photo credit: peruisay

In my work as a trainer, I’ve met many brilliant teachers. We’d already run our Transformational Teaching program since 2005, covering aspects of learning and teaching strategies, life skills and how to re-ignite the passion in some of these very dedicated teachers.

Some of them are very good at what they do. Yet, no matter how good they are, there’s so much more they can do to bring out the best in their students if only their methods change just slightly.

1. Student rapport. I’ve seen many teacher stumble on the issue of student rapport. A lot of times, teachers are unable to manage a classroom full of what they call ‘attention deficit’ students. It’s not an easy task, but you can achieve great success if you learn strategies for rapport building.
2. Deeper communication. Yes, it is important to learn communication, no matter how much of it you already know. More importantly, it’s not about talking. It’s about really going into the mind of the other person to understand what they are thinking and how they might react. Putting yourself into their shoes will also enable you to read them better, understand their mental processes and also create for yourself a set of strategies to better teach your students once you know how they think.
3. Leveraged support. Many students today learn through the net. If, as a teacher, you’re not yet connected to the internet with your own blog or podcast, you might want to look at these tools for education, so that you won’t have to keep repeating certain things and also keep your teachings consistent.

photo credit: Vix Walker

Just so you know, I’m studying EMDR, which is an area of interest I had developed over the years since learning the similarities between NLP’s Eye Movement model and Francine Shapiro’s Eye Movement Desensitization process.

After looking at EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, for the uninitiated) training for day 1, one of the most important things that has struck me is the level of order and clarity that an EMDR therapist has in the treatment modality. It’s not trying to be a cure-all or panacea, and I suppose that makes it easier for the specific treatments to work.

NLP, of course, does not claim to be a cure-all. In fact, I’ve stated over and over again, it is not even a treatment modality. Some people have taught NLP from the standpoint of psychotherapy and personally, it just doesn’t work. It’s like saying you’re drinking coffee by mixing some coffee powder into a glass of water. What you get is really diluted psychotherapy. Sure, the flavor could be there. In fact, there could even be some effect from the caffeine. However, what NLP “therapists” really miss out is the huge amount of knowledge they haven’t gathered through the academic rigor of studying and comparing different psychotherapeutic approaches and the theories supporting the approach.

I’ve used NLP in therapy because I am a counselor and I have sufficient knowledge to apply certain things in the area of therapy. I also happen to be a student of linguistics that makes me understand the language structures that makes this work.

Not surprisingly, the language structures and the processes in EMDR do not deviate from my understanding of good psychotherapy. A good NLP practitioner can easily model after an EMDR specialist and generate very similar results, provided they share the same theoretical background.

So in any case, EMDR is interesting, and fit in with my expectations of a useful model of psychotherapy, especially for the purposes of dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A formal study of NLP to explain the underpinning processes in EMDR, in my opinion, could actually help an individual better understand psychotherapy as a whole.

It’s quite a tricky  question because on one hand, leaders do things that make them leaders but nobody really calls into question whether they are “faking” it. Sometimes, it’s people who “display” leadership at the right time that become leaders, get praised or promoted as a result of it.

At the same time, people who have leadership skills but do not display or communicate this may end up sidelined, simply because there is a perception of this lack of leadership ability.

In evaluations and assessments, we propagate that people are leaders because they exhibit certain behaviors. But there are some people who do not exhibit such behaviors that people still want to follow. Could it merely be a perception? And are we barking up the wrong tree when we call for behavioral assessments? Is leadership more of an “intangible” quality?

I would like to believe that such an assessment is useful to a certain extent, and that “x-factor” will require a bit more than just a behavioral assessment in a moment of time. After all, we also need to assess if person A has “more” of the x-factor than person B a lot of the time.

It even appears that there are some people who step up to leadership only after they are pushed into it. I’ve heard from someone that good leaders are often reluctant ones.

Some of us are great leaders in one context, but flop in another. Perhaps then, leadership is nothing more than a projection of people’s expectations. Perhaps there’s something more to that. And often, it takes an extraordinary situation before an ordinary person can be recognized as being a leader.

Perhaps, if someone isn’t deemed a leader, that person hasn’t met with an extraordinary situation they can step up to… yet.