NLP & Exam Stress
Whose stress is it?Sometimes it’s not the child who’s stressed, it’s the parent. It can be a very stressful time for parents, especially when they their children have very different strategies to prepare for exams.
Stress or lack of motivation?
And if there is something going on for the student, is it stress – in the sense of fear and anxiety? Or is it that the child has lost interest in the whole thing and lacks the motivation to revise and prepare for the exam?
Lack of motivation
Faced with a pile of textbooks and notes, it’s a real problem for some students to get started. Understanding their prevailing thinking strategies is a big help. For someone who thinks in a visual way, drawing mind-maps, pictures, decorating text books with bright coloured paper and writing notes in different colours are examples of strategies that work.
For auditory students, making songs and rhythms out of key facts will be a winner (I can still remember that when a straight line cuts two parallel lines, the alternate angles are equal, because I made up a song about it thirty-five years ago!)
And those of a kinaesthetic disposition might cover textbooks with different materials or arrange information spatially – for example, associating facts with different objects in the house or street and then physically and mentally walking the chain of information.
Anxiety and stress
We can think of stress and anxiety as a “memory” of the future. Our brains store experiences that we happen not to have had yet. And so all the great techniques that NLP offers for changing the way that memory is stored can be used to great effect. Here are a couple of ideas.
Is it ALL exams that the student is stressed about? Or just some of them? If he or she is fine about some exams, we can explore how they “do” thinking about the exams that are fine, and how they “do” thinking about the exams that are stressful. By exploring what someone is feeling, seeing, hearing, even smelling and tasting, when they think about an experience, we gather data about how they process that experience internally. And by comparing two different experiences, we can coach the student to make changes to the way they think about the “stressful” exam. For example, one might involve a picture seen to the right, the other, a picture seen to the left. By moving the “stressful” picture to the same place as the “fine” picture, the student begins to change their way of thinking about the previously stressful exam.
If all exams are stressful, we might use another NLP tool – anchoring. We all do this quite naturally all the time – for example, the smell of fresh baked bread, a special song on the radio, the touch of velvet, the sight of a rainbow, the taste of lemon – all of these and many others can evoke an instantaneous change of internal state for us. Anchoring is the art of achieving the state change we want when we want it.
So, the first thing is to find out what internal resources the student needs when they take exams – for example, confidence, cheerfulness, focus – whatever is right for them. Don’t make assumptions – what they need might be very different to you.
Then, the student associates into a time when they fully experienced having one of these resources. “Go to a time when you were really confident. If there’s more than one, choose the one that is most appropriate for doing exams. And when you’re there, just check that you are seeing things with your own eyes, and take a moment to enjoy it. And see what you see, hear what you hear and feel what you feel……” When the experience is at its peak, the student anchors that experience, usually with a gesture – like touching a wrist, an earlobe – anything that can be done DISCREETLY in an exam room.
If there is more than one resource, just repeat the process, using the same physical gesture to stack the resources into one great anchor.
When you’ve finished, have the student jig about or talk about something different, and then ask them to fire off the anchor. They will experience an immediate state change, of exactly the right kind to support them during exams.
Honour their strategies
Finally, whatever strategies the student has come up with, honour them. You may have written notes in green ink on index cards and studied ten hours a day , but if the right strategy for the student is to seemingly do nothing and then be frenziedly active for the two days before, honour that their way of doing things is right for them.
© Jane James 2005