April is Autism Awareness Month!  As a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with children and teenagers on the autism spectrum, I read and wanted to share these four blog posts that I found helpful and well-written.  Thank you to a reader of the blog who informed me of these blogs.

Helping Asperger's Teens to Survive and Thrive: 15 Key Steps

How to Create a Backyard Sanctuary for Kids with Disabilities

15 Behavioral Strategies for Children on the  Autism Spectrum

For Teachers and Educators: Strategies for Working with Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

     If you are a parent or work with children in any capacity, you have probably heard of Dr. Carol Dweck.  She is a professor of psychology at Stanford University.  Among her many professional accomplishments, she has written a best-selling book called Mindset.  
     Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success.  But more than 30 years of research  has shown that an overemphasis on intellect or talent, and the implication that these traits are fixed or innate, leaves people feeling vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges, and unmotivated to learn.   Teaching people to have "a growth mindset" encourages a focus on the process, rather than talent or intelligence and produces high achievers in school, work, and life. 
     Parents and teachers can help teach a "growth mindset" in children by praising them for their persistence or strategies, rather than the child's intellect or talent.  The key is to provide the child with specific praise versus generic praise.  For example, telling a child "You are a good athlete," may actually undermine their abilities in the long run, but noting to that same child that "I liked how much you practice free throws to get better" demonstrates more specific praise on their effort, rather than the child's talent.  
     Here are some other examples:

• "I liked the way you tried different strategies on that math problem until you finally got it."
• " You really studied for your science test.  You read over the material several times, made those flash cards, and quizzed yourself.  It really worked!"
• "Mistakes are so interesting.  Here is a mistake.  Let's see what we can learn from it."
• "You really took your time with your drawing.  I liked how you added details to the house and the landscape."

     Invaluable praise like this can foster motivation and confidence in children and teens by helping them to focus on their specific actions that led to their success.

Many people feel as if they're adrift in the world. They work hard, but they don't seem to get anywhere worthwhile.  A key reason that they feel this way is that they haven't spent enough time thinking about what they want from life, and haven't set formal goals for themselves.

How to Set a Goal

First consider what you want to achieve, and then commit to it. Set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound) goals that motivate you and write them down to make them feel tangible. Then plan the steps you must take to realize your goal, and cross off each one as you work through them.

Goal setting is a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to turn your vision of this future into reality.

The process of setting goals helps you choose where you want to go in life. By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your efforts. You'll also quickly spot the distractions that can, so easily, lead you astray.

Starting to Set Personal Goals

You set your goals on a number of levels:

• First you create your "big picture" of what you want to do with your life (or over, for instance, the next 10 years), and identify the large-scale goals that you want to achieve.
• Then, you break these down into the smaller and smaller targets that you must hit to reach your lifetime goals.
• Finally, once you have your plan, you start working on it to achieve these goals.

This is why we start the process of setting goals by looking at your lifetime goals. Then, we work down to the things that you can do in, say, the next five years, then next year, next month, next week, and today, to start moving towards them.

Setting Lifetime Goals

The first step in setting personal goals is to consider what you want to achieve in your lifetime (or at least, by a significant and distant age in the future). Setting lifetime goals gives you the overall perspective that shapes all other aspects of your decision making.

To give a broad, balanced coverage of all important areas in your life, here are some ideas for setting goals in multiple categories:

• Career – What level do you want to reach in your career, or what do you want to achieve?
• Financial – How much do you want to earn, by what stage? How is this related to your career goals?
• Education – Is there any knowledge you want to acquire in particular? What information and skills will you need to have in order to achieve other goals?
• Family – Do you want to be a parent? If so, how are you going to be a good parent? How do you want to be seen by a partner or by members of your extended family?
• Artistic – Do you want to achieve any artistic goals?
• Attitude – Is any part of your mindset holding you back? Is there any part of the way that you behave that upsets you? (If so, set a goal to improve your behavior or find a solution to the problem.)
• Physical – Are there any athletic goals that you want to achieve, or do you want good health into old age? What steps are you going to take to achieve this?
• Pleasure – How do you want to enjoy yourself?
• Public Service – Do you want to make the world a better place? If so, how?

Spend some time brainstorming these things, and then select one or more goals in each category that best reflect what you want to do. Then consider trimming again so that you have a small number of really significant goals that you can focus on.

Setting Smaller Goals

Once you have set your lifetime goals, set a five-year plan of smaller goals that you need to complete if you are to reach your lifetime plan.  Then create a one-year plan, six-month plan, and a one-month plan of progressively smaller goals that you should reach to achieve your lifetime goals. Each of these should be based on the previous plan.
Then create a daily list of things that you should do today to work towards your lifetime goals.

At an early stage, your smaller goals might be to read books and gather information on the achievement of your higher level goals. This will help you to improve the quality and realism of your goal setting.

Finally review your plans, and make sure that they fit the way in which you want to live your life.

Staying on Course

Once you've decided on your first set of goals, keep the process going by reviewing and updating your list on a daily basis.
Periodically review the longer term plans, and modify them to reflect your changing priorities and experience.

SMART Goals

A useful way of making goals more powerful is to use the SMART  mnemonic. While there are plenty of variants (some of which I've included in parenthesis), SMART usually stands for:

• S – Specific (or Significant)
• M – Measurable (or Meaningful)
• A – Attainable (or Action-Oriented)
• R – Relevant (or Rewarding)
• T – Time-bound (or Trackable)

For example, instead of having "to sail around the world" as a goal, it's more powerful to use the SMART goal "To have completed my trip around the world by December 31, 2027." Obviously, this will only be attainable if a lot of preparation has been completed beforehand!

Further Tips for Setting Your Goals

The following broad guidelines will help you to set effective, achievable goals:

• State each goal as a positive statement 
• Be precise: Set precise goals, putting in dates, times and amounts so that you can measure achievement. If you do this, you'll know exactly when you have achieved the goal, and can take complete satisfaction from having achieved it.
• Set priorities – When you have several goals, give each a priority. This helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by having too many goals, and helps to direct your attention to the most important ones.
• Write goals down – This crystallizes them and gives them more force.
• Keep operational goals small – Keep the low-level goals that you're working towards small and achievable. If a goal is too large, then it can seem that you are not making progress towards it. Keeping goals small and incremental gives more opportunities for reward.
• Set performance goals, not outcome goals – You should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible. It can be quite dispiriting to fail to achieve a personal goal for reasons beyond your control!  In business, these reasons could be bad business environments or unexpected effects of government policy. In sport, they could include poor judging, bad weather, injury, or just plain bad luck.
• Set realistic goals – It's important to set goals that you can achieve. All sorts of people (for example, employers, parents, media, or society) can set unrealistic goals for you. They will often do this in ignorance of your own desires and ambitions.
  It's also possible to set goals that are too difficult because you might not appreciate either the obstacles in the way, or understand quite how much skill you need to develop to achieve a particular level of performance.

Achieving Goals

When you've achieved a goal, take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. Absorb the implications of the goal achievement, and observe the progress that you've made towards other goals.

If the goal was a significant one, reward yourself appropriately. All of this helps you build the self-confidence you deserve.

With the experience of having achieved this goal, review the rest of your goal plans:

• If you achieved the goal too easily, make your next goal harder.
• If the goal took a dispiriting length of time to achieve, make the next goal a little easier.
• If you learned something that would lead you to change other goals, do so.
• If you noticed a deficit in your skills despite achieving the goal, decide whether to set goals to fix this.

       Studies have shown how being distracted can become a bad habit that ultimately decreases our effectiveness at work or in school.  Psychologists have identified new ways to help people overcome the hurdles that stand in the way of their productivity.  Here are some key strategies to enhance your productivity.

1.  Minimize Interruptions
            We are constantly bombarded by emails, ringing phones, text messages that reek havoc on our productivity.  When you need to concentrate and focus, find ways to create that space.  Put up a "Do Not Disturb" sign on your office door.  Turn your cell phone off.  Put your phone on silent and put the screen face-down so you can't see texts or notifications.  Study after study has shown that we, as humans, are not good at multi-tasking.  We think that we are but we are not.  These interruptions take us away from the task at hand. 

2.  Increase Attention Span in 15 Minute Increments
           One way to increase attention span and productivity, is to take a "technology break" after 15-minutes of uninterrupted work.  Give yourself a study or work break where you can check email, check alerts or texts, after completing 15 minutes of  uninterrupted work.  Once you master working for 15 minutes at a time, start increasing the time before taking a technology break.  Research has shown that taking small breaks allows us to maintain focus.  

3.  Write Down Your Goals To Boost Productivity
          We have all heard that setting goals is important but how to do this can seem elusive.  Establishing a habit of writing down your goals can boost performance and productivity.  The act of writing down a goal seems to make us accountable to the goal.  The act of writing down goals can also help us to become more reflective as we evaluate our goal outcomes and handle problems that may arise.

Whether you are going on a business trip to Turkey or just want to impress your significant other with la langue de l'amour, there are many reasons to learn a foreign language.  A wealth of research has investigated what helps the most.  

Here are a few strategies to help pave the way to become fluent in that next language.

1.  Watch Social Cues: Pay attention to nonverbal cues, such as gestures,  pointing, and eye gaze.  They can enhance your understanding of sounds, words, phrases, and even grammar.  In Japanese, for example, the gestures for "Come here" looks like the American gesture for "Go Away."  

2.  Listen To Your Own Accent:  You can improve your pronunciation by recording yourself in conversation and practicing with a native speaker.

3.  Tune Out to Tune In:  Listening to the new language spoken in the background while doing other activities or tasks can help you to learn to distinguish among similar sounds.  So, feel free to put those telnovelas on while you cook dinner.  

4.  Sleep On It:  Going to bed soon after you practicing a new language or drilling vocabulary can help you to consolidate what you have learned.

5.  Say It Again:  Hearing and repeating words and phrases helps you to learn them faster and commit them to memory more.

6.  Immerse Yourself:  Of course, we have all heard that nothing is more effective for learning a new language than complete immersion in the culture.  Living and working with native speakers can round out this experience.  

When you need a favor, there's nothing more convenient than shooting off an email.  It saves you the awkwardness of making your plea face-to-face. But, do not expect the same results.

A new study showed that people believe that email requests are just as effective asking in-person.  The study, published in the March 2017 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, told 45 participants that they would have to ask 10 strangers, either in person or via email, to complete a survey with no compensation. Participants in both groups thoughts that one or two people would complete the survey but they were largely incorrect.  More than 70% of people approached in person were willing to complete the survey. While only 2% of those asked via email were willing to comply.

What about soliciting a friend of colleague?  Face-to-face interaction is still the best method.  When a friend or colleague asks you directly and asks for a favor in person, it means they are in serious need and respect you enough to pay you a visit.  

      Emotions can be hard to control but adopting some basic techniques can improve your emotional well-being.
 1.  Be Thankful!
  Being grateful for what you have enhances satisfaction.

2.  Be Active!
   Physical exercise and intellectual engagement usually prevent people from focusing on negative emotions too much.  Strain your body once in a while at gym or at a nearby hiking trail, enjoy good food, books, culture, and music.  Such endeavors can make it easier to look at the bright side of life.

3.  Meet People!
      Mingle with people you like.  An active social life is an effective means to overcome everyday worries, mild anxieties, and builds your social support.

4.  Try new habits!
       Changing your routine can help you focus on positive events and avoid boredom.  Start a gratitude journal and take note of nice things that happen to you daily.  Reserve a few minutes to review these happy times.

          Most of us believe that we are good listeners. As a psychologist, I spend my days listening to people and trying to help them.  But we all have times when the people we care about feel that they are not being heard or listened to.  Here is some advice on how to be a better listener.

1.  Check your assumptions.  
          If you are already certain that you know what is going on in someone's head, your brain is primed to accept only information that agrees with your preconceived notions.  Yet, if you can cultivate a sense of genuine interest about where the other person is coming from and what he or she might say, you create an environment in which whoever you are talking to feels heard and you can actually hear.  While we are hardwired to make assumptions, it is possible to check your assumptions out loud with the person you are listening to.  Try asking "so you mean..." or "so you're thinking that..." and let the person confirm or correct. 

2.  Get curious.
          The amazing thing about being genuinely curious is that it keeps you from being defensive.  A good way to exercise curiosity is to ask open-ended questions such as "Can you say more about how that makes you feel/bothers you/to help me understand?"

3.  Suspend judgment.
          Sometimes we become so entrenched in our own beliefs  and opinions that we close down and don't want to hear anything else, even from those closest to us.  But if we close down, we are going to miss important messages.  The first thing to do is to suspend your judgment.  Try really hard to let the other person talk.  Take in the entire message, no interruptions allowed, and just listen.  When you do that, you will often find that even if you do disagree there is at least some shared ground or goals, which makes it easier to put yourself in the other person's shoes.  This is what empathy is all about.  

4.  Know when to tap out.
           Genuine listening requires humility and curiosity, and neither humility nor curiosity can be faked successfully.  If you are not feeling well, if you are hurried, stressed, or overwhelmed, you are not going to be able to be truly present  and curious during a conversation, especially a tough or difficult conversation.  In those moments, there is nothing wrong with saying, " I can hear that this is really important to you, and I want to give you my full, undivided attention.  Can we wait for a bit?  I need some time."