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XPaul Kensett E-mail: paul.kensett@www.thesmartschool.co.uk Info: Posts by the author (2)

Cognitive Behavioural Coaching

From the original blog post at: transformationallifecoaching.co.uk

When I think of coaching and all that people believe coaching to be there is a strong emphasis on task-based approaches leading to a goal being achieved and quite often action plans that focus on doingrather than being.

Within CBC (Cognitive Behavioural Coaching) there are some key pillars that underpin client interactions.

• Coaching provides a safe place for personal exploration
• The dynamic of “effective coaching” allows for self actualization for the client
• It is fully person centred and integrative
• CBC allows deeper meaning for the client and their experience and goes beneath the goal as the focus of the session

Cognitive behavioural coaching focuses on the internal world of the client, which could include values, beliefs, cognitions, physiology, emotions and results.

That’s not to say that there isn’t an element of actions and goals built into the coaching interactions but the shift will happen for the client on a deeper level and this in turn can create new openings and a future focus on how they will show up in the world based on these shifts.

In today’s society people are wanting more than a quick fix and an action plan.

Many times people can achieve their goal quite swiftly but may return to the original place of frustration wondering how they got back to there and questioning themselves and they change they want.

The reason why, is that without working on the deeper structures of experience the client could  just be going around in circles and not moving ahead with any sort of permanency.

This can create further frustration and can fuel the negative mind sets that could be underpinning the clients original challenges.

Within a typical CBC based session the coaching practitioner would be looking to work with the client on emotive, important issues for them and really get to the core of the clients difficulties by using simple and powerful questioning, a sense of holding space for the client and allowing the conversation to naturally flow without the coach needing to fix, provide solutions or work to an agenda of a hard and fast goal being in place.

As in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy the skilled coaching practitioner would be looking at faulty thought biases and how this could be impacting the client in negative ways.  An example would be catastrophizing  – “everything is always bad! – how many times have you heard this or possibly thought it yourself?

Through a CBC approach we can start to unpick what these thought structures are which will also affect clients physical responses and results both practically and emotionally . We can help clients formulate a different way of doing things with more positive results.

CBC can help with:

• Limiting beliefs
• Negative cycles of behaviour
• Low confidence and self-esteem
• Compulsive behaviours
• Interpersonal issues
• Any pattern that runs enough times for it to be a problem and so much more

Coaching isn’t a one stop for change but done skilfully, with congruence and trust the effects can be truly transformational.

 

Filed Under Coaching in Action, From our satellite blogs

XRobert Stephenson E-mail: robert_stephenson@me.com Info: Robert is Head of Dynamic Youth Coaching at the Smart School and Director of Unclassified Arts. Robert loves working with young people and the educational sector using coaching, NLP and creativity to engage, motivate and inspire young people.Posts by the author (2)

Confidence Coaching with Young People

This blog post is from Robert Stephenson on our new youth coaching blog at http://dynamicyouthcoaching.com

Recently I have been working for Mousetrap Theatre Project, with a group of young people based in Southall. The young people are all taking part in the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, and at the end they have to do a presentation. This group is made up of young people who haven’t had lots of positive experience in making presentations, in putting themselves out there, in talking to large groups of people about their achievements.

With this in mind I was asked to help the group develop their confidence, which is something I come across quite often when working with young people. They often put up this front of ‘I’m ok’ and ‘I don’t care about anything’. However in my experience this is not always the case, in fact there are a lot of young people who do care and are will to work with you to develop their skills and confidence, so that they are able to make the best of their lives. With this particular group, we spent lots of time exploring what confidence meant to them, who they saw as having it, what it looked liked, getting all our ideas down. Read more

Filed Under Coaching in Action, From our satellite blogs

XPeggy Guglielmino E-mail: peggy0027@googlemail.com Info: Posts by the author (7)

Introducing Person-Centred NLP

This blog post is the first from our new blog at http://personcentrednlp.com

Hi, welcome to my new blog! My name is Peggy and I’m the director of the new Person-Centred NLP course at the Smart School. You may be wondering “so, what’s person-centred NLP”?! That’s a very good question.

Person-centred NLP was born out of observation of the current NLP world. NLP has got a  reputation for being a quick-fix tool that can help people solve their issues almost at the click of a finger. When I first learnt NLP, I must confess that’s exactly what I did. Got the client in, quickly run through their history, and jump in with one of the brilliant NLP process I had in my magic tool box. Most of the time, it did the trick. However, when checking on some of those clients a few months later, I had quite a percentage of people reporting the changes weren’t quite as powerful as expected on the long run.

So when I saw those clients again, we started an in-depth conversation in order to find out underlying issues that were getting in the way. And the more we talked, the more we naturally created a special relationship, that seemed to be allowing my clients to make lasting changes in a more natural way.

With time growing, I spent more and more time developing this kind of relationship until I realized that some of my clients were getting incredible results, sometimes even without the help of NLP or hypnotherapy standard “exercises”. And it simply confirmed what studies had already shown, the fact that how the client and the therapist relate is one of the most important aspects of a successful therapeutic encounter, regardless of the therapy.

NLP person-centred therapy was then born and is deeply inspired by Carl Rogers six conditions needed to produce personality changes:

• Psychological contact or a relationship between the therapist and the client (on the professional basis of course!), where there’s rapport and respect of both persons as important individuals.
• Client’s congruence, where the client actually is aware of the issue and genuinely wants to change it.
• Therapist’s congruence: now I personally think this is a very important one: the therapist is genuinely involved in the session and will display honesty and care for their client.
• Therapist gives unconditional positive regard towards the client, with a genuine belief that the client has all the inner resources and the capacity to change
• Therapist’s empathy, where the therapist feels compassion and empathy for the client in order to fully understand their map of the world
• Client’s perception of the therapist’s empathy: not only is it necessary for the therapist to have empathy, but it is essential that the client receives it appropriately.

I have been applying those principles in my personal NLP/hypnotherapy practice for a while now and I have noticed indeed how much more effective those sessions were. I do believe that in order to change, people need unconditional support and approval, and I think that’s what describes best in essence our new person-centred NLP approach.

 

Filed Under From our satellite blogs, Opinion