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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

XHolly Worton E-mail: holly.worton@gmail.com Info: Posts by the author (7)

Don’t Be Afraid to Think Beyond Life Coaching

When people think of coaching, they likely think of either life coaching or executive coaching. But the skills we learn at The Smart School can be applied to a number of different areas. Just look at Nick Hardy and Nami Haghighi working with small businesses, Claire Habel with marketing, and Sonia Gill with head teachers. They’ve all been through The Smart School because they wanted to train as a coach, and then they applied their coaching skills to a very specific niche, which was more business-related, rather than personal development.

I decided to train as a coach primarily because I wanted to help people. I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to work with women to help them find their life purpose, and I wanted to run weekend and week-long retreats. I was very much focused on training as a life coach, and very determined to become a life coach. Yet as the time went on, and I finished my diploma, and continued to struggle with my business, Nick and some of my colleagues helped me realise that my true niche lay not within life coaching, but within business-related coaching…specifically, in the area of social media. Read more

Filed Under Opinion

XNick Bolton E-mail: nick.bolton@www.thesmartschool.co.uk Info: Nick Bolton is founder of the Smart School and provides the vision, passion and energy that makes the school such a unique place to be. Within the school he now heads up the unique Rapid Results Business Coaching programme and delivers some of the Master Classes.Posts by the author (32)

Courage in the open space of coaching

I often consider the pros and cons of using “models” in coaching.

They can certainly be useful to provide frameworks which help sessions become more effective.  And models are great when you’re starting out and even as an experienced coach to remind yourself of things you might have missed – questions that could create change.

But, you know, ultimately the true art of the transformational coach (as opposed to say a performance coach) is bringing personal presence and an open space for the client’s self-discovery to be nurtured.  This requires trust in your capacity to hold that space and to ask the questions that begin to loosen up the client’s model of the world.

That’s why, at the Smart School, we moved away from the GROW model (a perfectly adequate coaching model by the way) and created a pathway, called TOOLKIT, which is less a model than a way of seeing the whole coaching journey.

From building Trust, to defining Outcomes, to Opening up the client’s experience of the world and then Loosening it up, to teasing out their existing Knowhow, resources and capabilities and Identifying options for change to Tasking themselves to take action, TOOLKIT offers a journey that can span weeks or even months rather than a model that fits into one session.

That takes courage in your ability as a coach to keep the space for self-discovery open.  Sometimes coaches are so intent on results that they forget transformation takes time!

For me this is all summed up beautifully in a book I’m reading right now called “Love’s Executioner” by the existential psychotherapist, Irvin Yalom.

Now, of course Yalom is talking here about therapy but I would like you to substitute therapy and therapist for coaching and coach and patient for client.  Then try it on for size:

“…the capacity to tolerate uncertainty is a prerequisite for the profession.  Though the public may believe that therapists guide patients systematically and sure-handedly through predictable stages of therapy to a foreknown goal, such is rarely the case: instead…therapists frequently wobble, improvise, and grope for direction.  The powerful temptation to achieve certainty through embracing an ideological school and a tight therapeutic system is treacherous: such belief may block the uncertain and spontaneous encounter necessary for effective therapy.”

I think that when coaches reach that level of courage around their coaching they begin to step into a transformational place.

Filed Under Opinion