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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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Russian Dolls in NLP |
was reading a blog this morning on NLP and they mentioned how a lot of practitioners don’t know what process or technique to use with their clients. Because they are focused on the processes rather than being focused on the person’s needs.
When I train my Person Centred NLP course, I remind my students that I’m only teaching them those NLP processes so they can later on draw on them or even more importantly use only part of them to match the needs that their clients bring into the session.
This morning my client came in requesting my help to deal with her recent break up. She was still hanged onto the guy, felt angry with him and didn’t feel she could manage alone to move on. So I thought of doing a couple of grieving processes, such as the De-cording one (invented I believe by Connirae Andreas) as well as a lovely process I call The Cloud that involves identifying what the person got from the relationship and access those resources in a more direct way.
In the middle of the de-cording process, my client got stuck in her anger for her ex, and decided she needed to let go of that feeling before being able to move further. So I drew part of Dilts’s reimprinting process, giving her inner representation of her ex-boyfriend the resources he was missing in order to be able to symbolically handle the break up the way my client needed.
But as soon as that part was dealt with, she got in touch with the remnant of a limiting belief we’ve addressed last week, that she is not worthy of love. We had performed a lovely reimprinting process on that belief in our last session, got some amazing shifts, and she just needed to recall the new empowering words of her Dad that we had created during that process.
We then went back to the decording process and she felt she couldn’t let go fully of her ex. Because this time she needed the grieving Cloud process, even though I had planned to do it after the decording. So off we went into the Cloud, in order to finish the decording, using bits of reimprinting here and there.
I finished the session future pacing my client, and that’s when we realised she needed to do the re-cording bit of her decording process with the symbolic future man of her life. So we worked on her future timeline, linking her with her new potential partner whilst finishing the future pacing.
I felt I was playing with russian dolls all along integrating one process in another, and my clients concluded the session feeling much better and able to let go of her past relationship. I don’t believe she would have been able to go there so quickly if I had only used a standard process the way I had been taught. It’s a little bit like juggling, you need different balls in order to make it work.
Let me know your thoughts on which processes you find useful to combine for the good of your clients!
Filed Under NLP & Hypnotherapy|
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It’s not you, it’s me! |
My client this morning brought an interesting dilemma. He was at work last week and one of his customer asked his opinion on other traders in the field. Having a nice rapport already with that regular customer, my client allowed himself to share his thoughts on that subject, which actually weren’t very positive…
On his way home, he got a bit worried, wondering if he had done the right thing in being so honest on that topic with a customer. He asked his girlfriend her opinion and she got very wound up and angry with him, criticising the fact that “he always talks too much”. My client was puzzled as her reaction seemed overly strong and felt very guilty about it all. He immediately asked me to schedule an appointment.
When John went into details about the story, it seemed he couldn’t find any controversy in what he had shared with his customer, as he was very careful in not mentioning any names and only giving a general opinion. Through some coaching, we quickly realised that John didn’t think there was an issue in him talking too much actually, he had simply adopted his girlfriend’s beliefs that he did something wrong. Read more
Filed Under NLP & Hypnotherapy|
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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 NLP & Hypnotherapy
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The client already has all the resources they need – NLP Case Study #3 |
Today I saw Clare, one of my regular clients, who initially came to see me a bit more than a year ago for help with low self esteem. Despite having completely sorted out most of her issues, Clare continues to come back because she enjoys her sessions and as she describes it, in her very busy life it’s an opportunity to take some “me time”.
Clare came into my practice feeling quite under the weather and mentioned having a bad sore throat. In the past we have worked on her physical symptoms, such as stomach pain or back ache with impressive quick results, so Clare asked me if we could do the same on her throat. Read more
Filed Under NLP & Hypnotherapy
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