This article features the answer to a question today from one of our Parents & Professionals members (click here to join: https://nlp4kids.org/membership/)

What do you do when a child or young person says, “I can’t do it!” and genuinely feels stuck, and cannot move forward? Schoolwork and homework are useful examples to focus on: Getting a child past the idea of being stuck and out of that habit of saying “I can’t do it” is important.

When a child’s brain is developing, their brain has a lot of pathways called neural networks. As they’re growing up something called neural pruning occurs. Neural pruning is when the brain is trimming back some of those networks that are not in use.

You’ve heard of the phrase “use it or lose it”; that is what is happening on a neuronal level. If, for example, you have a child who speaks a second language, but they do not continue to use that language, they won’t be able to speak it when they grow up. They will forget it.

That’s because the neural networks have got trimmed and pruned away. If there are certain things that you would like the children in your life to become highly skilled at, we need to help them get past the idea of being stuck. They need to get back into the motion of doing ‘it’ as soon as possible so that they don’t convince themselves that they can’t and lose the ability to do it because they spend too long not doing it!

I like to get ahead of a problem. I anticipate that at some stage a child will say they say they can’t do ‘it’ (whatever ‘it’ is) but it’s probably really important that I’ve asked them to do it.

To get ahead of the problem, I do something called ‘the red test’. I get them to look around the room and think to themselves (or say to themselves) ‘red’ as in, the colour red, whilst looking around. I tell them to look for all the red things, notice how many red things they can see and then close their eyes.

Then I say, “Tell me about the red things that you saw.” They’ll list it to me because their eyes will have got drawn to the red stuff as they looked around the room. Then I say, “Keep your eyes closed and tell me about the blue things that you saw.”

You’ll often find there might be one or two blue things that they knew were in the room, but the list is going to be significantly shorter than the red stuff because they were looking for red things. Then I say to them “If the red stuff was all the things that you didn’t want or all of the things that you thought you could not do, you just saw evidence of it everywhere! It was all over the place! If the blue things were the helpful things, all of the things that we wanted, all of the things that would make you feel like you could do ‘it’, you didn’t see any blue because you were too busy thinking about red things.”

This is a practical example of how we can, accidentally, make our brain think that stuff is more difficult than it needs to be or that we’ve got more evidence of not being able to do something than the evidence of being able to do something.

It all comes down to what are you looking for. 

• If what you’re looking for is to prove that you can’t do it, guess what, you’ll prove that you can’t do it.

• If what you’re looking for is to prove that you can, then your brain will start to see more of that.

Have a conversation with young people about the fact that they are in charge of their brains and that they can take proactive responsibility for making their brains think differently.

“You must take charge of it and it’s not just going to happen naturally, it’s not just going to come to you. You must think it that way.”

In NLP, we have a module called chunking, which is where you either take small stuff and build it into bigger and more abstract things, or you take big and abstract things, and you break them down into much smaller chunks.

Let’s say that you have a child who has a piece of work in front of them and they say, “I can’t do it.” Start with “Have you got a pen? Can you pick up the pen? Can you remove the lid from the pen?” You can make a joke out of it and make it fun. This isn’t about making them feel silly it’s just about taking it step by step. What happens often when someone says “I can’t do it” what they’re often saying is, “I am overwhelmed. I cannot take all this in.” We’ve all got different thresholds on what overwhelm looks like.

For one person ‘overwhelmed’ might be a 10,000-word dissertation. But for someone else ‘overwhelmed’ might be two plus two equals, and it’s the only thing on the page in front of them. There are often other things going on, possibly too many other things going on. Ask them to forget their parent’s divorce or that the rabbit escaped yesterday. Just let that stuff go for a second.

“Right now, there is just one thing to do. Take your lid off your pen and we’ve already made a start.”

If this was a five-point checklist, we’d already done one thing. Break it down and make it simple and achievable. When I worked with very young children, who had been out of education, nursery, and those sorts of things for some time, perhaps due to illness, we’d often find that when they returned their development had got set back a little bit.

Not only were they not in alignment with everybody else in the group, but they were often perhaps six months regressed developmentally from how they had been before they left. So, we would give them a jigsaw puzzle that was suitable for a much younger child, because giving them something easier, would allow them to tap into a sense of achievement. As it was super-easy for them, we would start to see the self-confidence creep back in. When self-confidence is there, they’re more comfortable with facing something a bit more challenging.

Think about how you can bring things down an academic level for them to make it so that they can’t claim stuck-ness because it’s so ludicrously easy for them to do.

Finally, consider ‘unsticker questions’. These are good for tripping your brain out and getting you to think differently. These are sometimes used in a therapeutic environment because we also face this problem as therapists, of people saying, ‘I can’t do it, or ‘I’m stuck.’

Stuckness shows up a lot in therapy. In some sessions, you can hear “I don’t know” a lot! We might reply with, “what would happen if you didn’t know?” That too can be an unsticker question, but the true unsticker questions are a bit wackier than that.

An unsticker question could be something like, “What would a pigeon say if it had this problem?”

It’s like a jump start for the brain. It’s the same as when you’re angry, and

someone makes you laugh, and it’s ridiculous. It snaps you out of that anger mindset that you’re in, so it works similarly to that.

“If you could put this problem on a cloud, would it float?” 

Unsticker questions loosen things up a little bit and make your brain freer. And that’s the point, you know the opposite of being stuck is becoming free again. So even though it’s not necessarily going to get you the result that you want (yet) it’s going to get things moving, and it’s going to take away that brick wall or stuck-ness.

“If a worm had this problem, would it turn it into words?”

“If a wizard had this problem, what kind of spell would he make?”

Employ one suggestion from above at a time – because sometimes if you throw everything at it at once, you don’t know what worked.