What is Executive Functioning?

Executive functioning (EF) consists of a broad set of skills and abilities distributed throughout the brain and body. These abilities allow us to select a goal, create a plan of action, and persevere through difficulties and challenges until it is attained. We apply EF at school and at work, in personal relationships, during psychotherapy, and at the grocery store. Although cognition, memory, and abstract-thinking are major contributors to EF, it also relies on emotional regulation, relationships skills, and varying degrees of self-awareness. As such, optimal EF reflects the integrated participation of our mind, body, and connection with others in our navigation of our day -to-day world.

Until recently, the ways EF and general intelligence have been thought of and measured has focused almost exclusively on its cognitive components. While these are certainly important and a lot easier to measure, they only reflect one aspect of EF. Thinking of people as disembodied thinkers and the brain as a computer, has limited the useful application of the concept of EF for psychotherapy, education, coaching, and rehabilitation medicine. The majority of people that come to treatment with complaints about EF are not suffering from brain lesions or medical illnesses, but from an array of physiological, emotional, and relational challenges that undermine proper neural integration and optimal functioning.

The best way to assess EF is in the real world of the people, places, and things our clients interact with and adapt to in their day-to-day lives. This ecological and whole-person approach naturally includes an appreciation of human diversity in general and of neurodiversity in particular. And not just the diversity of individuals, but the range of environments and situations we pass through each day. This is why the standard “one-size-fits-all” model of EF, over-indexed on cognition, is doomed to fail with the majority of our clients.