Girl Scout Leader Uses NLP Coaching To Encourage Shy, Withdrawn
5 Year Old Girl To Speak
NeuroLinguistic Programming, or NLP, is a much used tool in many
coaching practices but the tool can, and should, be applied to
situations in our every day lives as NLP has several techniques
for diagnosing and intervening in certain situations.
Let's Meet Erica
Erica is an engaging and beautiful five year-old: a mess of long
brown hair, expressive eyes and a delicate air of innocence.
Erica, like many little girls, is a proud member of a Brownie
Troop. Unlike most girls, however, Erica never spoke. Outside
her home, Erica transformed into a shy flower who was terrified
to make herself heard.
Week after week, Erica would attend her troop meetings and pass
them in total silence. After seven months of silent
participation, the girls were offered an opportunity to present
a play to a group of younger Girl Scouts.
Erica's Troop Leader wanted to ensure that Erica did not miss
out on the incredibly opportunity to collaborate with the girls
in her troop and share in the joy of post-performance
accomplishment.
The girls were charged with creating the entire play: writing
the script, preparing costumes and producing the play. Erica
would sit silently, working diligently at the tasks the other
girls assigned. Because of her inability to feel confident
speaking to the troop, she was missing out on a chance to be
heard and fully contribute her special beauty to the play.
Determined that no child be left out, the Troop Leader gathered
the girls together one evening and began teaching them an NLP
technique called Anchoring. An anchor is a unique stimulus that
involves multiple senses to stimulate and stir the brain to
remember and recall a particular resource. It is a way to get in
touch with a specific feeling, recall and recreate it in the
body at will.
The Troop Leader approached Erica and asked her, "Erica, can you
say, I'm a strawberry?" Erica's face turned a deep shade of
crimson and her eyes drifted to her shoes. Her reply was barely
audible: "...bewwy" she mumbled rather unintelligibly.
The Troop Leader recognized the incredible courage it took for
Erica to reply and set to reinforce Erica's personal triumph.
She crouched down so as to be eye-to-eye with Erica and gazed
into her eyes, smiled and said "Erica, you have the most
beautiful voice that I had ever heard. Your words and thoughts
are a precious gift. Thank you for sharing your voice with me.
Could you please say them one more time so that we could all
listen?"
Slowly, the Troop Leader asked her girls to surround Erica. All
the girls in the troop loved Erica and wanted to support her in
her first tentative verbal steps. They waited for Erica to
speak.
Erica smiled tentatively and said the word, "bewwy" again.
The Troop Leader then guided each girl to make full eye contact
with Erica. They all took turns making full eye contact with
her, smiling, applauding and hugging her. Through their
collective actions, the troop showered Erica with multiple
images and feelings of positive reinforcement.
The Troop Leader coaxed another sentence out of Erica and
response from the troop, guiding Erica to touch her hand in a
unique way as the girls began to respond lovingly to her words,
knowing that the touch would enable Erica to reproduce the same
feelings of support on her own.
The next time that she spoke the word "bewwy" she smiled with
pride, knowing that she had accomplished something great and
that she was loved and valued.
By the end of that session, Erica was talking a blue streak. She
was saying things like, "I wuv giwl scouts and I have de best
weader."
The simple little change that Erica felt and experienced that
day is just a small building block to the foundation that she
will need to become a woman who is strong and self empowered,
capable of leading others like her to their own healing.
NLP Anchoring The NLP Anchoring process can be broken down into
four steps.
For ease of illustration, we'll use confidence as the desired
feeling. Everyone can use a little more confidence. As you read
through each of the steps, take time to reflect and respond. 1.
Recall a time in your life when you felt confident. Allow your
mind to run a movie of that memory. See what you were seeing,
feel what you felt at that time. If there were sounds, hear
those sounds, tune into what you were saying to yourself and how
you felt about that. Make the memory vivid and as real as you
possibly can. Use your imagination.
Now kick it up a notch to expand all the senses. Make the colors
brighter, the images larger and the sounds more clear and
vibrant, you might even want to add a soundtrack of your
favorite music, whatever you can do to make the image unique and
more powerful is best and most effective for best results. 2.
Choose a place on your body where you will touch yourself or use
an object to remind you of that feeling of the time when you
felt confident (ie use a keychain or a small hand held object.)
You can also visualize a symbol that represents the meaning of
what you want to anchor. For example, you could visualize making
a fist and putting it up into the air in a power move and
saying, "Yes!"
Now combine that touch with the actual memory. Right before the
point in the movie when the feeling is the most intense, you
fire off the anchor by using the unique touch or any other
method of anchoring that you have chosen. 3. Repeat the process.
Think of the time when you felt confident and fire off the
anchor by touching the object, visualizing the image, hearing
the sounds, feeling the sensations in your body or creating that
unique touch. 4. Test it out. Fire off the anchor. You should
expect to be instantly transported to a time in your memory when
you felt confident. If not, repeat the process until you get the
desired feeling on demand. And finally: Remember to have fun!
NLP is a great process and it works surprisingly well -
magically transforming negative situations (or collapsing
negative anchors) and installing new empowering ones.
Isn't it time you started chopping some of those daunting
memories that have been preventing you from being the best
person you can be?