Smart Thinking
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X E-mail: info@www.thesmartschool.co.uk Info: Nick Bolton is founder of the Smart School and now heads up the unique Rapid Results Business Coaching programme.Posts by the author (17)

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