We Coach Executive Function Skills
We Help Your Child Learn How to Learn
Your child is bright. You know it, and deep down they know it too. What’s missing are executive function skills: the brain’s tools for planning, focus, memory, and follow-through. School assumes kids have them. Almost nobody teaches them. We do.
Build Confidence
Understand How They Learn Best
Reach Their Full Potential
“Not reaching their potential.”
If you’ve heard those words at a parent-teacher conference, you’re in the right place.
Your child was not born with the essential Executive Function Skills that enable them to:
Retain information
Organize and plan
Pay attention
Manage emotions
After more than a decade of assessing and coaching students, I can tell you what usually sits behind those words. It’s not laziness. It’s not attitude. It’s not a lack of intelligence. It’s a bright kid missing one or more of the brain-based skills that school quietly demands every single day.
Here’s the reframe that changes everything: your child is not giving you a hard time. They are having a hard time. These are skills, the skills can lag, and lagging skills can be taught.
~ Samantha Woods, Founder
Stop
Assuming it’s laziness, attitude, or a lack of effort.
Stop
Fighting the same homework battle every single night.
Stop
Hearing “I can’t do this” from your child.
It’s Not Too Late to Build Your Child’s Essential Life Skills
Your child’s Executive Function Skills can still be developed with specialized coaching and support.
Even more, coaching provides the greatest impact to those who need it the most. Whether your child has an ADHD diagnosis, another learning difference, or no label at all, coaching meets their brain where it is and can provide life-changing outcomes.
Knowing the impact that these skills have on your child’s success is the reason why we have made it our mission to master the science of coaching Executive Function Skills.
When your child has a fully developed foundation of Executive Functioning Skills, they become better students, better global citizens and find greater success in life.
Working Memory
Holding information in mind while using it.
Impulse Control
Pausing to think before acting or speaking.
Flexible Thinking
Adjusting when the plan changes.
Start Building Your Child’s Essential Skills & Confidence
1
Understand your starting point
The Student Foundation Program brings intake, assessment and coaching together. Your child completes the Brain Blueprint with their coach in session 2. The coaching plan takes shape at intake and is finalized after the Blueprint, with a detailed report to help you understand your child’s strengths and needs.
2
Match
Your child is paired with the coach best suited to their strengths, needs, and personality. Every Kaizen coach is an experienced educator, also trained and certified in Kaizen’s coaching methodology.
3
Coach and Track
Weekly one on one sessions build skills using your child’s real life. After every session you get a plain-language report: what was covered, and how to reinforce it at home.
The Brain’s Air Traffic Control
Executive function skills are the essential brain functions that help us manage our emotions, focus on what’s important, set goals and get things done.
Experts break down the executive functions into three dimensions: working memory, self- control, and mental flexibility.
In most situations, these simple skills work together to support complex tasks. A common example used to describe executive function is Air Traffic Control at a busy airport that helps planes take off and land safely from multiple runways. Without the cooperation of pilots, navigators, controllers and weather forecasters working together the airport would be on a collision course.
Executive function skills don’t come naturally
No one is born with Executive Function Skills, but everyone has the potential to develop them.
The 11 skills we coach:
- Attention and focus. Staying with a task, even when it’s boring.
- Impulse control. Pausing to think before acting or speaking.
- Working memory. Holding information in mind while using it.
- Emotional regulation. Handling frustration without losing the whole afternoon.
- Task initiation. Starting without ten reminders.
- Planning and prioritization. Breaking big tasks into steps, and knowing what comes first.
- Organization. Keeping track of materials, ideas, and belongings.
- Time management. Knowing how long things take, and finishing on time.
- Flexible thinking. Adjusting when the plan changes.
- Goal-directed persistence. Sticking with a goal past the exciting part.
- Metacognition. Stepping back and seeing how you think and learn.
Most brain development occurs before the age of 5, followed by another growth spurt during the teenage years into early adulthood. Just as children develop physically at a different pace than their peers, their brains also develop at a different pace. Other differences in ability can be related to environment or child-development which means that some children need more practice than others to build the same skills.
Regardless of the difference, with the right support, your child can develop their strengths and overcome their weaknesses. This is why Kaizen Education has made it our mission to empower your kids for learning and life.
What about ADHD?
ADHD is not a mystery condition. At its core, ADHD is a significant deficit in one or more executive function skills: the brain’s systems for attention, self-control, planning, and follow-through. That’s why ADHD looks so different from child to child. It depends on which skills are affected, and how deeply.
Kaizen started as an ADHD coaching company. For over a decade, we worked with the brains that needed the most support: students and adults with significant executive function challenges, where generic study tips simply don’t work.
If our coaching can build planning, focus, and follow-through in a brain with severe executive function challenges, it can build them in any brain.
So we expanded. Today we coach all brains: diagnosed or not, struggling or simply not yet reaching their potential. No diagnosis is required, and none is ever made here.
Kaizen coaching supports, and does not replace, care from your child’s doctor or psychologist.
Lagging executive function skills can look like this:
Homework doesn’t start without constant reminders, and ends in tears more nights than not.
Assignments get done, then lost before they’re handed in.
The backpack, the desk, the bedroom: chaos, no matter how many systems you’ve tried.
Small changes to the plan cause big reactions.
Everything is left to the last minute, then panic.
Multi-step instructions evaporate moments after you give them.
Building Your Child’s Executive Function Tool Kit Benefits Everyone!
When your child is equipped with a strong set of executive function skills it sets them up to lead a fulfilling life with the ability to manage the many possibilities that life offers: education, work, friendships, parenting, and giving back to society.
The more you invest into developing your child’s executive function skills, the greater the benefits you’ll both see in the future.
Empower your child for learning and life with Kaizen Education.
Frequently Asked Questions
Below is a list of answers to our most commonly asked questions. If you can’t find the answer to your question, please contact us and we’ll get right back to you.
How do you figure out my child’s strengths and challenges?
We use your input, the student’s goals and the Brain Blueprint to shape coaching. You’re welcome to share school or psychoeducational assessments too. If you’d like a first step before a conversation, explore our free quizzes. They can help you reflect on everyday patterns; they don’t replace the assessment and guidance included in a coaching program.
Are sessions online or in person?
Both. Most of our coaching happens online, which works beautifully because your child practices skills in their real environment: their own desk, their own materials, their own routine. In-person sessions are available at our Calgary office.
Is this tutoring?
No. Tutoring teaches WHAT to learn: math, reading, chemistry. We coach HOW to learn: the planning, focus, memory, and follow-through skills that sit underneath every subject. Many families use both; they solve different problems.
How do we start?
Book a free consultation. Tell us what you’re seeing at home and school, and we’ll tell you honestly whether coaching fits and answer every question you have. No pressure, no obligation.
My child has already completed a psychoeducational assessment. Can we skip the Brain Blueprint Assessment?
No, and here’s why: they’re different tools doing different jobs. A psychoeducational assessment identifies diagnoses and school accommodations. The Brain Blueprint Assessment is built for coaching: it measures how your child’s brain learns across 4 categories and 10 cognitive skills, the foundation our entire coaching methodology is built on, so your child’s coach knows exactly which skills to build and where to start. And please do share the psychoeducational results with us. Many families get those results and then hear nothing about what to do next. Coaching is the “what now,” and the two assessments together give your child’s coach the fullest picture.
My child has ADHD. Can you help?
Yes. Supporting ADHD brains is where Kaizen started, and our coaches are specifically trained for it. See “What about ADHD?” above: it’s our origin story, and it’s exactly why our coaching works for every brain.
Empowering Brains for Learning & Life
We help kids, teens, and adults reach their true potential through neuroscience and coaching their unique strengths and needs for lifelong success.