NLP coaching for learning difficulties – how do learning difficulties begin?

Everyone visualizes / imagines / sees pictures in the head. When you were 6 weeks young,  you started smiling at your mother. You matched a picture in your head with the picture of the person looking at you. You might also recognise her voice or smell, but if she put on a wig, you would cry! Blind people visualize too.  Vision and visualization are different things!

If your friend walked into the room now, would you recognize him or her? Imagine the friend with pink hair. Did you change your picture? Now imagine that you are watching a car driving up to the red traffic light. See it stopping. Watch the movie in reverse. By the way, what colour was the car? And what colour is the front door of where you live?

This is how you control the pictures that you imagine. Every person is born with this skill. But sometimes a person gets stressed, the brain gets confused, and loses this skill or starts applying it wrongly. And that’s how learning difficulties begin.

Every person with and without learning difficulties sees pictures in hlis/her imagination

• easily, sharply, clearly
• far enough to be comfortable, yet near enough to be easy to see
• as movies or as still pictures, whichever s/he needs at a given moment.

Every person with and without learning difficulties sees pictures in his/her imagination

• Hairstylists imagine a finished haircut.
• Taxi drivers picture where they’re going.
• Double glazers, construction workers, or carpenters imagine the finished items.
• Architects imagine the finished building and then draw the plans.
• Artists imagine what they’re creating.
• Surveyors see whether the buildings match the plans.
• Students visualize mind maps, sequences, formulae, equations, materials for revisions and exams.
• Healers see blocks of energy in the body.
• Good spellers imagine a written word before s/he spells it!
• People excellent at math imagine the mathematical progressions and draw results,
• …hence seeing numbers is an essential skill for mathematics.
• Salespeople visualize the concepts they’re selling and then describe them.

To spell, read, and count well you need to see still (=not moving) words and numbers.

Fluent readers store pictures of whole words in their brains. You also need to be able to do it in order to spell easily. Most people develop the skill of storing whole words and groups of numbers in their brains naturally. But some people don’t. And the confusion leads to literacy and numeracy learning difficulties. The harder they try, the more confused they are, and the letters and numbers may start moving around the page.