references
1. Attributed to Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Physicist & Nobel Laureate
activities
Activity 1
the meta model inaction
Here are some statements you may well have heard before from your learners. Think for a moment what you would have normally said, then have a go at asking different questions. Decide what is deleted, distorted or generalised in each statement and what would be an effective challenge to the statement to help the student think differently about the problem. Remember that some statements may have more than one deletion, distortion or generalisation, so think about which one you will challenge. There is a summary of the key questions to remind you below the grid.
Statement
Deletion/Distortion
/Generalisation
Challenge
Everybody thinks I’m bad
I know what’s best for her
You make me angry
She hates me
It’s the wrong way to do it
This is the way we should do it
I don’t get any support
I need help
I am always wrong
I never get praise
I can’t do it
I shouldn’t go
I am confused
Dogs are bad
This is the way we should do it
I don’t get any support
I need help
I am always wrong
I never get praise
I can’t do it
I shouldn’t go
I am confused
Dogs are bad
Tap to download Resources
summary of meta model questions
How do you know?
Compared to what?
How do you know when to…
What specifically is (verb)...ing you
Who says?
When?
What?
How do I/they do that?
How does this mean that?
What stops you?
What would happen if you could?
What would happen if you did?
Everybody? Always? Never? Nothing? All? No one?
Extension activity
Now think of some statements you, your students and your colleagues often make and practise challenging them with the Meta Model.
Activity 2
modal operator s activity
Imagine that your manager has called a meeting. Read the statements in column one as if you are saying them to yourself and score yourself out of 10 as to how likely you are to go to the meeting. Now read column two as if your manager is saying the statement to you and notice if there is any difference in what you say to yourself and what another person says to you relating to your motivation. Which one is most likely to get you to the meeting? You may notice that you use this term more often than not to motivate your students, but of course they may use a different modal operator!
Say to yourself:
Your manager says to you:
I can go to the meeting
You can go to the meeting
I may go to the meeting
You may go to the meeting
I have to go to the meeting
You have to go to the
I should go to the meeting
You should go to the meeting
I must go to the meeting
You must go to the meeting
I will go to the meeting
You will go to the meeting
I am going to the meeting
You are going to the meeting
Extension activity
Create a similar exercise to the one above to use with your students around homework. This activity can create useful discussions about how your students motivate themselves and how they can feel good about getting on with the homework and feeling satisfied that they have completed the work.
This eBook is licensed to Dominic Luzi, [email protected] on 10/18/2018
chapter 16
Timelines and other techniques for Motivation and Success
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“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” (1)
Nelson Mandela
In this chapter
Timelines in the classroom – preparing for exams
Bringing success into the present
Spinning bad feelings into good feelings
From stuck to motivated with a Visual Squash
Swish for a change
Visual Squash for a whole class
Over the years NLP has evolved a range of techniques to help people drive their own internal processes and make changes to how they think and feel. But the techniques are not NLP per se. NLP techniques develop over time as our skills improve and we find faster and easier ways to help people drive their own brains. Some techniques are no longer used because we have found better ways, but the fundamentals of NLP don’t change.
Here we share with you some of the tried and tested ways to help your students to success. It is not an exhaustive list; it is designed to help you to begin to use your skills to create solutions for yourself. So these techniques are to get you started. The more you practise and build your confidence with this material, the easier it will be to find your own processes that work and you can begin to use NLP to improve the lives of your learners. We are sure that your creativity can find new and exciting ways to use these processes.
Timelines
Working with timelines allows you to support your students to unlock motivation and become self-managed learners. You can anchor the feelings of success and utilise the resources that are in the past, present and future. This enables learners to gain insights into the stages of their learning journey in relation to goals that are both short and longterm, and you can help them to install time-management strategies to help meet required deadlines.
We experience time in different ways at different times in our lives. Very young people have little concept of time – everything is very much in the moment. Think of how we explain to little ones that Christmas is coming and will be here after 2 sleeps. Exam dates in 6 months seem a lifetime away to a teenager, whereas for an adult it comes around all too quickly.
Often, young people are unable to put off immediate pleasure for long-term gain. In fact, there is evidence that teenagers lose the ability to delay gratification due to the changes in their frontal lobes during adolescence and in some cases don’t regain this ability until they are in their early twenties.(2) Many students will choose a short-term benefit such as going out with their friends over the long-term benefit of passing their exams or graduating from college. One solution to this problem could be just to wait for them to grow up a bit, but this won’t get them through their exams or motivate them to do their homework. The answer is to bring the pleasure of the success into the present state. Timeline work is an easy and rewarding process, useful for both one-to-one work or with a whole group.
Some applications of timelines in a learning context include changing the way the learner experiences things from the past, such as unhelpful experiences and decisions, so that they can experience what they want in their future in more resourceful ways. You can also use timelines to build propulsion into the experience of the learner, and timelines can also convince students that they are capable of achieving their goals and help them to build well-formed outcomes .
Timelines are a way of spatially organising time in our internal representation of reality. There is no way for our brains to conceptualise time, so we use space to represent time. The timelines that most people adopt can be described as either Through Time or In Time , although there are other cultural variations.
In time: This is where the sense of time is experienced as inside the body, (associated into the experience). Often, this is the perception that the future is in a line ahead of you, and the past in a line directly behind you. The present is experienced as ‘within’ you and is therefore kno
wn as in-time . This is the best state to be in to enjoy the moment. Being in time, you are also less likely to be aware of time passing, less likely to plan or stick to a plan and you may become side-tracked very easily.
Through time: This is where the sense of time is experienced as being outside the body (disassociated from the experience). Often, the timeline is perceived as laid out from left to right in front of you so you can see it. In this state, the past, present and future is ‘available’. Being through-time is to be conscious of time passing, to be aware of the interaction of events, have time to attend an approaching lesson, to be able to plan, work to a plan, and multi-task.
By using the imagination to travel back and forwards along a person’s timeline, we can create the experience of bringing future feelings of success into the present moment. This has the effect of making the gratification immediate. We can also travel along the timeline and gather resources that are necessary for the success.
Preparing for exams and tests
A simple and easy way to prepare students for exams or upcoming tests is to take them on a timeline journey. Making elegant use of the Milton patterns, allow your students to fill in the details of the experience for themselves while stacking positive suggestions along the way so it is perfect for them. You can experiment using the following process:
Have your students push back on their chairs away from their desks and close their eyes. Play some quiet relaxing music and weave a pleasant and relaxing journey into the future to a moment of success. Encourage the students to really appreciate the good feelings and amplify the state. Ask them to turn around inside their heads and look back at all they have achieved to get to this point of success. Mention here all the steps that lead to successful exams, like preparing a plan, organising time to revise, making notes, remembering and recalling easily. Take your students through each day and each exam, letting go of any doubts and moving on to the next confidently.
Next ask your students to move along their timeline inside their heads back to the present whilst gathering all the resources, skills and behaviours they have observed so they can bring them all back into the present with the feelings of success. As you ask them to open their eyes, explain that using your imagination in this way feels like remembering an experience and when we do something once it’s much easier to do it the second time, even if it is in our imagination, isn’t it?
Appendix E has a full transcript of this journey for you to use in your classes.
This process can be easily translated into a physical classroom activity, and this is often preferred by active and energetic learners. To do this, create a timeline on the floor across the room with three flipchart paper ‘islands’.
Write NOW, EXAM and SUCCESS on the separate ‘islands’.
Start with the group on NOW and create a great anticipatory state about the future for the students and anchor it with a sound and gesture. Devise a game with the students where they fill in the timeline with Post-It notes with all the activities and stages necessary to get success. Take the group to the SUCCESS island and build a really great state of what it feels like to succeed and anchor it.
(Check back to Chapter 11 for a reminder of how to do this). Have the group walk back to the EXAM island, taking the great feeling with them. Move them back to the NOW island while gathering all the resources they have from the future, bringing them into the here and now with the great feelings. Fire off the ‘success’ anchor in the present and connect it to the resources they have collected.
These two examples are designed for structured sessions. However, often a student becomes stuck or fearful in the middle of something else. In this situation, changes to the perception of time and success can be done conversationally to change the student’s perception and feelings. By changing the tenses of the verb from future to present and from passive to active the experience of time changes too. Teachers tend to overuse the word ‘will’, which has the effect of pushing the experience into the future. It is more useful to push the resources into the past, so the student has them at their disposal and can bring the sense of achievement into the present.
Consider the effect of the following questions and statements:
What will you achieve tomorrow?
As you leave class tomorrow what will you have achieved?
Imagine yourself leaving the class tomorrow, now what have you achieved?
The first question places the experience in the future. The second sentence places the experience in the future past and the third sentence brings the achievement into the present.
When a student is stuck or saying they can’t do something it can be useful to physically move them away from the place where they are stuck and use a timeline conversationally to create a more resourceful state, as in the following example:
Ellen declares in the middle of the class that she just can’t do the exercise. The teacher agrees with her, saying ‘yes that’s right Ellen, you can’t do this yet’ . (Notice the teacher gains rapport by not arguing with the student or trying to convince them they can do it!) ‘So come over here for a moment’ and the teacher leads her a few steps away from Ellen’s seat. She then says, ‘now just imagine for a moment how you would feel having completed this exercise; what a sense of satisfaction you now have, feeling really good that you have done it.’ (Building a feeling of confidence and success in the present) ‘Just look back at yourself (pointing at the chair) and now that you have completed the task give the other Ellen some advice as to what she needs to do to succeed. What do you think would help first? After that what is next?’ Very quickly Ellen is finding the resources within herself to complete the task and it really only takes a minute or so. There are some other factors at play here too. By discussing ‘Ellen’s problem’ in the third person, the student can disassociate from the unpleasant ‘stuck’ feeling while she thinks about the resources she needs to succeed.
It’s worth stating that a person doesn’t actually have a timeline! It’s a useful metaphor for representing time to ourselves as a construct, so we are able to help our students overcome difficulties. Students find timelines great fun as well as a great resource. Once they understand the process a little, we often find that they begin to make use of the process for themselves.
Putting things in the Past
A similar process can be used to help students put in the past those experiences that have led them to believe that they can’t do something, or are stupid, or will never be able to do something. Often, these beliefs come about because of a silly suggestion made by an unthinking adult with no intention of causing a lasting effect. However, sometimes they become limiting beliefs. If a student has failed in the past and believes they will fail in the future, it’s a good idea to help them to understand that the best thing about the past is that it’s over, and that just because they once believed something they don’t have to now.
During a lesson observation, a very caring adult education tutor said to a group of nervous adult learners, ‘now I know that you find exams difficult and stressful, don’t worry though I am here to support you and no matter how hard you find it, it really isn’t as hard as you think it will be’ . Even if the students had not been worrying, stressing and finding it difficult previously, they were now! The tutor meant well and really cared, but the meaning of the communication is the response you get! All this tutor needed to do was to put the past behind her students by saying, ‘I know that some of you may have found exams tough in the past, but as you look back you can realise that it is over now that you are here with me you can find the experience easy and even enjoyable as you begin to learn how clever you are’ .
Spinning bad feelings into Good Feelings
Many students have unpleasant feelings about school and college and some may become anxious or stressed by past experiences which they worry will recur in their lives. Neuro-Hypnotic Repatterning® (NHR) is one of the most powerful ways of changing long-held bad feelings into good ones. It works dir
ectly with the kinaesthetic , rather than using the other representational systems to change a person’s experience. You will by now be familiar with this process from the chapters relating to state management.
To begin, ask the student to pay attention to the unpleasant feeling and notice how and where it moves in their body. Watch any hand gestures they make, as people often indicate with their hands where a feeling is and where it moves to. Notice the direction and ask the person to spin the feeling in that direction just for a moment so they become aware of the movement (often the feeling will intensify so only do this for a second or two). Next ask the student to take the feeling out of their body, put it in front of them and watch it spin, then begin to spin it in the opposite direction. Ask them to move the feeling back into the body and notice that the feeling has changed (often to the opposite feeling). Ask them to spin this good feeling faster until the student finds just the right intensity of feeling and starts to imagine carrying out the activity that they used to be anxious about in this new and comfortable state.
Here is the process illustrated:
There are a number of storybooks for younger children which use the NHR process in the story to help little people change bad feelings into lovely ones. Some of these books are listed in the bibliography.
Teaching Excellence Page 23