Behaviour Problems – They won’t listen to me!/

Behaviour Problems – They won’t listen to me!

Archive for the ‘NLP for Children’ Category

Behaviour Problems – They won’t listen to me!

Posted on: June 8th, 2012 by Leonne 2 Comments

 

It’s true, a lot of the time our kids do not listen to us, but that doesn’t mean they will not listen to us. Its all about what we are asking them to do or what we are forgetting to ask them to do.

Words have Power

Anybody who has practiced NLP or Hypnosis know’s the impact of language on the way we think, in fact everyone reading this is aware of the impact of language on our emotions and behaviour, consider this quote from Shakespeare:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

Would it be as often remembered and repeated if it was said like this:

Oh Rom’s, why does your name have to be that?                                                                   Pretend he’s not your old man and Change your surname;                                                    or if you wont do it, promise you’ll love me                                                                               and ill change mine.

It doesnt quite have the same impact, does it. And in the same way the language we use everyday has more or less impact depending not only on the words we use but the order in which we use those words.

Road Blocks or Diversions.

Sometimes children do things which we dont want them to do and many times I hear people (and myself from time to time)  saying to their children, “stop it” or “dont do that” or “thats enough” and the child goes on doing whatever they were doing and it seems as though they “wont listen”.

“Stop jumping all over my furniture”, “dont fight with your brother”, “enough of that banging”,

One day your driving along on a journey you have a map marked out and you know exactly the route to take to get you to your destination, but then you come to a one way street and theres a road block, all routes are blocked off you have nowhere to turn, so you look around for a sign, showing you where to go but there isn’t any, what do you do now? Your basically stuck, you either go back from where you came and not get to your destination or you have to go on through the road block.

Now think about taking the exact same journey coming to the road block but this time theres all those yellow diversion signs set up leading you on a different route to your destination, a bit of a pain initially, but know you realise you have a choice, you have at least two different ways of getting where you want to go, not only that, you’ve also enjoyed the new scenary you have taken in along the way.

So when we are asking children to stop doing something (a road block) its really important to set up a diversion and tell them where you want them to go, the destination is whatever they are getting from the unwanted behaviour, (which in most cases will be something they need to do to develop and learn) and they can still get it but in new ways which now gives you and your child more choices.

“I know you want to have fun jumping around, and thats good. My furniture is for sitting on and eating on, do you think it would be a better idea to use your trampoline”. 🙂

This maybe a really simple Idea but also a very powerful one too.

Leonne Daniel

P.S If you have trouble controlling your own emotions so that you can make better decisions and remember to set up the diversions then look out for my furure blogs where theres more to come on controlling your state!

 

 

NLP for Parents and Children

Posted on: May 17th, 2012 by Leonne 1 Comment

Nightmares are a good thing!

Ok so the titles a little misleading, anyone who’s a parent knows that its not great being woken early hours of the morning because your child is having a nightmare and then whats worse is that they kick you all night because they have to squeeze into bed with you because they’re so scared.

But by using some NLP techniques you can use this problem and many other problems as an opportunity to give your child some really useful resources.

A few years ago when my son was around 5 or 6yrs old he started to have  a few nightmares and on a couple of occasions I suffered a few sleepless nights as a result of being kicked, well I like my sleep :), and hate the thought of my son being upset by this so I thought that I’d better help him to sort it out.

So then the next time, I hadn’t even got to sleep when he woke saying he was scared. I started to explore with him what was actually scary about these dreams, and it was something about zombies, (turns out his older sister had shown him the music video to Michael Jacksons thriller) So I asked him what he would like to dream about and he told me some sort of cartoons which he liked at the time, I got him to start to think about these and began to joke around with him, helping him to relax, but then he told me he couldnt think about this as whenever he closed his eyes these zombies would appear, I told him this was really cool, as if he could get these zombies to appear in his mind then what other things could he see. I knew at the time he loved Ben 10, and for those of you who dont know Ben 10 is this cool kid who fights off scary aliens by becoming an Alien himself. I got him to tell me  when he could see himself in the picture and what were the zombies doing,(this allowed him to disassociate from it and reduce any negative emotions) and then asked him what would happen if you suddenly became Ben !0, at that point things started to change from being a nightmare to becoming a game which of course would be fun, I then asked him who else he thought would be useful to have in this situation, and he started to come up with all sorts of suggestions like batman, superman, and many other super hero’s, so his dreams were like the Avengers movie way before he even got to see it.

Jacob took this a step further and realised that each one of these super hero’s had different resources, to help him defeat the different types of bad guys, in fact he even had to start inventing new bad guys in his dreams because he was enjoying it. I also suggested to him that these super heroes could help him create a forcefield so that he get his rest when he’d finished beating them. This was important to help him sleep peacefully. I think we also created some cool sounds effects in there too!

The great thing about this was that not only was I teaching Jacob how to deal with the nightmare but a much more powerful resource for any child, to consciously take control of his internal world, the things he see’s, feel’s and  hear’s inside his mind. Its not that Jacob never had a nightmare again, he did, but with a little prompting he was soon coming up with all sorts creative solutions about how to deal with his internal world, and I also got some sleep :).

Thats how you can turn a problem into a resource using NLP.

Leonne Daniel specialises in using NLP to help Parents and Children.