Week 2 – 5 Grateful Thoughts

1. Is it a happy thought?

Many of us aren’t even aware of our thoughts – and that’s especially true for younger children, who don’t live in the cognitive realm, but in the realm of imagination.

So I’m going to share a couple of different ideas with you for this one, so you can adapt this week’s technique for younger and older children.

Is it a happy thought? Children aged about 6-12

Children of this age can usually tell which kinds of thoughts they’re thinking, but often feel ‘stuck’ in those thoughts and don’t know how to change them (that comes next in steps 2 and 3!).

So if you ask them if a particular thought is making them feel happy or sad, then they will usually be able to tell you.

If the word ‘thought’ doesn’t work for them, you can shift it by using questions like:

Is the story you’re telling yourself inside one that is making you feel good or bad / happy or sad / light or dark?

Younger children

Young children are often totally unaware of the concept of ‘thinking’. However, each thought we have triggers an emotion and a sensation in your body – and young children can easily connect with this.

So, if your youngster doesn’t ‘get’ thinking, instead ask them how they feel – and allow them to reply with either the description of an emotion or a physical sensation.

If they are really strongly in the world of imagination, you could play with allowing them to describe their feelings via an imaginary character. For example:

If you were a fairy princess / prince right now, how would she / he been feeling?

For a really young child (aged 3+), you might not want to get them using words at all. Instead you could offer them a box of crayons and ask them to draw the colour that they are currently feeling – this will make more sense to them than you might think! Then you could ask them whether, just now, that colour is making them feeling smily or frowny.

Teenagers upwards

Teenagers like to dive in and analyse, to understand and to go more deeply into thoughts and emotions.

For them, you’ll be able to get them to share the narrative of those thoughts – they will be aware of the full story behind those thoughts. They will also easily pick up, for example:

• Where in their body they are ‘feeling’ that thought
• What kind of physical and emotional sensations are connected to it – hard / soft / pulsing / constant / light / heavy / painful / uplifting / colourful / monochrome…
• Whether the physical and emotional sensations connected with these thoughts are constant or shifting.

In the NLP world these are some of the ‘sub-modalities’ that our unconscious mind uses to tell different styles of thoughts and memories apart. We’ll use these in steps 2 and 3.

2. Experiencing that they can choose which types of thoughts to ‘feed’

This is where the surprises can come in.

Most of us believe that we have no choice over our thoughts.

Thank Goodness that’s not the case!

If your child comes up with a thought that is making them feel bad, simply ask them a question (and you can adapt it to suit your child’s age and vocabulary):

What might happen if you chose to think a happier thought, instead?

Important: This isn’t about ‘getting rid’ of ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ thoughts. It’s about opening up the possibility that those darker thoughts don’t have to hang around.

You can simply let them float on through – like a conveyer belt or a passing cloud – and set your intention that your next thought will feel better.

For teenagers, you can help them use the ‘sub-modalities’ (the ‘qualities’ of the thoughts) to turn things around. If they were thinking dark or blurred or throbbing or spiky thoughts, they could choose a thought instead that is the opposite of these – light or clear or humming or soft? You can even take the existing thought and make it soft instead of spiky, to help it to shift.

3. Help them to practise this, by consciously choosing five happy thoughts in a row

This one can be a game – it’s not a competition and you don’t get it ‘wrong’ or ‘fail’ if you can’t think 5 whole thoughts in a row that are happy or upbeat. It’s simply a way of playing with the idea that we can choose which thoughts to feed.

Here’s a simple way of doing it:

Think Five Happy Thoughts

• Breathe in and breathe out with an ‘ahhh’ sound – relax!
• Smile gently and close your eyes.
• Think back and remember something really happy that happened – something that makes you feel a big ‘thank you’ in your heart.
• Allow that feeling to grow.
• Now think another happy ‘thank you’ thought – remembering that happy memory and letting it grow.
• Do this for five thoughts in a row – or more.
• Now notice how you feel – and how your smile has grown bigger!

 
How did you get on?
Could I tempt you to share, over at the forum? Thinking 5 happy thoughts