The Practice Group
Nigel & Jenny Heath:-
Address: Jinglewood House Ltd, Lyndhurst Road, Landford. Wiltshire
SP5 2AS
All of Nigel’s other reports:
2004 NLP reports
2003 NLP reports
Thursday 5th March, 7.00am. Time to let the dogs out for their morning visit in the
garden. As I walked into the conservatory I was met by the sight of large white cotton
wool lumps of soft wet sticky snow falling in profusion in the garden. After my first
joyful excitement I recalled that tonight Emma was due to join us in Eastleigh having
been snowed off in February. Then I remembered the title of my email to you all on
Monday “No snow forecast for Thursday!” It’s early yet, I thought, plenty of time
for it to melt, and melt it did. By the evening the only reminder of the early snow
was the remarks made to me by certain folks who remembered my earlier email, thanks
guys!!
Should I stick my neck out now and report that there is no snow forecast for
April 2nd, so book it in your diary, right there, now, that’s done, isn’t it?
Nigel’s report for the March 2009 meeting. Emma Sargent
“How to be a better PARENT with NLP”
If you have read the ‘blurb’ about Emma, you will know she is an NLP Master Prac and NLP Trainer as well as being the author of a book called ‘Flying Start’. A book aimed at parents, full of good child coaching questions. Emma took the first few moments to reassure us that she is as capable of ‘bad parenting’ as anyone. Indeed she confesses readily to finding it much easier to coach other people’s children than her own. Of course other people’s children don’t know where Mummy’s ‘hot’ buttons are, or just which tone of voice to use to wheedle what you want.
Other people’s children haven’t seen you naked, covered in mud, drunk as a skunk,
rat-
Emma expressed her dilemma for the evening. How to fill two hours was not the issue. How not to keep us all there for two weeks was. What would be of most use / interest to us? Being a Trainer she knew the answer to this, and asked us what we wanted to know from her.
These were our outcomes
for the evening.
Meeting children for the first time.
Praise -
Boosting confidence. (Theirs
not yours!)
Tantrums. (Theirs and yours!)
Motivating them over GCSE’s.
Transition between parent/child
to adult/adult.
Connect onto ‘their’ planet.
The effect of conflict between parents.
Getting
them to play on their own.
As Emma wrote up our thoughts she also interspersed them with stories, comments and questions to clarify what exactly was meant. A good coaching technique to apply to children of all ages when they are not specific enough in their statements, questions and particularly answers! Many of the heartfelt pleas on the chart on the left met resonating cries and groans from the rest of us. Well the parents amongst us. We had some brave souls who attended in their capacity of children, not having been fooled by all the ‘wonderful’ hype that tends to go around the ‘having a baby’ process. The major dilemma we all face is forever being our parent’s child, no matter how old we become, until we sometimes become their parent. A place Emma was not prepared to divert to at this time, needing at least three hours to begin to touch the subject. In my work with people as a therapist I have experienced the shift that happens when a sensible and lucid adult wanders into the home of their sensible and lucid parent and they both regress several decades and begin communicating and behaving in a very different way. This is particularly disconcerting when the child is 60 and the parent 80.
I digress, but so did Emma, and she started it, so there!
This soul searching, anecdotes and comparing of parental wounds took quite a while and I was beginning to wonder if we were going to play with our NLP, or just sit around talking, when Emma introduced us to the first exercise of the evening. Everything before had, I realised, just been a long introduction. Made longer by interruptions and diversions from the audience. The theme Emma had picked on, based on our requests, was around ‘Values’, those things we invest time and money in, and don’t like it when other people trash. them.
“What’s important to you about being a parent?”
If you’re not a parent ask yourself “What’s important in your life? Or in work?”
We spilt into groups of three and explored with each other our ‘values' around parenting.
When we re-
Time for another story. Emma’s daughter was due to take a tap dancing exam and at bedtime the night before was clearly ‘stressed’ about the following day. Emma acknowledged how easy it is to ‘placate’ the fears of others and at the same time to put down or belittle their fears. So in good coaching style she asked a question or two to elicit exactly what shape these fears took. Her daughter told her that she was worried about the exam because as she thought about it she kept seeing the examiner as a witch who was going to do horrid things to her if she got anything wrong.
Time for some gentle re-
Emma wanted to support her daughter and was with her for the exam. The ‘swish’ had clearly worked for when the examiner entered the room, with wild red hair and staring eyes, Emma was sure this was no teddy bear! Her daughter however seemed blissfully unaware of this resemblance and didn’t fall in the sink once. (Tap dancing?)
The sorts of questions Emma used, which are good coaching questions for children
from 3 to 103, were:-
I think we took the break about here.
The key to unlocking the inner world of our mind is by finding a route from ‘Surface structure’ to ‘Deep structure’. For ourselves this can often be a tricky manoeuvre. With the help of a parent or coach this becomes possible. Those of you familiar with ‘Clean Language’ will know about the power of metaphor and enabling the ‘client/child’ to explore their inner landscape. Meta model questions which drill down to find detail from vague generalisation achieve a similar objective. “How do you know?” Requires an inner search. (Trans derivational). Questions you can ask yourself include. “How do I know that?” & “What do I mean?”
Back in our groups we took some time to explore more deeply the value statements we had made earlier. To discover the relationship between the outside and the inside of our value sets, to share some of our own insights with others. On a personal note I would like to thank my two cohorts who helped me explore my values around my children and linked for me the ‘lack’ in my own childhood with the ‘plenty’ in my children’s.
Somehow the second half of the evening races by even faster than the first and very soon it was time to be saying a big THANK YOU to Emma for an entertaining and thought provoking evening. To receive the special offer she had brought along for us, (bet you wish you had made it now!) and to dismantle the room, pack up the books, take down the posters and get out before we got locked in.
To get your hands on a copy of Emma’s excellent book “Flying Start”, coaching questions every parent should know, and to find out about the NLP refresher programme Emma and Tim are planning, visit Emma’s web site.
