Coaching and NLP both share fundamental principles.

They aim to support people in living happier, more peaceful and fulfilling lives.

Coaching helps people to unlock their potential and maximise performance so they can achieve their goals. NLP makes coaching even more powerful by adding tools and techniques to resolve the inner conflicts and personal barriers that are hindering a persons success. Once these are resolved the chances of lasting behavioural change and continued personal evolution are greater.

In this blog I will explore some of the components of NLP that contribute to the success of the coaching process.

1. Rapport: at the heart of NLP lies rapport and understanding how to develop a relationship with your client based on trust, respect and mutual influence.

Rapport is natural and as human beings we innately seek to be in rapport with others. NLP teaches you how to enhance and build rapport and helps you to understand what you might be doing, that is preventing rapport being established. Rapport comes from being able to take a second position. From this position you open up communication channels of being able to understand another persons ‘map of the world’ and meet them where they are in how they make sense of their experience. Building rapport requires you to take a genuine interest in another person and deeply listen to their experience. It requires you to have a mindset of curiosity rather than making assumptions and judgements about someone’s behaviour. This enables you to seek to understand who they are, how they think and why they behave in ways that they do. Another key skill of rapport is being able to see the other persons point of view even when you don’t agree with it, and accept that we all view the world in different ways.

In the coaching relationship rapport creates a climate of trust. Building good relationships begins with pacing another persons experience and NLP teaches you how to do this. When you understand another persons map of the world you can gain rapport on their terms and then you can lead them more successfully. There are different levels of rapport that you learn in detail when you train in NLP. Rapport is built at levels of matching and mirroring, voice quality, language and values and beliefs.

An NLP coach will skilfully seek to build rapport on all of these levels so that the person feels understood and respected on an ‘other than conscious’ level. You know how it feels when you are instantly connected with someone? NLP teaches you how to do this with great skill. Enriched communication is the essence of excellent coaching skills. One of the main aims of NLP coaching is to find the leverage points for your clients learning. Rapport enables you to notice more about your client so that you can tap into their leverage points, and support them in discovering for themselves the answers within them. The result of this is that they learn to understand themselves better and gain confidence in coaching themselves.

If you are a leader, coach, therapist, educator or anyone who helps people discover their potential, then knowing how to build rapport successfully is an essential skill. NLP shows you how to watch and listen to another person so that you can observe when they are in their high potential and congruent states and when they are not.

As an NLP coach you give feedback to your clients on the characteristics that you notice so that your client can have more choice about if they stay ‘stuck’, or whether they choose the state that supports happiness, fulfilment and inner peace.

If you are looking for a coach for personal development then an NLP coach will be skilled in helping you to recognise your states of high potential and excellence, and teach you how to replicate them so you live with more congruence and rapport with yourself and others.

2. Presuppose excellence: When I was training as an NLP supervisor, my mentor Melody Cheal taught me many wonderful things. Here are a few

• Your clients have all the resources they need or can create them
• See your client as totally resourceful in the desired outcome
• No matter what they think they are always more than that
• Clients are more than what they consciously know
• They are more than their problems

As an NLP coach one of the biggest influences that we have is our belief in the person that we are coaching. We need to imagine the person achieving the goals that they are expressing and realising their potential, so that we can communicate congruently that we believe in them. When we hold a positive representation of our clients no matter what they are presenting in front of us, we open the space up for positive personal change from a place of wholeness and respect for another human being.

The coaching relationship is one of mutual influence and respect not a place to ‘rescue’ someone from their distress. We influence people by the beliefs we hold about them. When we believe in their ‘excellence’ and ‘potential’ this is where we lead them.

NLP highest potential coaching helps people to discover the subjective structure of their experience so that they can find out how they are creating their reality and making their life what it is. Once they know this they are empowered to consciously choose the life they want.

If you are wanting to add NLP to your coaching, leading, mentoring or education skills then I would love to connect with you and tell you more about my trainings. I offer certified NLP training and workshops/training days within organisations for team success, leadership success, wellbeing success, employer motivation and highest potential success. I also offer coaching and supervision. – email sarah@sarahfletchercoaching.com

If you are looking for a coach for your own personal development then you can book a discovery call here to find out more

You can also listen to my Unlocking Possibilities podcast which dives deeper into these blogs. You can listen on Apple or Spotify

Join up to my main mailing list here for more information about NLP and mBIT

https://sarahfletcher.simplero.com/trainingandcoaching

See you next week, thanks for reading 😊