…are exactly what my work in this field is based on. If you just stumbled upon this article and are not familiar with what submodalities are, check out my two posts devoted to explaining the term here and here.
Learning difficulties are behaviors that have been learnt wrongly by the affected individual and the most effective help will be if we adjust the submodalities of these behaviors to being comfortable for the affected individual in the end result.
An example of how we can adjust submodalities is when letters and words move around the page for someone with dyslexic tendencies. To this person no amount of breathing or physical balancing exercises, nor dietary adjustments [by the example of some theories out there] will change their moving words. Yes, all these approaches can work in synergy and will do no harm in the context of developing the whole person or other aspects of the person’s life, but they still won’t change the letters and/or words moving when this person is presented with a reading material. The fact that their words and letters are dancing around the page is a product of their brain. So the visual submodality of movement must be changed to that of stillness. We must freeze the movement in order for the person to start seeing the letters instead of the blur that movement produces.
Another example of using submodalities in my work is when people have trouble spelling [or speling?] words with double letters. When some people I’ve worked with were asked to spell the word balloon, they were confused about whether there were two Ls or two Os in the word. This type of “learning difficulty” is quite common, yet not at all difficult to unlearn! So, let’s work with balloon.
Firstly, one must see the word in their imagination still [=not moving], at a comfortable distance from their face [=not too small, but not so big that they can only see part of the word!], and written on some plain background in a nicely contrasting color to that of the background.
Next, once all of the above is in place, one can comfortably read the word in their imagination [=photogrphic memory]. When a person encounters the double letters and finds them confusing, s/he can distinguish them by seeing them in a different color from the color of the rest of the letters in the word. If one sees the word written in navy blue, s/he can make the double L in yellow if the double L is what causes confusion. Once these Ls are yellow and there’s still confusion, why not make the yellow Ls flash?
I trust that by now you’ve a good idea of how my entire work is based on submodalities. For the purposes of absolute clarity I’ll summarize below all the visual submodalities I’ve mentioned in this article:
- color
- contrast
- distance = near / far
- size = small / big
- movement / stillness
- flashing
