When you are thinking of taking on a Coach, whether it is for personal or business reasons, it’s good to know just how that Coach can specifically help you to achieve your goals more successfully. At Standing in Spirit, we take this idea seriously, so we have discussed the idea of Coaching in this short article.
Most professional Coaches today use NLP as an integral part of their work because time and time again, NLP has been proven to support the coaching relationship and to achieve results. NLP focuses on how you communicate with others and with yourself and how you can change and enrich this communication to achieve the results and goals you want in your life. And, of course, to go further and uncover the goals that you haven’t even recognized yet because when you work with a professional Coach, you can begin to open up new doors and new perspectives that will change your life in positive ways that you haven’t even yet considered.
The presuppositions of NLP are the foundation of the relationship between the Coach and the Client. The central presupposition of NLP is that the map is not the territory. In other words, the way that we represent the world in our minds is not the same as the world itself. Another way to think of this is to understand that events don’t have meanings – we attach meanings to events. For example, if two company executives look at the same recession, one might see disaster yet the other might see huge potential. The event (the territory) is the same, but the interpretation (the map) is different. By working with a NLP Coach, you can quickly begin to identify the parts of your own maps that are holding you back from the success that you can truly attain. The motto of Standing in Spirit is “Let it Flow”, and by that we mean that we can help you to remove the limitations in your own maps of the world and let success flow to you much more easily. We’re not saying that you don’t have to work hard – you do – we’re just saying that it’s really important to establish the best maps of the world for directing that hard work in exactly the appropriate ways to achieve your goals. Isn’t it time that you let your hard work move things in exactly the right way – the best path through the most appropriate map?
NLP offers many coaching tools to help you to create and use the most appropriate maps that will allow you to perform at your very best, to effectively access all the resources that are available, and to achieve your goals much more quickly than you could have imagined. NLP is fundamentally interested in the modeling of excellence and the tools of techniques of NLP Coaching are appropriate for everyone who is interested in improving performance, in areas as diverse as personal development, therapy, medical professions, teaching, sports, business, relationships and much more.
One of the best definitions of Coaching based on an NLP perspective is the one posited by Robert Dilts on the back cover of his book, From Coach to Awakener.
Coaching is the process of helping people and teams to perform at the peak of their abilities. It involves drawing out people’s strengths, helping them to bypass personal barriers and limits in order to achieve their personal bests, and facilitating them to function more effectively as members of a team.
Historically, coaching has been focused towards achieving improvement with respect to a specific behavioral performance. This involves promoting the development of that person’s behavioral competence through careful observation and feedback.
In recent years, the notion of coaching has taken on a more generalized and expanded meaning. Personal coaching, executive coaching, and life coaching provide support on a number of different levels: behaviors, capabilities, beliefs,values, identity and even spiritual. These new and more comprehensive forms of coaching–executive coaching and life coaching–can be referred to as capital “C” Coaching. Large “C” Coaching involves helping people effectively achieve outcomes on a range of level. We guide people to learn about new environments, for instance; coach them to improve specific behavioral competencies; teach them new cognitive capabilities; mentor empowering beliefs and values; sponsor growth at the identity level; and awaken people’s awareness of the larger system or field.
As Dilts’ definition shows, one of the strengths of NLP Coaching is that it takes place at many levels, and you will find yourself recognizing new resources and possibilities as you see your work and life at each level with these new perspectives. Combined with the power and potential of NLP, Coaching can traverse all of these levels easily and take you much further much more quickly than you had previously thought.
Peter Wrycza also describes the strengths of NLP for Coaching in the journal AnchorPoint:
When people ask, ‘What’s NLP?’ I now say, “It’s the most sophisticated approach to coaching there is.” And if they need more detail, I can explain how it is so: because it offers a powerful methodology for uncovering the structure of subjective experience, thereby helping us to model excellence in any field. And it uses the fruits of that modeling to draw on more of our inner resources, so that our Performance and our Alignment become and remain best friends, as we grow and develop.
And at Standing in Spirit, that is our goal – to provide Coaching and training that will let your performance be aligned in exactly the directions that will bring you the greatest success in your personal and working life, no matter how you define that success. But at Standing in Spirit we like to say it a little more simply: Let it Flow.