing a lot. You know, I was working in elementary, but I ended up in that position covering all the way from pre k through high school. And so you're on the school team. You are getting all these language referrals.
Dr. Karen (Guest):And I don't know, you know, what your experience was, but I always felt like I really didn't have a clear picture of what the SLP's role should be in language and literacy. So that's what inspired me to do my doctoral work, which was really focusing on vocabulary and language. And a good way that I find that people understand with just things that are trending now is that it's kind of the language strands of the reading rope. And obviously, as SLPs, we can address some of those other things. But if you really wanna tailor what you're doing as an SLP in the school system in a way that makes sense for your role, that's really where you can focus and make a lot of impact, assuming that there's already a robust reading curriculum in play, which that's a whole other conversation.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So that's what inspired me to study language and metacognition during my doctoral work because I didn't really feel like I had a good system. And I always felt like I was guessing and not really seeing great results. So that's what inspired me to start the first suite of courses that I did when I first started my business, which was really focused on the language therapy aspect, which it really focuses on how can you, as an SLP, make an impact when you have 30 to 40 minutes a week and your students have all these language needs, and there's so many different things that you could be working on. So that's where I started. And I found that when I was working with SLPs on that language ask and I would say that I was working on executive functioning, but I was just in a very specific area of language and executive functioning.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Meaning that if you're doing language therapy effectively, you're pulling in a lot of internal dialogue and problem solving and self questioning. So the way that you do language therapy effectively is that there's a lot of executive functioning work embedded into it. But a lot of people when they came into the program, these are SLPs that are going into the schools and they're feeling like they're so overloaded, and their language therapy planning is taking so much time. And it's just this thing that's about their job that's really stressful. And a lot of them, once they got clear on that aspect, like, what do I do when I have kids in front of me?
Dr. Karen (Guest):They started to come to me with other issues. Like, okay. I get that I'm more confident in my sessions when I have students in front of me. But what about all these other things that are an issue that are impacting my students? And I always knew that I wanted to more directly address the executive functioning piece, but I was thinking more academically.
Dr. Karen (Guest):But at that point, that's when I decided to just really focus on the bigger picture things that you have to do as an SLP to be effective in your work. And I always explain it as planning for service delivery instead of planning for therapy. So not only do you need to think about what do I do when I have a group of students in front of me, it's like, how do I fit into this bigger picture? Like, what can I be doing to consult with other teachers to create training so that I can educate other people about what I do, and so that I can train people to support students when they're in their classrooms or if you're in private practice to be coaching parents? If you're talking to your administrators about programs that need to be put in place, how do I have those conversations?
Dr. Karen (Guest):So there's all those other things that we have to do in order to make things happen to make sure that our students are successful. And I see the work that we do in executive functioning just because it's so much more than what you're doing in therapy. It's obviously that, but it's much more than that. There's so many other pieces that need to be in place. And so that's why I started focusing more on leadership, and I see executive functioning as this leadership is this big umbrella and all these things that you can do in your job.
Dr. Karen (Guest):But I see executive functioning as a thing that is initiative an initiative underneath the how you think about yourself as a leader, as an SLP. And it's one of those tools that you can use to really be kind of emerge as a leader on your team and be seen as somebody who is more than just the person that goes in the closet and works on ours.
Melanie (Host):Yeah. I really thank you for even saying that and how executive functioning type into even if I'm hearing you correctly, type our confidence as leaders. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. I normally ask my guests this at the very beginning, but I really just jumped right into for your business.
Melanie (Host):Can you tell us what your, why is what your big picture is?
Dr. Karen (Guest):Oh, there's so many. If I could even go back to my experience when I was growing up, I was a very shy person. I would say I definitely had a lot of social anxiety. And when I was in 1st grade, my parents had the conversation of should she be held back because I needed some extra help in reading. And so I would say that I had a version of what would have been RTI.
Dr. Karen (Guest):It wasn't called that back then, but I was fortunate enough to have the help that I needed so that I was able to catch up. And I saw what my parents did for me and the just the whole setup of what happened for me personally that helped me to be successful. So I think about that a lot when I think about what we can do for our students, because it was, there was an academic piece. My parents did a lot for me as far as emphasizing reading and literacy and making sure that I got the academic support that I needed and making sure that they were spending time focusing on homework, but it wasn't just that. There are other things that my parents did for me such as just making sure that I was in a lot of different activities, not helicoptering to be in a situation where I was able to have that because when you think about the language and academics and then the executive functioning, it's it really is this you have to have the right blend of focus on the academic work, but also focus on real life skills.
Dr. Karen (Guest):And so it's so hard to get those pieces in place. And so I think it is really important for us as clinicians to figure out how we fit into that and do some work in making sure that those pieces are in place because that's gonna look different for every student depending on what resources they have available to them and what's going on in their community, and it it really does look different for all students. And so I think that's my why and why I started off with very micro level, here's what we do in therapy. Because I do think as a clinician, you do need to start there and figure out what your own protocols are and get confident there. And that's when you can get to the point where you have the bandwidth to start thinking bigger picture.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Like, okay. I feel good about what I'm doing in therapy, but now I need to figure out how I can coach other people to do what I do. Because with executive functioning, if you're just focusing on stuff that you're doing in therapy, it's not going students aren't gonna have generalization. And with that specifically, being able to make sure that students have the right support they need to make sure that we have the right, help in their classroom when they're experiencing something challenging that requires multiple steps, and there needs to be the right scaffolding in the environment to to make sure that they have support, but also the right experiences to build those skills. And that is not it's not an easy puzzle to solve, but I think we at least need to understand what the ideal scenario could look like and then figure out how to make it feasible to all the different students we're serving because it's so dependent on how things work in your building.
Dr. Karen (Guest):If you're working in a school, what's the community like? What kind of resources do you have available to you on your team, on in your community? What's the family life like for your students. So I think we do need to start off with what are the skills we need to build and what experiences do kids need to have in order to get there, and then we can start to figure out the logistics of how it applies to our situation. So I would say that's my why because it just seems like every time I solve one issue, then there's these other ones that pop up.
Dr. Karen (Guest):It just layers of the onion. And I don't think I ever will have it completely figured out, but I'm certainly trying to keep pulling back all the layers.
Melanie (Host):There's there's infinite layers, but I'm actually more thankful that you're part of the piece of the puzzle. Yeah. Liam, and you're an excellent teacher. I've already learned so much from it. From 15 minutes, they'll be good on this call.
Melanie (Host):Yeah. You mentioned scaffolding and that's something that, a lot of people did actually wanna know about. Do you have any, first of all, how would you explain scaffolding and 2 part question. So how would you explain scaffolding and add any just powerful strategies that we can implement that in the school setting?
Dr. Karen (Guest):Oh, that is that is a big question. So scaffolding, you think about scaffolding of a building, it's the structure. So it there's a number of ways you can think about it. There is modeling and help and support, So you're actually creating that structure. So there's actual assistance that you could be giving or even just setting up situations for students.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Because as adults, we're going through our day to day lives, we're managing our schedules, and we're creating all of those things. So as adults, when we're supporting kids, we don't wanna give them too much support. There needs to be some freedom in there, but we're thinking about setting up those experiences for kids. So and, obviously, that scaffolding is going to fade away as they get older. So I think about it like if we think about executive functioning specifically, there's the time blocks in the day.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So, you know, here's if, in the school day, it's like, here's math, here's reading, here's, you know, recess. Or if you're thinking about it at home, it's like, you know, here's the time that we're getting ready for school. Here's our unstructured playtime. Here's when we're doing homework. So there's those time blocks during the day.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So part of it is just set setting things up. So that's one way you can think about scaffolding, and then you can think about how the structure you provide on the task within those time blocks. So, like, during your language arts period, you might be working on a writing assignment. There's structure within that time period. And within those little time blocks, you might be doing specific activities where you've got certain steps and goals that you need to achieve during those activities.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So the scaffolding could look like providing modeling, providing strategic prompting, again, doing things like the explicit instruction framework, like doing I do, we do, you do. So those there's a lot of different ways you you can do it. When we think about it within the therapy setting, there's queuing hierarchies. But then another thing that you can do is with scaffolding is there's the assistance within the activities, but then there's also presenting situations that are gradually increasing in difficulty. So that's another way you can do it.
Dr. Karen (Guest):It's you can give them the hard task and provide support, or you can give them an easy task and then you can make it a little bit harder. So there's a lot of different ways, but basically it's it's support. And I mean, yeah, there's it's very situation specific. But with executive functioning, I can if we wanna get into a definition and, you know, what people are doing and just some examples of things people can think about when they're scaffolding, we could do that. But, yeah, I hope that answered your question because there's a lot to it.
Dr. Karen (Guest):I'd say to kinda wrap up all of that that I just gave you, when we think about the schedule aspect of it and the the the structure that we create for kids. We can think about big time blocks during the day, and then we can think about what happened within those time blocks. So that's one way we can think about it as far as just making sure that we are creating the right experiences for kids. I would that that a lot of times in therapy, we're focused on the the one that's, you know, within activities. But when we think about coaching and supporting other people, we can kind of create guidance in helping with those other things.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Because a lot of times those are happening outside of the therapy session.
Melanie (Host):Mhmm. And thank you. And who the I guess the archetype that's coming to my head is little Johnny who is really just just busy, just a busy kid. He fast a little bit all over the place and is really discouraged with the schoolwork because frankly, he just can't fill enough to really even focus on it. He has a bad reputation in school.
Melanie (Host):So speech therapy is like his place of refuge. What would be in for us to coat the teacher and even ourselves to give him those scaffolding strategy?
Dr. Karen (Guest):So I think I go big picture before I go specific. So if you are, like, let's say that you're an SLP and you're kind of like, I I need to create a better system for both language and executive functioning. What I recommend is that, you know, you you are going to work with teachers just, you know, as situations come up. And obviously, with that type of situation, you wanna make sure that you're setting clear boundaries and expectations for the student, that you're giving sensory breaks, you know, that you're using visuals. So those are kind of some quick go to things that I could mention, but what you wanna do when you're thinking long term, if you wanna think about things that are going to really make an impact in helping you train other people is that you have to think about your own personal systems and skills as a clinician and do some of that work so that you can put yourself in a situation where you can do all the things you need to do to actually support the teachers.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So a way to think about that is with language, I do recommend people get clear on the language therapy aspect first because nobody else is doing that in the schools like we are, but a lot of other people can be effective in supporting executive functioning just because it affects things all across the day. So it does make sense. Get your language therapy protocol down first, and then you can start to pull in some work on executive functioning because they are different. With language, you're thinking about the word and the sentence level. And when we're thinking about executive functioning and self regulation and attending, the reason that we're able to attend or pull our attention back to something is because we are looking around and paying attention and asking ourselves questions about what should I be doing?
Dr. Karen (Guest):What are the steps I need to take? And you're visualizing that in your head. You're noticing when you're off track. So it's not necessarily about being hyper. It's more about being able to regulate, pull yourself back, with with attention issues.
Dr. Karen (Guest):It's not that we wanna sit and force ourselves to pay attention longer. I mean, yes. Eventually, you can get to the point where you're able to do that if you work up tolerance for certain activities. But the important part is is that noticing when you're off track and coming back. So you have to do a lot of self talk and use a lot of language to plan in your head in addition to visualizing it and pairing the the words to language.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So if you don't have strong language skills, especially for kids who have that DLD profile, is going to be very hard for you to benefit from some of that high level comprehension work that we do in reading, which also requires a lot of executive functioning. So you do need to have good language skills at the word and sentence level. You need to have complex syntax. You need to have the retrieval skills to be able to, you know, like, generate a lot of ideas. Some of the things that we even do in aphasia therapy where it's a lot of confrontation naming and coming up with ideas.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Being able to come up with ideas and options for doing things is part of executive functioning, because really it's about goal directed behavior and being able to engage in the things that allow us to to persevere and through things. So, let me come back to where I was. I was talking about language therapy, and then I was talking about after we do that, we can start to think about what we are doing in our therapy to work on executive functioning and kind of get clear on what are some things if I have a student in front of me and they're completing a writing assignment or they are, working on something that has multiple steps. There are tool you can use to work on that specifically. There are ways that you can, model strategic planning, help your students to be able to sense time more effectively and pay attention to how long things will take or think about how long things will take and estimate what the steps will look like to encourage them to visualize and pair that with language.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So it is kind of hard to do that work if students don't have the language skills. So I recommend doing pulling that in after you get clear on what your language therapy protocol is, both for sometimes for your students, but just for you professionally, you can't figure all of it out at once. You kinda have to do it in layers. So I say language therapy protocol, executive functioning protocol. And then when you're clear on your personal operating procedure, like, what am I doing?
Dr. Karen (Guest):Then you can start to get to the point where you're actually writing that down and thinking about how do I transfer this information from my brain to other people's brain. So I recommend getting clear on that first, just because you're you're a human and you you have to scaffold your own learning just like you would for your students. And it's not realistic for you to just, you know, walk in in a month later and have the whole building trained. So I stay, like, focus on those things and, of course, try to help teachers problem solve and troubleshoot for those unique cases that come up while you're doing that. But think about, you know, you have your kinda main initiative that you're working on one at a time.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So that's that's a way that is feasible for you to do it as a professional is skill when you're working with student. And, you know, it's so important that we do that really for both of those areas.
Melanie (Host):Mhmm. And one thing that just stuck out is doing it one at a time, if you're giving us those steps because I'm just thinking about speech pathologists like myself with some executive functioning problems, and it's easy to get overwhelmed and bogged down by all the tasks at hand and all of those micro steps that are very important, especially when it comes to the strategy of all of this. And so that does lead me to my next question. I'm thinking about the people who want to even enter the field, the graduate students who are feeling that imposter syndrome and even the CFs and seasoned FLPs who continue to feel that imposter syndrome, because maybe they're introvert. Mhmm.
Melanie (Host):They themselves have poor executive functioning skills. So how are we gonna teach people executive functioning skills if we struggle with that every single day? Though, what could you tell us? 1, to uplift us, also maybe even any strategies that you have?
Dr. Karen (Guest):Yeah. So okay, I will talk about the mindset stuff and then I can talk about the strategies. So with introversion and social anxiety, like, I ex experienced that. I've experienced it my whole life. You know, that when I was talking about what my mom did for me, she's an extrovert.
Dr. Karen (Guest):And one of the things that she really encouraged me to do was have a lot of social interactions so that I could move through that and get comfortable. And so here's where you don't want to if you're an introverted person, you don't wanna pretend like you're a bubbly extrovert and force yourself to be in all these situations that are so overstimulating 247. Obviously, you don't wanna do that. You wanna be aware of what you need to recharge, how you like to connect with people, but you also don't wanna get trapped in this way of thinking of I can't do that because, like, I think of it as this is something that you know about yourself to help you prepare and be successful. It's not something that needs to prevent you from doing things.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Your way of being successful with those things might look different for other people because you might have different support needs, but you don't have to let it prevent you from doing things. With the introversion aspect of things, there's executives dysfunction and anxiety go hand in hand. Because if you want to be successful in a situation, you have to think back to a situation and have this mental picture in your head of, like, what was another situation that similar to this other thing that I'm going to do to that is that might be similar, but also might be have some differences. You can use past experiences using episodic memory to prepare you for the future, and then you can use your future thinking skills to think, okay. That was something in the past.
Dr. Karen (Guest):What can I use from what I know to plan for the future? And then you can visualize what it's going to look like being successful in the future situation. And then you can also think about the steps and make your to do list using language. Again, all of those things that I just mentioned are executive functioning skills that can help you plan. And if you go into a situation and you feel unprepared because you haven't done that or you don't necessarily haven't built up those skills yet to be able to do that, it's gonna make you even more nervous.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Feeling a little bit nervous, a little bit of nerves and stress is normal, but if you have those tools to prepare yourself a little bit better, it it does help you to make it more manageable. And then over time, you do the thing and then you learn from it, you can self reflect and think about what am I gonna do different next time, which again is also part of executive functioning. I would encourage people to use those skills and think about how can I build my own executive functioning to manage those feelings because the more experiences you have, it's not that I still experience impostor syndrome all the time, but I have learned from the past that there are ways that I can prepare and strategically keep expanding what my comfort zone is? So I would say that, you know, there's a chicken chicken or egg debate with executive functioning and anxiety. It's like, am I experiencing executive dysfunction because I'm so anxious?
Dr. Karen (Guest):Or am I anxious because I don't feel prepared? Now whether in the chicken or the egg, you can still intervene in one place and have it affect the cycle in some way. So I would say for introverts, like, I I know that I really benefit from scaffolding, and I like situations that are structured. Like, an IEP meeting where it's like, here's everybody's job is way less stressful to me than going to the staff party where there's unstructured mingling.
Melanie (Host):That is way more nerve wracking because it's
Dr. Karen (Guest):less structured. But I can kind of ask myself, alright, is there a way I can prepare and advance? Is there a way I could try to create scaffolding for myself? So I think just just asking yourself that question of what scaffolding do I need? Again scaffolding is support, and we talk about support needs.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So that's one way you can think about it is using that, using if you, you know, have 88 d or something else, you're introverted, whatever it is. I think executive functioning can be a really powerful proactive tool to help manage that anxiety regardless of what's what's the cause and what's the symptom kinda so that's how I think about it, and I think about that with kids as well, especially kids who are with there's kids who have experienced trauma, and then there's kids who are experiencing executive dysfunction. And everybody's experienced trauma to some extent, but there it impacts kid differently. But regardless of what happened, just providing that scaffolding and structure and that feeling of safety. I mean, that is part of making people feel safe is knowing that there's structure.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So Mhmm. People can be a really important proactive tool for both the adults and the kids.
Melanie (Host):Yeah. And I I liked how you mentioned I mean, there's a few things you said that I really wanna touch on, but we really Okay. Ours. But Yeah. Think about, first of all, the structure and adding structure to the therapy room.
Melanie (Host):Yeah. A lot of speech pathologists I mean, just personality types. Right? Yeah. I'm more so type b.
Melanie (Host):Like, let's just mhmm. Here are 2 things. I'll tell you the 2 things you're gonna do today, and let's have fun. But and I'm just I'm noticing that as I'm supervising graduate student. Yeah.
Melanie (Host):Hey, little Johnny really needs the structure. He's giving you all this therapy attitude. He's talking back. He's getting out of his chair, all those things because he needs the structure. Maybe well, one thing that I've just learned throughout life, even outside of speech pathology, is kids need that to feel safe.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Exactly. Yeah.
Melanie (Host):Yeah. Which is really a psychological a psychology conversation that I wanna do John. But yeah. So, so thank you for that. I'm thinking about the SLP to be the flip, the speech for the columnist who's gearing up to go to ASHA in November.
Dr. Karen (Guest):He
Melanie (Host):was also an introvert with executive functioning difficulties. He's about to step into very unstructured setting. What is, can you give them as far as preparing?
Dr. Karen (Guest):Well, that's a good question. So I think, anyway, there's there's a couple ways you can prepare yourself for a situation when you're nervous. So you can prepare yourself in your head. You can imagine what it's going to be like. You know, athletes use visualization all the time.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So there's one way I say, you know, for you know, when I explain it to kids, I say you're having a dress rehearsal in your head. So that's one tool that you can use. You can see whatever that situation is that you're nervous about. Is there a way you can create a mini version of that before you get to the big thing? I mean, a simple way that people do this is, you know, you're giving a presentation, you give it in front of your mirror before you go in front of the audience, or maybe you give it in front of a smaller audience to rehearse before you go into the in front of the big audience.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So with something like ASHA, I would say, are there ways that you can do some networking events in your community? They're only a couple hours long, so they're not super overwhelming. So you can just get used to the, like, let me walk into a room and figure out who I'm I'm going to talk to and what's my game plan. And another thing that is can be challenging, it's really challenging for me as well, but I found it to be extremely helpful is that, obviously, if you've got something coming up specifically, you can just try to look for opportunities to prepare that for that specific event just before it. But just making it a regular practice to do some of those things that you know are a little bit uncomfortable.
Dr. Karen (Guest):It's so you're not, like, growing to the grocery store when you're hungry. So for example, something that I have been doing this past year that I regret not doing sooner in my business is just focusing a specific part of the day on networking. So some of the things that I do online is that I send 10 connection requests a day to people that are in fields related to mine and speech pathology, special education, all the different places that are relevant to what I do. And for a while, what I was doing was I was sending the connection request. And then for some of those people, I was just asking to get on a call with them.
Dr. Karen (Guest):That's actually a strategy that you can use for job search networking, but there's a lot of ways you can do it. So I was getting on calls with strangers, just making it a regular practice. So doing something like that saying, I'm gonna connect with this many new people within this time frame. And then also just making a habit of just going to those live networking events because it's like you won't want to do it at the time, but if you make it part of your practice, makes it so much easier when you do have something like that. And things that used to make me so nervous, it's not that they don't make me nervous at all, but it's much more manageable.
Dr. Karen (Guest):And the range of things that I'm able to do without feeling like I'm in total panic mode has expanded. So like I said, you don't have to be an extrovert. You don't have to be the life of the party going to things every night, but you can carve out some time to focus on that. And then you can also make sure that you carve out the the recharging time for things that, you know, are restorative to you as well. So there's the preparing for the thing, but then there's also the habits that kinda help you to make sure that when something does come up, you've prepared for it.
Melanie (Host):So if I'm hearing you correctly, would you say it's pretty much like training yourself how to ride a bike? Like you want
Dr. Karen (Guest):it Yeah.
Melanie (Host):Riding a bike, you want it to be or you wanna know the strategies to get through the discomfort as and
Dr. Karen (Guest):Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, and that's what I'm doing for myself is, like, I would say I'm it's kinda like what my mom was doing for me when I was younger, but now I'm an adult and I have to figure out how to keep myself disciplined.
Melanie (Host):Mhmm. If you're in a certain way to do
Dr. Karen (Guest):it, you can hire a coach, you can join a an accountability group. There's lots of different ways. And I think that sometimes when people think about internal and external motivation, which is a little bit unclear about, you know, all of that. I know there's it's kinda controversial about, like, should we be giving external rewards and things like that? And I think what really we wanna think about with, like, sticker charts and things like that is that, you know, number 1, a lot of times sticker charts don't work well for kids with executive functioning issues because it's so abstract that it doesn't really mean anything for them.
Dr. Karen (Guest):But the other thing is that if something is just sort of externally imposed on someone, you're doing the executive functioning for someone. And so it's not bad to have consequences because in life, you have consequences, but it's more about modeling the self talk of what's going on while you're doing it. You know, like, in as adults, we have to do our work before we can do things that we enjoy. So, yeah, you can create structure like that for kids and talk them through it and model the self talk of, like, oh, I should we should really, you know, get this work done because then we're gonna have more time later to, you know, play the game or what whatever it is that you're doing. So you're doing that for kids when they're younger, and you're gradually fading it back so that when they're adults, they could do what I just described, which is now I know what I need to put in place for myself to stay accountable, in order to follow through with things.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So really it's about, like, putting the support in place and fading it. And then when you're an adult, it's just it can still be there. It's just that you're the one that's orchestrating it and putting it in place yourself. It's not that, you know, external reinforcement is bad and and, you know, internal is better. Like, the way that we develop internal motivation is that we are able to manipulate our environment and, you know, create this scenario where we can talk ourselves through things, but also put ourselves in situations where we know we're going to be successful.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Like, gosh. Like, how some people know that they're not gonna be motivated to work out unless they schedule it with a friend.
Melanie (Host):Right.
Dr. Karen (Guest):That's fine. That's your support need. So just, you know, find a way to make that happen. And I think for kids, it's really important that we are explicit about teaching that. And for adults, you just have to think about what to put in place to make sure that you follow through with things.
Melanie (Host):Mhmm. And it's great to start early. I'm thinking about from pre k up even to high school, because there are so many times, even now at this point in my life where I had to learn the hard way. And so I use my calendar like crazy, my calendar, like I'm staying right now, or even the small things like, okay, this is my break or whatever, because executive functioning skills, I really have to get that down pack. Otherwise, things would just fall through.
Melanie (Host):And it's you really can't do that when you have a caseload size of like 60.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Yeah. That's cool.
Melanie (Host):Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Karen, I'm so sad, but this is our time. There's a few things I wanna ask you, though.
Melanie (Host):Mhmm. First of all, I know that you have some freebies for us. Can you tell us about that?
Dr. Karen (Guest):Yes. And so I will share a couple things because I know that we talked about executive functioning. We didn't get super specific about defining it, and I know that most people listening have at least some idea of what it is, but I go into way more specifics and some of my other content as well as just what people are missing when it comes to providing the support just because maybe they don't have the resources or the information or whatever it is. So the first thing I wanted to share is I do have a free training where I do talk about executive functioning and what's neurodiversity affirming and how we can support kids and how that could look in the school systems as well as some of the issues with the current things that are being done. So to sign up for that training, you can go to doctor karen dudekbrannon.com backslashefleadership.
Dr. Karen (Guest):And that does provide information about one of my programs, the school of clinical leadership, which takes it a step further for people who are interested in learning more. So I do mention a paid program at the end, but I found people find it useful regardless of whether or not they decide to take the next step. And then the other thing is that I do have a free guide. It's an executive functioning implementation guide for the schools. And I do talk about some of those same things, but I share what it can look like as far as what everyone's role is because that's something that really needs to be clear if you are going to think about not just what's going on in your therapy session, but how you can be a leader on your team.
Dr. Karen (Guest):So to sign up for that guide, you can go to doctorkarendudekbrandondot com backslash eschools. And then the final thing I could share is the Defaq Leaders podcast. So I do talk about executive functioning on that show, but I talk about lots of other things. I initially started with the name are they 18 yet in the parenting category, and then I rebranded last year to de facto leaders because I had noticed that the show had taken on a new direction with just the content I was doing, the things that people were asking me to talk about. So I rebranded to make it more in the leadership and education and healthcare reform space.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Right. You talk about some things that are more specific, what you can focus on in therapy, but I have this past year really focused on bigger picture things. So talk talking to different therapists and leaders and principals, people who are in the ed tech space or using their clinical skills, their educational skills to support students in different ways and kinda thinking about some of those bigger picture things that we need to do to be able to support students beyond just what we're doing in therapy. So to learn more about that, you can go to defacto leaders.com and also my website, doctor karen.dudockbrannon.com.
Melanie (Host):Wow. Thank you so much, doctor Karen. I'll be sure to put those in the show notes. So one final question. What are some things that you would like done in the field?
Melanie (Host):What changes would you like to see moving forward?
Dr. Karen (Guest):Oh, gosh. So if I had a magic wand and a blank check, I would say that, you know, it would be great if SLPs or someone, you know, could be doing language therapy and executive functioning therapy in the school setting. But I don't you know, just based on the way things are set up, I don't, you know, I don't think that's going to be realistic. So what I do hope that people do is that, yes, we should really focus on building our clinical skills, but we also need to think about these other things. We also need to think about building our leadership skills because when we think about advocacy, it is really important for people who are directly working with students who are seeing how all these policies are impacting students.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Say something to the people who are making those decisions and learn to develop those relationships with the other people on their team or even the people that they are reporting to that are the leaders. There's this concept of leading up where it's, yes, those are people in the leadership position that are making the top down decisions, but you can also lead from the bottom up. And because information that they don't about how they're supporting their students. So that is what I hope is that people start to learn how to do that, more effectively and start to focus on that in addition to the clinical skills because they're both really important, but they need to support each other.
Melanie (Host):Well, that's a whole other episode and the other film. I know.
Dr. Karen (Guest):And I'm noticing your your comments, the doctor karenspeak.com back slash language is actually my language therapy training where I talk about my language therapy protocol. But we did talk about that today, so that is something that I think a lot of people would find useful as well. And then the EF leadership is the implementation guy. Oh, wait. No.
Dr. Karen (Guest):That's my executive functioning training. I have so many pieces of content all running together for me.
Melanie (Host):Please send me the executive functioning training. And then you also did send me your
Dr. Karen (Guest):Oh, gosh. That is that would be I haven't gone into that one in as much detail as I did for a long time, but I would love to I would love to talk metalinguistic awareness and all of vocabulary and all the things.
Melanie (Host):But yeah. Yeah. We we will have to schedule another chat. Well, doctor Karen, thank you for coming on the show tonight for educating the audience today. I feel like you brought, I feel like you really did bless a lot of people.
Melanie (Host):I'm really just thinking about the peaches listening to the Mhmm. Meet with conversation, not just for their clinical skill, but also for themselves. Mhmm. Well, thank you so much for sharing your voice and your wisdom with us tonight.
Dr. Karen (Guest):Well, thank you so much for giving the opportunity to do it.
Melanie (Host):Yeah. Well, everybody, thank you so much for coming. Thank you, doctor Karen.