What is NLP Coaching?
Posted on 6th August 2024 at 06:41
Have you ever heard the phrase ‘you need to get out of your own way’? And no doubt you’re familiar with the phrase ‘old habits die hard’ - and it’s so true. We can often be our own worst enemies, and our best-laid plans are thwarted by no-one but ourselves - that’s proved every January, by millions of abandoned New Year’s resolutions!
However strong the intention is to change, it can be far tougher to do it in practice; but there is a way to break the vicious cycle of good intentions and failure, and it’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) coaching.
So What Is NLP?
Before we answer this question, we need to take a step back and talk about those dreams, goals and ambitions. They are different for everyone, of course – but the reasons we don’t achieve them are surprisingly similar. Our subconscious thinking, feeling, the internal language we use and deep-rooted behaviour patterns play a major part in every choice we make. They are responsible for rationalising those choices, and any fallout from them as well.
Let’s take a simple example: you know you want to eat more healthily, and set yourself a goal to make your own lunch every day instead of eating out. You start well, but after a few successful weeks, life gets busier and you start dropping a couple of homemade lunches off your schedule – and you tell yourself that it can’t be helped, because life is just too full and something’s got to give. Soon you’re back to eating out most days, and the homemade lunch happens next-to-never.
You’ve made a choice there, and rationalised it to yourself, based on familiar patterns of behaviour. But you could change this completely and permanently, by re-writing the connections your brain makes, and how you think and feel about your schedule, and even your lunches – with a little NLP coaching.
What Does NLP Coaching Do?
NLP is the study of internal communication – how you speak to yourself, debate with yourself, and make those defining choices. It focuses on understanding how you organise your thinking, feelings, language, and behaviour, and works on changing that to achieve specific goals – or just to benefit your life and relationships in general.
With NLP Coaching, we break down all the walls and barriers that you’ve put in your own path, whether you knew you were doing it or not. Essentially, we identify and change those patterns of behaviour, beliefs and how you speak to yourself that may be limiting you from reaching your full potential – helping you to get out of your own way, and get on with achieving those ambitions.
What Does NLP Coaching NOT do?
This is very important. While NLP does change the way we think, it is not a form of therapy, counselling, or psychoanalysis – and an NLP coach is not a therapist, unless they hold a separate professional qualification in a specific field. If that is the case, they may use NLP to enhance what they offer through their professional practice.
How Does NLP Coaching Work?
NLP can be used to address a specific habit or way of thinking, or it can be used to benefit your life, relationships and habits more generally – so we begin by establishing what you’d most like to achieve.
We discuss any limiting beliefs that are holding you back – especially the long-held ones that may have been established many years ago, that you’ve never thought to question.
The best NLP coaches do a lot of listening. They take in as much information about their client as they can, and get a feel for what hinders their personal and professional progress. They hear about successes, and what made those different from the failures. Then, using the techniques that best suit that individual, they identify how to break the limiting or ‘bad habit’ thought patterns, and replace them with patterns that will allow them to break through the barriers that have held them back before.
NLP is a seriously powerful and transformational tool, and you can harness its abilities for all sorts of aspects of your life: whether it’s to break a specific habit, or simply to be more in charge of your own thoughts. It can improve your relationships, help you to live a healthier life, make those business goals achievable, and even overcome long-held fears.
We’ve got personal experience of NLP’s power, and we’ve made it a core element of the coaching services we offer. If you’d like to discover what it could do for you – and your ambitions, big or small – contact us today.
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