You may have heard a little about some of the techniques used in NLP and how effective they can be when used with adults, but they also can bring amazing results for children.
Much of NLP is focused on strategies and, since its creation in the early 1970s, NLP has been continually improved upon. One major contributor is author and trainer, Robert Dilts who, having had difficulty with spelling throughout his life, decided to use his NLP modelling skills to observe and analyse the differences in mental strategies of good and poor spellers. He quickly noticed that the good spellers were using a consistent, replicable strategy. From these observations the NLP Spelling Strategy was born.
My eight-year-old nephew is a happy, bright kid, with a keen sense of humor, endless curiosity and a solid vocabulary. His reports from school are pretty decent but he was experiencing difficulty and frustration with spelling which was concerning his parents a little.
When I last visited him, I told him I was going to show him 'a cool trick that not many people know'. I brought out some coloured markers and index cards and asked him what word he'd like to learn. The first word he chose was 'hippopotamus'. Don't you just love the way children don't anticipate limits?
Once I'd written the word down, we spent about 30 seconds learning the word using the NLP Spelling Strategy. He was delighted when he nailed it on his first attempt. Backwards! My sister-in-law's jaw just about hit the floor and the look of joy and amazement on her face was priceless.
Fifteen minutes and many high fives later he'd slam-dunked 'February', 'environment', 'intelligent' and a number of other tricky words. He now knows he's a spelling champ and that learning to spell can be easy and fun.
That's just a quick story to share with you about what a joy applying NLP to a common issue can be using the simplest of techniques to help create change.
Think about the change for my nephew. Now that he's learnt an effective strategy, he'll never struggle with spelling again because he simply won't ever have a reason to 'unlearn' what works so well for him.
The other wonderful gift that came out of this for him is the improvement to his self-esteem. He now knows that the problem was never with him; it was just a faulty strategy. How great is that?
0 comments:
Post a Comment