Smart Thinking
The Smart School Blog

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)

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.

 

 

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