The world is constantly changing. The year of 2020 showed to us that our life can be changed dramatically in a very short period of time. It means that our work, lifestyle, daily routine and even hobbies can’t remain the same all the time. It concerns education as well. In particular, language studies. As the demand for languages has increased a lot due to the transfer to online space, educators (teachers) faced some difficulties, because conventional methods don’t work anymore as they used to.
Modern students need modern methods. Now they want to acquire a new language as quickly as possible as they have time pressure. People need to communicate now and here, they can’t wait till their general level of the language is good enough. Moreover, their requirements are narrower than ever before, they want to be good at a foreign language for some restricted needs. Nowadays there are many specific areas where people should be able to use the language just for their purposes. For example, IT specialists need to understand and to be understood about the project. They use particular vocabulary and special grammar constructions for that. Language courses don’t adjust to them. They provide very general information from the IT sphere if they do it at all. Private tutors might help better, but they don’t know how to elicit all the necessary language from clients, because they use conventional methods. They are used to teaching, but not interacting. What is more, there are no books for such target areas. And traditional teaching is based on books and other printed materials only. One more typical case with modern students is when they already have good knowledge in the language but with some gaps, which requires a personalized approach and structure. It means that such students learnt the language earlier but they didn’t acquire it to the full. And one more iteration of conventional courses is not the best option for them. They need just to fix their weak points and not to study everything from the very beginning again.
I understood all this and was constantly looking for improving my teaching methods. When I came across Neurolanguage Coaching ®, I got interested in it straight away. It gave me a new look over the educational process and I didn’t hesitate a moment to enroll into the nearest course with Rachel.
The best thing about NLC ® is that you shouldn’t wait till the end of the course or till gaining your certificate to start practicing it. So I used this opportunity. At those times I had some private clients whom I was teaching with the conventional methods. So I decided to apply the received knowledge straight away.
Let me tell you about some cases here.
I decided to start with my most diligent student at that time.
“On the scale from one to ten where ten is the maximum where are you with your motivation?” – I asked. –
“Zero”, he answered without any hesitation. It’s impossible to describe how shocked I was to hear that.
“Why are you here?” – my question was. –
“To improve English, I have always wanted to speak it well. I have many tries (school, university, language courses, self-studies), but all of them weren’t successful.” –
“So, what I’m hearing is that you DO have motivation.” – and I started digging deeper into it. And after 5 minutes there it was! The client who came to me with no motivation (as he thought) and the reason to improve English for work, suddenly realized that he wanted to move to another country and to get his dream job. And the language was one of the main criteria for it. His last words in that session were “Thanks for our motivation conversation. I have never thought about it in my life. I was just doing everything for the sake of doing”. I was very happy to learn that my first try of NLC ® techniques worked! And after a couple of sessions later he told me that he had already searched for the vacancy of his dream position and enrolled into one more course to gain some knowledge in the specialty. That was a thing to be proud of myself!
So I went further with my other clients as well. I had been teaching English one girl for a year or so already. And we got pretty good results, but she was constantly saying: “Tatsiana, I can speak English only with you. I’m so afraid of speaking at work or in public”. I was very sad to hear that because I understood that there was not much use of her language progress as she was using it only with me. I tried to help her with that but I couldn’t do it efficiently which bothered me even more. But NLC ® introduced to me such things as triggers. And Rachel taught me to deal with them through powerful questions and active listening. So now this girl is a founder of a charity organization that is going to obtain the status of international soon thanks to her ability to advertise it at different meetings, conferences and presentations.
Having such success with my permanent clients I decided to get a new one just for practicing exceptionally NLC ® sessions.
So my new client was a QA engineer in a multinational company who after the promotion had a strong necessity to improve his English. His language wasn’t bad but he had used it before only in a written form. In a new position he had to organize online meetings where there was a lot of speaking. So he came to me with 3 issues:
– He couldn’t speak English and moreover he was afraid of doing it;
– He needed a very specific vocabulary for his project discussion;
– He had a good grammatical overview but with some particular gaps.
Although his motivation was high but external he was happy to make it more vivid after my powerful question and active listening. It turned out that apart from work he travelled a lot with his family and didn’t feel good not being able to communicate on trips. After our brain-friendly conversation and collaboration we created a personalized roadmap including the needed vocabulary and pieces of the necessary grammar. Moreover, in the first session we dealt with his trigger as well. Coaching techniques helped me to make him look at this issue from a different perspective. The received knowledge about the brain let him get more control over himself too. Definitely 8 sessions haven’t improved his language a lot but it moved him to a different level of the language using. He satisfied his first needs and was happy with his quick results. Now he’s travelling with his family and sometimes sends me ‘thank you’ messages in social networks.
These are not all ‘magic moments’ which I have already had in my work practice applying NLC® though I have been doing it for the second month only. Now I’m happy not only to ‘teach’ English but to heal my clients’ language.
