I was sitting in the park with a client talking about a project when all of a sudden we got distracted by loud noises. As we looked up we saw 2 little kids probably less then the age of 5. One older brother and one younger brother.
The older brother was running towards the park pigeons and screaming “aaaaaaaaah”. A second later the littler brother (3-4 years in age) started to copy him. He run after the pigeons screaming “aaaaaaaaah”.
It was the cutest thing. But that is not what moved us. We sat and watched the behavior of this child and how he went from one state to another in a flash of a second. I.e running around screaming “aaaaaaaah”, to general observation mode, to curiosity, excitement and wonder. It was amazing he was changing state from second to second.
It was amazing to see how this young child was going through a learning experience all from copying his brother. In NLP this is known as “Modeling” which is the process of adopting the behaviors, language, strategies and beliefs of another in order to ‘build a model of what they do.
A young child is in perfect optimal state for learn new things because it has no pre-conditioning. A child will try anything. and on many occasions will succeed and keep trying.
But we as “Adults” try and then give up to easily. If you watch a child when it is young it is inspired by adults to walk as s/he sees adults walking all the time. The child will get up, fall down, get up, fall down numerous times in order to copy us to walk. And when it takes its first steps, no one can take away the joy and happiness that it feels.
My self and my client started speaking about how we adults get conditioned and choose not to change state when we get ourselves in one. Its sad but then again many people do not realise that they have the ability to change state, but choose not to due the so called behavior of “adults” and how “adults should behave”.. If you are upset, why choose to remain upset? If you are depressed why choose to remain depressed? If you feel happy why not choose to stay happy for no dam reason at all. Now that does not mean go out with a big smile on your face so that every one thinks you are mad (then again there’s nothing wrong with that). It just means that we have the ability and the resources to be however we choose to be.