I will share few relevant learnings about NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) in parenting. This is the first one:
One important lesson I had learned is about our limiting believes or limiting thoughts. Like it or not, we all are brought up with many limiting believes that will hinder us from success, or will slow us down. I have a lot of these limiting believes. I will eliminate all these believes as soon as I can find one. I am sure many of you have limiting believes too. E.g. "I am not good at Math", "I am not educated, my son cannot be top boy", "It is too stressful to be a top student", "Only rich person can do this" etc... The list can go on forever.
When I was young, one of my limiting believes was, "kids should only read books according to their age". Following this thought, primary 1 student should not do secondary school Math. In fact, he should stop at primary 1 Math. So, when my kid showed his talent in Math when he was in P1, my action was, "OK, do less Math and catch up with English and Chinese". Looking back, that was one major regrettable decision I made. His classmate, whose father did not have such limiting belief, proceeded to do secondary school Math in P2! Certainly his classmate did very well in Math thereafter.
Unconsciously adopting limiting belief is something that we should guard against. Often, we may not even realize. For example, my son always made 2 careless mistakes in his Math exams and his practice papers. Initially, there were even more. We worked on this. His careless mistake count came down from 6-8 to a consistently 2 careless mistakes in each paper. After learning about limiting belief, I spoke to him as I realized that both of us had this limiting belief. Unknowing, both of us kind of accepted that it was OK to make 2 careless mistakes and we thought that kids could never get rid of careless mistakes in Math.
I asked him, "son, why is it that all this while, you made 2 careless mistakes and not 1, not 3? Are you committed to do better, or are you just interested to do better?" He assured me that he was committed and he agreed that he could have done better. We went through the issue again and applying visualization technique, plus a full analysis on those careless mistakes on how he could do better, his marks improved! 99.5! I am sure he will get 100 (zero careless mistake) soon. Hopefully before PSLE!
To get rid of limiting believes and negative thoughts, we need to change the limiting thought to a positive one. To do that, we need to feed our mind with "healthy intellectual food". So, I gave him this book, "You Can Win" by Shiv Khera!
This book will show him, and motivate him that he can win. I have read the book in late 1990s. I am glad that he is so interested in the book that he reads this as and when he has time. I can see that the book inspires him to do better. For your convenience, please allow me to quote from the official website. You can read about Shiv Khera here
“Winners don’t do different things, they do things differently.”® An easy-to-read, practical, common-sense guide that will take you from ancient wisdom to modern-day thinking, You Can Win helps you establish new goals, develop a new sense of purpose, and generate new ideas about yourself and your future. It guarantees, as the title suggests, a lifetime of success. The book enables you to translate positive thinking into attitude, ambition and action to give you the winning edge. - See more at: http://www.shivkhera.com"
You may also like to look at this amazon site for reviews, price and preview of the book.
Reading this book is just a good start. I will work on all my limiting
believes, and his as well. One challenge is to eliminate his limiting
belief that "GEP (Gifted Education Program) students always do better". I
want to eliminate his inferiority, and make him aware, sky is the
limit!
In order to coach him, I know that one essential condition is that I must also do the same. I need to repeatably remind myself about that and feed my mind with positive reading materials. I must take action now.
P/S:
This book is meant for adult, and clearly may not be suitable for young children. You may want to start with other motivational books meant for younger readers. I would think that you may want to start with the following books first if your kid is below 12 years old. Let him be familiar with motivational books first before buying this one. Please see also my review about "I am Gifted, so are you" and "7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens". You may find the product links at the end.
