Motivate Your Child to Success

Use NLP to Inspire Students to Peak Performance

Mar 1, 2009 Thaddeus Lawrence

There are many reasons why your child isn't doing well in school. Use the NLP logical levels to accurately uncover where his difficulty lies.

The NLP Logical Levels are very useful to understand change from an education point of view. Developed by Robert Dilts, they are based on the ideas put forward by anthropologist Gregory Bateson's work "The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication".

Bateson pointed out that the brain is classified into different hierarchical levels in the course of learning, change and communication. Each level organizes the information on the level below it, and the rules for change are different across the levels. Changing something on a lower level would not necessarily have an effect on the upper levels, but changing something in the upper levels would change things on the lower levels. The logical levels of your child can be detected by his language patterns and are as follows:

Spiritual/Greater Purpose

This highest level views life as a connection to a larger system and answers the question of “Who else will benefit?” or “What is the greater purpose or vision?” Has your child been questioning the meaning of life? Or have you heard him making statements such as "Learning mathematics is pointless and doesn’t do anyone any good”?

Identity

The identity level looks at how the individual thinks of himself and answers the question of “Who am I?”. What is the level of your child’s self image and self esteem? A key indication of your child questioning his own sense of worth is when he makes statements such as "I am stupid” or “I am not a Grade A student”.

Beliefs/Values

As an individual, your child will have certain beliefs and values about what he does. This level affects the motivation by looking the reasons for doing it and answers the question of “What do I value?” or “Why am I doing this?” You may have heard these statements from your child: “I don’t understand why I have to go to school” or "Learning how to do arithmetic is dumb".

Capability/Strategy

This level looks at the skills, strategies and techniques required to accomplish a task. It answers the question of “How do I do it?” This is an area neglected by schools as they presuppose that students know how to learn academic subjects. When it comes to studying, does your child employ the same technique time and again? Or have you heard him say "I am studying a lot but I don't know how to learn my spelling words correctly"?

Behaviour

Change at this level affects specific actions and answers the question of “What do I do?” Take a look at how your child spends his studying time. For example, what subjects does he spend more time on? Is he having trouble selecting his subjects in school? Have you ever heard him wonder “I don’t know whether I should write one page or two pages of this essay"?

Environment

Attempts to change at this level affect the external constraints a person has to live with and answers the questions of “Where or when or with whom do I do it?” A typical statement from your child would be "The other kids were too noisy and it distracted me” or “The room was just too hot”.

The standard response to an underperforming child is that he needs to study harder. But this blanket advice can be a hit or miss. So start paying attention to his speech patterns and self talk and use the logical levels to determine the correct point of intervention and implement appropriate motivation strategies.

The copyright of the article Motivate Your Child to Success in Parenting Methods is owned by Thaddeus Lawrence. Permission to republish Motivate Your Child to Success in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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