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NLP – Skills for Learning
54
Maps
You can hear these shifts in language patterns as you take people through a learning experience. They are a very important indicator to you that your learners are rearranging their internal organisation to integrate what you are helping them to learn. They are adding new information to their maps of the world.
Of course, not only your audience’s language can shift during a learning experience – yours can too. You can intentionally shift language patterns at specific points in time to effect change in your audience.
You can think of motivation as being the mental process that takes place when a person naturally moves from thinking at the Capability level to thinking at the Behaviour level. Therefore, by changing the structure of your language you can directly influence people to take action or to organise their ideas and learning more easily.
By listening to how people talk, you can understand how they think. The reverse is also true, so people will switch thinking modes depending on how you talk.
When you listen to people talking about skills, tasks, learning and abilities you will hear a number of interesting language structures that give you a great deal of useful information about what they have learned.
When you hear “I can” or “I can’t” you know that the person is talking about capabilities. When you hear “I do” or “I don’t” you know that they are talking about behaviour. The two are fundamentally different and must not be confused or generalised to the same meaning.
Language itself is a generalised, distorted, filtered metaphor of what is really happening inside your head. Here are some examples of the kinds of statements you will hear from learners, along with a translation that recovers the original thinking. Read the antidotes carefully as some may look the same but are slightly different.
These words are known as ‘modal operators’ and in English grammar, they modify a verb in some way, perhaps by placing a condition on it.
The suggested meanings that I have given below are, of course, just ideas based on this particular context, and they probably won’t match what you’ll find in the dictionary.
NLP – Skills for Learning
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Maps
Meaning Antidote
Can I have the ability and knowledge to do this Good! (How did you learn?) Can not I imagine this being done, I do not yet know
how to do this myself
What would happen if you did? What stops you?
Will I have the ability and the motivation to do this Good! (How did you decide?) Will not I have the ability to do this but not the
intention / motivation
What would help you decide to do this?
Could I have the ability to do this but execution is conditional on another factor
What stops you?
What would happen if you did? Could not I am imagining this being done, I imagine
myself trying and failing
What stops you?
What would it be like if you could? Would I have the ability to do this but something is
stopping me
How do you stop yourself? What would happen if you did? Would not I have the ability to do this but an internal value
or belief is stopping me
How do you stop yourself? What would happen if you did? Might I have the ability to do this but have not yet
decided whether to
How will you choose? How will you know? Might not I have the ability to do this and I want to retain
my free choice
How might you stop yourself?
Do I regularly do this or am doing this ‘now’ Good! (How did you learn?) Do not My beliefs prevent me from doing this or even
thinking about doing it
How did you decide not to? Was there a time when you did?
Am I place myself in the category of… What kind of things does that enable you to do?
Am not I place myself outside of the category of… What are you then?
What does that enable you to do?
The word “now” has a special meaning for us – it doesn’t necessarily mean this present moment, which was just then anyway. “Now” means an ongoing period of time that you internally think of as the present. For some people, “now” means any time between last week and next week. For others, “now” is just a few minutes long. Everything that happens within this moving frame of time is happening “now” so you might say “I’m going to the gym now” or “I’m working in London now”. It doesn’t mean that you are there right at this moment, it means “in the present” or “these days”.
NLP – Skills for Learning
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Maps I know you already knew that, but I wanted to point it out because it’s one of those simple things that we take for granted that reveal huge amounts of useful information. You know that I’m writing this now, but that’s a different now from the now when you’re reading this. I’m writing this now, and you’re reading this now. We are connected through time and space by these words. In fact, we are all connected through time and space by the words we use.
It’s always interesting to recognise the many ways that people differ, and the range of possibilities that exist within our perception of experience. Time itself is highly subjective and different people will think of time in different ways. In particular, what one person calls a short wait is an eternity for someone else. As you start to hear the way that language reveals the structure of experience, you will hear many different ways that people organise their internal resources.
The more you listen, the more amazed you’ll be at the differences between our maps of the world, and the better you’ll be at communicating with other people and helping them to learn effectively.
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