Never too young to start

NLP for your preschool child

I’m a terrible one for starting to write books but not getting them finished or I finish them but don’t get round to having them published. This extract is from one such book.

It all started when a young mum called me up and said that she was on mat leave and wanted to use the time to train in NLP with me so she could use the techniques for her preschooler and her new baby.

So what did I do?

I wrote a course to fit in with the number of weeks she had available and we had weekly sessions with face to face zoom calls and I sent the notes from the session plus details of an exercise or two that she could do with her child. At the beginning of each session she was able to feedback how it had gone and I would answer her questions. This course is available on my website. Click NLP for preschool mums for more details. I thought afterwards that it might have been fun for a group of mums with preschoolers to share the cost and support each other going through it.

I then turned the course into a book which is yet to be published because like so many authors, the ‘day job’ tends to take priority. As you probably know this for me is training in NLP and EFT and running a successful coaching practice helping children and teens with whatever is holding them back from being the happy souls we all want them to be. If you’d like to have a chat about how I could help you or your child, I offer a free call Book a free call.

Let’s start with some basics. After all, I’m sure you’d like to know how NLP could benefit your little one.

Basic concepts of NLP and the 10 beliefs of excellence and how they are relevant to parents of pre-school children

What exactly is NLP?

Do you find yourself wondering ‘why are they doing this?’ or ‘why are they so anxious’, ‘why do they get so angry’ and you ask them. They don’t know. They love you and want to help you by giving you an answer so they maybe give you what sounds like an answer that you’ll be satisfied with. But it will not help.

What happens is that there is a sequence of events.

1.     Something happens such as a sibling taking something of theirs or mummy saying they can’t have something they want or it’s raining and they wanted to go outside to play. This is what we call an ‘external event’.

2.     If your child is visual they will notice what they have seen. If they are auditory, they will pick up on what’s said and the tone, pitch and volume. A kinaesthetic child will be more attuned to their feelings and what was done. Children will have the ability to do all three but will have a preference. This makes some events mean more depending on their preference.

3.     Your child then filters it according to their map of the world

-       values about what is right or wrong, important or not important

-       beliefs about the world they live in – basically home and school

-       memories of when this happened before

4.     They then create their own internal representation which is their version of the event.

This is the ‘neuro’ bit of Neuro Linguistic Programming. It’s everything that goes on ‘behind the scenes’ as it were. It’s what the mind conjures up based on the child’s ‘map’. This map is their own unique take on the event.

They will delete some bits of information, only see, hear or feel some parts or aspects of the event, a bit like one of those tests where they zoom in on a very small part of an object and you have to guess what the actual object is.

They will generalise as well, saying ‘that always happens to me’ or ‘she never listens’ , making a rule based on one piece of evidence.

They also distort, mindread and predict the future saying ‘I’ll fail’ or ‘this means she doesn’t love me’ or ‘I won’t know anyone’.

We now have an even more complex picture of the event and we are still only at the N of NLP!

So let’s move on to the L – linguistic.

This is what they say. So can you see that there’s a whole story before they even open their mouth to say something?

Let’s also remember the body language and physiology that you see before they speak. This is part of the communication too. Pre-school children do not have the language skills to access the thoughts and feelings they experience and reflect those in words that make sense in the moment to someone, you, whose map of the world will be completely different; based on your beliefs and values, experiences, memories etc.

How they respond becomes the next event and so the situation develops. This is then the P of programming which is about the patterns we repeat whether they bring us happiness or not.

NLP was developed by John Grinder and Richard Bandler in the 70s when two university students decided to explore the secrets of success. What if they could ‘code’ it so that anyone using that code would achieve whatever they wanted. They called this aspect modelling. This is what makes NLP different from other similar modalities. The idea is that by applying the underlying belief – remember this is the very first often subconscious part of the N of NLP – you can achieve your best in whatever you’re doing. They then created some core beliefs of excellence which are general and can apply to anything we do. Amazingly, I find these beliefs just as effective today as they proved to be in the 1970s.