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What is NLP coaching?
Your ultimate success at helping people achieve their desired outcomes â including managing change â will depend on your ability to observe, identify and utilise the multitude of patterns that will constantly be offered to you in your sensory experience by clients⌠not in the ability to measure and average types of behavior.1
Consider, if you will, the issues people bring to coaching: they might be feeling fear, frustration or lack of confidence about their work; they may be searching for more fulfilment or need to understand their own or their colleaguesâ motivations and goals. They may want to be more innovative and influential, resolve conflicts, manage time better or shape their own and othersâ performance. Maybe they are in a bind with regard to their relationship, need to set priorities and get more balance in their lives, or align business goals with people goals.
People like this seek coaches who listen carefully and help them understand what they need to think and do in order to make the desired changes. But as well as knowing what they need to do, clients need to know how. It is the focus on how people make changes that is the essence of NLP.
A bit of background
Whether you know little or lots about NLP, you have probably heard that NLP is based on Richard Bandler and John Grinderâs understanding that people internally code their experience of the world and of their life, first neurologically and then through language. The most detailed and technical account of the process of discovering, exploring and developing NLP is in Whispering in the Wind, which Grinder wrote with Carmen Bostic St Clair. They explained that the way we know what we know has to do with how we experience the world outside ourselves:
When Bandler and Grinder first started to study peopleâs subjective experience â by observing, listening, asking, eliciting and experimenting â they found that the meaning a person made related to the specific sequence (as well as intensity) of representational systems the person used to process information coming in through their visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory senses. Representational system sequences were called strategies.3 That is what is meant by the structure or patterning of experience. By observing, listening, asking, eliciting and experimenting â modelling â Bandler and Grinder also discovered that people can change their feeling responses by changing the sequence and intensity of the sensory information. Then they explored how: they asked how changing the qualities of the representations (called âsubmodality shiftsâ) can be utilized to make permanent change, and by observing, listening, asking, eliciting and experimenting Bandler and Grinder came up with a number of change patterns.
Grinder and Bandler understood that the structure of language and experience could be modelled in terms of sequences of sensory experience. By accurately mapping these sequences a change agent has the keys to modifying unwanted or unuseful behaviours.
NLP modelling is based on the distinction â and correspondence â between the deep structure of experience (unconscious) and the surface (transformed, mapped by language) structure and is regarded as âone of the crowning achievements of NLPâ.4 Dilts talks of the distinction between pure NLP modelling and analytic modelling which is used for information gathering and pattern finding:
So it is important to bear in mind that while NLP is often perceived as tools, techniques or a technology, originally it was developed as a means of âunderstanding how people process information, construct meaning schemas, and perform skills to achieve resultsâ.6
The term NLP refers to the whole mindâbodyâemotion system, with systemic patterned connections between neurological processes, language and learned behavioural strategies.7
The rest of this chapter covers:
- The goal of NLP coaching.
- Modelling as the key to effective change work.
In the following chapter I describe the key skills of an NLP coach at work.
The goal of NLP coaching
The goal of NLP coaching is essentially to maximize the clientâs ability to respond to their situation resourcefully; to increase the choice they have.
By going through this mapping process the client moves towards greater self-awareness, behavioural flexibility, choice and effectiveness. The goal of coaching is to clarify the clientâs present or âproblemâ state, their desired outcomes, and to use various NLP skills to enable the client to access their inner resources and resourcefulness to get the changes they want. See Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 The goal of NLP coaching
Present state is the internal (and external) picture, sounds, feelings, self-talk and behaviours the client is using to create their current, unwanted responses; desired state describes how the client wants to look, feel, sound and act when their outcomes are achieved, and resources refers to the neurological and linguistic potential the client has to alter their internal representations and external behaviours in order to achieve their outcome. In the next chapter we look at the skills or patterns an NLP coach uses to harnesses the clientâs resources.
Summarizing so far: NLP addresses the relationships between how we think, speak (to ourselves and others), feel and act. By analysing and learning from these relationships people can effectively transform the way they traditionally think and act, thus adopting new and more useful ways of thinking, feeling, speaking, acting. The analytic part of this activity is called modelling and is a key feature that distinguishes NLP from other coaching models. In this book we will be talking a lot about the meaning and uses of NLP modelling.
Modelling is the key
It is through modelling that âNLP studies the way people take in information from the world, how they describe it to themselves (code it neurologically) with their senses of seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling⌠filter it with their beliefs and values, and then act on the result.â10 Those internal and external senses are known in NLP as representation systems.
Another way of saying this is that modelling makes explicit the specific thinking and language patterns, beliefs, as...