Episode 75 of the Becoming Centered Podcast is all about how Residential Counselors can help kids become more cognitively self-regulated. Residential Counselors are uniquely positioned to help children and youth clients develop their executive skills. These skills help kids to structure and regulate their own thinking. Residential treatment provides frequent opportunities for kids to practice planning, prioritizing, organizing, sustained attention, time management, working memory, and flexibility. Supported by beliefs in the importance of these skills, practice is what develops the self-regulating regions of the brain. This is done by repeatedly asking clients to plan ahead, to make thoughtful choices, to organize their physical environment and their thoughts, to pay attention when others are speaking to you, to pay attention to time constraints, to be thoughtful about how to complete sequences of tasks, and to be mentally flexible to daily disruptions and being able to identify more than one possible explanation for why something has happened or why another person has acted in a particular way. As your clients become more skilled at these executive skills they will become more thoughtful people with more thoughtful behaviors.