• Do you love helping people find solutions to their problems?
• Are you the friend that everyone tells their secrets to and asks advice from?
• Are you fascinated by how people think and learn and solve problems?
• Do you like to see others grow, develop and succeed?
• Perhaps you are already a coach and looking to develop your coaching skillset?

Whether we realise it or not, many of us coach others all the time. Work colleague, team members, our children, our partners, friends and family. We give it our best shot, and I’m sure most of us do a fairly good job, but wouldn’t it be fantastic to be able to do this more purposefully, with skill and intention?

For some people, it may be that you have kids and you’re helping them to learn their independence, navigating the tricky world of friendships and early romantic relationships. You help them to learn new skills (you don’t want to be wiping their bum when they are 20!) and to understand the complexities of the world around them.

The way you speak to them, give them feedback, give them instructions and support them when they are learning will be shaping their self-esteem, confidence and capabilities for their whole future. That’s a big responsibility, eh? The good news is, there’s loads of NLP that can help this be the most positive experience it can be – after all, Linguistics, or the way you use language is in the name (Neuro-Linguistic Programming = NLP.)

For some, it might be a team at work that you manage, or someone you’re helping through a project, or even the colleague who sits next to you and throws in those random ‘what do I do now this has happened…….?’ questions.

Particularly with a new team member, if you just tell them the answer now, they won’t go through the process of figuring out for themselves and so next time, they will just come to you with another similar query. To help someone grow into a role, sometimes you need either let them think it through, with some guiding questions of what to think about, or let them make the mistake and give some high-quality, constructive feedback afterwards.

Many of us may be the friend or family member that everyone else comes to with their problems. It can sometimes be tempting to just tell them what to do, or give them advice from when you were in a similar situation. But a good coach will help them to work out what is right for them to do next, in their own unique situation. They will listen carefully and make a judgement call on the right kind of support to give.

The NLP Diploma, and by extension, the NLP Practitioner is also packed full of tools and techniques that can help out family and friends, from breaking patterns of behaviour like overeating, and nail biting, to helping to make decisions with the Decision-Making Compass, to thinks like the Phobia Cure and achieve their goals with the Well-Formed Outcomes Process.
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Of course, lots of coaches use their expertise to work with paying clients to earn a living, in a range of specialisms.

• Life coaching
• Business coaching
• Executive Coaching
• Sports Coaching
• Relationship Coaching
• Career Coaching
• Performance Coaching
• Health Coaching
• And many more

As a sole income, or sitting alongside other professions, coaching can be a rewarding and personally fulfilling way to make a living. Many coaches make all their income from coaching alone, while others will combine it with another role, like consulting, holistic therapies, personal training, being an instructor or trainer. If its an area of life where people have problems or challenges, then there’s an opportunity for a coach!

Whether paid for, or coaching in your day-to-day life, what all these situations have in common is that someone else has a problem, or a challenge that they are facing, and you can’t make that decision for them. That person needs to make a decision for themselves - you can simply support them to make the best decision for themselves. And that is what coaching is all about.

Sure, you could just tell them what to do, but this rarely works – humans are far more bought into an idea and likely to carry it out when they’ve thought-through and come up with it themselves.

Coaching, in fact, is very rarely about giving advice. While you may often be to see an obvious solution, or feel like you know what the other person should do, its not your problem to solve! In fact, it may even be a little arrogant to think that you know what is best for someone else, better than they do.

The nub of coaching is about questions – asking great, open questions which allows the coachee to think about something differently, to consider it from a new point of view, to explore a part of the problem that they haven’t noticed yet, which may just be where a solution is hiding. It’s about helping someone to find their own best solution, without wanting to sound like a hippy, but from their own ‘inner wisdom’, rather than from you.

NLP works with Open Questions a lot – these are questions which are focused solely on the answerer’s agenda, without trying to lead them down a certain path. They give the space and the opportunity for the answerer to explore the question and all possible answers (rather than a Closed Question just requiring a yes or no answer.) Open questions can explore relationships between things that the answerer previously thought were unconnected. They come without judgement and deepen the answerer’s understanding of themselves and the situation.

Some of the most impactful moments in my coaching career have been a long silence, left purposely unfilled, giving the coachee time to ponder the question at hand, reflect and find a new solution in the absence of any other noise. So sometimes, the skill is in staying silent rather than saying anything.

Of course, there’s much more skill to it than that. A great coach works to build rapport with their client from the start, earning the respect from, and connection with, their client that enables them to open up about what is important to them, and feel psychologically safe enough to explore new territory.

A capable coach will recognise patterns of behaviour, and can feed these back to the client, and where appropriate, support them to make a change of habit.

​There are many NLP processes which help to break old patterns of behaviour (like Breaking an Anchor) and install new patterns or new habits, like the New Behaviour Generator. 

A good coach will also be able to mirror back to the client energy levels, passion, values and beliefs that they may not be aware of.

More often than not, when a client comes to me with two choices, its clear from the outset which one they will choose, as their eye sparkle and their voice leaks passion in every phrase. Its just a case of helping them to smash through any barriers that are in their way, or to support them in dealing with anything holding them back – most commonly, lack of confidence, low self-esteem, feeling like they don’t deserve it, or fears over money or some other kind of safety.

Whatever your role in coaching others, the NLP Diploma lays the foundations of the skills that are needed to do it well – great coaching questions, how to listen really effectively, and tools and techniques to help people think differently.

At a deeper level, the course will help you to read between the lines of what people say into what is really going on for them, understand body language, pick up on incongruencies, and build really strong rapport. The course covers the skills to give feedback to others, how to support and challenge gently, and it is filled with opportunities to practice your skills so that you leave already feeling capable and confident.

The NLP Diploma makes up the first module of the 16-day long NLP Practitioner, which certifies you to practice as an NLP professional, or simply use your skills to help out family, friends and work colleagues.

During the course, you will often practice on topic in pairs or threes, enabling you to experience the coaching as a coach, as the coachee and as an observer. This triple perspective enables you to have a deeper insight into how the tools work. Multiple practice opportunities mean that by the time you’ve finished the course, you’ll feel confident to go out there and coach straight away.

If you are interested to find out more about the NLP Diploma, or Practitioner, contact me at [email protected] or on 07757 542956. 

You can book your place right now at:
NLP 2-day Taster
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Change Your Life with NLP (4-day Diploma)

NLP Practitioner

• .Are you feeling burnt-out?
• Lacking in resilience?
• Lacking in purpose?
• Do you feel a bit stuck in a rut?
• Do you feel lost, or directionless?
• Do you feel as if something is missing, but you’re not sure what?
• Are you dissatisfied with your life?
• Feel like you don’t know what you want out of life?
• Burnt-out

If any of these apply to you, then it might be one of the reasons to study the NLP Diploma: to learn how to practise self-care. 

Self-care is very different for different people. It can even be very different for the same person at different times in their life, or in different situations. Sometimes, its all about a bubble bath, candles and a good book or favourite piece of relaxing music. For others, or at a different time, self-care might look more like making time for a run or a gym session. Sometimes its pizza and chocolate on the sofa, other times it's preparing a healthy, nutritious meal. 

The old saying is "You can't pour from an empty cup." Practising self-care is first of all about realising you need to do something that is going to fill your cup in that moment. And then secondly about choosing the most appropriate thing to do that will fulfil that need in this moment. 

Sometimes in life, we just feel a little bit stuck, or directionless. It’s not that there’s necessarily even anything WRONG, it just doesn’t feel quite RIGHT. This often happens when we’ve lost connection with what is important to us, what we’re passionate about, who we really are as people.

It might feel like you’d plodding along on the treadmill of life, but you can’t stop it, or get off, or even pause – if feels like you’re moving, but you’re when you look up for a moment, you’re stuck in the same place.

The NLP Diploma helps to find these answers – we explore our personal values, what makes us tick, what makes us feel connected, contented, peaceful. It can also teach you important skills to learn resilience. For me, resilience comes in two different types.

There’s right now, in-the-moment, the-shit-has-hit-the-fan challenges, where we need immediate resilience to deal with what is happening in front of us. This could be a difficult conversation with a colleague, friend or family member, or an incident that happens and needs to be dealt with, or even when we’ve got a lot of do in a short amount of time and feel overwhelmed.

And there’s also resilience over time, when we are faced with an energy-sapping, drawn-out difficult period. This could include things like health problems, a difficult boss or colleague that you have to work with, a relationship which is feeling a bit arduous, or financial problems. Sometimes, it can be nothing at all that we can pinpoint, but just a feeling of needing to keep on going but without much energy or joy.

Sometimes, we know it’s our career, or our relationship, or our lack of ME time, or our fitness levels that are causing us to feel a bit down in the dumps. Sometimes we don’t know what it is, just that it feels like something is missing or lacking.

Some of the coaching skills and questions covered on the course can help you to work out exactly what is going on for you, and start setting an outcome for how you want things to be different. You’ll explore where you might be feeling conflicts, both internal and external, and ways to feel more at peace.

When we feel stuck in a rut, this can often impact our mental health. The course looks at ways to manage or change your emotional state. This is immensely helpful in those situations in the moment, where you need more resilience, or confidence, or motivation, or even something like more calm.

Would you believe me if I said you are far more in control of how you feel than you currently think?

It’s true. You are able to take control of your emotional state in any given moment and change it to something that is more resourceful for you.  And the good news is there’s lots and lots of different ways to do this, so you’ve always got a little trick or tool available to you!

Emotional state management is based on one of the NLP Presuppositions: Your mind and your body are connected, if you change one, you’ll change the other. We explore this connection and look at how changing just one thing can make a huge different in the way that you feel.

This could be your body position, the language you use, your own internal self-talk, the way you think about something, the way you walk; (and lots more) can impact the way you feel about yourself. Even something as simple as changing your breathing speed can make a big difference.

Have you ever noticed how when you close your eyes and think about something scary, or overwhelming, it tends to a appear as a vision, right up close in front of your face? It fills your whole field of vision, and is bright and big and, well, in your face. No wonder it’s scary and overwhelming!

Even simple thinks like taking control of the image, and making it smaller, changing it to black and white, moving it away from you, can make a big difference to how you feel about it. You can even imagine folding up the picture, and putting it in a match box. You could toss the matchbox in the bin. Or out the window. (Make sure there’s a bin out the window too – we don’t want littering!)
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(Please note this course is not a substitute for professional help if that’s what is needed, but it can sit nicely alongside counselling, medication or one-to-one coaching, as well as for people who just need a bit of support.)

There are other elements to self-care too. One really important one is your mindset. When you’re feeling a little low or worn down, it can be easy to sink into a negative mindset. This then creates a spiral of despair, where everything seems negative.

One of the biggest long-term takeaways I’ve learnt from studying NLP is the NLP Presuppositions. These are a set of phrases which can become a way of thinking – they can make a really big difference in your approach to life, to forgiveness, to understanding (rather than defending) They are also sometimes referred to as the NLP Beliefs of Excellence.

One example is “There’s a positive intention behind every behaviour.” I’ve found that useful in so many situations. Firstly, it helped me to understand (and forgive) the boss I was working for, who I found really challenging and who had a big emotional impact on me. The saying helps you to look for the motivation behind the behaviour.

While that motivation may not necessarily have a positive intention for you, it WILL have a positive intention to the person doing the behaviour.

For my boss, my guesses were he often came across as rude and direct in his communication, as he himself was feeling under a lot of pressure and this helped him let off steam. He had a huge, high profile agenda dumped on him shortly after taking on the job which lead him to working long hours. He expected the same of his team (with little understanding of childcare, family, or sleep needs!) but this was likely because he wanted to deliver on his targets and couldn’t do it alone. It was the biggest thing in his life, and I don’t think he could understand that it wasn’t the biggest thing in other people’s.

So, while I’ve not been in his exact situation, I have certainly felt under pressure and may have let of steam in a way that came across as direct or rude, and I’ve certainly had big tasks to deliver and felt very alone trying to do it, and wished for support and not understood that someone else I was working with had other priorities.

On the NLP Diploma course, we spent time exploring the NLP Presuppositions and how they can help you change your mindset to be more positive. This bunch of phrases, and the meaning behind them has really made a big change in the way I approach difficult situations, and life in general!
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The other common topic in self-care is around boundaries. Many of us know we ‘should’ be doing more things to help us ‘fill up our cup’ (you can’t pour from an empty cup….) and we want to do more, but we then find ourselves without time, money, energy or all three! This is where setting boundaries can come in really handy. 

Whether that’s setting boundaries with yourself to make time for doing a hobby or exercise (one of mine is to put my phone aside at 8pm, get off Facebook and doing thing creative and/or relaxing, like crochet.)

Or it might be setting boundaries with someone else – a partner, your family, a friend, that a certain time of the week is for you to do your thing. In our house, it’s locked into the diary that Tuesday nights are for me to go to choir practice (something that is both uplifting and meditative for me) while Phil does bath and bedtime for Maisie. When there is something he wants to do, that time is locked in too.

It sounds really simple, but many people struggle setting and sticking to boundaries. This takes:

1. Knowing what you want/need to do for self-care (everyone is different) – sometimes a bit of self-discovery around what you need or value can be useful
2. Setting it as a goal and making a commitment to it yourself
3. Communication (if someone else is involved) to get the support you need to uphold the boundary
4. Accountability – holding yourself (and others) accountable to what you’ve agreed to do

​The NLP Diploma can help with all of these things – there are tools to help you understand your own values (and which ones aren’t currently being met.) There’s the Well-Formed Outcomes process that helps you to cement your goal. There’s lots on communicating with other people, and things like the NLP Feedback Process to help hold discussions around how it’s going. There’s also techniques like the New Behaviour Generator that can help you to mentally rehearse your new habit until it becomes a certainty it will happen, rather than just a dream or something on your wishlist. 

When I first did my NLP Diploma, I was in a place of needing some self-care and resilience. In fact, I probably should have sought more help and support, but the stigma of mental health leaves of absence in 2014 were unfortunately all too common. I was in a stressful job, having lost the love for it, feeling tearful, unhappy and overall, stuck. The relationship I was in at the time also wasn’t great – nothing majorly wrong, but nothing majorly right either. And just generally, I was feeling a bit lacklustre, a bit ‘meh.’

The problem was I didn’t really know what I wanted to do differently! After 4 days studying the NLP Diploma, I had gotten a great big kick up the backside. I wrote my letter of resignation on the day I finished the course and had significantly developed ideas for my own business combining the 2 things I’m passionate about, helping others, and mountains. The relationship improved with some self-awareness and increased communication (also due to the course content – but ultimately ended a year or so later – coinciding with my journey through NLP Master Practitioner!)

Your path will no doubt be different to this, but it’s a great example of how the course can help you find the confidence and courage to take action to make your own situation better. If you’re feeling any of these things:

• Stuck
• Directionless
• Stuck in a rut
• Burnt-out
• A bit ‘meh’
• In need of self-care

Then the NLP Diploma is a great opportunity for you to get what you need. Whether that a metaphorical kick up the backside to make the changes you’ve been thinking of but never getting around to. Whether it’s a big metaphorical hug of spending some time learning about yourself and what you truly want and need. Whether it’s the buzz of learning something new and interesting. Or whether it’s a wanting a connection with other fascinating individuals and the satisfaction of supporting others on a shared journey through the course.

If you are interested to find out more about how the NLP Diploma could help you discover your purpose, or to book your place now, contact me at [email protected] or on 07757 542956.

You can book a place directly at Change Your Life with NLP (4-day Diploma)

• Are you a leader or manager and looking to develop your leadership skills?
• Do you wish you knew how best to motivate your team?
• Are you a leader who needs to set vision and direction?
• Do you need to influence upwards in your organisation?
• Would you love to discover the secrets to charisma and success?

If so, then you may be interested in Reason Number Two to Study for the NLP Diploma: Become a Better Leader.

(You can check out my previous blog post on Reasons to Study for the NLP Diploma Number One: Personal Development.)

Would you love to:

• Be able to adapt your communication style when needed to influence both upwards and downward
• Build strong rapport with your team
• Learn tools for having difficult conversations
• Give honest feedback that is well received and heard
• Understand more about the different perspectives and thinking styles in your team
• Understand your own strengths, weaknesses and preferences and how others may experience them.  
• Learn useful tools for strategy setting
• Get people on board with your vision and goals for your business
• Know how to motivate individual team members
• Have the self-confidence and courage to lead and believe in yourself

The NLP Diploma is a fantastic personal development course to help you become a better leader. In the rest of the article, I focus on some of the key issues facing leaders today:

• Imposter Syndrome and leading with confidence and courage   
• Influencing Stakeholders with the ability to adapt your communication style
• Managing a diverse team of people

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Many of our participants on the NLP Diploma course are wanting to improve their leadership and influencing skills in a work setting (although, it always comes in useful at home too!)

​As a leader, there are so many conflicting demands on your time. From managing, motivating, and inspiring your team, to keeping on top of your own workload, to influencing key stakeholders, to being up to date on the latest market trends or policies and laws. Plus everything else on your to-do list!

It can be really challenging to keep on top of it all, and particularly to feel like you’re doing it well. A recent study by KPMG found that a huge 75% of female executives, across all industries studied, have experienced Imposter Syndrome. From personal experience of coaching clients, males are not immune to Imposter Syndrome either.

Imposter Syndrome is the feeling of inadequacy or self-doubt that can beset even the most competent of leaders. Leaders that suffer with it often report the feeling that they are about to be ‘found out’ – that they aren’t actually capable of the job and that someone else will ‘discover’ them as an imposter at any moment.

At the very least, this can make for an unpleasant experience at work. At the most, it can cause crippling lack of confidence and self-esteem and cause incredibly skilled and valued leaders to quit their roles.

To be an authentic leader, you need to have confidence and courage in your convictions, while also acknowledging your short-comings and, where appropriate, showing your vulnerabilities.

That is where the NLP Diploma can help. Many of my students say that the biggest thing they came away from the course with was a new sense of self-confidence and clarity on their direction, whether that was business, career, or personal. They feel a sense of resilience and courage to follow through in their convictions.

The course covers how you can manage your emotional state when things are challenging, allowing your to stay level-headed and make decisions. We also look at the power of your unconscious mind, and how your conscious mind can sometimes distract you with red herrings and seemingly ‘logic’ – although these are often just excuses masquerading as logic instead and stem from our fears and worries.

We explore how you can tune into your gut feelings and inner confidence and ignore the sometimes unhelpful commentary and self-talk that goes on in your conscious mind.

Here are some quotes from leaders who have been on the course:

“The biggest change in my life has been the quiet confidence and feeling of self-worth. I now feel able to say no and walk away from situations that make me feel uncomfortable.”
“We talked about confidence issues and I learnt a number of tools and techniques to put in 'My Bag of Resilience.' I still use these techniques now.”

At its heart, NLP is about communication and human interaction, and this is what (nearly) every single business thrives on. You might be leading a team of people, you might need to influence key stakeholders, or you may need a deep understanding of your customer, and their drivers, motivators and habits. Perhaps you’re doing all three.

For any of these things, you need to be able to appreciate the individuality of people. What works for one person simply won’t work for someone else. The ability to flex your communication style (and content) is key to connecting with, and influencing the range of people you’re likely to come across in any organisation.

Where one stakeholder might just need the headlines to be able to get on board, another stakeholder might want to delve into all of the details. One colleague might prefer a phonecall to chat an idea through, while another prefers a written report or visual powerpoint to understand something. One team member might value lots of support and encouragement and a daily check-in, another person might experience this is micro-managing.
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Understanding people as individuals, including what they value, what motivates them, how they prefer to receive information, the level of detail they like to operate at, as well as knowing how to build rapport with a variety of people are all really important for a win-win outcome .

Have you ever heard the phrase “people join companies, but leave managers?” We join up to a company based on its vision, purpose and ethics, but we tend to leave jobs due to being badly managed, or having personality clashes with our supervisor or boss.

Perhaps you feel you don’t speak the same language as your boss? Or maybe your team don’t see things the same way as you? Or maybe just a few tweaks in your leadership gravitas could make a big difference?

One of the biggest challenges in any business is managing the people. Even when we follow the classic, although misguided, pattern of recruiting people just like ourselves, they still turn out to be their own individual person.

And if you’re able to recruit the kind of diverse team that is proven to bring greater business benefits, then this team will include different cultures, different ideas, different thinking and communication styles. Inevitably, this is then going to need a huge amount more flexibility of style to manage them all as individuals as well as a cohesive team.  

The NLP diploma can help improve your leadership and people management skills by exploring the human connection basics.

This includes things like the science behind how to build rapport, exploring different communication styles and preferences, and how to communicate in a style that ISN’T your preference.

The course helps you to understand what makes people tick – how you can inspire and motivate your team, and how you can bring people enthusiastically onboard with a vision and purpose, by expressing it in a way that can really be heard and resonate with everyone. It covers how to find out what someone values and to respect their ‘map of the world’ while also upholding your own values too.

One of the key tools you will learn on the NLP Diploma is the Feedback Model. This is a way to give constructive honest feedback, balanced with both positive and negatives and in a way that is well-received and encourages acceptance rather than defensiveness.

From the words you use, to the body language you display, to the energy and gravitas you portray, the NLP Diploma can help you to become a better, stronger, more people-connected leader with increased flexibility of style and approach.

Study the NLP Diploma to become a better leader.  

You can find out more about the course and book your place now at: Change Your Life with NLP (4-day Diploma)

If you’d like to chat it through, contact me at [email protected] or on 07757 542956.