Empower your kids!: A coaching guide for parents

By Judy Bartkowiak

Parents have a natural and automatic desire to rescue, protect and shield their children from difficult situations. Parents want to show their love by stepping in and helping wherever they can: with homework, bedtime monsters, the dark, new experiences, making friends…

But by rescuing our children, are we helping them to build their self-esteem? By stepping in and fixing things, we communicate that we don’t think they can do it on their own. We make them think they need us. What if there was a better way?

This book will give parents the skills to guide their children to find their own solutions and to create new possibilities. These tried and tested coaching skills, drawn from the author's vast experience of working with parents and children, will give children choices. It will give them a positive mindset, and a ‘I can’ attitude.

If we can show children how to fix things for themselves, then we set them up for a lifetime of independence, and confidence in their own abilities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Free Association Books
• Release date: Mar 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781911383574

Judy Bartkowiak

Judy Bartkowiak is an NLP trainer and coach as well as an EFT trainer and coach who specialises in working with children and teens. Before becoming a therapist, she worked in market research, and then ran a Montessori nursery alongside her therapeutic work. She has written extensively on NLP.

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Empower your kids!

A coaching guide for parents

The ultimate guide for coaching them to overcome low self-esteem, anxiety, anger, fear of failure and much more with NLP, EFT and 25 years experience!

by Judy Bartkowiak

First published by Free Association Books.

Copyright ©

2021

Judy Bartkowiak

The author’s rights are fully asserted. The rights of

Judy Bartkowiak to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act

1988

A CIP Catalogue of this book is available from

the British Library

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978-1-911-38356-7

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Cover and illustrations by Jane Kelly

For parents everywhere, you are amazing.

These extra coaching skills will enhance what you already do, give you new ideas and ways to guide your child to where they need to be, emotionally and mentally.

Introduction

In 2010 I wrote my first book ‘Be a happier parent with NLP’ which was based on everything I had learnt about applying Neuro Linguistic Programming to parenting my own four children and working with children and teens in my coaching practice ‘NLP Kids’. I followed this book with a series of workbooks called ‘Engaging NLP’ which were written for children, tweens, teens and parents, to learn about and to apply these NLP techniques and ways of thinking for themselves. I then went on to train others in NLP and then, in 2018, I trained in the Emotional Freedom Technique and Matrix Reimprinting. So this book ‘Empower your kids! A coaching guide for parents’ is an update, which includes everything I have learnt in the last 10 years as well as the experience I have gained through training and coaching.

Much has changed in our reading habits and the way we access parenting information, so I have deliberately tried to make this book a blend of theory and practice with plenty of practical activities you can do with your children, together with a few examples that I hope will illustrate the idea.

In Part 1 you will discover how NLP and EFT can add to your existing parenting skills. It is a general section that is relevant to whatever your child or teen may need right now. It is a good starting point for understanding how we process what we experience, from our initial response, what we make something mean based on our unique mind and then what we do with this in terms of behaviour. Here you will also find the ‘how to’ for EFT tapping although I will include a short reminder in chapters where I’ve suggested tapping so you don’t have to keep turning back to Part 1 every time. It is more of a reference section which you may want to refer to if you find something you’d like to know more about as well.

In Part 2 you’ll find the topic chapters. I’ve tried to think about all the different situations or issues you might encounter, but please be aware that I am not a doctor so I’m purely giving you some ideas based on NLP and EFT of things you can try yourself. If I’ve missed out something you want to know more about, in the first instance find something similar and use that chapter, but you could also contact me for further help. I would say that in any situation, tapping will relieve any negative emotions and is uniquely versatile - your child simply says what they feel and you can help them tap through the points and clear it.

One of the core premises of NLP is that you already have all the resources you need, and I fervently believe this. One of the resources you quite definitely have, and may not fully appreciate, is your intuition.

My intention with this book is to give you a ‘go to’ for whatever you feel is troubling your child. If you’re not sure, a good question to ask yourself is, if I was behaving in this way, what would I be feeling? This child is your child, they are ‘of you’, they have learnt from you so use your instincts and your understanding of yourself to understand them. It’s a good starting point. This will lead you to the chapter in this book that you need to use with them.

I have four grown up children now but they weren’t always grown up. NLP and then EFT gave me tools and techniques to use to understand them and to calm myself so that I could more clearly make decisions, communicate them and hold fast. Needless to say, it is much easier, as any coach or counsellor will tell you, to help other people’s children than your own. Many times they would say, Mum, don’t NLP me!. But they’ve all grown up to be wonderfully wise and kind so I’m going to guess that NLP certainly played a part in that.

A bit about me: I am a prolific writer and loved writing even as a very small child, writing squiggles on paper made into tiny books for my dolls and reading them the ‘stories’ I’d written. I also love teaching, too. I love to share what I know about working with children and teens which is something I’ve been doing since I left University, first as a Children’s Qualitative Market Researcher and then as an NLP Kids’ Coach, more recently adding other modalities such as Art Therapy, Mindfulness, EFT, PTT and Walking Therapy into the mix. In this spirit of sharing, I ask you to share these tools and techniques with your children and your families.

The principle behind this book of coaching skills is that as parents we want to step in and help our children but sometimes this verges on rescuing when we take over and do things for them that they could do themselves. When they work out a solution for themselves this builds confidence and resilience, and it teaches them that confidence comes through learning from mistakes and making different choices, seeing new possibilities. By rescuing we deny them this learning experience. Coaching puts the onus back on them to take responsibility and when you learn these coaching skills you’ll know just what to do and say to encourage them.

NLP

Basic Principles

‘Neuro Linguistic Programming’ doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, does it? Luckily, it’s a lot easier to explain than it is to say.

‘Neuro’ is everything in our mind: our thoughts, beliefs about the world we live in and beliefs about ourselves, those we love and who matter to us, and others with whom we interact. It is our experiences and memories. In fact, there are so many million pieces of information in our heads that we have to apply some filters to reduce those thoughts to a manageable amount that we can cope with! It refers to the way each of us processes what we see, hear, feel, taste and smell. We experience something through our senses and we filter it through our life experiences, memories, beliefs and values such that every one of us creates, from that same experience, something unique which we call our internal representation.

The ‘Linguistic’ part is how we express that through our body language and the words we use, our tone and everything about the delivery of our language. Each of us has a style or preference (visual, auditory and kinaesthetic and within that a preference in terms of our metaprogrammes (choices/process, detail/concept, towards/away from, match/mismatch) so we each convey what we are thinking in a different way. When we want to be heard and understood by our children, it helps if we have some awareness of our child’s language patterns so we can match them for rapport. I’ll explain all of these so you can work out your own language pattern and that of each of your children.

‘Programming’ is the result and the patterns we run. By noticing the structure of each interaction, we can make better choices so that we can improve the communication next time. We can fall into patterns of behaviour which do not give us satisfaction, yet we often find ourselves repeating them just because they are familiar. It is our challenge to question and change these patterns so we can get the results we want and be happier as a parent.

I explain this sequence to children when I first meet them and they find it interesting to think about some of the things that happen to them on a regular basis, break it down and work out what they need to do differently to get a different result. I only wish it was as easy as this; it does take a few sessions!

The emphasis of NLP is on what happens before the behaviour. As parents we often find ourselves focusing on the behaviour. That’s what we notice first. But what about the things that went on in your child’s head to produce that behaviour? What about those thoughts, feelings, memories and experiences that created beliefs about themselves, some positive and others less so, that made them respond with that particular behaviour? When we only focus on the behaviour, especially the behaviour we don’t want, we miss the opportunity to help them change it by understanding the process for themselves and choosing different options.

The Emotional Freedom Technique or EFT is an energy healing technique based on rebalancing the energy flow in the body through tapping on meridian points. This is expressed really well in this diagram.

We are their ‘people of influence’, they love us, watch us and learn from us, so I want to share with you how YOU can influence the changes that you want to see in your children simply by learning about how we all process our world.

In Part 1 I’m going to explain how NLP and EFT applies to parenting and give you the opportunity to try the techniques for yourselves first. Maybe practise them on your partner. Become familiar with the thinking behind the techniques so you feel comfortable with them and you’ll soon get the hang of how to use them so fluently that you can just introduce them to your child or teen as they need help, in the moment.

How to improve connection and understanding with your children

If you’ve heard of NLP before it may have been through work. A lot of companies use elements of NLP in their training programmes to enhance management and leadership skills. Of course, as parents this is what we are doing with our children. I well remember listening to Sue Knight talking about how NLP can be used to motivate employees and my immediate thought was I wonder if this would work to get my kids doing their homework without moaning? It did!

We need to be amazing managers, leaders, motivators, counsellors, first aiders, teachers, chefs, party planners… and whereas the needs of employees may change year on year perhaps, the needs of our children can change weekly. So, we need to be creative, versatile and able to give and receive feedback constantly so that we can better adapt to a changing environment.

What I used to find so hard, though, was the emotional involvement. We love our children and are acutely aware of our responsibility to raise them in the best way possible. This isn’t like the work environment at all, is it? Every failure, every success is personal. It can’t not be. Yet, sometimes, it is the fact that we take everything personally that can get in the way of making the best decisions and responding in the most ‘adult’ way. We can let our emotions get the better of us and end up sounding more like a child than the child themself.

One of the most useful NLP techniques I applied successfully was disassociating. Imagine when you are right in the middle of it, feeling their pain, feeling your own pain, and unable to think clearly. Now take an emotional step away for a moment and imagine the scene as if from an impartial bystander or even a CCTV camera. What do you see now, what do you hear? When we do that, we focus on what we observe rather than our interpretation of the situation which has become clouded by our emotion as a parent.

I will take a brief dive into Transactional Analysis here to explain. We have access to three modes of being:

Parent – all the ‘should’s, ‘must’s and ‘ought to’s

Adult – the computer mind, slightly detached, observes and reports

Child – the emotions: love/hate, passions, joy/sadness, overt expressions of emotion

At any time we can be in one of these modes, as can your child. I’m sure we’ve all heard a child tell another child what they ‘shouldn’t’ do. When we get into a shouting match with our child, we are both in ‘child’ mode. At some point, we may move into ‘parent’ mode and tell them what they ‘must do’ but disassociating is to step into ‘adult’ and to observe what’s happening, what’s being said, what is needed, and to calmly ask questions to seek resolution.

This section here is about ‘skilling you up’ so you have more choices of how to respond to your child. My belief is that the more choices you have, the more chance there is of one of the choices being effective.

Let’s start with understanding ourselves. When we know ourselves better, we have the tools and vocabulary to understand our children.

Thinking back to how much we experience every moment, imagine if we had to process each of the many millions of bits of information individually each time we saw, heard or felt anything? In order to reduce the amount we have to process we focus more on the senses we prefer.

These senses are visual (see), auditory (hear), kinaesthetic (feel) (known as VAK), olfactory (smell) and gustatory (taste). Most of us can access them all quite easily but at different times we will focus more on one than another.

We do tend to have a preference, though, so if you usually notice what you see, care about how you look, the colours you wear and the visual aspects of your surroundings then you may well be visual. You will notice messy bedrooms, things not being in the right place and probably have a creative flair.

Is this you?

If your child tends to be more visual, they will notice your facial expressions, how you look, how their food looks and in a general way, colour, form and the way things appear to them. They will want their writing to be neat and not want to cross things out and they will learn best from what they see, so diagrams, pictures and the written word will be good learning tools for them. Their voice tends to be higher and they speak fast, looking up as they access images in their mind. They tend to be very imaginative so dreams can be vivid and sometimes frighteningly real