‘Where your attention goes energy flows’ is a common saying in the world of personal development. But is it technically true? Probably not, but it is a useful thing to keep in mind when we are dealing with young people who are causing some challenges in some way shape or form, be that from their behaviour or because of things that are troubling them?

If we put too much time and attention into the things that we do not want then the likelihood is we’re gonna be feeding the monster that exists in that negative thing that we can sometimes be guilty of doing. We don’t want to have the monster around us anymore and as a consequence, we’re more likely to see more of it. For example, do you remember last year on social media, there was a whole thing that did the rounds called Momo. We did a little bit of snooping into the Momo stuff and discovered that actually a lot of the claims that were being made about the effect that this was having on young people we’re not accurate whatsoever. There was very very little reported activity around children taking negative reactions toward Momo and by that, I mean self-harming and committing suicide, it just wasn’t accurate.

Momo gained so much attraction because of the number of people that were online talking about it and most of those people were the parents and not the children. When we have something which is big and scary or we don’t like it or we don’t want it, very often we end up talking about it a lot. Now that in itself is not a problem – the problem is whether or not we are being problem or solution focused on how we’re communicating about that thing.

If what we’re doing is becoming upset, complaining, talking about how worried we are, all of those sorts of things are fuel to the fire to keep it burning in an unwanted direction. When we start to become solution-focused what we need to do is to focus on the bits that we want instead and by doing so we give that more of our time and energy, which then causes that particular entity to grow more fiercely and with more energy than the thing that we want to avoid.

Think about where you are putting your time, your attention and your energy with the young people that you’re working with. If you are putting your efforts into concentrating on a problem that you don’t really want them to have then we need to flip it over like a pancake. We’re gonna flip it on to its other side and say ‘well what is it that we want instead if we don’t want to see this behaviour, what’s the behaviour that we do want?’ Let’s have a conversation about that. If we see glimmers of it somewhere in the distance then we will put loads of focus on it and we’ll start magnifying it. That is the thing that really gets the attention in this situation and likewise, we can do the same for ourselves.

Sometimes the challenges that the young people around us have are from our own anxieties about what might be going on for them or how we’re interacting with them. If we conserve our energy and instead focus on how we want to be presenting ourselves. Maybe that means to be more confident around them when I’m talking to them about this; instead of feeling anxious about it I’m going to focus on the confidence, I’m going focus on keeping my voice calm and keeping my spirit and demeanour in a peaceful place.

All of those sorts of things will move us in the right direction towards how we want to be around the young people that we’re interacting with. Think about where you are putting your time and energy, remember ‘where your attention goes energy flows’

By Gemma Bailey
www.NLP4Kids.org/gemma-bailey