Today in my Facebook group I have a guest speaker talking about her My Mood Stars which are used my parents and teachers to encourage emotional literacy in children from the youngest age. We are used to using emoticons in our messages and social media posts and these small squidgy faces are brilliant for children because without having to use words, they can recognise the emotion and show mummy and daddy what they are feeling. Many takes Sleepy star to bed with them or snuggle up with Sad Star. You can play games with them, hiding them or asking children to name the emotion and Wendy has written lovely books to accompany the Mood Stars.
But how do we get our mood in the first place?
Here's a diagram showing the NLP Communication model.
Let's start with the 'external event' this is something you see , hear or feel, touch, taste or smell.
That experience has to be filtered otherwise we'd be in 'overdrive' all the time trying to figure out how we feel about it. So we 'generalise' by comparing it to other similar events we've experienced, maybe deciding that whatever it is doesn't matter because 'mummy always says that'. We 'delete', pay more attention to certain parts of the event (the parts that matter to us) and we 'distort' which means that we make a belief or a decision based on the event that may or may not be a fair representation such as 'mummy loves my sister more than me' or 'my brother is mean'.
Other filters are called metaprogrammes and these are ways we prefer to process the information; maybe we like to have choices but we aren't given one so that makes us cross. Maybe we like to know the detail about the homework assignment but we've just been given an essay title so we are confused and don't know what to do. You can read all about these in my book 'Understanding children and teens' see the link below.
After all this filtering, each child will create their own internal representation of what that even means to them. This will be unique to them based on their filtering and also their previous experiences and memories of similar events.
From there they express a physiology and that is where the mood stars come in, this will be a facial expression and a body stance.
This then morphs into a behaviour and this becomes the next external event. And so it goes on.
Here's a diagram showing the NLP Communication model.
Let's start with the 'external event' this is something you see , hear or feel, touch, taste or smell.
That experience has to be filtered otherwise we'd be in 'overdrive' all the time trying to figure out how we feel about it. So we 'generalise' by comparing it to other similar events we've experienced, maybe deciding that whatever it is doesn't matter because 'mummy always says that'. We 'delete', pay more attention to certain parts of the event (the parts that matter to us) and we 'distort' which means that we make a belief or a decision based on the event that may or may not be a fair representation such as 'mummy loves my sister more than me' or 'my brother is mean'.
Other filters are called metaprogrammes and these are ways we prefer to process the information; maybe we like to have choices but we aren't given one so that makes us cross. Maybe we like to know the detail about the homework assignment but we've just been given an essay title so we are confused and don't know what to do. You can read all about these in my book 'Understanding children and teens' see the link below.
After all this filtering, each child will create their own internal representation of what that even means to them. This will be unique to them based on their filtering and also their previous experiences and memories of similar events.
From there they express a physiology and that is where the mood stars come in, this will be a facial expression and a body stance.
This then morphs into a behaviour and this becomes the next external event. And so it goes on.
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