Another frustrated parent had recently contacted me with a fabulous querry which I just had to share with the world.  If you persist reading to the end, you may find a lot of answers to the problems of that special someone you know…  I’ll copy it below nearly verbatim and then I’ll present how I advised her.   So, here’s what she said…

I am writing about my son who is now 10.5 years old.  He was always a very bright verbal preschooler in the eyes of his preschool teachers.  He went to school and we were surprised that he did not pick up reading as quickly as we imagined.  His maths was excellent.

Fast forward a couple of years and his reading is below average and he has started to make what looks like silly errors on exams and refuses to rote learn any timetables etc.   He had difficulty with the fine motor part of handwriting from the start but seemed to get over this, but his actual writing seems years below his verbal ability.  His writing looks like that of a 7 years-old in grammatical structure (uses no punctuation and joins sentences with “and then” like when he is speaking).  His spelling is atrocious.

He has always been immensely sociable and kids just seem to adore him as he is very funny and likeable.  Anyway, he was tested with the Weschler (WISC) and his verbal came back at 132 (98th percentile), Performance 138 (99th percentile), his processing at 106 (75th percentile) and his working memory at 97 (44th percentile).  The achievement test (WIAT) reflected his below average school results – particularly in spelling which was at the 14th percentile.  The psychologist at this point said this was a very smart child with a learning disability – probably auditory in nature.  The school did not test his hearing – saying he was ‘way too articulate to have a hearing problem’.  Eventually we had his hearing tested – he has mild unilateral hearing loss (35db – 40db) at the lower hearing thresholds – he apparently only hears 55% of what is said in the left ear when noise is in his right ear.  To me, he looks a bit ADD as well – won’t concentrate on and actively avoids homework, and apparently is quite distractible in class.  Could the mild unilateral hearing loss make him appear like this?  Could this cause the apparent difficulties in writing, his worst area?

His comprehension in reading is now well above age.    Is it likely there is something else going on?  Due to his wonderful social strengths we are very reluctant (and he is devastated at the potential thought) to use any amplification options.  He does not want to appear different in any way – in his mind it would be committing “social suicide” by having to wear a hearing aid or have an FM system and be labelled.  I tend to agree that this may not be the best course for him.  I was just looking for any input at all as to what to do with this information I now have, if anything?I would appreciate any help or comment at all on any part of the above.

…and here’s how I advised her:

yes, there definitely IS something else going on here.  And the thing that’s going on is VERY positive for him – IF you know how to directionalize it!  Your son is – and notice, none of the tests he went through, NOR the wonderful psychologist, told you this, because they simply haven’t got a clue – incredibly VISUAL – and all that’s going on is that he’s just using his visual skills inappropriately in the context of words.  I hazard a guess that a very common thing that happens to many children happened to him – his brain got confused when he first encountered words at a very young age and his brain has so far not found a way out of the confusion.

Your son is incredibly visual and the facts that he’s excellent at math and reading comprehension perfectly confirm this!  Think about it: math is a visual science.  And how do you remember what a story that you read was about?  You remember the content and plot of the story, because as you read it, you created pictures or even movies in your head.  That’s visual memory.  And the label “learning disability” that the psychologist gave you for your son is a generic “cover-all” term that people who do not understand what’s going on give you, because it sounds professional and also, for them, provides an easy way out of having to deal with you and your son to any greater depths.  In the case of your son, the label actually means “using his visual skills inappropriately in the context of words”.

Don’t underestimate them – if you are a parent and want to ensure that your child does well at school and in life!  Reading to your children will encourage them to get the imagination going = visualize the content of what you’re reading to them.  This will help develop the visual memory which will be useful at school for spelling, reading comprehension, learning lists, and any kind of mental arithmetic.

And don’t be afraid to boldly ask your children what they visualized!   Asking them about their experience = getting to know their ways of thinking.  How many parents bother to ask their child what the character from the story looked like to the child or what she was wearing when the child imagined her? Very few!  And these very parents who never think to ask are later most surprised when they find out that their child has trouble spelling, reading, remembering what the reading was about, writing, or even math.  Well, if you don’t ask, you won’t know.  And if you don’t know, you don’t know your child.  No wonder then that discovering these differences comes as a big shock!

So keep asking – about everything!  Where and when did what happen, how, why, and who with whom made it happen?  Who and what else was there, colors, places, indoors or outdoors, things the characters had on or with them, etc.

And if you have a nanny who generally does the bedtime story reading, show her this article, ensure she understands its point, and train her to interact with your children too!

The answer is simple: because they find the content of lecture notes [and other study materials such as textbooks etc.] very hard to take in.  This is demotivating because students see no progress in learning and feel the struggle and the rest is…

…well, a disaster! So how can we help?

Have you ever thought about the simple fact that if you read some story, you enjoy reading it, because you make up your internal pictures or even movies of the plot as you read?  Well, exactly the point!  While in stories there’re lots of concrete nouns [=words that describe people, places, objects] and lots of action verbs [words that describe what one does = action], study materials aimed at the higher education student have very few concrete and loads of abstract nouns [such as descriptions of states, intellectual concepts, and jargon pertaining to the subject of study] and very few action-oriented, but lots of nonspecific, auxiliary, or passive verbs.  The key difference is that the concrete nouns and action verbs in stories are easy for us to visualize, while the abstract nouns and compound auxiliary and nonspecific verbs in study materials have no pictures.

To give you an example, here’s a story:

I’m walking down a quiet country lane.  Nobody around, just me in my jeans and walking boots, squeezing a half-full bottle of water in my hand.  It’s a nice pleasant day, birds are twittering, trees are gently whispering the rustle of their leaves.  Suddenly I hear a noise in the distance.  It sounds like a motorbike or a car.  And then I notice it’s getting closer and closer.  Before I realize it, it whizzes past me…

By the way, what was it that whizzed past you as you were imagining this while reading the excerpt above?  And what color was it?

And here is an extract from a study material:

The dissociation process is not always effective and often other things must be done to deal effectively with these kinds of problems.  in this particular case, however, the process was extraordinarily effective and there were very few repetitions of the common patterns of emotional breakdown.

Well, I believe I’ve proven the point more than enough!  And, surprise, surprise, the same applies to legal, corporate, and business documentation – as I already wrote about in one of my much earlier entries.

So how can we help the poor university student to decline the invitation to the next party and give the void time to studying?

Students:

• visualise as much of the content you read as possible!  For abstract nouns, you can use symbols, things, places, people, and even colors.  Go with whatever comes to mind first.  That’ll be somehow significant to your brain – otherwise it wouldn’t have come up!
• Verbs are kind of easier – somehow the brain finds even the passive verb more digestible.  But passive verb can easily be transformed into active verb.  So, what’s stopping you?
• And once you have clusters of concepts, put them into a story.  Make up a movie like a film director – whatever the setting and characters, as long as your brain has some visual representation of what you’re reading that makes sense to you and is an easy anchor for retrieval.

Have you ever wondered where ADD, ADHD, dyspraxia, or even dyslexia, dyscalculia, and  stem from and how you could help yourself or someone who had any  of them?

The root cause is a definitive lack of grounding.  And don’t confuse this with grounding a child for their behavior when you don’t let them go and see their friends.  Most people are familiar with being ungrounded.  It’s that ghastly feeling of having thousands of thoughts and way too much going on in and above your head – often described as overload.  If we move our focus down to the area around our belly button, that busyness goes away.  If we move it down out of our body into the ground, that’ll give us even more relief.  As human beings we operate best when connected to the earth.   Grounding is a very natural process.  For example, if we want to stand on one leg, we have to ground the other, or we’ll just fall over.  People who do sports, such as wrestling, martial arts, yoga, gymnastics, horseriding etc. all find grounding essential, although they may use different words to describe it.

People with dyspraxia or ADHD are often very physically wobbly, disorganized, and overwhelmed.  Dyslexia and dyscalculia are also products of movement – of pictures, letters, words, and numbers, and movement as a  product of the brain is often connected with physical wobblyness, fidgetiness, inability to “stay still for 2 minutes” or “stay in one place for too long”.  I firmly believe that this movement in the brain is not only a product of applying fantastic visual skills overfantastically in the context of words and numbers, but also amplified by the lack of connectedness of the body with the earth = grounding.  Have you ever noticed children with learning difficulties sitting on their legs, with legs crossed, or legs stretched but toes pointing upwards while only the heels touch the ground, or sitting fidgety when struggling at school?  Grounding is not a permanent state and we operate at our best when grounded, even if we’re not in contact with the floor.  And if we cross our legs and arms, we can lose the energy flow and be ungrounded again.

When we’re born, we’re not grounded.  We have been grounding through our mother.  After birth we’re carried around and can continue to ground like this for some time.   If you observe very young children, you’ll notice that they’re very bouncy, legs flying all over the place.  Somewhere around the age of 7 they start to get grounded.  It is all part of their natural development and growth.  If a child is born to an ungrounded mother, s/he may never experience what grounding is really like.  It may therefore be harder for this child to naturally develop grounding.  And this is why some children grow to adulthood without ever having experienced grounding.  As I said before, grounding is not a permanent state.  You can be grounded when relaxing, walking in the forest, etc. but when triggered by your thoughts [such as important work stuff or schoolwork] you can become instantly ungrounded and often feel very wobbly and psychologically insecure, uncertain, floaty, or confused.

There many reasons for being ungrounded:

• the frantic pace of our modern life
• traumas and pain
• not wanting to be in our body
• our busy thoughts running rapidly in the past, present, or future – with worry or frantic planning
• energy blocks caused by unhappiness, operations, injuries
• significant negative emotions that we’ll have metaphorically buried in our legs and/or feet
• picking up energy from our environment that disturbs our energy system
• other people’s energy
• recalling a previous negative emotion or limiting belief
• and even using electrical equipment

So, how do we ground? Here’re a few suggestions:

• several therapies are available to assist, including any massage, but especially reflexology, Reiki, meditation, energetic NLP = using the power of your thought to clear your energy channels anywhere at any time
• drinking water.  Sound too simple, but it can really help!  Water is not only a distributor of electricity in our bodies and an aide of clearing our bodies of toxins and waste products, but also a source of energy and electricity for our bodies and brains.
• try moving to a place away from electronic equipment.  Electronic equipment sends invisible, but definitely present magnetic waves that can interfere with our energy system and result in headaches and other symptoms.
• practise focusing on the present moment = this very second.  Not what happened 5 minutes, 5 days, or even 5 years ago.  Free yourself from planning into the future with “what happens if I do this or that” thoughts, because these racing thoughts race faster and faster day and night, especially before you fall asleep.
• you can just imagine you’re a tree.  Let energy come up into you through your feet while passing stuff that you don’t want down into the ground [and releasing it to the center of the earth].
• ground through your male and female reproductive organs where energy often gets clogged up by imagining there’s a tube connecting them with the earth where energy flows through.

People with learning difficulties often have fantastic visual skills.  But highly visual people are often very ungrounded as they struggle to keep up with their internal pictures.   They have so much activity going on in their heads, so many thoughts flying around at one time that it’s difficult to stay grounded.  And let’s remember: it is only a matter of choice whether you’re grounded or not at different times and in different contexts in and of your life.  And at different times of the day you may prefer different states.

…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.

A simple example of how we can adjust submodalities is when letters and words move around the page for someone who “has” dyslexic tendencies.   To this person no amount of breathing or physical balancing exercises, nor dietary adjustments [by the example of some theories available for your viewing on the internet] 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 reality that the letters and/or words are still moving when this person is presented with any 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 still picture.  We must freeze the movement in order for the person to start seeing the actual letters instead of the blur that movement produces.

Another simple example of using submodalities in this kind of 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 found themselves confused about whether there were two Ls or two Os in that 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.

Now, once all of the above is well in place, one can comfortably read the word in their imagination [=photogrphic memory].  When one encounters the double letters and finds them confusing, one 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 the 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 got a good idea of how my entire work is based totally on submodalities.  For the purposes of absolute clarity of your mind I’ll summarize below all the visual submodalities I’ve mentioned in this article:

• color
• contrast
• distance = near / far
• movement / stillness
• flashing

I hope this makes sense!

A college student recently contacted me seeking my advice on slow reading.  How privileged I felt – and still feel!  For one thing, I was able to rise to the challenge yet again.  And for another, I have the perfect reason to share it here – and thus hopefully help god knows how many frustrated folks who have a similar story to hers.

Here’s her story:

I’m a first year college student and I often struggle with how slowly I read. I started reading when I was 4 and always loved it. Books were my best friends and I intended on writing one myself one day. I started to become aware and more directly affected by the speed that I read when I was in 4th grade. We would have reading groups where we would read a book together and discuss it along the way. I read so slow that I was put in my own group … by myself.   My teachers thought I just wasn’t quite smart enough. Finally, they decided to actually give me some reading tests. Turns out I read really slowly, but I comprehended everything I read.  Once they figured this out, they realized that I wasn’t stupid at all, and put me in a focus group for advanced students.  Going through middle school, I started figuring out how my brain processed stuff.  You see, I do really well with memorizing things because I can picture them in my mind. Colors and shapes come to mind for every word, date, or number I confront.  Then when I go to recall that thing I had to memorize, it’s a color sequence, not an actual word.  This, I realized, was the cause for my slow reading.  I had to read every word and turn it into a color/shape.  Well, now I’m in college, and my professors have little sympathy for slow reading.  I struggle a lot because the only way I can memorize things is by sitting there, picturing it, converting it, and processing the information, but by the time I do that, I’m way behind.   I want to know if there’s something that’s actually wrong with me, or if it’s just how I learn best. Is there anything I can do to “convert” things faster, or some way I can make the synapses more efficient?

And here’s how I advised her:

Well, you were incredibly lucky to have had teachers in your primary school who spotted your smartness and put you into that focus group!  Not many folks are that lucky – which, as you can imagine, has devastating effects on their adulthoods!  So, great for you!:)

What can you do to convert things faster?  First, you’re VERY visual, so you can – and, in fact, must! – use your visualisation to see words as pictures of what they are = words instead of as colors or shapes [which will, no wonder, slow you down!].  Start with seeing shapes as you would normally do.  This is familiar and you’re good at it, right?  OK.  So you can now start teaching yourself to see the shapes of words = what they look like when written down.  To do this you must observe a lot and carefully.  You must observe what letters  and then words look like when written down.  You can start with simple, 3-letter words like cat, dog, fox, bed, pen, etc.  Write each word on a separate A4 blank paper, put the paper in front of your face at or slightly above your eye level, and look at the written word for 15 seconds.  Then close your eyes.  Can you see the word?  Or has it faded quickly?  Or can you see something else?  And if you ARE able to see the word, how do you see it?  Are the letters big enough to see them comfortably but not so big that you can’t see the whole word?  Are they on a background of a contrasting color?  Are they in upper case or lower case?  And if you tried seeing the letters in the other case, would that be less or more comfortable?  Experiment with this.  You never know what you may find.  Can you spell the word forwards… and even backwards?  If you can, then you definitely see the word, which is important!

Is there something actually wrong with you? Yes!  You have developed the wrong HABIT of visualising for seeing words.  For seeing words you need to see words.  Seeing shapes or colors is the wrong tool for this job.  This is the only thing that’s wrong with you.  Absolutely nothing else.  And the good news is that it’s not that bad!  After all, you CAN change your habits of thinking!  You CAN change the ways your brain works.  It’s all in being present in the moment and being really conscientious in working with yourself.  Once you start seeing words as what they look like when written down instead of as colors or shapes, your reading speed will improve rapidly!  Fast readers recognize written words as blocks, as opposed to letter by letter, at the back of their brain.  Slow readers read slowly, because if they can see letters at all, they look at them in isolation, i.e. letter by letter.  You need to see whole words and once you get good at this with some practice, your brain will automatically send them to the back of the brain.

You mention that you have a fantastic memory, right?  So this is another superb asset you have that you can use here: PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY!   It’s the best type of memory one can have – especially for seeing words!  So when you write a word on a blank A4 paper, take it up to your eye level, and look at it, take a picture of that word with your imagination.  The idea is to teach yourself to see the word as if it was a photo in your head.  When you see the word as a photo, you see it as a block which I mentioned above.

It’ll come – with practice.  Now bear in mind that all these exercises I’m giving you here are to be done only initially, until seeing words as blocks becomes automatic for you.  Once it does, you’ll be reading so fast anyway that you won’t have time for all this.  This is literally to get you started on the right track – to teach the brain a new way of thinking.  So start slowly and practise til you get fast and automatic.

And remember these few tips too:

• always hold any book or paper you’re reading in front of your face and at or slightly above your eye level.  That’s where your visual field is.  Never hold your reading material in your lap so that you have to be looking down to read it!  Never!  Because there you’d be in your feelings which, again, is the wrong tool for the job as visual as is reading!
• Whenever you read, do your best to sit with your both feet firmly on the floor.  This will provide you grounding – and extra sense of safety and security.
• When reading, do your best not to subvocalize, i.e. not to pronounce the words in your head.  This would also slow you down.  If you don’t do it, great.  But if you do, teach yourself – again, gradually – not to do it.

A client of mine had undergone an operation of his shoulder two weeks ago from today [the date of this post].  When I saw him today, he said something that inspired me to write this.  He said “I still have the sling in the car.  When I go out into the shops in the high street, I still put it on.  When people see me with it, they move away.  I don’t wanna get it bumped into just yet.”  Apart from the fact that he ws referring to his motivation away from having the healing process disturbed by an accidental knock from someone, he [without realizing it?] highlighted another important principle which I’ll touch on deeper here.

And similar statements from folks in wheelchairs or with other disabilities I’ve heard in the course of my work to this day include examples like this: “We’re going to the O2 [former Millennium Dome in London UK,  now a concert venue].  We’ll take the wheelchair.  That way we’ll get the front seats.”  So this brings home the NLP principles that every behavior is purposeful, demonstrates a belief, and has a positive intention.

“Funny” how every person in a wheelchair I have ever spoken to has told me how s/he’d love to walk again and how much more liberated his/her life would be then.  Yet, the statements that come out of their mouths on the other end of the continuum fly right in the face of all this.  So how come?  What’s the positive intention of all this?

And how does what I’ve said above connect with learning difficulties?  Well, just tell a dyslexic student that s/he will get extra time during exams – and watch his/her reaction!  So this is what labels [labels = "I'm x" or "I have x"] do.  The extra time during exams will not, of course, add any benefit to this student, because once told s/he will get it, s/he will adapt his/her thinking and working tempo to the extra time which will result in the same end result – gotten to in a longer time span.  So the extra time will actually add the opposite of benefit to the student, if we only look at the fact that all other students have now left the room to do something more pleasurable in their lives…  And there’re other people here who will experience the same disbenefit – such s the invigilators, teachers, or school janitor… they all have to stay around a half hour longer!  The extra time would add benefit only in case if our student didn’t adapt [adapt = slow down] his/her think-and-work pace to the extra time and was thus able to produce more as to the quality and quantity of a result.  But because of our beautifully fast ability to adapt, this doesn’t happen.

So labels give us security and denote our comfort zone [boundaries].  Labels also encourage us to be lazier and more complacent with ourselves.  Does this sound harsh?  Maybe.  But it won’t change reality.  Labels also give us a blanket of explanation.  Now that we know that we’re dyslexic, we can finally justify why we’ve had words bouncing around the page all our life!  And very importantly, labels very often make others pay more attention to us than they would if we were just like them.  Labels are static: ‘I’m x’ or ‘I have x’.  It’s in the language.  Labels are static.  And static things give the impression that they can’t be changed = will stay the way they are for the rest of our lives.   And this is the root of all the above [if in this paragraph alone], because once something can’t be changed, where’s our need to question it?

So how’s all this a food for thought?  How would the world change if people who are having difficulties of any kind started addressing their fears of changing for the better?   How would the world be if mainstream education stopped tiptoeing around people with learning difficulties and started working with rather than around them?  Would it make differences?  I firmly believe it would!  You?