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NLP or coaching? Choices, choices… |
A few days ago, we ran a webinar on Life as an NLP Therapist.
And an interesting question came up. Why NLP rather than coaching? Or, indeed, why not the other way round.
The odd thing was that Peggy (our head of NLP) and I (a dyed in the wool coach) instinctively felt we knew the answer but we could neither of us fully put it into words. You see here at the Smart School, coaching has become increasingly transformational. Long gone are the days when coaching was just about planning a series of actions (actually, in many places outside the Smart School, that attitude still exists but let’s not worry about that here!)
And so any simple answer that coaching only deals with tasks and clarity of action and NLP/hypnotherapy with the deep issues that block us was clearly not right.
There was something else at stake that would mean someone should choose one over the other OR decide to master both to get the best of both worlds.
But what worlds? What’s the terrain? What’s the atmosphere?
And the more we tried to pin it down, the more like mist it was to say something that concretely separated them. We felt it but we couldn’t voice it. So we pondered, we debated, we questioned and we examined.
And we reached a conclusion, of sorts.
It seems to us that it’s like a Venn diagram. There’s a crossover where coaching and NLP look, sound and feel like each other. But there are parts that differ significantly and it’s in those parts that the distinctive qualities, the je ne sais quoi (Peggy will like that as she’s from Nice in sunny south France!) exist.
Peggy spoke about how we she helped a client with Crohn’s disease to recover faster from surgery not through any specific actions on his part but through a change in his own sense of mind/body connection. As a coach, I couldn’t do what Peggy did. I might help someone manage an illness more effectively but I couldn’t create an unconscious shift in the body’s ability to heal itself.
But as a coach, I would have all the tools and understanding to help someone think through at a conscious level their choices, decisions, actions, perceptions and thoughts. I would have more tools perhaps to bring to conscious awareness the unconscious thoughts and beliefs.
Was that it, then? Was it a divide between conscious discovery in coaching and unconscious change in NLP/hypnotherapy.
Well, yes and no! Life is never so simple. You see, although in coaching, we are working at a conscious level, the client’s unconscious is still at play. And although in NLP, the unconscious plays such a big role, the conscious mind is (usually) still engaged.
But I think we can say this:
Someone who invests their time and energy in mastering NLP and hypnotherapy does so because it offers them the ability to work with clients at a deep level of unconscious change on emotional and perceptual blocks that manifest themselves in ways often remote from the source.
And people who spend their time mastering coaching want to be able to work first and foremost at the conscious level using a range of approaches to help clients learn through active awareness and specific actions.
Now I KNOW that there will be NLP practitioners screaming at this blog, defaming my name for such a simple distinction. And I KNOW there will be coaches turning in disgust from their screens at my philistine conclusion. But this post is opening a debate and raising one way to see the difference. It’s not conclusive and it’s not definitive. But it’s a start!
And in the end, it seems to me, it comes down to two core questions:
Firstly, for you, what way of working resonates with you? What excites you and appeals to your way of thinking and doing things? Explore coaching and NLP/hypnotherapy and see what you prefer.
And then thinking of your future clients, what do they need from you? Who are the clients you want to help and what approach is most appropriate? Would hypnotherapy or specific NLP processes gel with them or would it fall on stony ground? Would coaching be able to reach the parts that your client group needs?
Or do you need both? Do you need to integrate the skills?
You see, both coaching and NLP bring important and unique strengths to client work in the change field. For some people, learning and mastering both will be an essential journey where for others knowing what work they want to do and deciding which best fits that work is an important step to taking the right journey.
If you want to know more about NLP and even experience some of its power, then book a place at our NLP Therapy Discovery Day. And if you want to know more about transformational coaching, book your place at our Coaching Discovery Day. It’s a great way to start your own journey.
Filed Under From the Director's Chair, NLP & Hypnotherapy, Transformational Coaching
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We’re at CamExpo – come and say hello! |
Once again this year, the Smart School will be Cam Expo, www.camexpo.co.uk, where we’ll be sharing our unique approach to coaching and NLP Hypnotherapy with the visitors.
As the UK’s “only dedicated event for the complementary, natural and integrated healthcare sector”, this is a brilliant and vibrant show for anyone interested in this area.
The show takes place on Saturday and Sunday, 20th & 21st October at Earls Court.
Why not come down and meet us at stand 2535. We’d love to see you there!
Filed Under From the Director's Chair|
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Why do we always have to be different? |
“Why do you always have to be different?”
You can just imagine someone saying this, can’t you? An inflection on the always to stress just how exasperating you are for being different.
But I was thinking about this today and wondering why we, here at the Smart School, always have to be different.
Why don’t we just teach GROW like so many other coaching schools – it’s easy, people know it, it’s been around since the stone age. Why don’t we just run our NLP course over 7 or 8 days and send the customers packing with a wad of certificates and no confidence? Why don’t we just teach the usual business models like SWOT and PEST to business coaches?
Why do we have to be different all the time?
I was thinking about this because in a sense we make life hard for ourselves! We have to strive harder to say why we do what we do rather than falling in line with everyone else.
But the reality is that it’s because we truly care about what we do and the impact that we have. You see, a lot of coach training courses and NLP practitioners courses (in fact, most) do what they do and teach what they teach not because it’s the right stuff, but because it’s what they have always done AND what everyone else does.
Take NLP training. Who in their right mind thinks that a skill and approach that is all about working with the unconscious mind to create life long change can be taught in 7 days flat with no real-life experience? And yet now it’s the norm! Because it works? No, because it’s what people do and it’s easier to follow the rest than to ask yourself, “does this REALLY work?”
If all NLP trainers had created their own courses in isolation, what are the chances they would all come out with the same structure, the same content and the same duration…and that it would be so improbably short a course! Zero I would suggest!
But we had to be different! When we decided to launch our Person-Centred NLP & Hypnotherapy Programme last year, we thought and thought about how best to deliver it to make it work. We knew it needed longer to ensure students practised the skills. We knew they would need support through mentoring. We knew that many things taught in NLP are just frivolous and we dropped them.
Because in the end, for us, it’s about what will make coaches and therapists who can work with real clients and be exceptional at it.
That’s our question. It’s the one that drives how we create and deliver our programmes.
Everything we do is done for a reason. That’s why it’s smart.
And that’s why we always have to be different.
Filed Under From the Director's Chair
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