Ian Davies, NLP4Kids-Buckinghamshire

01/07/2022

We can't change what happens, but we can choose our response. Happiness isn't about everything going well - it's about responding constructively, even in difficult times.
I particularly like 7,15 and 19. What are your favourites...

15/06/2022

07/06/2022

How to Unstick a Stuck Child

We're answering a question today from one of our members (click here to join: https://nlp4kids.org/membership/)

The question is around, unsticking a stuck child.

What do you do when a child or young person says "I can't do it" and they genuinely feel really stuck, and they cannot move themselves forward?

We're going to specifically focus on schoolwork and homework.

Getting a child past the idea of being stuck and getting them out of that habit of saying "I can't do it" is important. When a child's brain is developing, their brain makes lots of pathways called neural networks in their brain. Over time, as they're growing up something called neuro pruning occurs.

Neural pruning is when the brain is trimming back some of those neural networks that are not in use.

If you've heard of the phrase "use it or lose it", that's what's happening on a neuronal level. If you have a child, for example, who learned a second language, when they were maybe two or three years old and they do not continue to use that language, they won't have it anymore as they grow up. They will literally just forget it. That's because the neural networks have got trimmed and pruned away, if there are certain things that you would really like the children in your life to get good at or to become highly skilled at, we need to help them get past the idea of them being stuck.

They need to get back in the motion of doing it as soon as possible so that they don't convince themselves that they can't do it and then lose the ability to do it because they spend so long not doing it!

One of the things that I like to do with children when I am working with them is to get ahead of the problem. I anticipate that at some stage they will say they can't do it (whatever it is) but it's probably something that's really important that I've asked them to do.

To get ahead of the problem. I do something called 'the red test'. I get them to look around the room and think to themselves or say to themselves 'red' as in the colour red whilst looking around.

I tell them to look for all the red things, notice how many red things they can see and then close their eyes. Then I say, "tell me about the red things that you saw."

They'll list it to me because their eyes will have got drawn to the red stuff as they looked around the room. Then I say, "keep your eyes closed and tell me about the blue things that you saw."

You'll often find there might be one or two blue things that they knew were in the room, but the list is going to be significantly shorter because they were looking for red things. Then I say to them "if the red stuff was all the things that you didn't want or all of the things that you thought you could not do, you just saw evidence of it everywhere! It was all over the place. If the blue things were the helpful things, all of the things that we wanted, all of the things that would make you feel like you could do it, you didn't see any of it because you were too busy thinking about red things."

This is a practical example of how we can accidentally, at times, make our brain think that stuff is more difficult than it needs to be or that we've got more evidence of not being able to do something than we have evidence of being able to do something. It all comes down to what are you looking for. If what you're looking for is to prove that you can't do it, guess what, you'll prove that you can't do it.

If what you're looking for is to prove that you can, then your brain will start to see more of that. Sometimes we need to be having conversations with young people about the fact that they are in charge of their brain and that they can take proactive responsibility for making their brain think in a different way.

You have to take charge of it and it's not just going to happen naturally, it's not just going to come to you. You have to think that way.

In NLP, we have a module called chunking, which is where you either take small stuff and build it into bigger and more abstract things, or you take big and abstract things, and you break them down into much smaller chunks.

Let's say that you have a child who has a piece of work in front of them and they say, "I can't do it."

Start with "Have you got a pen? Can you pick up the pen? Can you remove the lid from the pen?" You can make a joke out of it and make it fun. This isn't about making them feel silly it's just about taking it step by step. What happens often when someone says, "I can't do it" what they're often saying is, "I am overwhelmed. I cannot take all this in."

We've all got different thresholds on what overwhelm looks like. For one person overwhelmed might be a 10,000-word dissertation. But for someone else overwhelmed might be two plus two equals, and it's the only thing on the page in front of them.

There are often other things going on around them, possibly too many other things going on. So, ask them to forget their parent's divorce or that the rabbit escaped yesterday. Just let that stuff go for a second.

"Right now, there is just one thing to do. Take your lid off your pen and we've already made a start."

If this was a five-point checklist, we've already done one thing. Break it down, make it simple and achievable.

When I worked with very young children, who had been out of education, nursery, and those sorts of things for some time, perhaps due to illness, we'd often find that when they returned their development had got set back a little bit.

Not only were they not in alignment with everybody else in the group, but they were often perhaps six months regressed developmentally from how they had been before they left. So, we would give them a jigsaw puzzle that was suitable for a much younger child, because giving them something that was easier, would allow them to tap into a sense of achievement.

Because it was super-easy for them, we would start to see the self-confidence creep back in. When self-confidence is there, they're more comfortable with facing something that's a bit more challenging.

Think about how you can bring things down an academic level for them to make it so that they can't claim stuckness because it's so ludicrously easy for them to do.

Finally, the final thing is something a bit more fun, which is what we refer to as 'unsticker questions' in NLP.

These are really good for tripping your brain out and getting you to think in a different way. These are sometimes used in a therapeutic environment because we also face this problem as therapists, of people saying, 'I can't do it', or 'I'm stuck.'

Stuckness shows up a lot in therapy. Some sessions you can hear "I don't know" a lot! Sometimes we would reply with, "what would happen if you didn't know?"

That can be an unsticker question, but the true one unsticker questions are a bit wackier than that. An unsticker question could be something like, "What would a pigeon say if it had this problem?"
It's like a jump start for the brain.

It’s the same as when you're angry, and someone makes you laugh, and it's just so ridiculous. It snaps you out of that anger mindset that you're in, so it kind of works in a similar way to that.

"If you could put this problem on a cloud, would it float?"

Unsticker questions loosen things up a little bit and make your brain freer. And that's the point, you know of the opposite of being stuck is becoming free again. So even though it's not necessarily going to get you the result that you want, yet, it's going to get things moving, and it's going to take away that brick wall or stuckness.

"If a worm had this problem, would it turn it into words?"
"If a wizard had this problem, what kind of spell would he make?"

Employ one suggestion from above at a time because sometimes if you throw everything at it, you actually don't know what worked.

By Gemma Bailey
www.NLP4Kids.org/gemma-bailey

The original version of this article was written by Gemma Bailey, director of www.NLP4Kids.org.
It was republished and rebuilt with additional content by NLP4KIDS PRACTITIONER IAN DAVIES www.aylesburytherapyforkids.co.uk

01/06/2022

When facing big challenges we can still notice the little good things. Even in difficult times, there is still a lot to be grateful for. And we can actively cultivate positive feelings by looking for what's good.

11/05/2022

Love this...

04/05/2022

The Beetle in Your Shoe
Putting up with stuff that is not the way it should be, it is a bad idea.

If you need to find some motivation to get you doing the getting-things-on-track stuff, then just keep on reading...
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was working and working and working and working. But I was not doing it in a particularly effective way.
As it happened, there were certain things about my life that were probably starting to go a bit wonky, but it felt like I was too busy to do anything about them.
Now, the reason why I'm telling you this story is that I speak to lots of parents, I'll be honest, I speak to a lot of headteachers who say "We have a problem, but now's not the right time to sort it out. Let me put it off for a little while. I'm too busy to attend to that problem right now. We'll circle back to it a little bit further down the line."
I fully understand that mindset, because that's the mindset that I was in a few years back.
In fact, things got so bad. I was firefighting…..all the time. Do you know the game, whack-a-mole? You have a little mole that pops his head up from a board and you whack it but then it pops up somewhere else? That was basically my life, but the mole was a metaphor for my problems.
I refer to it as firefighting because it's as if you put out one little fire in one place and then another one sprouts up somewhere else. But some of those problems might be slightly bigger problems that are not getting properly attended to because you're too busy doing the firefighting.
I've spoken to parents who have said that their child is anxious and school refusing but now's not the right time to deal with it because they're very busy with work.
I can understand how that happens. Your attention gets zapped by the thing that seems most demanding but when you deal with the big quiet thing that's also going on, the firefighting stuff and the little whack-a-mole stuff start taking care of themselves a little bit more, or at least you feel like you've got more energy to deal with them. This is because you dealt with the big monster that's over there in the corner.
It's the big scary thing that really needs looking at. We've had teachers
say "We've got children struggling very badly with mental health issues at the moment, but I can't get you in to see the SENCO because she's too busy dealing with the mental health issues in our children at the moment."
And it's frustrating because if you got us in to deal with it, then you wouldn't have that problem anymore!
Anyway, back to my story!

I was firefighting and I was running around like a headless chicken, trying to take care of too many different things, quite a lot of the time for other people. (But not always, some of it was my own things) and I wasn't dealing with the big stuff. I realised that for about three weeks, there had been something in my shoe.

Okay, now, we've all had that, we've all had a time in the past when you've been walking down the street and there's a stone or a pebble in your shoe.
You could stop and deal with the problem, take off the shoe and get the stone out but maybe instead you do that thing where you tap the toe of your shoe. Then you just shuffle the foreign object down to the front of the shoe and you don't really deal with the problem. You just shuffle the problem out of the way.

I was doing that. I had something in my shoe for three weeks, three weeks of shuffling, whatever that was down to the toe, telling myself I'll deal with it on a day when I can deal with it.

I was getting ready for work one morning, and my client had cancelled my morning appointment, but I didn't know until I was about to leave. So, I thought, "You know what, I may as well get in early and just have a bit of a chilled morning and sort some of those things out that have been on my mind."

I put my shoes on to leave for work and I realised there was still something in my shoe but now is a good time to deal with it.

I shook my shoe upside down, and out came a dead beetle.

I'd been walking around with a dead Beetle in my shoe for three weeks.
That is not acceptable.
That is not an acceptable way for an adult to function.
So, here's the moral of the story.
If there is a thing that you're experiencing with a child or a young person in your life, don't put it off. Don't turn it into the beetle in your shoe, that you just kind of shuffle away. I don't mean you're shuffling your children away; I mean that you are kind of side-lining the problems and firefighting around it, dealing with it day by day, but not really doing the thing that would solve it and resolve the issue.
That might mean that you need to cancel an appointment or take 10 minutes to spare so that you can sit down and send that email, make that phone call reach out to whoever you need to reach out to, to be able to help that young person.
Putting up with a beetle in your shoe is exhausting and it is unnecessary.
You are causing yourself to continue to deal with pain that you do not need to have. And so, if you can take the time to address this properly, you can get rid of that pain forever. And that young person who is probably going through the pain on a very different level to you, will also get to deal with that pain and get rid of it forever. That is entirely possible.
But you're probably going to need to pause to put the planning in place to be able to deal with this thing.
Don't make it a beetle in your shoe.

By Gemma Bailey
www.NLP4Kids.org/gemma-bailey
The original version of this article was written by Gemma Bailey, director of www.NLP4Kids.org.
It was republished and rebuilt with additional content by NLP4KIDS PRACTITIONER IAN DAVIES
aylesburytherapyforkids.co.uk

26/04/2022

Most of us are fortunate enough not to have to deal with Dyslexia...but what is it actually??

20/04/2022

Anger is increasingly something I work with. Knowing where it comes from is key to being able to deal with it.
Is it frustration?...work with how to solve a problem.
Is it anxiety?..Often is...deal with the anxiety.
Anger can be very destructive but it does not have to be...

07/04/2022

Encouraging a Problem Solving Attitude.

I'd like to give you some strategies to help young people with more independent problem-solving.
Since Covid has happened, many young people have had anxieties and concerns about being back at school. There's still a lot of social anxiety coming up because of being cocooned for 12 months. There are also other anxieties about Covid in the future and the risks that are still associated with it. However, it is not necessarily the right thing to step in and start problem-solving for your child or for the young person that you're working with.
When we do that, we hold them back from exercising the great, creative minds that they have - that are good at problem-solving. Problem-solving for them, inadvertently makes them believe that they can't come up with their own solutions. That's never your intention, I know that. But that's the message that they, on an unconscious level, receive.
In future when there's another challenging situation, they'll be much more inclined to need to reach out and ask for advice and support around how to deal with it, rather than coming up with their own solutions.
I'm talking about a small shift, but it's a significant and important one. Instead of coming up with answers, advice, and solutions for them when they express that they're experiencing a problem, turn their questions of reassurance back into a question that you then pose to them. Then they must start generating their own ideas and coming up with their own solutions. By doing that, you're not going to be taking away any power and responsibility from them. Instead, we're showing them that we trust them to come up with their own good ideas and that we trust them to be resourceful, competent human beings.
This can feel like a bit of an oxymoron, to think "I am helping them by not helping them." But that's how it works. Sometimes, this happens with adults, too - this isn't an issue that's exclusive to children and young people. Think about your own lives and the people that you know. We all know someone that we have a habit of swooping in and saving whenever they have a problem! They typically appear to be the person that has quite a lot of problems. It might be because they've never learned the skills to be able to independently fix things for themselves.
They're used to people swooping in and saving them, so they've grown into adults now who have this kind of expectation that that's what should happen, and when difficulties arise, they get stuck and overwhelmed by what's going on around them.
We want our children and young people growing into adults who are resourceful and able to depend upon themselves.
In the same way, I had a client once who was someone that would find life difficult everyday annoyances would be a big obstacle to her progressing and doing everyday things in life. I've personally always felt like I needed to crack on and overcome things and I remember her saying that if you want to get something done, ask a busy person! This applies in the sense of how productive we might be being, but I think that same rule also applies if you want a problem solved - speak to someone who is in a problem-solving mindset as they already believe in themselves and their ability to be able to fix things.
If you go to someone who's good at fixing things, they'll find it easy to fix things for you. But what we want to have is young people who know how to fix their own problems so that they become fully capable and independent.
One of the best things that we can do is to turn the questions that they have back into a question for them so that they then have to problem-solve the issue that they've brought up.
In the same way, don't jump in with a solution if they are just voicing a problem that they have and not asking you for advice. Sometimes people just want to offload and that's the same for young people, too. Sometimes they want to say, "this thing happened today, and I wasn't happy about it." But they're not asking you to solve the problem, they’re just offloading.
You could ask them "Do you want to think up some ways to be able to get through that or to resolve that issue?" But don't assume that that's what they're asking you for. If you do, it creates this habit of them dumping stuff on you because they know that you're going to swoop in and save the day.
Our job is to make them good at problem-solving for themselves, not to solve the problems for them. We can also start to become way more proactive at creating problems for them. This may sound mean but what I'm talking about here is giving them some roles and responsibilities.
Challenges that are posed to us are like problems that we need to go and solve. We've got to be proactive at times by putting problems in their way so that they get used to resolving different issues for themselves.
In fact, we want our young people to be excited about doing that, so that when some challenging stuff happens, they think "Oh, yes I like a challenge!" They then can enjoy that feeling of being independent. You get a good feeling and a good buzz out of figuring stuff out for yourself.
You'll remember from times in your own past, where you have done well and have a sense of pride from it. Maybe you got to see other people praising you and being proud of you too.
By giving them opportunities to solve problems, to come up against challenges and figure them out, we’re offering them this really wonderful experience of feeling good about themselves and having pride in themselves and helping them to become more resilient.
One of the things I end up talking about quite a lot when I'm running workshops, especially with adults and parents is around resilience and we have a lot of requests from schools in particular, who say we want our young people to learn resilience.
My belief around this is that resilience isn't something that you can teach. Resilience is something that comes from the opportunities that we expose young people to. Think about it this way, if you have baby-soft hands, you're not going to grow thick skin on your hands, unless you do some manual labour that toughens your skin up. Then you will start to develop a thicker skin. But the thicker skin comes from the gritty work that you end up doing from rubbing up against the rough stuff.
Resilience is the same. Resilience is developed because we rub up against hard times. It gives us thicker skin on an emotional level. If we are only ever giving our children experiences that are cushioned, soft and gentle, we can't expect them to develop any resilience because they're not rubbing up against any scratchy bark in life, that's going to give them that thicker skin that we want them to have.
If you want your young person to be a resilient young person, you've got to get comfortable with the idea of seeing them struggle sometimes, seeing them go through discomfort and deliberately putting some of those uncomfortable situations in front of them. By enforcing that problem-solving attitude in them they'll begin to think in that more independent problem-solving way.
By Gemma Bailey
www.NLP4Kids.org/gemma-bailey
The original version of this article was written by Gemma Bailey, director of www.NLP4Kids.org.
It was republished and rebuilt with additional content by NLP4KIDS PRACTITIONER IAN DAVIES WWW.AYLESBURYTHERAPYFORKIDS.CO.UK

01/04/2022

As you stay active this month, focus on ways that feel achievable for your own personal levels of mobility and health.

It's not about running marathons or hours in the gym; even just stretching and fresh air can boost resilience and benefit your mind and body.

30/03/2022

Dealing with Body Image Issues: Children and Young People

If you are unhappy with the way you look to a point where it impacts upon how you feel or causes you to think negatively about yourself, there are a few important things that can really help.

Firstly, the quickest and easiest way to change your body image isn’t by changing your image - it’s by changing how you think about what you see. Self acceptance will always give you more power and self confidence than a physical change. Remember too, that some aspects of body image are just fashion (has anyone notice that big lips are ‘in’ at the moment? A few years a go thin lips were ‘in’ and they will be again one day. Any one who has made a permanent change to their appearance will likely regret the decision when the fashions change in the future.)

Secondly, looking good doesn’t just come down to your body. It’s in what you wear, how you express yourself and how you interact with the world. Perhaps there are some improvements that could be made here.

Make sure you find something about yourself to like and make that your focus. Even if it’s just one eyebrow! Start somewhere positive and build in more over time.

Watch here: https://youtu.be/-e-S2iA0ftM or click the live link in my bio