Month: November 2012

The Circle of Excellence is a great way to manage your own state when you are teaching. It is based on the NLP idea of anchoring. You have probably heard of the story of Pavlov’s dogs. When he rang a bell, he would feed the dogs, and the dogs would salivate. When he had trained the dogs, just ringing the bell would cause the dogs to salivate. In NLP terms, he had created an anchor (the bell) which produced the response (salivation).

Now, I’m not suggesting that you start to salivate every time the bell for class goes. Instead, what you want to do is anchor resourceful states in your circle of excellence. When you have practiced this lots of times, then just by imagining stepping into your circle, you can easily enter those resourceful states.

For example, supposing you decide that you want to feel confident in the classroom. Then you can add the state of confidence to your circle. Other useful states for teaching could be openness, energetic, calmness, whatever you believe will help you to be in the best state.

Before you do the Circle of Excellence process, choose three states that you would like to always have in your classroom.

1. _________  2. _________ 3. _________

The Circle of Excellence Process

1. Imagine a circle in front of you about one meter in diameter.
2. Remember a time when you felt completely [State].
3. What did you see, hear, and feel at that time?
4. When you are sure that you are completely in that state, step into the circle.
5. Break state.
6. Repeat with other states that you want to add to the circle.
7. Test your circle. Make it stronger!
8. Pick up your circle and put it into your pocket! Use it and keep it well recharged!

Remember that this is not magic – it is simply anchoring resources to an imaginary circle. I promise you that it will work, just in the same way as it worked for Pavlov’s dogs, but you need to practice. If you practice your circle of excellence for a few minutes each day for a week or so, you will soon be able to use it to be in the perfect state for every class! The more you use your circle, the better it will become.

As always, enjoy using NLP, enjoy your teaching, and let us know how you get on.

©Copyright 2012 by Dr. Brian Cullen

My teaching has changed completely since I learned NLP, and I believe that NLP has a huge amount to offer teachers–to help you really make your classes as good as they can be. This page links to many resources for teachers all over this website and around the Internet. You should also sign up for the Tips for Teachers newsletter if you haven’t already done so.

Teachers all over the world have found NLP to be useful in many ways. If you are new to NLP, you might like to check out the “What is NLP?” page. Or if you are curious to find out how NLP can really help you,  other teachers are already using NLP to …

• Motivate learners and get them curious to learn more
• Use language carefully to get the results that you want
• Create rapport quickly with groups of learners
• Understand and utilize different learning styles
• Model the strategies of good learners and good teachers
• Help students with ‘learning problems” including ADD and Hikikomori
• Manage your own state and motivate yourself before every lesson
• Create a rich learning environment
• Use powerful language patterns to teach at both a conscious and an unconscious level
• Model the skills and strategies of successful teachers and learners
• Have more fun than you had thought possible becoming the teacher that you are destined to be

Here are some interesting tips on memorizing information from a neuroscience students.
How your brain likes to be treated at revision time | Education | guardian.co.uk.
In his first point, he talks about mnemonics.
“The mnemonic is providing you with a cue but, if you haven’t memorised the names, the information you want to recall is not there. You’re just giving your overflowing hippocampus yet another pattern of activity to store and retrieve.”
As some of you will know, I’m a huge fan and use them for pretty much everything in my NLP training. I believe that they are a powerful way to keep whole processes and large amounts of information within easy cognitive reach. It is so easy to refer to a book or the Internet for information, but it is only when we have it in our heads that we can make the creative links between disparate bits of information, at both a conscious and an unconscious level. For example, most people aren’t connected to Google as they sleep 🙂
His point is a good one–remembering a mnemonic without knowing the underlying meanings isn’t a whole lot of use. Yet, it is a powerful first step because it alerts us to the fact that we have incomplete information and can then start a search of our memories for that missing information. For example, if you’re using the SPECIFY mnemonic and you can remember all except the ‘P’, you at least know that you are missing the ‘P’ and can begin to guess or try to remember what it is. By having this information gap, you are able to search for something that you may have learned once.
Of course, it is better to remember it all perfectly, but we have all had times where we can’t remember some bit of information and then it pops into our mind a few hours later long after we have forgotten that we had forgotten something. Clearly, the unconscious mind was continuing to search through our memories and found the information somewhere.
If you didn’t learn the information at all in the first place, it’s not likely to be there, but having a mnemonic gives us a powerful map of a large amount of information without imposing much of a cognitive load.