#231 The Missing Skills Behind Independence with Katie Azevedo Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  00:58

your capable young person keep tripping over organization deadlines and follow through in ways that make you wonder whether they’ll really reach their full potential. Many parents hope these habits will improve with time, but what if the skills that lead to success and independence aren’t things that most young people are never explicitly taught. Today’s returning guest, Katie Azevedo, oh creator of the Executive Function Journal and host of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast has a reality check for all of us who want success and independence for our kids. Through her work with both students and working professionals over the last two decades, Katie has identified the two most critical skills people need to thrive in their school work and life. Spoiler alert, your child probably wasn’t taught either one in school. In our conversation, Katie shares a unique perspective on what separates people who consistently move forward from those who stay overwhelmed, behind, and frustrated. You’ll learn the warning signs that executive function skills need attention, why weak systems become more costly as responsibilities increase, and what parents can do now to help their young person build greater independence. If your goal is to raise a young person who can confidently manage life, work, school, and responsibilities without constant reminders from you, this episode is for you. I’m Lisa Marker Robbins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity A Flourish Coaching Production. Let’s dive right into a great conversation. Oh, my dear friend Katie, welcome back to the show. So, thank you, Lisa.

 

Katie Azevedo  02:37

Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m excited for today.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  02:40

So, Katie’s been on the show before, and we’ll link to her previous episodes in the show notes, but Katie and I were dear friends, and we talk all the time about this like chicken and the egg concept, right? So, is it you’ve got to get your executive functioning together before you can get career clarity, or the opposite way around, you get career clarity, and then you grow your executive functioning as you’re working on that career development journey. So, we don’t really have that answered, but we know that these things both affect one another, right.

 

Katie Azevedo  03:22

It’s true, and I don’t know if it’s a chicken before the egg or the egg before the cart before the whatever the thing is. I think there’s there’s always a time and a place to be working on developing our executive functions, and when we have a big project or big transition college, figuring out our careers and our majors, whenever those big moments are on the horizon, if there is a lack of executive functions, that’s when that lack of executive functions often shows up and explodes, and it can often make that ultimate goal of finding the right college path or career path feel or actually be insurmountable, especially if we’re talking about, you know, kids with ADHD or executive dysfunction, or even those who are neurotypical and just haven’t developed those executive function skills yet.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  04:09

Well, I think it’s.. it’s when we don’t have a process, we don’t know the next step with the work that I do. Even for neurotypical kiddos, it feels bigger than it is. I always say, you know, our feelings are not facts, but this age group that I work with, 15 to 25 year olds, the feelings are like you said, insurmountable, like they can become primary, and so I work all the time on let’s interrogate your feelings against the facts, and I see a little bit of it lift then, but I know you’ve got tools that help it really even more, you know. I, our listeners, one thing I love about Katie, and the work that she does with executive functioning, is she works with teens all the way up to adult professionals, you know, our age, so she sees the whole gamut and. And so she can look at what is happening back here with a young person and know how it’s going to impact them potentially even into adulthood if they don’t get some tools tips, I don’t, I hate to call them tricks, do you call them tricks?

 

Katie Azevedo  05:16

No, I mean sometimes if I’m trying to get someone to click on something I’m like, you’re a trick, and then I’m like, actually, it’s a full strategy system and method, right? Like, bait them with chocolate and give them the broccoli they need, kind of thing. Yeah, so with those

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  05:30

adult professionals, I guess that you’re serving, what do you see that is impacting career success with them?

 

Katie Azevedo  05:40

Great question, in a positive way or a negative way, or am I taking what holds your mat?

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  05:44

I guess really what holds it back, because that’s what I’m always working on, right? Like, what’s holding you back to get to where you want to be? Like, identifying where you want to be, and then how you get there. And so, when you have an adult professional that takes part of your coaching and learned your strategies. What is it that they’re trying to get unstuck? What are the two.. what are the.. I know you’ve already said I just gave it away, there’s two of them, but what there are.. what are the two biggest unlocks that then make a difference for them?

 

Katie Azevedo  06:15

That’s a great question. So, I would say it’s externalizing or creating external systems for the things that they’re often trying to keep in their heads, and you made a good point earlier, talking about feelings, and feelings aren’t facts, and you know we often associate big feelings and small tools with children and adolescents, but if someone doesn’t learn how to create, or yeah, create tools to manage the invisible things like feelings and time and tasks, then we don’t have success in whatever space that we’re trying to perform in, right. So, working professionals, the two biggest I would say skill deficits that are holding professionals back are a lack of task management and a lack of time management systems, and I think I mean that right there could be a chicken and egg conundrum, you know, which one do we start with first, which one’s important, and you know which one do we develop first and which one depends on the other, and I really I like to think of it as two independent systems that need to exist by themselves first, so you can build one first, build the next, build them simultaneously. Doesn’t matter, they need to exist independently, and they also need to sync together. And so, sometimes somebody could create a task management system, and it works for them, but they’re missing the time management system, and then they’re wondering why they’re overwhelmed, and they’re, you know, stressed out, and they’re not reaching their goals, and they’re not, you know, moving forward, or they make it like I did the

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  07:40

thing, and it didn’t.

 

Katie Azevedo  07:41

Yes,

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  07:42

it didn’t right problem. Okay,

 

Katie Azevedo  07:44

right? Or they might have, you know, time and task management systems created, but they don’t sync together, and in that case, you have the same, you know, lack of movement and lack of progress. So, time and task management systems, I would say, are the two critical systems that, if they’re not explicitly taught, you know, in at a younger age, adolescence, college, then oftentimes a young professional can arrive in the workforce being like, How do I manage all of these things when I don’t have a student portal, right, and I don’t have teachers being like, whoopsies, the assignment was late, I’ll get you, you know, an extra day. Real life professional space doesn’t work that way, so the consequences are often more significant when someone doesn’t have these systems,

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  08:29

and that’s why I wanted to start with this, this profile of an adult professional, because when you are underperforming, not performing, maybe at all, but when you’re underperforming in your job as an adult, you know when we think about our own children, what I hear from parents all the time, and what I want for our five kids is to be happy, independent, thriving individuals, and if you’re miserable in your job, you’re probably not that happy person that we as parents aspire to be raising, so I thought, like, okay, let’s start with what we diagnose from the adults, because now every listener, whether they have a child or children or they work with kids, that allows them to go, like, okay, then, then, how, when should we address this, and how do we address it now, so really, truly, like, if somebody had a teenager or a college student, or I don’t know, 23 year old who’s in their first job, you really don’t care if they start with task management or time management first.

 

Katie Azevedo  09:35

Well, I would say, let’s start with task management. So, task management are one of the things, and we’re not going to have success in school, or you know, at university, or in your career, if you don’t have some way to assess what the things are, track their status, make sure that they’re being completed on time, long-term projects, things like that. That there has to be some way to capture what are the things that are expected of me. Okay, and what is my status on those, and then once that’s created, so a task management system for students. A huge mistake that I often see is students saying, well, I just use the portal, the LMS, right, Google Classroom, Canvas, Bright Space, whatever the heck it is, that was designed for teachers, that think of a portal, a door that’s swinging in and out, right? So, as teachers post the assignments, and then the students submit the assignments, that’s it. The assignments go in and out, but there is absolutely no way whatsoever for a student to manage the work themselves. There’s, they have no control over that system, they can’t add their tasks, they can’t track the steps of a long-term project. The teacher might post something that says an essay is due on Friday, or you know, next Friday in two weeks. Well, what about all the micro steps that are involved in writing that essay and me making that happen? A student has no control over these, the student portal to be like, well, I’m going to write my intro on a Monday, and I’m going to do my first paragraph on a Tuesday. You can’t add study sessions. Study sessions are tasks, they take up legitimate time, but if a student is relying on the portal, which is not – I’m going to repeat, like it’s the hill I die on – it is not a task management system, it is a tool designed for teachers to deliver material, and for a student to submit

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  11:15

1. That’s a huge unlock, because I’m sure that parents are sitting there going, I’m logging in and checking the things, my kids logging in and checking the things, and to think that you’re making us think differently. I love that. So, so your child’s Schoology is one we have in my area, School Links. So, if you have one of those, view it as a teacher system, yep, and that is your child. If they’re relying on that, they are not managing their tasks. So that would be.. I was going to ask you, and I say, you already started with it, but I’m also wondering, like, what are.. if I’m a parent for a high school or a college student, what are the symptoms that I don’t have a task management system, so that would be one of them. Is you’re relying on the teacher system to guide your task. Well, are there any others?

 

Katie Azevedo  12:09

Certainly students who are like, “Well, I’ll just remember, like I’m keeping this all in my head, and that we have to move away from that ridiculous story. We do not store information like that in our head, and I know for sure that you know I have teenagers as well, and my daughter is like, I have my task management system, you know, I’ve taught her how to do that, and my son is like, I’m just remembering it, I’m like, oh my gosh, my own kids, they do resist this, but our brains are not designed to store non-relevant information that’s not related to our survival, which is what these assignments are, and so, you know, another symptom would be a kid insisting that they’re keeping it in their head, but the evidence is missed assignments, late assignments, wild procrastination, everything done at the 11th hour, asking for a lot of extensions, a lot of overwhelm, and then you know, trying, you have all these missed assignments, but the new ones are still coming, and so, how do you manage a backlog of assignments when the new ones are still coming, and then oftentimes that creates, you know, paralysis, and the students are doing absolutely nothing, and then it turns into, well, there’s just too much, and the teachers mean, and yada yada. In reality, there was no legitimate task management system. Task management systems are foundational, we’ll say, to students, and then moving upwards into the professional space as well.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  13:26

Well, as you were sitting here, you were talking about, you know, even your own children being resistant, and teenagers can be so much fun when you’re asking, they can be if they don’t want to do. I remember raising some that was not that long ago for me, what I started to think about as a professional myself, and I love organization, I love systems. Just, I talk a lot about taking, having a culture of conversation in our homes, and so parents, one thing that you could probably do is talk to your kiddo about, like, what you use if you’re, if you’re working outside the home, and your boss or your team gives you something to do, sharing with them, like how you manage that, right? And if you’re listing this, you might be going, like, “Oh, I need to do better too. So, yeah, I

 

Katie Azevedo  14:15

think modeling, modeling is a great strategy,

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  14:17

huge. Well, and it’s a non-threatening way to just start talking about your own work. I, I say all the time, like, we have to be careful as adults. I see parents go, like, they’re sitting around the dinner table, or, like, oh, I had the worst day, or.. and kids start to think these things about work period or specific careers based on what we are sharing, just on a off-moment flippant comment, but it has real impact, and I often see it to the negative with careers in work, but this would be a way to, like, flip that and make it positive, right? Absolutely, like, hey, we’re starting this new project at work, I. It’s pretty overwhelming, like let’s talk about these things to normalize it, and I think

 

Katie Azevedo  15:05

that can happen as well. Sorry, I just get so excited. I think that that sort of modeling what the parents are doing at work behavior applies to time management as well, because if a parent is saying, you know, like let’s say the kid says, “Hey, can I go to Johnny’s birthday party on Sunday? For a parent to be like, “Hold on, let me check the calendar. It looks like Sunday we actually have another obligation. Maybe I can move that obligation to Saturday, so that we can go to Johnny’s birthday party, right? So, having that conversation about time being something that can also be managed, otherwise, to this time is so abstract, and I hear parents often be like, well, the kid just needs to manage time better. What the heck does that mean? How do we manage something we can’t see, we can’t hold? Right, it’s invisible, and we expect our kids to know how to manage something that we ourselves don’t necessarily know how to articulate how we manage it, right? So, making time visible with calendars, that’s that’s a doesn’t matter. I’m very tool agnostic. It doesn’t matter if it’s, you know, paper or digital. Most of my students these days are on, you know, Google Calendar or something like that. But there has to be also a conversation about time being real and time being math and numbers, and something that we can control, right? That’s that time management system that also has to exist independently. And then you have your task management system, and then they sync together. And Lisa, you may be having a question on the tip of your tongue, and that’s, you know, the role of the interviewer, but I have an analogy. Yeah, I feel like I might forget it. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Let’s, let’s see if this works. Okay, I’m picturing we’re gonna set the context here as an airport. Okay, we’re gonna, we’re in an airport, and I’m picturing that all of the tasks, students, time tasks and obligations and commitments as being airplanes. Okay, those are all the airplanes in the sky. They’re coming from the left, the right, the east, the west. They’re swirling around there. Okay, those are the tasks. The task management system, it’s going to be like the air traffic control tower and the air traffic schedule that says I know this plane is coming from the left at 4o’clock I know this plane is coming here, we got these two planes about to whoopsies collide, we need to manage that right, and without a tower and someone you know in that tower, those planes are going to either be hovering around till they run out of gas, they’re going to crash, they’re going to end up at the wrong destination. They’re gonna.. gosh, knows what the heck happens to planes. All right, then we have.. so that’s task management. Okay, a tower.. a.. am I.. is this making sense? I’m hoping this makes.. yeah. Okay, okay. Except for the..

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  17:53

you said this plane’s coming from the left, and I’m like, well, they’re probably like from north, southeast, but okay, semantics. And then we have, then we will not be our air traffic controller, because I

 

Katie Azevedo  18:06

don’t get paid. Okay, disclaimer, I will not drive your plane. So then we’re looking at all like the runways, the open runways, and the slits that are slots that the airplanes go into, and so that’s the potential places that these plans could lane land, so that’s the time, that’s the potential time we’re talking about time management now. The planes and the tower were tasks and task management. Now we’re looking at the runways and slots, the

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  18:32

availability,

 

Katie Azevedo  18:33

right?

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  18:34

Bring these throughout, yeah, gotcha.

 

Katie Azevedo  18:36

And then the runway schedule is your time management, where you’re saying, okay, this runway is going to be open at 6o’clock for a plane. This runway be open at 4o’clock for a plane. Can’t put a plane on that at 4o’clock because I already have a plane at 4o’clock on that runway, but that runway is open, right? Yeah, so that’s time management, and together with task and time management operating together, and that’s what I was talking about at the top of the episode, with like singing it together. You have airplanes, and you know where they are, and you know where they’re coming in from the left or the right or the east to the west, and you know that they’re not going to crash, and you know which runway is open, and you know what time, and you know you can safely land the plane on schedule, and there is no chaos.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  19:24

Well,

 

Katie Azevedo  19:24

right?

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  19:25

And safety, right? I mean, like, so what I love about your analogy that you beautifully had for us is it.. I mean, there’s something very real at risk when we apply it to that. It doesn’t feel as risky with your previous example of, hey, can I go to Johnny’s house at 3o’clock on Sunday? Oh, we double booked ourselves, but the consequences can grow, and that’s one of the things, too. I just talked about this in a recent episode of our show here, where it’s like the consequences as kids get older. Bigger are bigger. I can tell you that from being a mom of young adults, that the consequences are bigger. They even the time consequences, right? Like, if you’re late for work over and over, you’re gonna get fired, right? If you’re late from school, you’re being marked tardy, right? You might get a detention, the stakes are lower, but to learn these skills before we’re, you know, in the workplace is huge. Exactly,

 

Katie Azevedo  20:30

and these, these two systems, time and task management, are scalable. They’re the two of the most scalable systems. And so, when you learn, let’s say, for example, task management as a student, and then you go through college, university, whatever comes after internships in your professional career, you can scale that. You don’t have to start over and reinvent the wheel, because you understand conceptually how task management works. You need to know that there are multiple input sources. It’s not just your student portal, it’s also your email, it’s also what the coach said at practice, it’s also your work schedule, it’s also the thing that your mom said, it’s also the family, yeah, I don’t know, skylight calendar task list that you’re responsible for, it’s the dog schedule that you promised your parents you would follow, right, and so knowing that you have all these input sources and you need to put them into one source of truth, and that is where your task management system is born, essentially it’s bringing all these things into one place, and then knowing how to manage that, manage them once you have them in that one place. Oftentimes, our students are so overwhelmed with all of the input, and they don’t even think of the coach being a source of tasks, the parents, the music director, the neighbor who wants them to babysit, you know, next week or whatever, the kids are just like, well, it’s in the portal. No, that’s just one plane manufacturer, right? If we’re going with our analogy, but there’s planes everywhere, and some of the kids don’t even know where the planes are coming. They don’t even know to turn left, east or west, they don’t even know to look up at the sky to find that the planes are even up there, so that’s I’m making this thing here

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  22:03

now. Well, I’m also sitting here thinking about, like, how we run our organization at Flourish Coaching, right? So we use Trello, which is our project management system, where we assign each other tasks, we communicate what’s going on. That’s much like the teacher portal. I’m sure we have working parents that are listening, who are like, yeah, we’re using Monday or Asana or Trello, or we have one native to our organization, and that’s kind of like the school portal, but yet I say to my business coaching clients all the time, most of our listeners know that I keep a small cohort of business coaching clients that they need that project management for the team. I always say, let’s get a team board going for your small business. I only work with small businesses, but then I’ll say, okay, so that test that you have to do, don’t just say like I get it done next week, literally slot it in on your calendar, when are you going to do it, and so that’s the professional side of how this works, for sure. Now it probably seems weird that we’re talking about this in summer, but you and I, the reason we intentionally did it was we were talking about, like, I asked you, is it possible to gain traction and new skills over the summer, when we’re not in school, we’re more not in high school when we’re not in college, for at least our listeners with students, right? Yes, so that post Labor Day they are hitting, or you know, August, if that’s when your school starts, they’re hitting the, we’ll go, they’re hitting the runway. Oh my gosh, and they’re able to take off. I wasn’t gonna say that, but like, yeah, me up, right? Okay, and you said absolutely. So, absolutely, yep. I think even I, as a mom, I’m like, okay, show me how. Our listeners love to know how, because if I sit here and go, well, we don’t have a lot of schoolwork to manage those that are already in launch career clarity with us, they do have tasks to manage with their time. A common error that I see all families make is thinking, like, “Oh, it’s summer, the lazy days of summer undermine us, right? And we just can’t. We feel like, “Oh, well, we can’t do anything, we’re just supposed to be lounging by the pool, so how can we take what you’re teaching us to gain traction over the lazy days of summer, so that when that comes to an end, we’re going to have a better fall, whether it’s in high school, in college, or in our profession.

 

Katie Azevedo  24:37

Great, and I think it’s you set it up right to say that summer is, you know, the perfect time to sort of develop these skills. It’s hard to learn how to drive a plane while you’re flying it. Oh my gosh, this metaphor is just like it’s not gonna die. And so I do have the assignment management power system. It is a program that is so bite-sized you can get through it in a weekend. And implement it on a Monday, right. So we’re not talking about let’s stay inside and you know dedicate our whole entire summer to learning this skill. And basically it’s so it’s Assignment Management system.com it’s called the Power System, and that’s exactly what it is. It teaches exactly what we’re talking about today, and it teaches students what those input sources are, where they need to be looking for their tasks, how to consolidate all of those tasks into one source of truth. I teach them how to figure out what kind of, is that going to be digital, is it an app, is it paper, what is that? Right, there’s some flexibility there, for sure, of what that looks like, but then how do you manage those tasks once you even are aware that then you have them, right? How do you manage the long-term tasks? How do you, how do you start thinking about even studying for a test as a series of tasks that need to consume time and take up, take up time and energy. And then, so there’s I teach a system for tracking the status of tasks, how to complete late work, like the backlog, backlog of the late work, when the new stuff is coming, so that you can dig yourself out of the hole, and it’s a very bite-sized program for one of the most significant skills, like the ROI on that program, I would say is is more significant than anything you could be doing this summer, besides, you know, working on your college essay, I mean,

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  26:21

career clarity, right?

 

Katie Azevedo  26:26

That was a given, but I just.. I think it’s one of those things where sometimes people don’t think about the system that they need or the skill that they don’t have until they’re already feeling all kinds of things and experiencing the consequences that you were talking about, yeah, and in the summertime it’s not like kids don’t have anything going on, because there’s often summer jobs and you know other things like summer courses for sure, and so you can kind of, you can learn the strategy and the system that I teach in the assignment management power system and start practicing it and applying it on a more like a little bit lower scale, it’s almost like the

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  27:03

micro things, right? Yeah,

 

Katie Azevedo  27:05

so that by the time school hits for real, for real in the fall, it doesn’t matter how many planes are in the sky, because like your airport is running perfectly smoothly, and you know what to do when there’s so many plans to

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  27:17

just, yeah, so you almost like a plug and play once, yeah, starts

 

Katie Azevedo  27:21

that is exactly it, and then once you have that, you can move on to time management and sync them all together.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  27:27

So, how long do you think it takes for, like, task management to be built out, or, like, would you recommend somebody starts building the task management, and then once they’re at a certain point, they start to layer on some of the time, or do you get task management to completion, and then move over to time?

 

Katie Azevedo  27:46

That’s a good question. I mean, so in a

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  27:49

student, I mean, I don’t know,

 

Katie Azevedo  27:50

it does, and it depends on, you know, what are all the things that they have. If they are, I don’t say just a student, but if all they’re managing is schoolwork, which is still a lot, right? But there’s also students who have, like, jobs and all this other, all these other things that they have to do, but I would say that if you follow the way that I teach it in the assignment management power system, you can honestly get through all of the little micro videos and strategies that I teach you in, you know, under two hours,

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  28:16

okay?

 

Katie Azevedo  28:17

And then you’re like, okay, I know, I know conceptually how this works. Then you get your tool again, and I give Rex in there and stuff too, but you know, let’s say that you’re going to use a planner. Let’s just say that,

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  28:29

yeah,

 

Katie Azevedo  28:30

right away. I

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  28:31

mean, I still, I have a digital calendar, but I use the full focus and planner, yeah.

 

Katie Azevedo  28:38

And so, and so, once you have, once you understand conceptually how task management truly works, and how to track a task from, you know, first being assigned into fully completed and submitted, then you could start using that system, like the very next day. The moment you have something that comes at you, you’re a student over the summer is going to be tasked with something to do the next day, a parent is going to say, ‘Hey, can you drop this package off at the mail? Well, I was just

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  29:04

thinking that I was like, ‘Okay. As parents, you know, I was talking recently about, like, at what ages my kids started doing laundry, and by what age they were fully responsible for it, and what did I do first. And so part of this independence to get them out on their own two feet, they’ve got to have a paying job, they’ve got to have executive functioning, they just need to know how to manage a household, an apartment that we’re not going to be creeped out walking into, because it’s so dirty, as their parent, and so layering on these independent skills that they’re going to need, so this is a that would be a great way to apply what you’ve given us. Katie, it’s been really great. Thank you. So, for those that are interested in checking out your task management system and getting trained on how to do it, where do they find

 

Katie Azevedo  29:54

it? Assignment management system.com that will take you to a page. It explains how it works. You can enroll right there, and it’s, it’s really accessible. It’s a $47 program. I wanted it to be something where people can, you know, get it, consume it, and watch the pay off. Everybody should have access to these skills, and a lot of things in education are feel inaccessible to our kids. And so this is something that, if you want to have a productive summer, you know what, too. I’ve heard parents say, after they’ve gotten their kid through it, they’re like, ‘Wait, I started doing that stuff too, after they watched the pro, after they, their kid went through it. So, they, the system, these skills are scalable to the career, for sure.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  30:34

I’m gonna say, we teach how to, like, how to build your LinkedIn profile, how to network, how to communicate on LinkedIn with confidence. How to search for jobs on there. How to study the anatomy of a job on there. And I get parents in our program all the time of the kiddos who are doing the work. I call them kiddos, even if they’re mine and they’re 30, but I have the kiddos, the parents going like, oh, you know what, that made me update my LinkedIn profile, so Katie, thanks.

 

Katie Azevedo  31:05

Of course, thanks for having me on the show. I love that. I love talking with you, Lisa. I think I think we covered some good ground today.

 

Lisa Marker-Robbins  31:11

Thank you. Have a great summer. Yeah, if you’ve been following me for a while, you know I always say that successful launches for young people don’t happen by accident, and this conversation shows that independence doesn’t either. It happens when young people learn the systems and skills that allow them to manage responsibilities and commitments with confidence. If today’s conversation made you realize your child could benefit from stronger task management skills. Katie has created an affordable resource called the Assignment Management Power System. We’ll link to it in the show notes. You can learn more. As I listen to Katie describe the relationship between task management and time management, I couldn’t help but think about all the conversations she and I have had over the years about career development and executive functioning. It’s a little bit of a chicken or the egg question. Does rowing independence help young people gain career clarity, or does having direction motivate them to develop greater independence? The truth is that both matter. If you’d like to better understand how career development fits into a successful launch, I invite you to watch my free career identification compass video. You’ll learn why so many young people struggle to gain direction and the process we use to help them move forward with greater confidence and clarity. You can get instant access at Forest Coaching co.com forward slash video. If you’re finding our episodes and resources helpful, please do me a favor, follow us, rate the podcast, review it, tell us what you think. It helps us reach more families with the support they need at this stage of life. Okay, I’ll see you again next week for a solo episode next time.