There is a vast literature on the power of visualizing the accomplishment of goals. The idea is that the brain can’t really differentiate between an actual experience and an experience that is vividly imagined (that’s why we get scared watching scary movies, even though we know they aren’t true). In a fascinating study conducted by the renowned neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a group of people was asked to play piano scales every day for a set period of time. Another group was asked to think about playing those scales without actually playing them. Researchers found that the participants in both groups showed growth in the area of the brain that corresponds with finger movements.2 The implications of this, and similar research, for athletes and rehab patients are enormous.
Once kids get a bit older, an effective method of goal setting is called mental contrasting. Developed by NYU’s Gabriele Oettingen, mental contrasting is designed to help students set realistic goals.3 It’s a way of protecting overreachers from disappointments by charting a path to what can actually be accomplished. And it’s a way of shoring up Debbie Downers whose first response to any goal is to come up with a dozen reasons why it will never happen.
The first step of mental contrasting is to ask your child to set her own goal. It should not be a group goal, and it should not be influenced by you. The goal has to be something that is both feasible and challenging.
Step two is to encourage your child to write down several words about the hoped-for outcome. They should not edit themselves during this process, but rather should feel free to write whatever comes to mind.
Step three is to ask your child to consider inner obstacles to that goal. Note that you are not asking them to think about external barriers. Again, ask them to take pen to paper and to write down those obstacles, considering how they will be affected and what they can do when they surface.
Sometimes Ned’s students set their ACT or SAT scores as their goal. The words they write down for step two might be “calm,” “confident,” or “focused.” When they consider inner obstacles, they write “rushed,” “stressed,” and “confused.” They are mentally preparing themselves for the test, and imagining how that stress or confusion will feel. Then they imagine themselves tackling these obstacles, or at least enduring them. What self-talk will they use? How will they flip to a test-taking shortcut to remind themselves that, unlike in school, unanswered questions may be better than allocating time for every question? What is their plan for coping when they face an obstacle? The knowledge that they have anticipated potential setbacks and allowed for contingencies will help them cope more effectively.
A student of Ned’s who struggled socially and was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder after switching schools worked on role playing with a counselor and practiced what she would do or say in social situations that made her uncomfortable. She did this over and over again. Though she rarely used the lines she practiced, knowing that she knew what to say made her less anxious. Social encounters no longer felt quite so unpredictable.
We are also big believers in setting “personal best” goals in the classroom, the music room, on the playing field—or in the backyard. It’s not that competition is bad per se—your kid needs to learn how to go for it when she really wants to win—but it is far more effective when the person she is competing with is herself. She may not have control over how much someone else practices or how good they are, but she has total control over how much she practices to beat her prior time or score. Seeing yourself get better at something is enormously rewarding. The truth is, you’re never too young to set a personal best goal, or too old.
Ned frequently tells the story of his father-in-law, an expert skier, who decided in later life that he wanted to take up snowboarding. Ned decided to try it, too. As anyone who has spent a day as a novice snowboarder knows, it’s deeply discouraging. You fall a lot. You get wet and pretty bruised up, especially if you’re over twenty. But then after day one, you start to spend more time upright than on your duff. On day two, you are nearly mediocre. By the end of the week, you may make it off the beginner slopes and start to get the sense that this may really work out. That feeling of learning a new skill and getting better at it fuels your inner drive.
The world of testing is fertile ground for personal best goals. One of Ned’s students, Allison, came to see him to prepare for the ACT. Her parents said they wanted her to get a 34 (out of 36). He asked what she was aiming for, and she said she wanted to get a 31 or a 32. Then Ned learned her current score was a 24. It didn’t make sense to set her goal at 34; that was her parents’ goal, not hers. But it also didn’t make sense to set her goal at 32, which was an unrealistic leap from where she was. They talked about it and determined that a reasonable goal for Allison was to get a 28. It was realistic but also challenging. Then, if she could get to 28, she could “lock in,” the way rock climbers do. (Most climb a stretch, lock in to the next clip, climb, lock in, and so on. If they fall, it’s 10 feet, not 200.) From the comfortable place of a 28, Allison could feel proud of the progress she’d made. Then she could look ahead and aim to hit that 31 or 32, a perfectly appropriate goal.
Whether it’s in the testing room, on the slopes, or in the backyard where your child is trying to learn to do a cartwheel, these methods of setting goals for her from A to B fuel her internal motivation and her sense of control.
Exercise #2: Pay attention to what your brain is telling you.
In our experience, when a child understands what is going on in his mind, he has more control of himself and will tend to behave and perform better. Knowing even a little bit about the brain—and about what may be unique about his particular brain—can restore his sense of control.
Even kindergartners are capable of understanding the basic functions of the brain. Dan Siegel, child psychiatrist and author of The Whole-Brain Child, uses a visual of four fingers closed over the thumb to teach kids what happens inside their brains when they get stressed. The thumb represents big emotions—things like fear, worry, and anger (this is the amygdala, though that’s a big word for kindergartners). The fingers over it represent the parts of their brain that help them to think clearly and solve problems (the prefrontal cortex). When their worry or anger gets too big, the fingers lose their grip on the thumb, which Siegel describes as “flipping your lid.” When kids feel themselves beginning to flip their lid, he encourages them to consider what they need to do to calm down—like going to a designated cool-down spot—so that their fist is closed again.
One of the more challenging kids Bill tested was a nine-year-old boy, Ben, whose parents were concerned about his distractibility, his anxiety and perfectionism, and his very low frustration tolerance. They were desperate to find out how they could help Ben be less reactive and difficult at home and in school.
Within the first few minutes of testing, Bill saw what they meant. While Ben was bright and articulate, he peppered his answers with sentences like, “I’m not going to be very good at this,” “I can’t do anything fast,” and “You’re gonna give me a bad grade, aren’t you?” When he got to the first hard item, he slammed his fist on the desk and said, “I can’t do this.” If Bill pressed him, Ben became so anxious and upset that he seemed to be on the verge of either crying or exploding.
This conversation followed:
BILL: I can see that this is really stressful for you. Can I tell you what I think is happening?
BEN: Okay.
BILL: I think if a good idea doesn’t pop into your head right away you start to feel stupid.
BEN: I do. It’s so frustrating.
BILL: I bet you know that you aren’t stupid. I mean, you can probably tell that your vocabulary is a lot better than most kids’.
BEN: I do have a good vocabulary. I know words that none of the kids in my grade know.
BILL: The challenge for you is that there’s a part of your brain, it’s called the amygdala, that’s working too hard to keep you s
afe. The amygdala is a “threat detector.” It’s on the lookout for anything that could hurt you or make you feel bad. It can’t think, it just senses possible danger, and when it picks up something it makes you feel stressed so that you will avoid the danger. I know some kids whose amygdala doesn’t seem to find anything threatening, but I also know a lot of kids whose amygdala is sensitive and finds almost everything threatening. I think you’re one of the kids who has a really sensitive amygdala.
BEN: I must be. I get freaked out and frustrated by everything. You should see me at school.
BILL: That must be really tough for you. For us to work together, we should remember that your amygdala is really sensitive and that it makes a much bigger deal about stuff than it needs to. So if you aren’t able to think of an answer right away, we can remind your amygdala that it’s overreacting—that you’re safe with me and that you really aren’t stupid. If you start to get nervous or frustrated or stuck, we’ll know that it means your amygdala is trying to shut you down in order to protect you from feeling stupid, which it doesn’t need to do because you aren’t stupid.
BEN: Okay.
When they went back to testing, it was remarkable how easy it was. For the rest of the morning Ben’s intense perfectionism and low frustration tolerance were things Bill and he could joke about, as they reflected on the misguided functions of his primitive brain, rather than a flaw in his character. When Bill asked Ben about his social and emotional life later in the evaluation, he used imagery that would connect with Ben (he was fascinated by explosives):
BILL: Does the frustration that I saw this morning happen a lot at school?
BEN: Yeah. I get mad so easily about everything.
BILL: Would you like to have a longer fuse?
BEN: What do you mean?
BILL: Well, you know how a stick of dynamite can have a long fuse, meaning that it will be slow to go off, or a short fuse, meaning that it will explode really quickly? My guess is that you’ve got a pretty short fuse because your amygdala is so sensitive.
BEN: [Motioning two inches] It’s this long.
BILL: Would you like to have a longer fuse?
BEN: A lot longer.
BILL: We’ll be talking more about that, and let’s talk with your parents, too, about how they can help you. I’ll also help find someone who can coach you to be less explosive.
Using simple language and vivid imagery and explaining the science of emotions can be remarkably effective, as is taking the problem out of the realm of the personal and into the scientific. It’s not that Ben was less anxious in school right away—it took a lot of work to lengthen his fuse. But giving him the framework to understand what was going on was an important first step. Bill recently reevaluated Ben, who is now fourteen and is dramatically better regulated emotionally. He is still intense and easily frustrated, but he is a highly motivated and very successful student who is managing his life independently. Significantly, testing, once such a source of stress for him, is now comfortable and easy.
Bill feels that one of the most important parts of his job is telling kids what he learned about them from their neuropsychological evaluations. When they understand what they can do better than most people and what does not come easily, it increases their sense of confidence that there will be a place for them in the world as adults.
Exercise #3: Practice Plan B thinking.
Many of the kids we see are anxious and obsessively driven, but Carly, an extremely bright, creative, and spirited seventeen-year-old, was arguably the most anxious adolescent we’ve ever been around. She was obsessed with going to Columbia and the pressure didn’t seem to be coming from her parents. After working with Carly on vocabulary and math problems and testing strategies, it became clear to Ned that her acute anxiety and obsessive focus on one college (out of more than three thousand) were interfering with her ability to think clearly.
Bill had tested her a few years earlier, and Carly and her parents agreed that it would be a good idea to go back to see if he could help. She told him that she was too busy to see her therapist, that she was already taking what her psychiatrist felt to be the highest safe level of antianxiety medication, and that she had too much work to go to bed any earlier. Bill and Carly concluded that every tutoring session with Ned should focus, in part, on what’s known as Plan B thinking. Carly needed to think about what she would do if she didn’t get into Columbia and, over time, to allow herself to feel okay and even positive about other options. Only by letting go of the fear that she might blow her entire life if she didn’t get into Columbia could she calm her stress response sufficiently to focus on answering test questions that she knew the answers to.
Plan B thinking (“What are some other things you could do if it doesn’t work out as you hope?”) is key to maintaining a healthy approach to potential setbacks. Though Carly was initially resistant, she eventually warmed up to the idea. She started to imagine her life at the University of Michigan, which she had chosen as her backup school. She thought Michigan, with its great campus spirit, would be fun, and she was drawn to the more relaxed atmosphere of Ann Arbor. She spoke to recent graduates and heard about some of the amazing opportunities they had enjoyed. And she was delighted to learn that her dream of grad school might be better nurtured at Michigan, as her grades were likely to be higher. Carly’s level of anxiety decreased as she began to visualize an alternative future.
Plan B thinking helps you put things into perspective. By envisioning alternate futures and creating backup plans, kids (and their parents) learn that if Plan A doesn’t work, the world won’t come to an end. Plan B thinking strengthens the prefrontal cortex’s ability to regulate the amygdala. It’s the prefrontal cortex’s job to formulate plans and goals—and having a clear sense of what you’ll do if your first option doesn’t work out makes it easier to stay calm and in control. Few things are more stressful to kids than the feeling that “I have to, but I can’t.” Plan B allows you to think more constructively. “If I can’t do this, then I could do that. . . .” It also increases flexibility and adaptability. Over time, practicing Plan B thinking will give you confidence that you can handle stress and setbacks.
Ned personally practices Plan B thinking constantly, and often takes himself through scenarios from the mundane (If we’re out of my favorite cereal, what will I eat this morning?) to the catastrophic (If a fire breaks out on the back of this plane, what will I do?). As a result, he feels in control, because he’s anticipated and determined how to handle a variety of situations.
For some, Plan B thinking may include considering radically different routes to success. Hearing stories about those who have developed meaningful, happy lives by following different paths is one of the greatest sources of perspective-giving solace we can offer, and we’ll talk more about that in Chapter Fourteen. But just knowing that alternate happy endings are out there and widening the frame a bit can go a long way toward alleviating stress.
I tutored a great kid, Roger, who got a disappointing ACT score. In deconstructing the test day, it turned out that Roger got lost on the way to the testing site. Our conversation went like this:
“I think you made one wrong turn and had a bad day,” I said. “Not every at-bat is a home run. In baseball, if you strike out or ground out seven times out of ten but get hits the other three, that could put you in the Hall of Fame. You just need a good at-bat.”
“Yeah, but I need that good at-bat next time.”
“Well, I can see why you’d think that. But here’s my take: You can take the ACT again in April. If it doesn’t go well in April, you can take it in June. If it doesn’t go well in June, there’s another ACT in September. If it doesn’t go well in September, you can take it in October. And if it doesn’t go well in October, you can take it once more in December. Now, if by December of your senior year you haven’t moved your score an inch, we may need another plan.”
Roger smiled. Having a Plan B (or C, D, or E) is awfully helpful. “Heaven knows, pal,” I continued, “you must have better things to do with your Saturday mornings than to take this silly test over and over. But because it matters to you given your goals, it’s important to realize you have lots of opportunities to get it right. So yes, we would love to see you knock this next one out of the park, do a victory dance, and be done. But if you don’t, you can just dust yourself off and try it again.”
—Ned
Exercise #4: Talk to yourself with compassion.
“I’m so stupid.” “I’m such an idiot.” “How could I be so dumb?!” We routinely hear these comments from kids, and many parents despair when they hear consistent self-deprecating comments. But don’t race to talk your child out of it. What you might say if your kid is caught in a circle of “I suck at everything” is something like, “That’s one way of seeing it. I see things differently. I’d be happy to share my view with you if you want to hear it.” If your child doesn’t want to hear it, keep it to yourself and hope for a better moment. Unwanted wisdom may make them grab tighter to their negative view of themselves because now it’s become a matter of control.
The Self-Driven Child Page 23