a. The first one is mirroring.
I am now giving a way one of the bigger secrets that few people know, and that I normally will teach in my VIP coaching. I teach it to you now, because I want you to feel the difference it can make if you alow someone to help you.
NLP says that we all have access to the resources we need – and i am now in this very moment giving you a very useful and valuable resource.
The principle of mirroring.
A child will often express the hidden feelings of the mother (or father).
Let’s start with a very easy to see example.
Imagine that you, as a parent, are really scared of dogs…
And even though you hide it, and you tell your child that there is nothing to worry about, your child senses your fear and will most probably become scared of dogs too.
Now, this same principle applies to much more hidden issues.
One of my coaching clients was struggling with dating. Whenever she met a man whom she liked, her 13 year old son would be scared of the new man and made sure that none of the men actually stuck around long enough to see if it could develop into something more serious.
She was really getting desperate, and as we worked on this, she discovered a really deeply hidden fear within herself: She was scared that men would promise her the world and then finally abandon her, as had happened with her first husband. As she started to see her own hidden fears, her son became more relaxed around men, and she is now dating a wonderful man who gets on really well with her son.
Oftentimes things are not so dramatic or easy to discover, and it is almost impossible to discover such things on your own. As my best friend says: “You cannot peer in your own ear” (she is a medical doctor!)
In the groups that I facilitate, people are part of a group of like-minded people, who want to discover better ways of parenting and relating with their children, and we often help eachother to discover these hidden issues that can really make our life quite miserable.
I can tell you, if you start to apply this principle, and if you can find people that are honest enough to give you the feedback you need, your relationship with your teen (and with younger children too) will turn around very, very quickly.
b. The second one is owning your emotions.
It is totally understandable and normal that you get emotional when stuff happens. You might get sad, angry, scared, whatever emotion comes up in a certain situation.
The trick here is to observe yourself. Are you often scared or worried? Or is your dominant emotion sad and disappointed? Or maybe angry? Observe yourself and discover the patterns. The next time that you feel an emotion come up, realise that you are not the emotion. Emotions are triggered by thoughts, so the steps are as follows:
1. observe and realize what you feel
2. think back to what thought triggered the emotion
3. realize that you are not the emotion, nor dominated by the emotion: you control your thoughts and thus your emotions
4. mention the physical signals of the emotion in your body, say them out loud. Do not mention the emotion like “angry” or “sad”
What will happen, is that you show your child that he can actually choose his emotions and he doesn’t have to let himself be ruled by his emotions.
I think that it is very obvious what this means for a child when he is coping with challenges in his life.
c. The third technique I want to give you is to start playing with the flow and the counterflow of energy. The moment that your child wants something that you don’t want, or the other way around, the normal thing to do is to strengthen our own position. The effect is that the other party, your child, also strengthens his position and you very rapidly end up in a powerstruggle.
If you avoid this powerstruggle, you make a huge shift in the relationship in one move. Avoiding the powerstruggle is simple but not easy, as is the case with the other tw techniques as well. That is why I suggest that you work in a group, I have a couple of groups running and depending on your situation you might fit in one of the new groups that will soon start.
The technique to end the powerstruggle is as follows:
The moment that you observe that there is a potential powerstruggle, or in other words, that there is a counterflow of energy, you stop immediately with any interaction. You take a deep breath, you might even say that you want one minute thinking time, and you decide if you want to go for the counterflow or the flow. Depending on the situation you might want to go for the counterflow from time to time, if your child would get into immediate danger for example.
If there is time and space for some discussion however, my advice is to at least try out the technique of going in the flow.
It means that the first thing you do is open up your mind and be sincerely curious about what it is your child wants, feels, needs in this moment. Just park your own emotions and thoughts on “the shelf” (I teach this technique in the course), and be there, on the other side, with your child, This is a very powerful technique, you can also use it with your partner, your colleagues, your boss. It is a very cool technique and it brings about a huge shift in awareness of both people.
I have learned this technique in my mastermind class, and I can absolutely tell you that it is vital for me, I often use it and it has shifted my relationships dramatically.
