The following case inspired me to share the important point that sometimes it isn’t a learning difficulty, but the perspective of the person who calls it a learning difficulty.

My 6-grader child writes backwards.  An example will be if I write a lower case d, I will write it just as the typed one.  He will first write the l and then the c to join it with the l to form the d.  I am concerned because I never had a challenge like that.  His writing is also untidy, which raises concerns in me about how he’ll fit in when he goes to higher grades.

…and here’s how I answered this mother’s concern:

I don’t see your son’s challenge as a problem for as long as he does write the d!  I’ve worked with children who don’t know how to write d at all at your son’s age. And that is a problem!  Where I see a problem is in your perception of this situation.  This may sound cruel, and I don’t want to discredit your thinking.  You say that you’re concerned because you have never had a challenge like that.  Since the way your son writes d is radically different from how you write it, you perceive it as a learning difficulty. But a different way of doing things doesn’t have to be wrong – especially if it produces the desired result. I’ll liken this to making coffee to demonstrate the point:

Some people make coffee by pouring the coffee, then water, then milk into the cup.  Others pour the coffee, then milk, then water into the cup.  The order in which people poured the ingredients doesn’t matter as long as they have a cup of coffee ready for drinking.  Where I see your concern is in the fact that you noticed your son pouring the milk in first and realised “wow, I’ve never seen that done before!  Is that wrong because I pour the milk in last?”

If this is the case, the problem will be solved if you accept that others have ways of doing things in a different order of steps.  If this issue is not the core of your concern, then I missed the point.

Then I went on about untidy writing

which is more of a problem. I won’t expand on it here, because I wrote about it here and here.  The gist and inspiration of this article is that sometimes people are concerned about the fact that others do things in different ways, or don’t do them in the same ways.  People interpret different as wrong or weird, and that inevitably raises concern.  So if you’re a parent, family member, or acquaintance of someone who you think may have a learning difficulty because of how s/he does certain things, reexamine your perspective before you label the person as having a learning difficulty.

So is it a learning difficulty or a matter of perspective?

Do you have a similar experience or situation in life on which you’d like an NLP perspective?  Let’s talk about it.

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Specifics – details

If you’re helping yourself or another person with learning difficulties, you must know the specific problem. Specific = our neuro-linguistic programming of chunking down = from general concepts to specifics / details.  Other words that will help you get the details are: ingredients, components, constituents, parts, elements.  Since people with learning difficulties are immensely creative, often highly artistic, and definitely quick thinkers, their style of thinking tends to be that of chunking up. This is always specific to context, but I’m referring to the prevalent bias in the style of thinking in the population. Chunking up = producing whole, large, abstract concepts first and then attending to details.  Seeing the big picture first. Did you notice the words in the previous sentences?  Whole, large, abstract, concept, plus the words principle, theme, essence, idea will chunk up.

ADHD

Get as precise details of the learning difficulties as you can.  If you’re dealing with ADHD, ask:

• How many screens do you see in your imagination [visual field] at the same time?
• What would be an example of what you see [in your head / mind’s eye / photographic memory / imagination / visual field]?
• What would this allow you to do / see?
• How many parts of x do you see?
• Which specific parts are moving / still / smaller / larger / in color / black and white / farther / nearer?

Reading comprehension

Spelling

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The root cause of all learning difficulties is a definitive lack of grounding.

This grounding is not the same as grounding a child for his/her behaviour when you don’t let him/her see friends!  Most people are familiar with being ungrounded.  It’s that overwhelming feeling of having a hundred thoughts and way too much going on in and above the head. People also describe it as overload.  If we move our focus down to the belly, that busyness goes away.  If we move our focus out of the body into the ground, that will give us even more relief.

Human beings are land creatures, hence operate best when they are connected to the earth. Grounding is a feeling of calmness in the mind and body, being at one with ourselves, being in control, on top of things, being connected with our bodies, and having clear focused minds. Grounding is a very natural process.  If we want to stand on one leg, we have to ground the other leg or we’ll fall.  People who do sports, martial arts, yoga, gymnastics, horseriding, skating, dance, etc. all find grounding essential, although they may use different words to describe it. People in different parts of the world use different names for grounding.  Other names are earthing and centering.

The metaphor of earthing

reminds of the electricity system in our homes. And we know why we need the electricity system earthed.  In exactly the same way we need to be earthed.  Another useful take on grounding is the practice of reflexology. Reflexology is based on the principle that all the energy channels that connect our internal organs have endings in the feet and hands.  To access vital energy from our environments we must have all energy channel endings in good condition to be able to connect with the earth = walk on healthy feet.  If a nerve ending is damaged, the influx of energy to the ending is blocked. Blocked energy hurts.  Trying to connect a painful congested nerve ending in a foot with the earth energy is like trying to put a plug into a defective socket.  If something hurts in your foot, can you walk = connect with the earth properly?

In contrast, have you ever noticed a gentle tingling or warm movement in your feet?  And what do your feet feel like when you’ve had a foot massage, a cold shower which stimulated the circulation, a hot tub, a swim, a good sleep, a good orgasm, or a walk in the fresh air?  Do your feet feel revitalized and pleasantly tingling?  Does it feel almost as if you can feel the blood flowing in the veins?  Do your feet feel lighter?

Grounding ourselves is like earthing electrical devices

Connecting electrical devices / appliances to the earth = earthing / grounding.  It protects devices from getting electric shocks, power surges, shortcircuiting, interference.  Grounding protects the delicate electrical circuitry of our bodies from interference from our environment.  Grounding enables us to receive free electrons and a vast array of energies from the earth.  Free radicals that we pick up from the environment are not healthy for us.  We can get over free radicals with a high volume of antioxidants which have negative electrons, but are available to free radicals.  The ground also has a lot of negative electrons which are available to free radicals.  But the soles of our shoes act as insulation between the earth and our feet, therefore negative electrons can’t access free radicals. Many people also walk in high heel shoes which is even less grounding!

People with learning difficulties notoriously lack grounding

People with dyspraxia or ADHD are often very physically wobbly, disorganized, overwhelmed.  Dyslexia and dyscalculia are also products of movement – of pictures, letters, words, and numbers. Movement as a product of the brain often connects to physical wobbliness, fidgetiness, inability to stay still or in one place for long.  Movement in the brain is a product of applying visual skills too well to seeing words and numbers. Lack of connectedness of the body to the earth – grounding – certainly makes it worse.

Have you noticed children with learning difficulties sit on their legs, with legs crossed, or legs stretched and the toes pointing up while only the heels touch the ground, or fidget when struggling at school?  Grounding is a temporary state. And we operate best when grounded, even if we’re not in contact with the floor.  If we cross the legs and arms, we can lose the flow of energy and be ungrounded.

When we’re born, we’re not grounded.  We ground through our mother.  After birth we’re carried around and can continue to ground through the mother for some time.  If you observe very young children, you’ll notice that they’re very bouncy, legs flying all over the place.  Around 7 years of age they start to get grounded.  It is part of their natural development and growth.  If a child is born to an ungrounded mother, the child may never experience grounding.  Hence it may be harder for the child to naturally develop grounding.  This is why some children grow to adulthood without having experienced grounding.  Again, grounding is a temporary state.  You can be grounded when relaxing, walking in the forest, etc. but your thoughts can instantly unground and make you feel very wobbly and psychologically insecure, uncertain, floaty, or confused.

People with learning difficulties often have fantastic visual skills.

Highly visual people are often very ungrounded as they struggle to keep up with their internal pictures.  They have so much going on in their heads at once that it’s difficult to stay grounded. Being ungrounded affects their concentration, ability to hold imagined pictures still, thus read, write, spell, etc. It is a matter of choice whether you’re grounded or not at different times in different contexts.  And at different times of the day you may prefer different states. Since grounding is essential for dealing with learning difficulties, I always teach people how to make it part of their lives.  It’s free of charge and side effects, totally natural, and inevitable for dealing with all learning difficulties.

It’s easy to teach yourself how to be more grounded.

The reasons for lack of grounding are:

• the frantic pace of modern life
• traumas and pain
• not wanting to be in the body
• busy thoughts running rapidly in the past, present, or future – with worry or frantic planning
• too many thoughts all want attention at once
• energy blocks due to suppressed emotions, operations, injuries
• significant negative emotions that we buried in our legs / feet
• picking up energy from the environment that disturbs our energy system
• other people’s energy
• recalling a negative emotion or limiting belief
• using electrical / electronic equipment
• stress.

So how to do grounding? Here are a few suggestions:

• several therapies can assist: any massage, reflexology, Reiki, meditation, energetic NLP = using the power of your thought to clear your energy channels anywhere at any time
• drinking warm water.  Water distributes electricity in the body, aids clearing the body of toxins / waste, and gives energy to the body and brain.
• try moving to a place away from electronic equipment.  Electronic equipment gives off magnetic waves that can interfere with our energy system and result in headaches and other symptoms.
• practise focusing on the present moment = this very second.  Not what happened 5 minutes, 5 days, or 5 years ago. Nor on what will happen 5 minutes, 5 days, or 5 years from now.  Free yourself from “what happens if I do x or y” thoughts, because these thoughts race in the mind fast, especially before you fall asleep.
• you can imagine that you’re a tree.  Let energy come into you through your feet while passing stuff that you don’t want into the ground [and releasing it to the center of the earth].
• ground through your male and female reproductive organs where energy often gets clogged up. Imagine a tube connecting them with the earth where energy flows through.

NLP has 6 levels of dealing with any situation.  The 6 levels beautifully apply to grounding and learning difficulties:

• I’ve given examples of how grounding applies [or does not apply] on the level of environment 
• On the level of behaviour you’ve witnessed how people act when they are ungrounded. They fidget, act inappropriately, have temper tantrums, can’t concentrate, comfort eat/drink, and so on. Grounding has the opposite effects.
• On the level of capability people know what and how grounds them, what and how ungrounds them, and how they can make more useful choices in this area.
• People’s beliefs and values play an important role in grounding.  If people hold very ungrounding beliefs [such as that they don’t deserve to be alive, healthy, or successful], this will penetrate their
• identity – who they are.
• And beyond identity we’re here on the planet – either down to earth or flying in the clouds… etc.

Finally, if you would like more NLP help with grounding and to perhaps know how we could apply it to your or someone’s learning difficulties, let’s talk about it.

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The problem:

I’ve always talked really fast and stuttered when I speak because I get really excited when I’m telling a story or trying to get a point across. Home remedies and explanations sometimes take over and my grandma calls it Mix Up Mash Up and says that it’s a sign of being smart. So I’ve never paid it attention until I got into a serious relationship. I don’t know whether it got worse or whether my new partner wasn’t used to it. Nonetheless, she started pointing it out every time it happened.

So I started researching a medical name for it – not getting caught up in labels, just curious – and didn’t find one. The research led me to another reader’s question to you on another site.  I don’t always realize when I do it. I think I said the sentence “Is the cake in the oven?”, and others hear “Is the oven in the cake?”. Most of the time others have to tell me that I mixed up the words. I know it’s my brain working faster than my mouth. When I write I think the sentence and write it. And when I read the sentence I see that I missed a word or wrote a word twice. I want to hear your thoughts and advice on it all…

The NLP solution for mixing words up:

My advice is this: you simply don’t connect your speech to your brain. You’re on chronic autopilot. So chronic that the electric impulse [metaphorically as much as literally] between your speech and your brain REALIZING what you say does not happen due to the automation of the autopilot! Just stop, reread, and think about what you read in this paragraph. You’ll see that it will make sense.

The human race has been spellbound by the power of the medical profession. Look at how its spell worked on you! What did you do first? You searched for the medical name of your issue! Yes, you were curious, not caught up in the labels, but if you weren’t caught up in the labels, why would you be curious?  That’s how the Western society is caught up in labels! I wonder how much energy you spent on not finding the medical name of your issue. You could have spent the energy on thinking about how to correct the issue.

The electric impulse of realization

Now back to the electric impulse between what you do and your brain realizing what you do. I’ll give you an example that may make you and other readers cringe, but beautifully illustrates my point. Have you ever visited the restroom at night? If yes, have you ever had a split second moment while eliminating when you hesitated whether you really were in the restroom and not in a dream?

If you have had this happen, you’ll know that once the split second passes, your brain will kick up such strong impulse of realization that you’ll frighten yourself realizing that you lost control over knowing whether you really were sitting there! You’ll then automatically – as a matter of reflex – ground yourself to the toilet or floor and check yourself, perhaps look around, to assure yourself that you really are in the restroom.

By this time you’ll be wide awake! THAT split second is due exactly to lack of the electric impulse between the action and the brain realizing the action! That impulse is also the missing element for people with dementia. It’s again simply autopilot – who thinks about going to the restroom at night three quarters asleep when nature calls?  One has to act, right? We act on reflex without realising. But it’s the not realising that causes autopilots and brainwash to a certain extent, no matter how harsh or offensive that may sound.

Be a pilot, not autopilot. That’s the NLP key to mixing words up.

Start practicing realizing what you say when you speak. Ground yourself and practise. Your brain must register what you say. Then you’ll start hearing yourself and stop mixing up words. I also suggest that you thank your partner for pointing this out to you. Take your partner’s feedback as an opportunity to catch yourself and practise the electric impulse of realization again when you catch yourself. Your partner’s feedback is a barometer of how well you’re doing!  And of course, realizing what you say must only help reduce stuttering, right?

If the issue described in this article affects you or someone you know, you may be inspired to get more help.  Let’s talk about it.

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I take it you already know of tough and bough and cough and dough…

Others may stumble, but not you, on hiccough, thorough, slough, and through.

Well done!  And now you wish, perhaps, to learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word that looks like beard and sounds like bird.

And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead; for goodness’ sake, don’t call it deed!

Watch out for meat and great and threat, they rhyme with suite and straight and debt.

A moth is not a moth in mother, not both in bother, broth in brother.

And here is not a match for there, nor dear and fear for bear and pear.

And then there’s dose and rose and lose, just look then up – and goose and choose!

Then cork and work and card and ward and font and front and word and sword.

And do and go, then thwart and cart – come, come!  I’ve hardly made a start!

A dreadful language?  Why, man alive! I mastered it when I was five!

And yet to write it the more I try, I’ll not learn how til the day I die.

Need I say more?  Well, perhaps.

Phonics can be confusing at the beginning of teaching / learning some languages

The poem demonstrates that English should be the last language on earth to be taught by the method of phonics at the beginning.  Phonics have their place, but can be confusing at the beginning of teaching and learning English. This is because the letters are often pronounced differently from how they should logically sound.  In languages that are very phonetic, such as Spanish, pronunciation of letters is far more predictable and consistent than in English and other languages that are not phonetic. Yet many an educational system in the English-speaking countries still teaches phonics at the early stages.  And that accounts for a large proportion of why some of our brightest children sit in special needs schools and some of our brightest adults sit well under the heights they could have reached.  Why is this?

If a picture says a thousand words, it also says the words in a thousandth of the time it would take to pronounce the words!  If I show you a picture, how long does it take you to look at it and see what’s in it?  A fraction of a second.  And in this fraction of a second you’ll take in the colors, brightness, shapes, content, details, sizes, proportions, distances… How long would it take you to verbally describe all that you see?  Several minutes.  That’s because sound goes in time.  A musical composition lasts several minutes, a sentence of spoken words lasts several seconds.  But a picture, a statue, or a building take a fraction of a second to look at and see.

When letters look differently from how they sound…

then phonics don’t work at the beginning stages of teaching and learning English and any language which is written differently from how it sounds.  This is because if you spell a word phonetically and do not see it, your pronouncing of each letter goes in time.  By the time you get to the middle of the word you’re lost, because you have no visual support to get you to the end of the word. And you’re mismatching the learning channels: visual and auditory [hearing]. Pronouncing phonics = the hearing channel. Seeing a word in the imagination as a photograph = the visual channel. To spell well you must see the word first and then learn to pronounce it.

If teachers of 4-year-olds grasp this simple principle and teach children to see words in their imaginations as photographs, we’ll have no difficulties with learning literacy. If you’re curious about more NLP ways to help learning difficulties in teaching / learning English, let’s start a conversation.

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