NLP

100.eng. ANCHOR POINT ANCHOR POINT When Performance Meets Alignment:
101.eng. NLP Coaching
102.eng. “So What is NLP?”
103.eng. I’ve been teaching NLP since the mid–1980s and an NLP trainer for 10 years.
104.eng. But when someone asks me what is NLP, I can still fumble.
105.eng. It’s not easy to give a crisp, yet comprehensible, definition of NLP without leaving out important aspects of our field.
106.eng. One can begin by trotting out one of the classic one–sentence encapsulations, such as: “NLP is the study of the structure of subjective experience.” This key definition (originally offered by John Grinder, if I’m not mistaken) points to our interest in what makes people tick.And it includes the notion of structure, reflecting NLP’s interest in pattern and generalization from individual experience to more general models of what works.
107.eng. But it is also a very“third position” definition.
108.eng. And NLP has a strong interest in developing our own capabilities and coherency.
109.eng. So Richard Bandler’s well–known handle “learning to use the mental processes that are ours,” provides a useful complementary, more “first person” summation.
110.eng. It distinguishes NLP from what otherwise might be thought of as a branch of psychology.
111.eng. NLP is not just about taking an objective stance; it is also about realizing one’s potential.
112.eng. However, with Bandler’s definition, NLP lurches towards other systems of self–development that also encourage mastery of inner processes, from Psychosynthesis to Tibetan Buddhism.
113.eng. But what sets NLP apart?
114.eng. So, we reach for a third handle on our field: “NLP is the modelling of excellence.” This definition brings in the “second position,” which also has an important part to play in NLP.
115.eng. It points to an important element in the uniqueness of NLP, the ability to reach into the inner world of people’s lives and touch the heart of what makes them masters.
116.eng. Clearly, the truth lies somewhere in the midst of these definitions.
117.eng. NLP is uniquely at once a psychological study, a system of personal development, and an unprecedented modelling discipline.
118.eng. NLP is neither therapy, new science, nor simply personal development, but a discipline that touches all of these.
119.eng. Throughout its schizophrenic history, NLP has wobbled between the strengths and weaknesses implicit in these partial definitions, each accurate in parts, but unjust to the whole, now pretending to be a serious field of study, a meta–model capable of enfolding other ways of thinking within its ample epistemological robes, now a system of personal development, and now a way of mining the riches of human excellence.
120.eng. Coaching: The New Profession
121.eng. But while NLP has been developing and struggling with its hybrid tendencies, a new profession has emerged, which has also charted a middle way between heavy–duty therapy and the need for many people to find a way to do better at their jobs and improve their lives: coaching.
122.eng. Like a “trainer,” a “coach” hails from the sports’ field, where the enhancement of skills is crucial.
123.eng. But whereas the trainer metaphor implies shaping the behavior of the trainee to install the trainer’s outcomes, the coaching metaphor implies coaxing out and guiding the potential already present within the coachee, helping the coachee define and realize his or her outcomes.
124.eng. From the sports field, coaches have migrated everywhere.
125.eng. Life coaches, professional coaches, personal coaches, many thousands of them in the United States alone, grooming people for success, helping them solve problems, even offering an element of psychotherapy to those in need of some deep re–orientation in their life, but who would run a mile from anything formally declared as “therapy.”
126.eng. NLP and Coaching
127.eng. NLP has woken up late to the game; yet, a flick through the pages of Anchor Point, suggests we are catching on.
128.eng. Ads for NLP Coaching courses are on the up.
129.eng. And rightly so.
130.eng. In many respects, what Bandler, Grinder, and the first generation of NLP trainers were developing was actually a sophisticated coaching model well before people had really latched on to the notion of coaching.
131.eng. By 1980, NLP already had almost everything that a good coaching model needs: an emphasis on outcome definition to focus on practical results, a tool–box for modeling the nuts and bolts of greatness, so that ordinary mortals could have a sense of emulating the Olympian achievements of the hyper–talented, an emphasis on the internal structure of inner processes, and some precise tools for eliciting them, and a range of models to help substitute unhelpful patterns with more useful strategies for success in many areas of life.
132.eng. Performance and Alignment
133.eng. With its emphasis on pragmatics and orientation towards enhancing
134.eng. personal effectiveness,NLP quickly appealed to a wide range of professionals in many countries seeking to enhance their performance at work in a variety of fields.
135.eng. But almost from the outset, NLP also recognized that increased performance goes hand in hand with greater personal alignment, the other half of the coaching conundrum.The inner coherence and congruency of the individual make all the difference to performance, particularly in the practitioner wishing to help others.
136.eng. And so from its early days onwards, NLP has striven erratically, with elements such as “the Circle of Excellence,”“ Ecology Check,” and “Logical Level Alignment,” towards an enhancement of both performance and alignment in practitioner and client alike.
137.eng. This acknowledgement of the importance of situating improved performance in the context of increasing personal alignment—to find as suggested in the Legend of Bagger Vance, our “authentic swing,” the one we born with—is an important part of what NLP offers as a coaching methodology.
138.eng. NLP and Development
139.eng. Where NLP has been weak as a coaching model is in its lack of any concept of development.
140.eng. For modern coaching reaches beyond the shaping of behavior and supporting new learning, to helping negotiate the Niagara Falls of individual and corporate development.
141.eng. From its outset, NLP has been heavily focused on facilitating change.
142.eng. Its methods have been most effective for influencing behavior and supporting the mastering of new capabilities.
143.eng. Time–lines notwithstanding, NLP generally operates with a very shortterm view of time.
144.eng. NLP interventions are designed to work at almost any moment in a person’s life, without much consideration of where they are in the unfolding of their life story as a whole.
145.eng. The chief exception remains some adaptation in the way NLP is used with children.
146.eng. However, the issues facing the coachee cannot always be easily translated into a linear, present–state, desired state, plus resource type of model.
147.eng. Growth operates in a more subterranean way, running through whole phases and transitions of a person’s life.
148.eng. Growth cannot be had on command; it invites us to receive it.
149.eng. There has been some recognition of this need for an enriched understanding of development with the borrowings from the Graves model by some trainers, flirtation with Wilber’s “Spectrum of Consciousness” by others, and my own attempt with Nelson Zink to articulate a model of “Levels of Development.”1 But such models are really just the beginning of a recognition that both change and learning need to be contextualized in the overall development of an individual or organization.
150.eng. Much more needs to be done to strengthen the NLP model in this direction.
151.eng. This I have a attempted with my Belgian colleague, Jan Ardui, formulating “A Way of Unfolding” (subject of a forthcoming article and book), in which we situate behavioral and contextual change in relation to the learning it necessitates or engenders, and the growth which it arises from or stimulates.
152.eng. Some complementary elements are also necessary if one plans to conduct coaching in a professional context, either within a company or as an external coach contracted by an organization.
153.eng. But with this proviso, and an enriched framework for relating to the general process of development in
154.eng. ANCHOR POINT ANCHOR POINT an individual or system, it’s time for NLP to redefine and resituate itself, and play to its strengths, as arguably the best coaching model available.
155.eng. For NLP’s formidable array of models and methods makes its approach to the art of coaching precise and authoritative.
156.eng. When people ask,‘What’s NLP?’ I now say,“It’s the most sophisticated approach to coaching there is.”
157.eng. 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.
158.eng. 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.