The title art for the RDIconnect podcast "Autism: A New Perspective." The subtitle reads "The podcast show to understand what's going on in the mind of your child and encourage you that growth IS possible! Hosted by RDI Certified Consultant Kat Lee."
Autism: A New Perspective
The RDI® Process: Not a Quick Fix
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When your child is struggling, it’s natural to seek quick fixes. But what if the key to long-term success lies in something deeper? In this episode of Autism: A New Perspective, host Kat Lee sits down with RDI® consultant and parent Lisa Palasti to explore the powerful concept of “process over product.”

Lisa shares her heartfelt journey as a parent of two children with challenges, including her son who underwent intensive skill-based therapies. While skills were learned, Lisa soon realized that those skills didn’t always translate to real-world success. This discovery led her to RDI® (Relationship Development Intervention), a process-based approach that focuses on building the mental tools and adaptive thinking children need to thrive in our unpredictable world.

Through meaningful, real-life experiences, RDI® encourages parents to become effective guides, helping their children develop dynamic intelligence—the ability to apply skills flexibly in various situations. While learning skills is important, it’s the process of nurturing curiosity, adaptability, and emotional connection that truly builds independence and well-being.

Check out this full episode to discover how focusing on process over product can unlock your child’s potential. 

Discover a Meaningful Progress

Parents, you are not only capable but uniquely positioned to guide your children toward meaningful progress. You just need the right support.

Learn more about the RDI® approach and connect with a certified consultant Find out more about the RDI® approach and connect with a certified consultant here.

Autism: A New Perspective is Available on iTunes!


Full Transcript

Kat Lee: Welcome back to Autism, A New Perspective, the podcast show where we help you understand what is going on in the mind of your child, and we always encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Kat Lee, and in this week’s podcast, I sat down with Lisa Pilasty, RDI consultant, parent, and RDI professional trainer in Canada. Lisa and I talked about that RDI principle that is so important, process over skills.

Let’s listen in. Lisa, we are here to talk about a topic that you and I have been engaged with in our work, our own lives, for years and years, and that is process over product. I think one of the topics that just has persisted through time into 2025 is the difference between a process and a quick fix.

Lisa and I, both being parents, definitely have a heart for parents who come to us and just have so many burdens for their children on their heart that they want them to not struggle. We certainly can relate wanting something to be fixed when their children are really struggling, whatever that area may be, Lisa. What we do is more about a process.

Can you speak to that to parents?

Lisa Palasti: Yeah, the process is about building new neural integration in the child’s brain, building the mental tools and habits that kids are going to need to be able to function in the world in an adaptive, a never-changing, complex, uncertain world. They’re going to have to have the mental tools and attributes to be able to navigate the crazy world that we live in today. What we’re thinking about here when we speak about process is helping to build the neural integration in the brain so that the individual can function more effortlessly with not having to work so hard, not having to be so overwhelmed all the time.

This process really lays the foundations on which is the glue for everything else, for the skills, because we all need those skills. But if we don’t have the functions in place or if we’re not focusing on the processing of building up the neural integration, then the skills often won’t hold up in the real world. With that said, it’s a process because we use everyday meaningful, real-world meaningful experiences to the word meaningful comes to mind because you can’t teach this process of learning and helping somebody to achieve a growth-seeking mindset.

You can’t teach that at a table like a skill.

Kat Lee: Do you think that we’re still focused on that more table work? I want to say that I love a nice accomplished skill. I love to see someone who’s struggling learn something.

It’s not that I’m against that, but that without this process we’re talking about can just lead to nowhere but that skill. Does that make sense?

Lisa Palasti: Absolutely. For instance, my son was taught to raise his hand when he wanted to speak out in class, but he never did because he didn’t know how to initiate or maybe he was taught it as a skill, but it didn’t hold up in the real world. I think that it’s risky business in the sense that when families get really locked in to trying to check the boxes or for their children to develop these rote skills, sometimes they are losing sight of what the attributes that their children are going to need to have in order to experience well-being in the world.

In RDI, we try to help families understand through the education that we provide them and through the process of learning themselves how to become a mentally agile guide. That’s a process. It’s a parallel process for the consultant.

We’re guiding the parent and working ourselves out of a job ultimately, but the parent is also then guiding the child. Everybody has to be on board with the idea that we’re going to learn through the experience and it will be meaningful.

Kat Lee: You reminded me of learning a skill but not learning the dynamic application of that with your raising the hand example. I’ve seen where children were taught to imitate, but then they would get into a classroom and be imitating when they shouldn’t be imitating. That’s because imitation is a dynamic process.

We apply what we’re imitating depending on the circumstance. It’s so interesting to think how dynamic intelligence applies to all the aspects of our life. I’ve actually had people say not all.

I’m like, no, all even to simple things like getting a drink of water. What kind of water will I get? Is it a hot day or a cold day?

Your mind is always engaged in this dynamic process combined with the skills that you have. If you don’t have the dynamic piece and you don’t have that process thought, you can have the skill of getting a drink of water, but you don’t even know when to apply it, which sounds kind of shocking. I think sometimes, don’t you?

Lisa Palasti: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s a very simple example, but I’m sure that there’s lots of other ways to think about it. Do I have time to drink the water now?

Do I want to drink too much water because I won’t be able to access a bathroom anytime soon? Is this water filtered? Is it not?

There’s so many different kinds of things to consider. Those are often decisions that people have to make for themselves personally versus having some kind of script. What’s going to be most meaningful to them?

Kat Lee: I think when you think about the scripting of life through skills, the problem with it is I have to know if this script applies to this circumstance. Therefore, I have to know a lot of scripts. Then you’re right back into that loop of without dynamic intelligence, I don’t know.

How do I do that? It reminds me of an example Dr. Gutstein had given. I actually saw myself where there was a student moving into another location.

They were moving from one place to another. People might think that they just didn’t want to do any work, but when everybody was helping, they didn’t know which thing to pick up first. How is everybody deciding?

I don’t know. I need somebody to tell me. We’re not really deciding.

We’re just picking. There’s no right piece of it. There wasn’t an issue with the skill of moving one item to another, but how to decide that, which again, to your point, it sounds kind of basic.

You kind of just start moving.

Lisa Palasti: You have to be able to go with the flow in the sense of I have to be willing and prepared to adapt as I go and make some quick decisions and some judgments and maybe some intuitions to make the best fit decisions in those moments. Scripts are also risky business because it can set people for failure in the sense that they can learn, I learned that script and I applied what I was supposed to the script and that’s what I was supposed to do and it didn’t work, which can leave people feeling really hopeless too. That’s the only bag of tricks, I guess, is I’ve got this script that I’m supposed to follow and it’s supposed to work, but the best laid out plans, it’s to be expected, won’t work out and you have to be able to adapt.

That’s why we have plan Bs.

Kat Lee: How do you help parents understand this concept of process?

Lisa Palasti: Well, for me, I’m blessed to have had the experience myself of raising two kids with challenges and my youngest was diagnosed with autism when he was two and a half and we engaged in a full 35 hour a week program of ABA and so what had transpired was that my son had acquired a lot of skills. I had this burning question of how are all of these skills that he learned, how are they going to hold up in the real world and where is he going to be when he’s an adult? Is this going to help truly support him?

Because he had essentially almost graduated from the curriculum in that he completed 95% of it and yet he wasn’t able to have reciprocal meaningful back and forth conversation because he had learned that when I ask you a question, I was expecting a specific answer. So when I first started speaking to him in meaningful, experiential, mindful ways, using more declaratives and whatnot, he looked at me like a deer in the headlights because he’s thinking, I don’t even know how to respond to that. I don’t have the answer in my Rolodex up here.

I could see him really struggling and so I had to spend nine months helping him to realize or to learn that communication is a back and forth of sharing ideas, thoughts and feelings, dreams, hopes, you know, experiences and once he had, you know, I enculturated that into our lifestyle, then eventually he started to reciprocate. But prior to that, all he had learned was when I ask you a question, then you respond. So back to your question though, is how do I help parents with this?

As a parent myself, I’m very blessed to have been able to share my experience because when I had learned about RDI, Dr. Gutstein was talking about the, I still remember, he used the Conference Board of Canada employability skills brochure and all of the things that they said that people were going to need in order to be able to function in the 21st century were things that RDI addressed and the research was very poor. It was less than 10% across the board of people that had meaningful employment, connected relationships, independence and a lot of the people that I had attended his two-day conference with felt really depressed by what he shared.

But I’m a half glass full kind of gal, so I’m like, oh, if he’s, and I connect the dots pretty quickly. So I thought if he’s talking about that, that means this program is doing something to address it. And so I embarked on RDI then with my family and that was, yeah, 21 years ago and now they’re, my boys are going to be 26 and 29 soon and they’re both independent and happy.

They have well-being. First and foremost is, I think, for people to just live life with ease and to be happy and have those connected relationships, because not everybody is going to be independent. But so when I am trying to guide my parents, I do have that good fortune of having experienced it first and foremost myself.

And then we also have one of our goals in our program is to help families think about what they want for the future. So we call that long-term perspective and we have them write mission previews that helps them think about what a day in the life will look like for their child and their family a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. And we will often refer back to that periodically to say, okay, are we on route to achieve those things?

And also, you know, we help assess the learning environment, the optimal learning environment that their children are in and if that is really addressing what they want for their child’s future or is it counterproductive because it’s sucking up all their child’s resources, time and energy. And so I think at the end of the day, Dr. Gutstein said it, I love the simplest things that he says, but once he said, don’t all parents want for their kids to want. So if we develop the guiding relationship so that the child can become more motivated to want to learn from the parent because they’re developing a sense of who they are then everything else is just going to become easy.

Kat Lee: Sometimes I feel like we haven’t arrived at parents generally being empowered through different things that they’re trying to do with their children. And I feel like RDI still has that answer for them, which is positive. But so many times parents are coming to me saying, well, I’ve been told that other people need to be with my child.

And I’m sometimes amazed that we’re still at that place in 2025. Yes. Dr. Gutstein was talking over 20 years ago about how parents were the guides and they had to be empowered to guide their children, make decisions for their children and help other people guide their children. And I still sometimes feel like we’re just in this, no, everybody’s telling me someone else has to do that. What is your experience with that?

Lisa Palasti: Well, I would agree a lot of the time though, I think it’s due to the parent being in crisis and they’re so stressed out and desperate and fearful for their child’s future. And they haven’t been afforded that confidence that they are best suited to really help their children. And so I think that through the process, sometimes it’s, I mean, we could tell people something, you know, until you’re blue in the face, but they have to experience it themselves.

So I often will tell a parent that, you know, that it is a process of learning, just like if you were to start a new job, you would give yourself some grace to feel slightly uncomfortable to know that you’re not going to know everything that you’re going to need to know, but you’re going to learn. So just like with a new job, this is similar to that feeling, but it’s worse because it’s emotional. It’s the thing that you love more than anything else in the world, but that you have to give it time.

It’s a process. And so for, I would say close to a decade, I pulled every single one of my clients and asked them how long it took them to start to really feel empowered and to feel competent and to feel like they knew what they were doing. And it didn’t mean that they weren’t gaining some competency along the way and learning how to be more mindful communicators or how to slow down for their kids or how to do some, you know, co-participating, guiding interactions with their child.

They’re still learning each step of the way. But in all that time that I pulled those families, the average answer was six months. It was like the golden, you know, number to help provide families with this understanding, like stick with it.

You’re going to get there. And they all came back to me and they said, you were right. And I’m so glad that you told me that because it helped me.

Kat Lee: When I think back to all these years of us talking about this subject, I can still remember Dr. Gutstein saying, you do need skills. It’s not, you do need them. So there may, you may have a child has need to work on skills.

And if you do, you do, but you combine it with this dynamic intelligence, a focus on dynamic intelligence, and you will have a powerful tool for your child. And thank you for joining us for Autism, A New Perspective, the podcast show where we help you understand what is going on in the mind of your child. And we always encourage you that growth for your child is possible.

I’m Kat Lee. See you next time.

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