A Useful Guide to NLP as a Coach

:oIntroduction

Why is this ebook worth your time?

You may have seen many books, ebooks, websites and newsletters on the subjects of coaching and NLP, promising instant results.

You may have experienced many training programs that promised to give you easy answers and foolproof recipes for success.

And while you may have realised that none of this was realistic 'as stated on the tin', you still wondered what parts might work for you.


This book is the result of ten years training, coaching and mentoring rising executives and highlights ideas and concepts from using NLP in a coaching and mentoring context that have helped people move towards their ambitions and dreams.

If you are genuinely interested in your own development, in getting the most from your career and life and playing your part in your business and it’s aspirations then this ebook will be an important step forward on your journey.
This ebook is written for you as both as a rising executive and coach and also recognises that being a coach may also be part of your own personal journey of learning and development.

What could you get from reading this ebook?

A firm grounding in coaching and NLP

Ideas that that, when taken on board, will make a genuine and positive difference to and for you

Perhaps even the start of an exiting new adventure which will result in a step change in your career and enjoyment of life

Some powerful and pragmatic questions to ask both as coach and client
While this ebook is titled ‘A useful Guide to NLP as a Coach’ many of the skills and techniques apply to mentoring, leadership, sales, managing change and consulting as well as coaching.

What are coaching and mentoring?

In most of the companies we've worked in at various management levels over the past 10 years, different people have very different views and expectations from coaches, mentors and change agents.

Some of these different views make it harder to establish the benefits and distinctions of these interventions and yet also underline the need for different approaches based on an organisation’s varied and changing needs.

An organisation and its managers have a very wide range of needs and in order to serve those needs we have to identify the professional roles that can support organisational development and change.

Change at the individual or organisational level follows the same underlying pattern and what matters are the abilities of the person facilitating that change as a coach, mentor, consultant and leader.

All of these roles perform the task of helping an individual or organisation move from their current situation to something that they aspire to. In an simplified scenario, the client or organisation is in a present condition and wants to move to some other condition. That movement or change requires action, and the role of the coach is to help the client to plan and manage a series of action steps which bring about the desired change.

Part of the coach or mentor’s role is likely to involve establishing the current situation and true aspirations of the organisation or individual. Often, consultants, coaches and managers assume that the perceived current situation is accurate, when in fact it may not be for many reasons ranging from insufficient information to blind optimism or even the deliberate misreporting of performance data. This is dangerous because in order to accurately navigate to your destination, you need to know exactly where you are now.

An ‘ideal world’ coaching model is shown in the diagram above. The generic approaches to coaching that are based on it fail not because of a flaw in the coaching process but because the world is not ideal. Clients are not always where they think they are, and what they want is not always what they really want, and so any action plan must take this into account.

Imagine that you have satellite navigation in your car and that it is telling you to ‘turn right’. You look out of the window and cannot see a right turn. Where is the fault?

There have been many instances of lorries getting stuck under low bridges because the satellite navigation didn’t take that detail into account. The route only makes sense when the present location and destination are accurate, and when the route has a useful relationship to ‘reality’.

Individuals and organisations often set goals that are not true to their actual intentions or aspirations because they are based on the expectations of others. For example, someone might pursue a promotion because of his or her perception of what friends, family and managers expect, even if it is not really what they want. Rather than succeeding or failing, the person ends up in between the two, wasting energy that could be directed into real achievement.

Companies often set a direction based on the needs of the market, their customers, stakeholders and competitors and again try to swim against the current of their own true intentions and needs. The result may be moderate success, but in a competitive market, that inevitably leads to failure of the business or venture.

The value of NLP to a coach or mentor is therefore in having a set of tools and techniques for managing the difference between the ‘ideal world’ coaching model and the ‘real world’ of the client’s situation. Where the client is missing or hiding information that is vital to understanding their current situation, a skilled coach can use NLP to align the client’s perceptions with reality so that any action plan is much more effective in achieving the results that the client seeks.

The organisation or individual client is responsible for wanting and choosing the outcome, for making the change, and for taking a view on the value of the intervention. The coach and mentor agent is responsible for facilitating the change; for identifying the steps and putting forward their recommendations.

The client has to take responsibility for implementing those recommendations, otherwise they do not take ownership of the outcome.

How directive or non-directive that facilitation is depends on the context and the individuals involved. In my experience, change is most likely to 'stick' where the individuals concerned have worked out the answers for themselves. However they often need a few missing pieces, ideas or parts of a strategy to make the change work effectively.

I differentiate between coaching, where the focus is more on a single outcome such as increasing sales revenues or customer service scores, and mentoring where there are complex and often competing outcomes such as managing stakeholders’ expectations or personal career aspirations.

In his book 'The Element', Sir Ken Robinson suggests that mentors have four key roles. They recognise our talents, they encourage us, they facilitate us and they stretch us.

In my experience the coaching that has the greatest value to an organisation is directed at their high performers and key influencers, and that with the continual 'delayering' of middle management, the coaches, mentors and change agents become an important 'knowledge store' within the organisation.
Coaches are often engaged to support ‘high potential’ managers who have been identified as having the raw skills and talent to become the leaders of the business in the future.

Succession planning and talent management programs help groups of high potential managers to build their support networks and develop the skills, relationships and experience to shape the business and ensure its continuing success.

It is also important to allow the organisation to evolve; to ensure that tomorrow’s leaders do not perpetuate today’s cultural issues

Why will coaching become more important?

As organisations become more complex, traditional management hierarchies disappear and the drive for performance accelerates. ‘Top down’ structures are being replaced with matrix management systems. People move around the organisation more often and there is a greater focus on exploiting tacit knowledge over establishing systems and processes. Relationships rather than roles drive the business and the speed of decision making has increased dramatically thanks to new communication technologies.

Amongst all of this, many people no longer enjoy a consistent management relationship and must look elsewhere for their personal and professional development.

A coach can support targeted changes in the business such as increasing sales performance or managing change whereas a mentor can be a longer term guide. Both supplement the traditional management structure, enabling a more flexible, more adaptable and more successful business.

In working with hundreds of clients and colleagues in dozens of companies, I have found that people who succeed in the corporate environment:

Develop a good relationship with and add value to their managers and manager’s peers

Develop a good relationship with and add value to their key stakeholders

Develop career options and revenue streams that are separate to and non-competitive with their current employer

Improve performance in their current role

You may be surprised by point 3, yet when you think about it you may recognise this in yourself or some of your colleagues. What many people do is to ‘hedge their bets’. They have one foot in each camp, saying they are committed to their manager yet reading job adverts at lunchtime and accepting calls from recruiters. They dream about what they want to do and resent their manager or employer for not letting them do it.

People who develop non-competitive outside interests are often more fully committed to the success of their current organisation.

When they are at work, they are at work, and will be until they either go home for the day or they resign. The people who hedge their bets are present in body but not in spirit, and this is obvious in their performance. The people who commit to those different ventures are open about it.

Coaching and mentoring can be extremely valuable to the individual and organisation in getting people to commit themselves to the pursuit of their goals.

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