neurolinguistic programmiing / NLP Tag

Posts tagged 'neurolinguistic programmiing / NLP'

How to Have a Good Day Everyday

Every day may not be good but there is something good in every day

Martin was a gorgeous 7-year-old who came to me for child coaching. His mom called and said she felt she could not help him. He never had a good day. He did not even know what one looked like.

After an abusive relationship with her husband, she divorced him and moved away to start a new life. They had been living in a nice place and their life changed dramatically.

For the first six months after they divorced, Martin’s mom insisted on taking him to see his dad, but his dad did not show up. When his dad did show up, he was angry and aggressive and Martin refused to spend time with him.

Since his dad did not care whether he came or not, his mom decided to stop putting pressure on them to see each other. “Martin is way better than before. He used to cry and have nightmares, but it’s much better now”, she said.

Still, six months passed and Martin was angry, negative and grumpy and life was tough on him. He never smiled, the whole world was bad, it is everyone else’s fault and every tiny thing made him blow up with anger and throw temper tantrums. After years of abuse, Martin’s mom told me she needed help, because she felt she was losing her son.

So first, we played “If I were a wizard”.

This post is part 16 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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Emotional Intelligence Helps Raise Stress-Free Kids

We would all love to have stress-free kids, but we don’t. In fact, most parents today are stressed about their children’s stress level, which is a Catch 22.

My philosophy is that what we feel as parents is projected onto our children through very sophisticated neural mirroring functions that we all have. So stressed parents raise stressed kids, and when kids are feeling anxious or stressed, we feel even more stressed. This is a never-ending vicious cycle.

I think high emotional intelligence is the cure for stress and parents need to focus on increasing their own emotional intelligence and that of their children.

You are probably asking yourself, “What is the connection between emotional intelligence and stress-free kids?”

High emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize our own feelings and manage them. So if our children recognize our stress, they can learn ways to deal with this situation and can grow up without taking our feelings on themselves.

As hard as it is to admit, our children are stressed due to their relationships, schooling, academic achievements, digital connections, peer pressure and intense exposure to the media. This is part of their everyday life, and as their parents, we need to seek alternative ways to medication in order to switch this pressure off.

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Attachment Theory: Attachment Styles in Relationships and Marriages

So far, we’ve covered how attachment styles affect babies and individuals, but what about attachment styles in relationships and marriages?

Have you ever heard the theory that we pick partners who are similar to our parents? I have wondered about this over the years. My life partner, Gal is similar to my dad in some ways and totally different in many other ways. He is also similar to my mom in some ways and totally different to her in many other ways. I find it hard to either confirm or deny the theory.

While it is hard to decide if this theory works based on personal attributes, attachment theory claims that in some strange way we relate and attach to our partners and in a way that matches the attachment style that was created between us and our caregivers in those first years of our lives.

This post is part 6 of 6 in the series Attachment Theory

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The Want Muscle

Sometimes being yourself is scary until you stop and remember everybody in the whole wide world is scared about the exact same thing

Magda came to see me after 16 years of heartache and pain. She was referred by a client of mine. She had seen psychologists and psychiatrists before, but felt very criticized and had never gone for a second session with any of them.

When I finally got to meet her, I was a bit surprised. She was in her early fifties and looked amazing – almost like a doll. She was tiny and very well presented with beautiful skin.

Yet, during the first 10 minutes of introductions, she managed to say only bad things about herself. The gist of them was that she was not good enough, unworthy and helpless. She said 27 bad things about herself in those 10 minutes. I counted!

This made me very curious about her because at that point we had just met and I knew nothing about her.

Coaching is very much like solving a puzzle. I tried to gather information that would allow me to help Magda in a way that the other therapist could not. As it turns out, Magda was an only child, born to very old parents. Her dad died when she was very young and her mom never had another man in her life.

This post is part 10 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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Abusive Parenting Cycle

Recently, I wrote a post about parents who justify their bad parenting style by claiming they are better than their own parents. Parenting like this creates a cycle: bad parenting, leads to difficult children, who become bad parents, who raise difficult children, etc. Over the last 28 years, I have dedicated my work to breaking this cycle. To helping kids through helping their parents.

Last week, this topic came up again when I met a 16-year-old girl who came for teen coaching. I sat in front of her for almost 2 hours and was shocked at how mature and aware she was. She was sitting in the same balcony in which I have seen many grownups who did not understand half of the things she did. Last year, I started writing a fictional story about a girl with parent problems and anorexia. In front of me was this most beautiful, good looking girl with a similar story. It amazed me to discover that the story is so much worse when you see it in real life.

She was a 16 year old, living with abusive parents, who believed they were better than their own parents, because unlike them, they did not use physical violence. It surprised me that they sent her for life coaching though. It seemed very contradictory to what a controlling and abusive parent would do. Never-the-less, I asked about her grandparents to get a better picture. Things became crystal clear: they had been abusive parents, who raised abusive kids, who become abusive parents. This cycle would go on and on unless this troubled, 16 year old teen could stop the cycle with her awareness (if she survived the emotional abuse).

This post is part 11 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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Feelings are Things

As a partner, a parent and a person, it is likely you find yourself in familiar situations, feeling the same familiar feeling and wondering how you got there. It may be as you walk in the door after a long day at work. It may be when some misunderstanding with your partner or your (teenage) child quickly escalates to an unpleasant exchange of verbal blows. It may just be when you look in the mirror.

All negative feelings are some form of fear and that fear is a defensive feeling aimed at protecting our self from being hurt. Some part of us recognizes certain words or behaviors as a form of attack raises the alert by creating this protective feeling.

The thing is, the “attack” pattern may have been saved in our mind when we were little and certainly in a particular context, both of which are longer in effect. However, our reaction is a subconscious one, which means there is no time for logic, but also that to get rid of this type of reaction we must “talk” directly with our subconscious (this is called Neurolinguistic Programming or NLP).

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ADHD Must Be Contagious

Active little boy laughing - that's not ADHD

Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is very trendy. If you search on Google, you will see that there are 34,800,000 hits for it (this is today, but I am sure tomorrow it there will be more, if only because I am adding this post…). It is amazing that as the years goes by, the percentage of kids and people with ADHD goes up.

Do you have an explanation to this?

In this post, let me try to give you some explanation to this inflation in the diagnosis of ADHD.

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Dare to Dream

For many people, dreams are the fluffy clouds we see at night when we go to sleep (well, in fact, only the visual people imagine a picture while dreaming).

Another dream in daily use is the wish. We wish for things and by this we tell our subconscious that this is what we want.

Every special event in our life triggers dreams in peoples’ mind. Birthdays, a new job, moving to a new house, a new year and every other new thing that has a feeling of a beginning, has the power to trigger such dreams.

Funny, but we can, if we dare, dream every day of our life.

Every day is the first day of the rest of your life

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Beware of Pink Elephants

Most of our coaching clients ask us, “How come I keep getting all the things I don’t want to have in my life?”

Oddly enough, the answer is hidden in the question. It’s all to do with … pink elephants.

Our brain is a very sophisticated machine, with its own way of interpreting the things around us. It turns out that one particular thing our brain can’t understand is negatives. Whenever we hear or use the words “no”, “not” or “don’t”, the brain simply ignores them and keeps the rest.

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