Book Review: Brain Hacks by Dr. Lara Honos Webb
Dr. Lara Honos-Webb is a Psychologist, Author, and Speaker specializing in ADD, ADHD in adults and teens. Brain Hacks is her latest release in a long line of books focused on improving people’s ability to improve their quality of decisions, actions and lives. I’ve had the privilege to build a personal relationship with Lara over the last few years and witnessed the passion and dedication she’s committed to this book. I am wanted to take the time to share my experience reading Brain Hacks, and how it impacted my goals, provided tools to overcome cognitive skill deficits, and how this book has also had an impact on others in my life.
I found Brain Hacks to be a powerful, straightforward read to better understand my “executive functioning”. The book provides a foundational understanding around the variables impacting your cognitive skills and provides tons of insight and tools from psychology and neuroscience. As a performance coach, & organizational culture consultant, this provided an incredible field manual/toolbox that was fun, easy to read, and immediately actionable. As a friend, it provided clear frameworks to provide relevant advice and support my friends as they navigate challenging moments.
My personal goals were to increase my effectiveness with building a business, transform an organization’s culture, and to build an understanding around why I’m avoiding action around producing my own personal content.. (hence my first book review…). Lara begins the book by providing a survey for readers to assess their Executive Functioning in the areas of:
Focus & Attention
Planning & Organizing
Cognitive Flexibility
Emotional Regulation
Impulse Control
I found that I had significant gaps in my Planning & Organizing skills which was significantly inhibiting me performance! I discovered the planning & organizing structure I have in place (or “exoskeleton” as Lara describes) isn’t working and is in need of an upgrade. This has been extremely helpful in providing tools to intentional develop skills to prioritize and organize, and rebuild the exoskeleton to be more effective!
If you find yourself “stuck” in any area of your life, I recommend you turn to the cognitive flexibility section, pick an exercise and do it! I walked through a few actions with a close friend stuck in her career and applied some of the activities. It almost immediately opened up new ideas, new possibilities , helped her get unstuck and provide next steps!
The visual layout and content structure made the process of exploring and applying the tools and tactics really easy. The takeaways summary is super helpful as a reference after reading while practicing and honing skills. Overall, Dr. Lara Honos-Webb does a skillful job using questions directed towards the reader to help identify personal opportunities to improve, while simultaneously creating the appropriate framing of why the concepts in the book are important, and how to immediately integrate them into your life to be effective. I found this book to be an easy, practical tool to upgrade my executive functioning.