Self-esteem is the extent to which you feel you are OK, a valuable person in your own right.  It is a measure of the opinion you have of yourself in all respects; your physical appearance, how well you perform in your work and sport, whether you feel you are popular and get on with people you meet and how well things are going for you at home with your family. Only you are the judge of your self-esteem, no-one else can make it greater or smaller. When you lack self-esteem no amount of well-meaning flattery will change this feeling unless you believe it to be true for yourself.

Self-esteem is a feeling and it can change throughout the day, over the week, month and years. You may be someone who measures it visually by what you see and the images in your mind, what you say and how you say it or your inner voice or how you feel in yourself or what you do. However you measure it, self-esteem is not tangible, it is not a fact. You cannot weigh it or measure it and it cannot be proven yet it can affect your sense of well-being and your sense of who you are in the world.

You cannot measure anyone else’s self-esteem either in fact they may seem very successful and confident to you, yet may be feeling very different inside and have low self-esteem but be very experienced at hiding it from others.

Here are some of the feelings and thoughts you might experience when you feel low self-esteem.

 " I can't do this. I'm useless."

"Everyone else is better than me."

"No-one seems to listen to what I say."

"Why do people keep criticising me?"

"I'm just a ............."

 Here are some typical thoughts you may experience when you are feeling high self-esteem.

  "My views are important, people listen when I speak."

"I get on pretty well with most people."

"When I make a mistake, I don't mind admitting it."

"I think it's important to be yourself."

"I'm OK with how I look."

Exercise 1
Here are some questions to ask yourself and think about. You might find it helpful to give yourself a score out of ten for each sentence so you can look at them after you’ve read the book to see how you have changed.

Q1. How well do you take criticism?  
Q2. Do you feel valued by your colleagues or those you interact with daily?
Q3. How often do you say what you really think or do you just agree with the majority view?
Q4. Do you get what you want from your relationships?
Q5. Do you take it personally if someone doesn’t agree with you?
Q6. Are you envious of what others have and think they’re doing better than you?
Q7. Do you sometimes feel unloved?
Q8. Do you feel embarrassed about your appearance?
Q9. Do you sometimes feel like a victim?
Q10. Do you feel you’re not good enough?

This was taken from my book 'Self-Esteem Workbook'. If you'd like to receive the first chapter free, just sign up to my newsletter. 

Some people thrive on choice and enjoy the element of selecting from a number of options, whether it be what to wear, what to buy, what to cook or eat or even what to say but others prefer to just pick something and go with it. In NLP terms we call it choices or process to indicate that those who don’t like choices want to work their way down a list of task as a process rather than branching off or pausing to make decisions. It isn’t really a bipolar scale, these are just the two ends of it. 

In a family situation it is very important to make it clear to your children what are options and which are not. There has been a growing trend to encourage children to make choices even at a very young age, whether to drink out of a red mug or a blue one, whether to wear this or that dress. This is inclined to make children capricious as they assume they can make decisions about everything which isn’t of course the case and can lead to some very lengthy preparations for leaving the house! You need to prepare your children for accepting your decisions and make it clear when they can choose and when it isn’t possible or appropriate. You can signal this by asking ‘would you like to choose?’ when there is a choice.

In the family you would similarly offer false choices to children who want choice so “would you like to do your homework with a cup of tea or a glass of milk?” Note that not doing homework wasn’t an option! Also, with ‘like’ and ‘homework’ close together in the sentence you are giving them a slightly hypnotic connection which might not have been present for them.

Parents need to know how to give choice when there is none because offering choices is not always an option when you want your children to get dressed to go to school by a certain time, eat healthy meals or do their homework. If you have older children you may not want to give them choices about what time to come home or where they go and with whom.

First decide on your compelling outcome. What end result do you want from the discussion or negotiation? What will you concede and what is non-negotiable? Simply going through this process has a remarkably calming effect and puts you in the driving seat. If for example the pick-up time is non-negotiable you can give them a choice of how they come home, with whom and by what means of transport. If the time you have to leave for the school run is non-negotiable give them a choice about getting dressed before or after breakfast or whether to wear a jumper or not, whether they need to give their shoes a clean.

There is always a choice, not just in terms of the ‘how’ but also a choice in how you ask. You can speak in rapport, using your child’s preferred language pattern – visual, auditory or kinaesthetic. If they are talking about what they don’t want e.g. “I don’t want to put on my shirt” mention something you don’t want in order to match them “and I don’t want to be late for the bus.” If they say ‘yes but’ or ‘no’ this is a mismatch pattern which you can still match for rapport by using the same pattern ‘yes but homework needs to be done first’ or ‘no, it has to be done first, then TV.

Learning about NLP means that we have choices based on more knowledge about ourselves and how we see our world and a better understanding of the other person’s world. We can then choose how we want to communicate with them.
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Even when there appears to be no choice in the ‘what’ that we have to do, there is always a choice in the ‘how’. These choices give us flexibility which puts us in control if we choose to be. 

-As parents or teachers, carers of children, you have a very important role to play in giving them feedback. Feedback is a gift of love that shows you care about them and have an investment in their personal development. Can there be anything worse than being ignored? Children need to know that you’re paying attention to them and they want to know where they need to make changes because that’s your job as a parent, to guide them so they can achieve all they can in life.
Encourage children to give themselves feedback. We all, even children, have a nagging little inner voice that gets cross and tells us off but it needs to learn how to give feedback in a way that we can learn from it, not feel permanently stupid and lose confidence.
Here’s how to do it:

1. What specifically went well today? (3 things)
2. What could have been better? (1 thing)
3. How could I do that better next time?
4. Overall, what lessons have I learnt?

You can teach this to pre-school children upwards. Encourage them to ‘read’ feedback non - verbally so ask them how they know something went well. What were the signs? Were they noticing what people said or how they looked or what they did?
We have a tendency to have a preference whether visual, auditory or kinaesthetic so if your child generally tends to notice people’s visual response to them, encourage them to also listen to what is said and what I done so that you can open their minds up to all three types of feedback. 

Feedback to children needs to be

1. Immediate – there’s no point in spending days thinking about it and then expecting them to remember what they did. Children have very short memories and will have forgotten what they did, what they did it and wonder why you’re talking about it days later.
2. Specific – you need to draw their attention to the specific thing they did or said and what exactly they need to do more of or less of because they won’t be able to read your mind. They need to know what you want from them.
3. Sincere – the feedback needs to reflect what you think and what you believe and be something they can see is of value to you. Use ‘I’ to show that it is what you think and don’t bring other people into it. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. Keep this between you and your child.
4. Short – avoid long sentences and lengthy explanations about why you feel like this it isn’t helpful. Use the KISS principle – keep it simple stupid.
5. What you do want – avoid the word ‘don’t’ tell them instead what you want them to do; either more of something or less of something.
6. Avoiding the word ‘but’ because your positive start will be forgotten once you use the word ‘but’. Replace it with the word ‘and’.
7. Accepting because you are not a mind reader so don’t presume to know what their intentions were. Instead give them the benefit of the doubt and look for their positive intention. For the most part, children want to please you but their map of the world is different to yours with other more pressing priorities such as playing!
8. Focused on the behaviour rather than being a personal attack on their identity.

 
The giving and receiving of feedback is how we learn. As parents we can be inclined to jump in and do things for our children, take responsibility for organising them and their free time, even decide when and where homework should be done. Allowing children to take responsibility from an early age means that they will make mistakes and our job is to allow them to do that and let them get the learning so that the next time they do it, they do it better. The best way to show them how to respond is to pause, be curious about the learning and thank the giver of the feedback.

Give feedback to your children with love and focus on how they can learn from it and become the excellent human being you want them to be. 

The pattern repeats itself again and again so how do we change this and break free of it?
You stop rescuing. It's as simple as that.
When you stop rescuing and let your children take responsibility themselves, you allow them to learn how to do it in school and in life. If you always step in to 'protect them' they believe they can't do it alone, they need you to fight their battles. How confident will they be? Not very. 
So they will be at the mercy of all those persecutors out there in the playground because they can't stand up for themselves.
So start to notice who plays victim, who is persecutor, who is the rescuer. How does it switch? What happens then? Is there a pattern? Experiment with stepping out of the Drama Triangle and see how they take responsibility for themselves. Teach them some simple techniques.
1. Victim - make it clear when their sibling has gone too far by giving eye contact, stand tall, belly out (that's where your energy is) and say 'stop' . They can add a hand up to indicate where their personal space is to show it's being invaded.
2. Victim - they can suggest a solution, compromise or win win.
3. Persecutor - remind themselves that they have more than one choice, other options are available such as walking away, playing with something else etc
4. Rescuer - ask yourself why are you rescuing? Is this your responsibility or theirs? What are you adding by rescuing? What are you taking away? How will they learn in future?

NLP is rich in ideas for improving rapport and this is what we need in order to communicate well with our children. 
 
VAK is the name we give to the visual, auditory and kinaesthetic preference that is usually the starting point for any NLP discussion on communication because it is the basic structure of the language patterns we choose. Visual is of course what a child chooses if they are visually aware and think in images. Auditory preferenced children like to talk, listen and enjoy sounds in preference to pictures. Kinaesthetic children are more physical and active and more sensitive to atmosphere and temperature. Listen for the words used when they are talking to you and use their pattern to make the best connection. A quick way to check out which your own child is, is to ask them a simple question such as "What was your favourite lesson today?" Then listen to how they tell you. Are they talking in pictures or sounds or more action and feelings? Use the same words back to them to encourage them to tell you more. For example:

Child - we did a really funny thing in class today (did is an action word - kinaesthetic)
Parent - what did you do?

Child - you should have seen the teachers' face (seen is a visual word)
Parent - what did it look like?

Child - the teacher told us about the Vikings? (told is an auditory word)
Parent - what did he/she say? 

Mismatched responses would be:  
Parent - what did you see / hear?
Parent - what did he/she do?
Parent - what did they look like?  
 
NLP Meta Programs are the way your mind works and includes patterns we’ve talked about a lot such as :

• associated/disassociated (connecting with your own feelings or standing apart and viewing them like a fly on the wall)
• away from/towards (avoiding something or positively aiming for something)
• matching/mismatching (looking for similarities or differences)
• internally / externally referenced (checking in with your own values or looking for the approval of others)
• big chunk/small chunk (big picture or detailed thinking)
• choices/ process (options or plans)

 
Listen for the thinking pattern and match it for achieving rapport.
 
Then there are filters we use that get in the way of clear and clean communication such as:
 
Distortions – assumptions about someone’s thinking or behaviour
-mistaken cause and effect i.e the idea that someone makes you feel something (no, you choose to feel it)
Deletions – vague statements, vague comparisons (i.e better than, worse than)
Generalisations – everyone, no-one, never, always, must, should
 
When your child uses any of these you need to challenge them to get clarity. The easiest and least offensive way is simply to repeat what they’ve said with an upward inflection at the end to imply a question and emphasise the generalisation. For example, they say “No-one likes me, I don't have any friends". You say "no-one likes you at all?" and "you don't have any friends?" and they may then amend the generalisation to explain that they do have one or two. This way you have a more interesting conversation, when information is more accurate and you achieve rapport.
 
You will improve rapport by matching verbal language in terms of pace, volume, rhythm, tone and pitch. Correctly done it will seem as if you speak the same language and have so much in common but do it parrot fashion or like an actor without sensitivity or good intention and it could be seen as mocking and insulting.
 
Non verbal language , how you stand, how you hold your head and your whole body posture needs to match the child you’re talking to so that you are mirror images of each other. This again improves rapport.
 
Think of people you know who communicate well and copy what they do. 

​Yesterday at breakfast I managed to break all the NLP guidance I give the kids and there’s me an experienced NLP Master Practitioner. Firstly my 15 yr old son kept slurping his tea noisily so I asked him to stop – naturally he continued louder than ever because it amused him. When I asked him again and was a bit annoyed with him, I realized I was absolutely doing what I advise parents not to do. I was rising to the bait and giving him attention for behaviour I didn’t want repeated. That’s why he repeated it, because it worked. He got my attention. So instead of starting off the day with a happy family breakfast, it was a bit grouchy. This was so unnecessary because in the whole scheme of things slurping really isn’t important to me. When our child does something annoying we have to check in with our values. Does this thing matter to me? How important is it? What is more important, to have a meal together in a friendly way before we all start work for the day or to correct his slurping. Well obviously I should have just stayed quiet. 

​Then what did I do next? Despite knowing full well that my husband has a visual internal referencing system – he wants to see things rather than be told – I proceeded to impart the details of my day when he asked what I was doing. So he just looked at me in a hazy sort of way and was clearly confused by so many different pieces of information. What I know he prefers is for me to pop a note on the noticeboard then he knows what I’m up to. So we too were slightly out of rapport.
 
The reason for telling you this is for you to think (as I didn’t on that occasion!) about how different members of your family prefer to be told things. The other day my Mum told me she’d really annoyed my brother (easily done!) by saying “I assume you’ll be spending Christmas with Sarah in Wimbledon?” He asked her why she couldn’t simply ask him what he was doing for Christmas. Assumptions can come across as what we call ‘unclean’ in NLP terms because we are mind-reading which is slightly disrespectful.
 
Some of us like to see information, others like to hear it and others like to get involved, for example “shall we…..?” or “ what do you think of the idea of….”. Bear in mind these preferences especially as you plan activities over the Christmas holidays.
 
Intense family time can lead to fracas so to avoid it, think about what is important to you this Christmas as just focus on those things. If having the house really tidy isn’t that important but everyone getting along nicely is, then overlook minor transgressions and focus on what’s going well.
 
Then lastly, when you get it wrong, forgive yourself like I did. We can’t get it right all the time, and remember, neither can they. Learn from what goes well and do more of it. One of my clients told me yesterday that her hubbie likes to do the opposite of what she asks so if she says ‘ I don’t suppose you want to do the washing up, do you?” off he goes to do it whereas when she asks him to do it, he procrastinates and she ends up doing it herself.
 
Get to know what works!
 
 
……and do it again…..and again