Welcome back to the “Neuroscience Meets SEL Podcast” this is Andrea Samadi. I want to first of all thank YOU for listening and providing feedback of the episodes. Since launching the end of June, without any paid advertising, we are on our 12th episode and we have reached 12 countries so far!  This is incredible! Thanks for all the DMs with feedback on the content and how you are implementing these ideas—I do appreciate hearing how these episodes are being received and how you are using this information. If you’d like to reach me with any questions, you can always find me on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Just search Andrea Samadi.For those who don’t know the background of why we launched the “Neuroscience Meets SEL Podcast” it began with the growing movement and interest in social and emotional learning in our schools and need to take these skills into the workplace with emotional intelligence training. Our goal is to close the gap recent surveys show exists in our workforce where 58 percent of employers say college graduates are not adequately prepared for today’s workforce, and those employers noted a particular gap in social and emotional skills like self and social awareness, and growth mindset that are crucial to college and career readiness and are finally being introduced into our schools. We want the ideas you take away with you to be actionable whether you are an educator working in a school, an employee of manager in a corporation, or someone just looking to take their skills to the next level.As a recap, in our first episode, we shared with you the “Why behind implementing an SEL/emotional intelligence training program in your school or workplace” with some strategies that we offered on how to get started. In the second episode, we introduced the first of the six SEL competencies (self-awareness). This episode has been the most popular so far, and the one I’ve had the most feedback on, showing me that self-awareness is of high interest to those interested in this work—both the school market, as well as the workplace. We’ve tied in interviews to connect you to these skills so you can hear directly from experts from the field and those who are implementing programs with success. With each skill we investigate the best practices and strategies that you can use either in the classroom or workplace to develop and improve your own program and practice, before extending these strategies to others. Don’t forget to look for ideas, tools and resources in the show notes section if you want a deeper dive into the content. Today we are on the fourth competency, out of six—Responsible Decision-Making.Understanding the neuroscience[i] behind decision-making can be an important tool when looking for new results.In our last episode with Chloe Amen, we discussed the importance of brain development and results and the fact that “your brain is not fully developed until the age of 25 for females and 28 for males”[ii] so it is critical that we take care of our brain to ensure that we are able to make sound decisions later in life.  An understanding of our brain’s functions and form are crucial to our future success, since our brain is involved in literally everything that we do.In the Brain Thrive by 25 Online Course (by Dr. Daniel Amen) that was designed to help teens and young adults improve brain function and performance, Chloe Amen (from our last episode) participated in the teen panel and noted that “People don’t realize the decisions they make now (as teens or young adults)—will affect their life later because we aren’t thinking about this at all! Decisions can affect our future—So how can I be my best self?”[iii] Imagine if we had all grown up protecting the organ that controls everything that we do? When I was thirteen, no one ever mentioned the importance of protecting my brain, or how it relates to my future success. We were all told to work hard, go to school and study, with the goal to graduate a