I am going to be asking you to do something that you might not want to do. I’m going to be asking you to stop what you are doing and take a step back. What I’m suggesting is quite hard to explain but it is to do with our state of mind and our psychology – subject areas frequently discussed when I am counselling children with my NLP skills.

With our psychology, it will manifest itself in different ways for different people but for example, let’s say that you have a young person in your life – be it your child or a child that you care for or teach in some way. They have a habit of making a particular mistake and you have developed a habit of always saving the day. This is a problem because what we’re doing in those moments (where we’re being superheroes and we are solving the problem for them) is we are being selfish. We are being selfish because you are preventing them from learning and you are preventing them from growing. The only reason you’re doing that is that it’s uncomfortable to stand back and watch the slow motion of them fudging it up or going through a painful experience. It’s a horrible thing to have to do to watch them nearly fail or completely fail.

You know if you can swoop in and save the day then, why wouldn’t you? Because you are stopping them from learning and growing and that’s not fair. You cannot keep doing that if you have a young person in your life who depends on you to help them when the going gets tough and you keep doing it and you keep giving them your time and your energy and your suggestions about how to resolve the situation, but they don’t take those on board they just keep repeating the same pattern and then you keep repeating the same pattern in response. What you are doing is you are stunting their independence from developing. I’m not telling you that this is an easy thing to do, to stand back and watch the metaphorical car crash happening in slow motion before your very eyes. It is not an easy thing for you to do. However, you have to do it because if you don’t you continue to (selfishly) prevent them from learning and growing and finding their own way – which quite frankly might have been a better way than your way was initially! Allowing this creative thinking to occur is something we teach on the NLP4Kids franchise training to become a child therapist.

You may need to watch them make those mistakes more than one time before they get the learning, but they will not get the learning every time you swoop in and save them. There are so many rewards and learning that come from making mistakes so we’re going to let them crack on and make those mistakes. We’re going dust them off afterwards and say positive and encouraging things to set them back on the right track again and then we’re going to watch them screw it up all over again. This is an area where therapy can be helpful!

We’re not going to interfere with that because what they’re doing is, they’re going through a process of learning how to be responsible and we want them to be responsible. We don’t want them to grow up and go into other relationships later on in their life where they become dependent on the other person because that’s what they’ve got used too. We don’t want them expecting that everyone else is going to continue to sort things out for them in the future because that’s not how the world works. We want to know that they can go into the workplace and deal with the stresses and that they’ll know how to deal with that because we helped them to develop that resilience they need.

My message to you this month is to step back and let them grow. Let them learn, let them take responsibility, let them become the people that we want them to be and if this article has been in any way useful or important for you to hear today and I’d like you to mention that in the comment box below.

By Gemma Bailey

www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org