There’s the cakeshop that sells you a slice of chocolate cake for $3. You’ve always thought that the cake tasted pretty good. One day, your friend invited you to have tea in a hotel. You ordered a slice that costed $10, took a bite, and instantly fell in love with that cake. The $10 cake belonged to a completely different level from the $3 cake.
The difference between the cakes was a matter of finesse.
Similarly to cakes, the difference between a good coach and a great one is a matter of finesse in their skills. They hone their coaching practice to such a point where it integrates with their whole person. It becomes their way of being and part of their lifestyle.
Today, more and more potential clients are demanding and highly selective in the type of coaches they trust to work with, whether it is within the organisation or outside. Hence, coaches who are extraordinary due to their coaching finesse are well sought after in the market. And that justifies why such great coaches are paid more.
Many coaches are now taking up NLP to fine tune their coaching skills.
There are 3 major advantages to doing this:
- Framework to tap into the subconscious mind’s power
- The power of mental rehearsal
- Multi-intelligence integration
Let’s start with Advantage 1: Framework to tap into the subconscious mind’s power.
Have you ever taken an exam in which you thought you did ok, only to find out later that you could have given better answers? You did study well, but the answers just didn’t come to your conscious mind during the exam.
Why don’t answer come to us when we need them?
Our conscious mind can only handle 7 plus minus 2 chunks of information at a time; we can never remember everything in our conscious mind. Most information is stored in our subconscious, so we need a framework to access it in there. One that helps you combine all the experience you have into a generalised formula that you can keep using without needing to hold everything in your conscious mind – which is mentally draining and decreases your performance.
NLP keeps your hands free and your mind at ease.
When you’re coaching someone, you need to juggle many things – not getting lost in their stories, seeing patterns in their challenges, and navigating the conversation where it matters the most. With the NLP coaching framework, you can easily do all these and combine all your coaching tools & skills into result-producing interventions.
Let’s now look at how NLP improves your coaching effectiveness with mental rehearsal.
Advantage 2: The Power of Mental Rehearsal.
Michael Phelps does this. Tiger Woods does this. And they have all testified that mental rehearsal plays a key role in their championship journey.
Once, this skill was only available to athletes.
Thanks to NLP, this skill is now mapped over to business, presentations, meetings, negotiations, exams, and any form of complex performance where people can prepare ahead to thrive in situations they don’t have full control of. Mental rehearsal helps people create the deja-vu effect of being well-prepared for something before they actually do it.
NLP mental rehearsal is not wishful thinking or talking people into change.
It is not about imagining big cars and beautiful houses and attracting them. NLP focuses on helping people mobilise their inner strengths to manifest what they want – with a very stable, replicable structure. Scientifically, in NLP coaching, you’re helping your clients form neuro-pathways in their mind, so that when they walk into the actual situation, they can get into their peak states quickly, trust themselves more and just go with the flow. That is the most powerful thing about NLP mental rehearsals.
Now to the last advantage, which is also the most powerful advantage for coaches.
Advantage 3: Multi-intelligence Integration
The latest neuroscience research shows that there are 3 “brains” in us: the head, heart and gut brains. This means that our intelligence doesn’t lie just in our head, like we used to believe, but in our entire being. We have mental intelligence (IQ), emotional intelligence (EQ), physical intelligence (PQ) and spiritual intelligence (SQ).
No one intelligence is better than the others.
Too much IQ and a lack of EQ impacts our relationships. Too much EQ and no PQ can cause a tip over in personal balance. The best way is to integrate ALL these intelligences; and for that we need a system. At Mind Transformations, this system is our unique contribution to the global NLP community. We teach people how to access their intelligences to generate powerful solutions.
Imagine when you integrate this system into your coaching.
You have a methodology that helps your clients have more wisdom and see the causes of their problems. And most of all, you can help them create deeper shifts toward alignment, leading to lasting change that they own.
Traditional coaching revolves primarily around questioning and talking.
If you deal with a case of a smoker who wants to quit, questioning would not be enough to help him change. In fact, all smokers know that smoking is bad for them, but they still do it. NLP gives coaches the ability to go one step further than the logical mind, tapping into the EQ, PQ and SQ to generate solutions that help clients deprogramme negative behaviours, and install better ones. This ability to align the mind and whole person is a great strength in NLP that complements other coaching methodologies.
For those who are pursuing a Professional Recognition in Life & Executive Coaching
Let’s summarise the 3 major advantages that help NLP coaches achieve finesse in their abilities:
- Framework that frees up your conscious mind, so that you can focus fully on your clients and the coaching process.
- Ability to facilitate mental rehearsals that increase your clients’ confidence and success rate.
- Ability to help people access and integrate their multi-intelligence to generate powerful solutions to which the head, the heart and the whole person agrees.
Is NLP a Coaching Certification?
At Mind Transformations, our NLP Practitioner and NLP Master Practitioner certifications are both the prerequisites for the International Association of Coaching Institutes (ICI)’s Professional Coach Certification. The curricula in these two NLP programmes give you the coaching finesse you need to start getting results with clients.
In Mind Transformations’ programmes, NLP and coaching are ONE.
With the 3 advantages above, we’ve only shown you the big picture of how NLP enhances one’s coaching competency. In the NLP course, you will practise the specifics, an array of NLP concepts, skills and coaching tools. You will get both ends of the experience – as a coach and as a client. Then you align and fine tune.
This is how you develop a high level of competence and finesse – to move to the level where people easily recognise your strengths and are willing to pay you more for the great work you do; just like how you would be willing to pay more for the better chocolate cake.