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In 2005, licensed clinical psychologist Anna Levy Warren launched Tutors, a New York City-based company focused on helping children develop and enhance executive functioning skills.
It wasn’t long before parents were hiring her to guide their kids in time management, organization, focus, and self-regulation, and wondering how she could help them, too. It was immediately clear to Levi Warren that something bigger was at play.
These clients were not unlucky, lost adults without jobs or guidance. These people were lawyers, CEOs, and CEOs. However, beneath the highly polished veneer of achievement, they were struggling to manage the constant barrage of calendar invites, text messages, and ever-increasing tasks in their highly demanding professional and personal lives.
Moreover, Levi-Warren says, these parents, buried under the weight of demands for attention and concentration, were filled with increasing anxiety. In 2017, Levy Warren partnered with colleague Chelsea Saunders, whose doctoral research focused on transformative change and prosperity, to co-found a new kind of tutoring service – an adult-focused service. While the duo started with about 30 clients in their first year, Levi-Warren says, by 2018, they had outgrown their ability to meet demand and began adding other doctors to their practice.
Through Steel Advising, at any given time, Levy-Warren, Saunders and their team help approximately 75 to 100 adults hone their executive career skills and build successful strategies in a wide range of roles, from first-year law firm partners to C-suite executives Executive. . “Many adults are being asked to perform and process information more quickly,” Levy-Warren says. “They have to manage more motivation and maintain more focus, but without the skills. We didn’t learn this in school.”
Executive function is the brain’s air traffic control center, where we manage our time, plan and execute projects, juggle multiple, simultaneous tasks, and regulate emotions associated with duties that require motivation and determination. As our world has become more complex than ever in how we receive, process and organize information, our attention spans have shrunk. Experts in this field, such as Levi Warren, stress that we as a society need to build a new framework to help adults develop executive function.
Adam Zamora is Senior Director at the Child Mind Institute’s Center for ADHD and Conduct Disorders, and has separately run special education consultations for 18 years focusing on exactly this skill set. When explaining the challenges he sees in his work with executive function, Zamora points to an episode of the popular children’s program bluish.
In the film, one of the characters gets lost on his way to pick up his son from school, after his phone malfunctions, cutting off the navigation app midway. Immediately, panic sets in and the father begins wondering out loud how he got to school. When the child in the back seat asks his father why he doesn’t know the way, the father replies: “I just turned on the sat nav and drove out of the area.” The episode follows where this father is almost unable to figure out how to find the school, and is completely confused by the technical glitch.
“This really represents what’s going on,” Zamora says, noting how this episode illustrates how technology has become an increasingly integral part of the way we live, work, and communicate with each other. This is also part of the reason why our executive functioning skills are being challenged as a society.
For some, gaps in executive function appear as we gain greater knowledge of neurological difference and have more regular diagnoses of anxiety, learning disorders, or ADHD, Zamora says. In many other cases, he says, it’s just a matter of lack of practice. “We’re all on autopilot, following what our phones tell us to do,” he says. “It’s about knowing how to visualize the steps needed to get from point A to point B,” Zamora says. While the bluish While the signal may seem like an absurd — and perhaps fundamental — metaphor for technology’s takeover of the more mundane aspects of daily life, Zamora says, it’s also very relatable, timely and unsettling.
In her book Attention span: A groundbreaking method for restoring happiness, balance, and productivityIn general, our attention span decreases, as we spend more time on screens and need to switch more regularly between conflicting tasks and their associated mental patterns, says Gloria Mark. Mark’s research at UC Irvine shows that the average attention span of 75 seconds in 2012 dropped in 2016 to an average of 47 seconds.
In Levi Warren’s work, meeting the remaining needs in the wake of these technological and cultural shifts comes in the form of $300-an-hour one-on-one coaching, as well as company-wide training sessions to help organizations rub the frying pan. They are often overlooked in the interview and training process. A private session with Levy-Warren, Saunders or one of their colleagues focuses heavily on individual needs, whether time management, organization or focus strategies, as well as uniquely designed action plans to build skills and overall effectiveness. “We have many different ways to communicate,” Levi Warren says. “Calendar calls and texting. ‘Change sets’ is what we say in cognitive language. We don’t have a way to help people deal with the material and process it differently. It was a legal cushion. Now, there are many steps and a lot of guidance on how to organize your mind.”
Closing the gap in these skills isn’t as simple as creating a color-coded calendar, creating an organizational system, or a motivating morning routine. Levy-Warren says the solution is more subtle and depends on the brain. “It’s the intersection between executive function and mental health,” she says. “It’s a lot about how you feel about yourself. Help me do the things I need to do, and remember that when you ask me to use braces, I’m anxious. It’s about holding space for all those complex intersections. . . . It’s a real misunderstanding of how things work. “Minds.”
How this works for customers at Steel starts with a level of curiosity about their behaviors. This is where the “edge of growth” is, Levy-Warren says. Once she and Saunders felt that advantage, they could push it, understanding any cognitive delays that might hinder progress. For example, says Levi Warren, a 30-year-old could do it Being 40 years old in the way she writes, but more like a 13-year-old in the way she manages her project deadlines at work.
All of these factors play a role in how an individual feels about themselves, and how they relate to their bosses and co-workers. Addressing the big picture—everything from sleep, nutrition, mental wellness, and emotional health—is about building actionable strategies to keep people accountable, as well as the organizations they work for, consistently on top of the cognitive and emotional burdens related to their employees.
Behavioral scientist Jeffrey Sanchez Birx is a professor at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business, and says the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated what was already brewing beneath the surface. Now, with remote work and hybrid schedules, the topic has become incredibly urgent for organizations recruiting and developing the next group of leaders. “There is a really urgent need to increase empathy and emotional intelligence across organizations,” says Sanchez-Birks. “We need it big time. . . . I think there’s an illusion that there used to be neurological homogeneity, and now there’s difference. We’ve been able to ignore it and now we can’t.” Instead, he says, organizations need to help people recognize The different ways our brains work and finding ways to incorporate those diverse methods into everyday life and the way we work.
It’s no surprise, then, that companies like Steel are receiving more orders than ever, receiving referrals from therapists whose patients need extra support, as well as companies hoping to meet employees where they are, and set them up for success within the organization. “There’s not a lot of money you can spend on this problem,” says Levy-Warren. “If you look at neurodiversity, you have to reinforce everyone’s scaffolding. There are different types of entry points, but how you do that is by understanding the fact that this is something everyone needs when they enter a new workplace.
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