
English: 
Mind in the Making is the result of a now
13 year journey where I set out to find out
what can we do to keep the fire for learning
burning in children's eyes.
 All young children are born with not only
a passion but a survival skill to learn about
the world that they live in.
 And yet, far too many children and adults
have lost that passion, have lost that fire.
 For the business community, engagement is
one of the major predictors of productivity
and that's what this is.
 I wanted to understand this by going out
and talking to some of the best researchers
who understand brain development, who understand
how we grow and how we change.

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 I ended up finding that there are these
life skills that emerge in all of us but we
don't pay very much attention to promoting
them.
We think of learning as the content of what
we learn but we don't think of learning as
the how we learn.
 And what life skills are, are the how that
we learn.
 They, interestingly enough, all involve
what researchers call executive functions
of the brain.
 And I know that sounds like a guy in a pinstripe
suit bossing you around in your brain but
what these are are the capacities that take
place in our prefrontal cortex that pull together
our social, our emotional and our cognitive
capacities that enable us to achieve our goals.
Basically Mind in the Making describes the
research behind these executive function life
skills and then talks about how we can promote
them in ourselves and in the children in our
lives.

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English: 
A very important life skill is focus and self-control.
 We live in a world that's full of distractions
and yet if we're going to achieve our goals
-- and remember, all life skills are based
around setting goals and achieving them for
ourselves.
 If we're going to achieve our goals, we
need to be able to pay attention and not go
on automatic.
 So focus and self-control involves being
able to pay attention.
 It involves being able to remember all the
things that we need to know to achieve the
goal that we have.
 It involves the flexibility to be able to
adapt as life changes and again, the control
not to go on automatic but do what we need
to do to achieve a goal.
Perspective taking is understanding what might
be going on in someone else's mind.
 It's understanding how that person thinks,
how that person feels and how that person
sees the world.

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English: 
An intellectual, a social and an emotional
understanding of the landscape of other people's
minds.
 And it's very important to deal with other
people if we don't think that what we think
is the only way that it -- you know, that's
the only reality.
 It's very important to understand other
people's realities as well.
Communicating is thinking through what it
is you want to communicate and then understanding
the perspectives of other people who are going
to be the recipients.
 They're gonna be the people who listen to
or understand what each other says.
 It's critical in business, for example,
to understand what your customers need and
want.
 It's critical in any family relationships
to understand what other people think and
feel but then to communicate in ways that
reach them best.
You could call communicating -- and they do
this in the business world -- the elevator
speech.

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English: 
 If you only had a minute in an elevator
with someone and that person was really important
to something that you want to do, what would
you say to be able to get through to that
person.
 That's what communicating really is.
Making connections is symbolic relationships.
Understanding what things go together, what
things are alike, what things are different
and how they might go together.
 In fact, making unusual connections is the
basis of creativity -- so important in our
world where you can Google for information
are the people who can put things together
in different way.
Critical thinking is a very important skill
because, particularly today, we're awash in
information.
 You could go on the Internet and find six
different versions of, you know, what -- if
you're not feeling well what's really going
on with you or even understanding a so-called
fact.
 There is so much information and we have
to have the capacity to understand what is
valid and what is reliable information.

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English: 
That's the basis of critical thinking.
Taking on challenges is more than coping with
stress.
 Life can be stressful no matter how we plan
for it, no matter what we want to do.
Things happen to us that we don't like.
 And we have to be able to cope with those
things.
 But taking on challenges goes beyond simply
coping with the things that happen to us.
 It means taking on that next harder thing.
 And if you think about  a world in which
information is changing constantly, we are
going to have to do things today or tomorrow
that we didn't even know existed yesterday.
 So we have to have the ability to take on
the challenge and try something hard.
 And failing is a part of learning.
 So, you know, being able to fail but learn
from the failures is all part of taking on
challenges.
Self-directed engaged learning is the ability
to continue to learn from life, to learn from

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English: 
our experience, to have the initiative to
learn in ways that we can use the information
that we have.
 So really all of the life skills -- all
of the executive function life skills add
up to helping us be ongoing learners because
it is the ongoing learners, again in a world
where information changes so rapidly -- it
is the ongoing learners who will thrive.
There has been a lot of focus on skills.
 Skills for the twenty-first century and
so forth.
 But I think that these particular executive
function life skills are the skills that we
need to thrive.
 We need them when we're little children.
 We need them when we're teenagers.
 We need them when we're adults.
 We need them when we're aging.
 These are all skills that can help us live
the life that we want to live -- that can
help us thrive.
 That can help us be what we want to be.
 And so there is so much scientific evidence
over time that shows that when we have these
skills we have the life that we want to have.
I invite you to join me in this workshop where
we're going to take a deeper look at the seven
essential life skills and we're going to look
at some video clips really straight from the
researchers' labs so that you can go into
the lab of a neuroscientist or a cognitive
scientist or someone else who studies our
development, particularly among children,
and look at how we know what we know.
 And then look at how to apply these life
skills to your own life.

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