This is part of a series covering my challenge of learning Arabic in 2 months. I’m using lots of Peak Performance techniques and sharing them along the way. The series is filed in the “Language Challenge” category.

What’s Eating You?

So far I have covered Peak Performance states, Goal Setting and the motivating importance of Curiosity. Now comes a peek into subconscious influences that direct our behaviour.

First a confession - As far as studying goes, I have been slacking off all week, fitting in a mini-break to Barcelona and catching up with friends. I may not have studied much Arabic but I have been paying attention to improving the way I process information for this task.

Reading, Writing and Speaking are separate brain functions but they are all open to being influenced by our thoughts. Our thoughts – and our beliefs about ourselves – shape our behaviour.

As we go through life, we subconsciously pick up lots of different ways of relating to ourselves, to others and even the things around us. This affects what we believe and how we approach things. It contributes to our uniqueness, making us feel our thoughts are a solid, fixed and intrinsic part of our personality.  Which they’re not.

In this article, I hope to show that through understanding and addressing what lies behind our thoughts, we can change our thoughts and shape ourselves to how we deserve to be.

Identifying beliefs behind our actions

Our beliefs about our abilities come from associations we’ve made through experiences we have lived through – either directly or indirectly through others. Some beliefs help us while others don’t.

To achieve peak performance in any given area, it’s useful to ensure that we are working with beliefs that support our goals. To do this, we first have to identify the beliefs (good and bad) that are having impact on the goal. This is what mine look like:

Goal: Reading
I was reading at the age of 3. My favourite place was in front of a book and I enjoyed the entire experience – turning pages, the mystery within them, following words with my finger, total absorption in the pretty pictures making up my own stories to go with them. I felt a genuine thrill combined with safety when I was reading and I still feel it now. I believe reading is desirable because I associate it with something good.

Goal: Writing
At school age about 8 and wasn’t allowed to write in ink until I could write neatly in pencil. All my friends managed it but not me. In the end I asked the teacher if I could give her an ink test page to prove I could do it. She agreed, I passed and became the proud owner of a fountain pen.  It’s a memory I did not even know I had until I started practising writing Arabic. I believe writing practice is a pain in the proverbial because I associate it with a teacher who kept saying “no”.

Goal: Speaking
Nothing jumps out at me for this goal. To me it feels like an activity much like going to buy a stamp for a letter – you do it when you need to, no fuss, no mess, just functional. I believe speaking is ordinary and everyday to the point where I have nothing else to say on the subject.

Goal: Remembering
I’m going to throw in memory too because I’m discovering associations with it relating to exams and the sheer impossibility of remembering useless dates and facts. I believe I can’t remember facts because I associate it with fear of failing an exam.

If you try identifying your own beliefs, you may find that you come up with several associations or that your beliefs are caught in some kind of a loop. Take it gently if that happens – take a break and look at the resources mentioned below to help yourself or find someone who can talk it through with you.

The impact of associations

As I go about learning to read, write and speak Arabic, these beliefs are affecting my behaviour. I am automatically giving priority to the reading aspects, feeling nervous and “on my best behaviour” about writing and not paying any attention to speaking – after all, I don’t actually need to speak it right now. I am also nervous about being able to remember what I learn. It feels as if I should only study concepts and outlines because I will forget the details anyway.

My associations and beliefs around:

• Reading… will help me so no need to worry about that.
• Writing… have a motivating quality to them so will help me by making me work harder.
• Speaking… will hinder me because I don’t view speaking as important. This means I won’t practice the words and won’t develop a good rhythm or accent. This will hurt my goal.
• Remembering… could lead to procrastination or even giving up. Because I’m strongly attached to the feeling of being unable to remember, there may well be self-hypnotic undermining of my own efforts to remember. This will hurt my goal.

Understanding the influence of my beliefs to this level of detail helps me to recognise the ways that some of my thoughts have the potential to hurt my goal.

Breaking unhelpful associations

To be at peak performance, I need to change the way I think about speaking and remembering. I can do this with logic or I can use a combination of NLP and EFT techniques. It doesn’t matter how I do it so long as I end up being able to see things in a different way.

The actual techniques I used need a detailed write-up and because I won’t be able to do them justice in this one article, I am planning a series of step-by-step tutorials on the subject of breaking unhelpful associations.

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In the meantime, if you want to get a start and read around the subject yourself, I recommend the following resources:

The NLP Workbook – I recommend this book to my clients as it’s suitable for beginners to NLP and also detailed enough to be valuable to practitioners too. The workbook format is practical and encourages you to put NLP into action yourself.

Try it on Everything – EFT DVD and companion book set.

Introduction to EFT Manual by Gary Craig, the founder of EFT.

Thoughts Support Success!

So, having broken the associations, I now find my thoughts are stronger and more supportive of my goals:

• Speaking seems more accessible and more vital in my goal of learning a language. I feel differently about it and practicing it every day actually feels more desirable… and attainable.
• Memory has placed itself in context. Exam pressure is no longer the first thing I think about. I’m more attuned to my successes and am remembering very clearly all the times I easily learnt things. Coincidentally (or not), I am noticing that in all these times I was highly motivated, interested and curious. Remember from previous parts of this series that intense focus and curiosity provide the ideal conditions for information to be stored in long-term memory.

When your thoughts are on your side, you’re automatically more attuned to following through because you’re not sabotaging yourself.

Next time I will be talking about the mental patterns of Reading, Writing and Speaking. If you enjoyed this article, please feel free to subscribe by RSS or email to receive updates.

Language Challenge Part 5 – Allowing the Brain to Read, Write and Speak

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image: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/xymonau
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This is part of a series covering my challenge of learning Arabic in 2 months. I’m using lots of Peak Performance techniques and sharing them along the way. The series is filed in the “Language Challenge” category.

Brain Plasticity, Curiosity and Learning

Michael Merzenich is a neuroscientist and has been called the world’s leading researcher on brain plasticity. Brain plasticity refers to the physical ability of the brain to change over time – either weakening or thickening.

It’s not just a child’s brain that grows and develops. Research by Merzenich and others has shown that under the right conditions (i.e. appropriate mental stimulus), adults of any age have the ability to grow stronger neural networks in their brains too, strengthening the links and actually changing the physical structure of their brain.

Learning a new language creates the right conditions for stronger neural links by involving inputs from multiple senses that exercise the mind from a variety of angles and create a stronger brain function.  Martial arts, chess and dancing are other examples of activities that involve multiple senses.

Curiosity

Just one week into my challenge, I am feeling the input from multiple senses colliding as they try and find a place to settle in my brain. What I’m discovering is that Reading, Writing and Speaking are three separate brain functions and approaching them in the way they “want” to be approached greatly speeds up the learning process. I will explain more about this in my next post because today I want to focus on Curiosity and how it plays a vital part in keeping momentum going.

Some of the features about curiosity are:

• It fuels a need to explore
• It makes us question things
• It makes us open-minded and receptive to differences and things we don’t understand
• It stops habitual behaviour from stagnating us and weakening our brain function
• It drives us to learn

This week, I discovered an inherent ability to recognise sounds and shapes and put them together. Just a week in and I already know half of the Arabic alphabet by heart and can read it and recite it easily. However, I also found that writing these shapes is more difficult for me from memory.

There are only 28 letters in the Arabic alphabet, but they all look different depending on whether they are at the beginning, end or middle of a word and also depending on whether they are printed or hand-scripted! I can recognise the shapes easily enough to read but writing is a completely different kettle of fish. “Blimey” I thought and screeched to a halt to re-evaluate my options and ask myself if I really needed to know scripting.

Guiding Curiosity

Now this is the important thing about curiosity. Curiosity can be like a pretty butterfly flitting from flower to flower. The path towards the goal is full of flowers – at each flower, curiosity gets a chance to change direction.

Curiosity made me start this challenge but it needs a helping hand to make me stay on track. The helping hand comes from the NLP PECSAW goal setting model. As I pause to re-evaluate my options, I revisit my PECSAW and the “Worthwhile” part of it floods me with the desire to break through my little alphabet issue – 28 letters, a million ways to write them? Pah! Easy!

Having a well-defined goal and constantly reminding yourself of the benefits of achievement helps to guide the butterfly towards it’s destination by reigniting it’s desire to get there.

Curiosity and Learning

If curiosity keeps you in touch with things to be explored, desire helps to create the right conditions for you to find a way to learn the new skills that ultimately strengthen the neuron connections in your brain.

Curiosity gets you thinking about a goal, desire finds a way – but actively reigniting curiosity throughout the period of learning turns the goal into a destination that can be mapped – both outwardly as you become fluent at the task and inwardly, as your brain gains stronger neural connections.

Language Challenge Part 4 – The Influence of Thoughts on Learning