can you just list off absolutely some of the skills that people that we may be dealing with in our families or at work or in life are missing absolutely that create challenging Behavior absolutely so you know I gave you some sort of uh big categories that they fall in problem solving flexibility frustration tolerance but I also told you there's 50 years of research that shows exactly where those skills are okay and in essence what we found is in they they're in five different areas and if we want to use fancy language just for sure they
what we call neurocognitive skills which is a fancy way of saying thinking skills in essence okay they're largely what you know happens in the prefrontal cortex of your brain okay uh so there's five areas one language and communication skills now really easy to think about with a kid because you know like most two-year-olds are very poorly behaved right we call the terrible twos not because they're evil little beings but because they lack a lot of skills including they're not great at knowing what's bothering them using words to tell somebody what's bothering them engaging in a
back and forth to solve a problem those are language and communication skills now most foury olds are better than that than two-y olds at that most eighty olds better than five-year olds most 20 year olds better than 10 year olds at that but notice my language most so you may be you know working with a 15-year-old who's got six-year-old language skills and and let's be clear this does not just apply to kids because you may be in uh marriage with a 45-year-old who really struggles to identify what's bothering them communicate it to others engageing the
back and forth to problem solve so that's one category language and communication skills and you know what else I just kind of got as I'm listening to you I I need to manage my face because I think I I look like I'm in a State of Shock the entire time I'm listening to you so I'm like where were you 30 years ago um I uh you're here now and we're all going to learn from you now um is that as you explaining the two-year-old then if you don't have the language and communication skills it would
be completely age appropriate and normal for you to exhibit challenging Behavior because you don't have the language and communication skills to express what you need well that's what I always say what do two-year-olds do when they're upset they don't calmly Express what's going on right they bite they scream they flop they run they hit you know they do all those things and that's what they've sort of gotten their bag of tricks in their toolbox uh so if they don't develop other skills that's what they're going to resort to you know there there's a um is
a good analogy a precedent that that I like to remind myself of because I think we've made a ton of progress there and I know this is going to this will resonate for you yeah um you know like when you and I were in school we didn't know much about learning disabilities true right so if you had dyslexia when you were our age growing up and you were were struggling to read people didn't say I wonder what she's having a hard time with they thought that you were either lazy or dumb and if they thought
you were lazy what would they do they would try to motivate you to work harder to read which you know the sad reality the ironic reality is who's working harder than anybody else in the classroom to learn how to read the kid to whom not coming naturally yeah and honestly I think we we lost a lot of kids by sort of teaching them that we thought they weren't working hard enough when actually they were working overtime and what they were struggling with was skill not will wow the the the opportunity for all of us to
look at any challenging Behavior or any frustrating or scary Dynamic with another human being as a skill issue is inredible you've covered one of the five skills and that was communication and language so what are the other the others right okay so the other has to do with attention and working memory skills that's number two okay and it's a big category but you know attention skills are like can you focus on something not that's enthralling to you but something that isn't that interesting or you don't exactly feel like focusing on right now but can you
sort of Marshall enough attention to focus on it Y and can you shift your attention from one thing to the next when needed and as a kid by the way you're told all the time but even as an adult we're told stop paying attention to that start paying attention to that right and then also what's confounding whether you have a child who's a gamer or you have a young adult in your life or a significant other who's a gamer you look at the fact that they can focus there yes and then you're like why the
hell can't you pick up your shoes or pay attention or keep a job well and this is a you know this is a big misconception for instance about attentional issues as a whole okay uh you know people think that if somebody's diagnosed with attention deficit disorder ADHD it means they can't focus at all it's just not true what does it mean well it means that they have a hard time focusing on things that are not intrinsically all that interesting to them in fact most people diagnosed with ADHD will tell you they have the ability to
hyperfocus which is an incredible skill and strength on something they're super interested in but it's when somebody says well could you pay attention to this now that is really hard to focus your attention on which by the way for kids in school there's a fair amount of school they're like I got to force myself to pay attention to this right so you know that's a skill it's a skill absolutely gotcha and what's the third one and well so hold on oh we're done oh my God okay well I I snuck in attention and working memory
because it's it's related to a see I have both problems obviously and I'm exhibiting it in the middle of this interview well you know most of us humans can only remember three to five things at one time and there are five of these so well Dr abon I my my memory not working right now so okay so keep going working memory just means keeping a bunch of stuff Ironically in your head at one time and balancing it together okay but the reason that's relevant is all problem solving requires working memory you don't realize but when
you're solving a problem you have all these files open in your head and you're toggling back and forth between them all at one time what's the problem have I seen this before what did I do about it how did it work out have I seen anybody else handle a problem like this how much I do it now and you're juggling all those things and if you're sort of hard drive crashes trying to juggle all those things it gets in the way yep okay all right so that's attention to working memory skills okay let's go to
number three yes and use jargon for one second I'll translate it okay uh number three is emotion and self regulation skills regulate is a word that's thrown around a lot these days does that mean well here's the thing just translate into plain old English it means to manage or to control okay so when people are talking about emotion regulation they're talking about your ability to manage or control your emotions okay okay and uh self self-control what are they talking about there they're talking about things like perhaps the most important human skill we have which is
impulse control okay all day all of us basically keep our impulses in check and we say to ourselves like uh don't say that that's a bad idea uh don't don't do that um you know we sort of check ourselves and I always tell people if you want to know how important impulse control is spend a day we should not do this today on the podcast but spend a day where you imagine what it would be like if you did or said the first thing that came to your mind all throughout the course of the day
and I'll see in jail you'll have I was gonna say you'll have a blast but yes uh it would be ugly okay because most of the time we're checking our impulses now again who who's not very good at checking impulses two-year-olds fouryear olds but guess what teenagers some teenagers but also adults true okay um and you know if I could just point out really quickly again a sad irony here yeah people who are very impulsive do stuff without thinking about the consequences of their actions it's the definition of impulse control think about the likely consequences
of what you do before you do it so if you have poor impulse control you do stuff without thinking first then you get hit with consequences typically the reason this is sadly ironic is guess what consequences required to be effective in the first place impulse control you got it because you've got to be able to stop in the moment and say okay if I do this what will happen oh gosh if I do that there's probably going to be this consequence or this bad outcome I probably shouldn't do that let me reel it back in
so in other words consequences only work if somebody has good impulse control because and I just want to make sure we unpack this because I think this is really important because a lot of us get in this Loop especially with kids or even with people in our lives that are adults where you literally like let's let's give an example because I'm thinking about like a a a a kid who is not studying at school and you start hammering them about you got to get more motivated got your grades up or else you're going to get
on academic probation and then you're going to get kicked out well if you have poor impulse control you're going to go party all weekend or you're going to blow off class cuz you don't have the ability to think about the fact that this is going to happen and when it happens it's not really that motivating because you still don't have the impulse control to think about the consequences if you don't get your act together to get back into school you got it so consequences in essence don't work for the people to whom they are most
applied is basically and that's why it's so frustrating to the rest of us because you can see the consequences and you're like why is this idiot not seeing what's about to happen do they not care about their family or their life or their future or my feelings or all that so I can see how not seeing impulse control as a skill that could be developed creates this real like almost toxic situation between you and another person where you just lose your power they lose theirs you're now in this weird standoff and it's spirals absolutely well
and we should be clear M none of these skills that I'm talking about are correlated with intelligence okay so this is not like if you're struggling with any of these skills just like dyslexia if you can't decode words that doesn't make you not smart in fact some of the most brilliant Innovative interesting people had a hard time decoding words their brains worked a little differently right same is true with these skills you can have poor language and communication skills but be brilliant you can poor attention in working memory emotion and self-regulation skills and we still
got two categories to go through you can struggle with those skills and be brilliant well and what you Al what you know that I think would be helpful for the person listening to hear and understand is that the majority of people that end up in jail actually are missing these skills or have a learning disability or have impulse control issues so it is not ever that you're dealing with a quote bad human being you're dealing with somebody who would do well if they can and they didn't have the conditions or the skill building that would
have helped them I I remember when I I first presented these ideas at one of the prisons we were working with one of the senior guards there uh everybody sort of respect the most he said after he said this is really interesting he said you know I think this might apply to like say 10% maybe 5% of the young people we have here but the rest of them you know they're actually criminals and what they lack is the motivation to not behave this way and a couple years into our work together it was amazing when
he was like you know doc got to tell you I still think there might be a couple of like sociopaths here but like 95 or more percent of these people here are struggling with the exact skills you're talking about yeah and that and it makes it heartbreaking and and that's why I'm thrilled that you're here because I think seeing these five skills that are things that anybody can learn but when you're missing it creates challenging Behavior this is the heart of what we're talking about because it allows you to approach any Dynamic with any human
being in a very different way you got it what is skill number four cognitive Flex ability cognitive fancy word for thinking so we're talking about flexible thinking and what is flexible thinking well you know there's a lot of um people out there who struggle with flexible thinking what I mean by that is that they tend to be more sort of rigid or concrete or literal or or we call black and white in their thinking it's sort of like all or none yeah and sort of the the Grays of the world are harder uh you know
as as kids you can spot these kids because uh they're the kids who if everything goes according to the rules the routine the structure uh the template they had in their head life is good yes but any change any unpredictability ambiguity uncertainty entering a situation they don't know what it's going to look like uh they don't have the template for um and sort of winging it what's interesting is is I I don't know if as you're listening to Dr ablon you're like that's me that's me that's me that's me I'm checking all five and I'm
missing all of them but what's interesting to me is that I can say that I definitely default to that all or none like things are absolutely fabulous or they're horrendous or it's going to be amazing or this is the worst or and my husband and kids often feel like they're on this emotional roller coaster with me because they're not quite sure are we going to get the Mel who's at level 100 are we going to get her at zero and I work at this so I hear what saying as a skill like I have to
practice these tools of catching my own thinking yes and wanting to have a mindset that is more flexible and over time I've absolutely become way more flexible so this is the thing it's you know kids brains are very malleable so you you know changeable you can help them learn skills more easily but sometimes people think that like once you're an adult you know you can't develop these skills that's nonsense you can change the adult brain but as you're saying it takes repetition and practice but you can become a more flexible thinker just like you can
become better at regulating controlling managing your emotions you can become better at using your language and communication skills and you know so these are this is a power of thinking skill not will because if it's about skill not will skills can be built and I have to say I have never seen anyone at any age with any level of skill where they couldn't improve that skill incrementally so I'm talking about the most severe cases there's always opportunity to improve our skills always absolutely this is so empowering what is the fifth the fifth is a big
category social thinking skills and what does that mean so it means all the types of skills that go into managing social interactions like basic ones like how do you start a conversation with somebody um how do you join a group group of people who are doing something smoothly without sort of butting in or upsetting things um to more subtle complicated skills like knowing how you come across how your behavior impacts other people I call it your feedback loop which we are all so reliant on in the world uh basically we do stuff and say stuff
and look around and say like how's it coming across and we adjust our Behavior if all is going well but some folks don't have a feedback loop or keep it open for a very short amount of time or misjudge the feedback right uh so you know th those are more complicated skills and probably empathy and perspective taking is one of the most complicated of all social thinking skills you know which is in essence can you try to understand where somebody else is coming from and all these skills can be interrelated to so these five we
talked about they're not mutually exclusive it's not I have a hard time with this and nothing else because you can imagine you know if if uh you're a very concrete literal thinker it might be hard for you to step into somebody else's shoes and empathize right or if you tend to uh think in a very black and white way your emotions may spiral pretty quickly if you start to catastrophize as you said a moment ago right and I can also think of things like especially in the social behavior like if you're somebody that just doesn't
have the skill of the the cues yes you're the awkward kid or the awkward person at work that just stands a little too close to everybody or like close talker or you follow somebody too closely into the bathroom and you just don't know yes that that then becomes its own thing that makes you start to wonder why don't I have friends and why do I feel like I don't belong here yep and so how does missing those skills create this Dynamic that is challenging for us with other people well the way it happens is because
you struggle with these skills you have a hard time meeting people expectations you end up doing things that people don't like that they don't want you to do and not doing things people want you to do people get frustrated with you yep and then people default to assuming this is a lack of will yep and they try to motivate you through incentives rewards consequences to try to behave better and that doesn't work because you're already trying hard you're trying harder than anybody else to behave well I mean this is one of the the the secrets
people think sometimes people who struggle with their behavior aren't trying hard to behave well no you know who's not trying hard to behave well well behaved people because it comes naturally the people who are really working hard are the folks who for whom it doesn't come naturally and then I got to say what gets really dangerous is not only are rewards and consequences incentives things like that not effective but they can cause real harm and if I can talk about two ways they cause please because I think where where we're going now is especially if
you think about it from a parenting context yeah that when you get frustrated you then discipline and you punish and you either spank or scream or yell or timeouts or whatever it may be Y and what is the impact if we're dealing with a skills situation yeah and and by the way that word discipline is an interesting one because people somehow have equated discipline with punishment yes where actually the origins of the word don't involve punishment at all the origins of the word discipline revolve around teaching really means to teach and punishment is a very
poor way to teach now if you think skill not will now you're in the business of teaching because you know what you're teaching which is skills but to go back to the harm two ways okay that I think classic discipline rewards consequences things like that cause harm one is that when you try to motivate somebody with some external motivator some like tangible thing that you'll get this um if you do this or you won't get this if you don't there have been thousands of studies that have shown not just with kids but with adults too
that when you use external motivators to try to get kids to do stuff or people to do stuff it actually decreases their internal drive to do what you want them to do they do become more motivated but what do they become more motivated to get the thing get the stuff they actually become less motivated to achieve the goal you want them to achieve which is ironic so not only is it not work it makes matters worse and and this smell is not a small correlation this is a strong what we call in research negative correlation
the more used external reinforcers the less internal drive develops and it actually can cause even more problem because what ends up happening is people uh end up behaving in unethical ways also because they're just trying to get the stuff I want to talk about the second way that I think rewards and punishments can really be harmful because not only do they decrease internal motivation okay intrinsic motivation but for kids and adults they can do real damage to self-esteem because here's the thing you know if we're constantly using rewards and consequences we're sending the not so
subtle message that we think at least part of the problem here is you're not trying hard enough or why would we smart adults be trying to motivate you and my grandfather who I was incredibly close to and uh he lived till he was 106 wow yeah my grandmother just celebrated her 107th uh birthday we call that a Smuckers grandparent you know how they used to put them on TV yes with the Smuckers Jam so my my grandfather was really really close to uh grew up in Tupelo Mississippi at the beginning of the 20th century and
what he saw in his life is amazing but he had all these like great grandfatherly say sayings these like Pearls of Wisdom he would impart and one thing he would say to me all the time is he would say you know what steuart if you give a dog a name eventually they'll answer to it if you give a dog a name eventually they'll answer to it and what I realized with the kids we're talking about today is is that if you treat a kid like they're lazy unmotivated don't care aren't trying hard enough we shouldn't
be surprised when over time guess what they start to look like and talk like and act like kids are lazy unmotivated don't care aren't trying hard enough because if you give a dog a name eventually they'll answer to it and I want to be clear us parents you know we would never set out to make our kids feel that way of course of course teachers never of course try to make people feel that way but with every reward and consequence again Comes The Not So subtle message hey if you tried harder this would go better
it's unavoidable it sounds like what we're going to learn from you today is an entirely different way to look at and approach a situation where someone's pissing you off you got it what we've learned over the years is there's only really one reliable predictor of helping somebody to change their behavior what is it
