NLP Techniques Applied to Training and Coaching

As a trainer I very quickly learnt the value of preparation. I am not talking about preparation like having your notes ready, knowing the material and that sort of thing. All of that is obvious. What I am talking about is making sure your audience is prepared for you and the learning.

This could take the form of setting expectations, removing common limiting beliefs, installing a massive compulsion to succeed and any number of things dictated by the context and situation.

When I first started working as a coach I quickly discovered that many people come in with beliefs that limit how well you can work with them. One simple example would be many clients would come in with the belief that the problem they were facing was so tough that it would take a lot of coaching for them to resolve.

Very quickly I learnt that coaching has some similar aspects to training. Getting your clients or students prepared for the learning, the development or result was far more important than the intervention itself. Consider the example above, if a client has already decided that it will take hypothetically five sessions to be coached over a particular issue they will not be satisfied until they have spent the “due” time.

Whereas even if you spent the whole of the first session shifting that belief to something like, “I can find a solution in just one session”, you will have saved three coaching sessions. And I now have a frame that blows this sort of thing out in minutes so you don’t even have to spend a session discussing it. I will give you the pattern further down the page but first let me give you the whole problem.

Ruled By Emotion, Justified on Logic

It would be great if we could take limiting beliefs and get our clients and audiences to believe something different just through logic. But this rarely happens. Trust me, when I started as a coach I would tell my clients that even though they thought of their problem as huge we could still deal with it in one session.

I would confidently tell them about how many other people came in with the same problem and how they had left having it completely resolved in the one session. My client would explain why their problem was different from everyone else’s. I would explain how the mind works and how quickly the unconscious mind will adapt to new processes if you know the techniques. My clients would explain how they have tried the same thing and why it didn’t work.

The trouble is that when someone holds a belief they will tend to justify, explain and defend it. And as a coach I was constantly pointing out unhelpful beliefs that my client’s would ingrain even further as they defended their position citing the “evidence” and the logic as to why things had to be that way.

A Trainer’s Guide to Coaching

I spent some time looking at solutions to this problem and eventually got a genius idea. Like all good ideas it was incredibly simple once I have realised it. All I need to do was take a leaf out of the trainer’s handbook and just reframe the beliefs before we start coaching.

The first thing I tried with my next client was to get them to briefly tell me about the reason they were there and to rate the problem on a scale of one to ten. Obviously they would rate the problem highly. I would nod at them sagely and say something like, “I can see that this is a really serious problem and that means we have to devote some serious resources to it. I’ll tell you what because the problem is so big, I don’t normally do this, but let’s devote this entire session to resolving it so you know that it has completely gone.”

This whole pattern is designed to pace the client’s initial conception of the problem, set the expectation that we are taking it very seriously and then reframe the meaning of serious to a whole session as opposed to five sessions.

Did this work? Actually more often than I expected. But there is a neat little twist I started doing with my clients that made this pattern work almost every time.

Take the Trance to do some Covert Hypnosis

Imagine what happens with this client if you have taken the time before this covert intervention to explain to them how the mind works. What you might do is split the world into two types of people, those that fit your client’s self-image and those that don’t. You then explain the difference between the two categories. This might include the idea that certain types of people create solutions very fast when they follow a particular process. You obviously link this to your client’s self-image illustrate with examples and give them whatever justifications they need.

As you can see this is a trance induction that is driving your client to identifying with a group of people that think in a particular way and can easily install a compulsion to get the results that they want.

The specifics of what you use can be different for each client. For example if your client is an artist you might talk about common traits with artists is that they can make connections between random things. If you are talking to a business person that you know follows a rigid business model you might draw this as a common trait for successfully business people.

Whatever you are using the end result is a linking phrase such as, “and that means these types of people will become solution focused as soon as they (insert your coaching process) and when they do that they get answers to their issue almost immediately. Now I am not saying that you are in this category (that is the category you have already elicited as their ideal self-image) but you look like you might  be…” I usually pause at this point to allow them to butt in and explain why they are exactly that sort of person. When they do this I know everything has worked properly and they are going to get a great result.

I don’t move from this position until my client is positive this is the right thing for them, that it will work for them and that they are desperate to have a go. I then ask them to rate the problem and do the whole “better spend the whole of the session on it” thing with them. You can guess how quickly they get over the big problem that was stopping them so that they can focus on the “good stuff”.

Covert Coaching Trances

Obviously this is a simplistic example. We have not discussed the specifics of these trance scripts, or what happens if they don’t take the preframes on board or any of the other things you may want to tweak to make this work effectively.

Next week (Sunday 13^th May) I am running an afternoon workshop specifically devoted to all the covert hypnotic inductions I have developed over fifteen years of coaching clients. We will discuss how to set up timelines, gain even more compliance, anchoring your client to trance and many different ways of blowing out their beliefs. I also intend to present the coaching model that changed my reputation from being a good coach to being one of a kind. Click through here and find out more.

The True Key to Learning

When we are young it is easy to pick up and start installing the beliefs of others. A personal example would be my musical ability. At the age of 13 I went for trumpet lessons at my school. After the second lesson my teacher told me I was tone deaf.

As a result I gave up and did not pick up a musical instrument again until I was 16. Even though I used to be permanently attached to my Sony Walkman and was spending every last penny I was given on records I still believed I was tone deaf and would never be able to play a musical instrument. It took my mother three years to convince me otherwise and even though I know it is obviously untrue I am still left with issue that centre around the idea of not being able to hear tones correctly.

 The Problem with Belief Changes

The interesting thing about these sorts of beliefs is that they are so easy to pick up. Then you just sort the evidence to make it fit. This makes them very difficult to change because you will tend to believe the things that confirm your belief and ignore or treat as an exception the evidence that contradicts your belief.

You have an investment wrapped round evidence to support your beliefs. Using counter evidence will not normal change anything, it will just give you examples of exceptions, excuses or anomalous results. As a result I like covertly changing beliefs and then ratifying the new beliefs and creating new evidence supporting the new beliefs. You know when you have done this right because when you espouse the old belief your client will look at you as if you are mad for even suggesting it.

Bill kindly wrote out the exact process he used to blow out an incredibly difficult belief from a very challenging client. Here is his process:

Hey Rintu

I left you some feedback on your Steroids material that you recently used in one of your emails.  I am the dad with the 11 year old daughter her mother anchored to the concept that math is too hard to do.  During Spring Break we were together for 10 days so it was time to follow up on helping her get her math down pat.   I thought you might appreciate getting an update on the situation.

The highlights from my earlier note are as follows.  My daughter’s math skills were a paradox for years.  In many contexts of her life she has an almost photographic memory and yet struggled with simple things even when they were complete memorization.  Finally I realized her frustrations were more related to years of anchoring (mostly installed by my ex-wife who is completely math phobic) that math is just too difficult to do.  I used the thoughts about learning being confusion on the Steroid Material to get some NEW ideas easily into her realm of being doable.  We really didn’t have time to do much on breaking the anchors on the old stuff.

The first thing to do over Spring Break was to get our daughter caught up on the things she had learned long ago but convinced herself she would never be able to actually do well with.  This may have been easy if I had practitioner training instead I improvised using the tools learned from your APP course.  My solution was not elegant but it worked.

Since she was already so firmly anchored and resistant to change, my first step was to anchor her to the negative thoughts even stronger and then throw them away.  I made her spend a solid hour a twice a day doing the things she was struggling with.  Along the way I would frame it as hard, draw HUGE red X’s over the ones she missed and tiny checks on the ones that she got right.  She was not a happy camper and there was a LOT of RED on those pages.  Along the way I started setting up anticipation loops that there were easier ways but refused to tell her what they were.  She was begging me for the secrets and I simply refused to give her any.

After a few days I decided she was ready for the “secrets”.   Honestly there aren’t any secrets to doing 6th grade math.  After days of torture and my framing by opening the anticipation loops she was ready to believe I was showing her something new even though it I was just presenting it SLIGHTLY differently.  So now she is anchored to a large group of math problems are actually easy.   The only thing that really changed was her beliefs about what we worked on.

The second thing was to teach her the new material that will be taught in her school beginning this week.  This was incredibly easy as she didn’t have a negative anchor.  The whole trick was to avoid framing it as math at all.  Instead she was learning Probability and Combinatorics.

I just laid out various combinations of face cards from a deck asked questions that were simple for her to answer that were thinly disguised probability problems.  Then I allowed her to discover it was nothing more than proportions (which was a part of what we had done earlier in the week).  CLICK…..she is now the greatest “Probabilitist” in her school.

She has also become quite the “Combinatoricalist” using similar methods.

To sum it all up….She was tortured for a few days doing things the way she had been doing them.  She made the switch to those things being virtually impossible to being quite comfortable with them even if she makes a calculation error from time to time.  She is now a “Certified” Probabilist and Conbinatoricalist meaning the next 3 weeks of school is going to be easy for her.

I should probably feel ashamed of torturing her, being benignly deceptive and abusing the English language.  But I don’t.  Certainly there are probably more elegant methods and perhaps one day I will have the opportunity to learn them.  In the meantime I will continue to do what I know how to do.

Take care

Bill

Text Book Application of NLP Techniques

Bill thinks he might have better results if he had been on an NLP Practitioner course. My experience is many NLP practitioners and Master Practitioners not having the skills or ability to think through and execute such a smart plan. So my challenge to Bill is, “How do you now let go of that belief and step into your own powerful skill set?”

And my challenge to all the people on the Advanced Persuasion Patterns or the Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed course is to deconstructed Bill’s process, work out why he has taken the steps that he has and then put it back together again for a different context.

If you want to take your own NLP Persuasion Skills to this sort of level easily then Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed is the course to start with.

The True Meaning of Personal Development

I’ve met many personal development course junkies that keep going on courses like it is some kind of holiday but their lives never seem to change. Take this the right way I love going on courses, but I also expect to take the skills and information and apply them to something.

The following is an email I received the other day from “John”. I’ve obscured some of the details so his company, past and present can’t find out who he is. I love what John has done here because he has, in the face of adversity, taken some really simple ideas and run with them. As a result he has dramatically changed his life. Have a look at what John says and see how you feel about his change.

Dear Rintu,

My name is John and I thought I would let you know about my persuasion experiences since I joined your (advanced persuasion patterns) course in December.

But first let me paint you a picture of how I ended up doing your course and the benefits I have already experienced since joining.

I work in research carrying out experiments in relation to (deleted for anonymity) for a well-known university and in October my life was turned upside down by the announcement that due to government funding being withdrawn I would be losing my job after a 3 month notice period. I think you will agree that any news relating to job cuts is never a good thing to hear, especially as my redundancy would happen during the Christmas period.

So I decided to update my CV and  I thought it wasn’t the best since I have no idea of how to ‘bum’ myself up (so to speak), and this is when I discovered about NLP which is how I discovered your book Job Persuasion skills. So I thought, well, NLP can do no harm as I have had not the best ‘luck’ with my CV in the past and so I bought the Job Persuasion skills book and duly digested and  followed the exercises and information provided within the book.

I followed the CV writing section to the letter, but to be honest, in my haste to remedy my impending bad situation, I only read to the CV section and sent my CV away to two companies with the hope that I might (and that is a pretty big might) hear back from one of the companies saying thanks but no thanks, let me say that this has been a pretty regular occurrence with my CV applications. You know, spending all that time and effort, building yourself up to applying and spending vast amounts of time trying to make the CV look and sound like you are the candidate to employ, ending with no response, which leaves you feeling rejected and a total failure for being so stupid to think that you might be worth at least a chat on the telephone.

Well enough of the self-pity, two weeks passed and I received nothing and by this time I had worked my way through the book, then something really amazing happened which I was totally unprepared for and something that I have never ever experienced in my working life….EVER, I not only got a reply from both the companies I wrote to, I secured not one but two interviews and have at the time of writing a third interview and three job offers to choose from, two offers of which are considerably better than that of my current salary, with better longer term prospects.

However this is not the end of the story, I also joined the advanced persuasion patterns course and I applied three techniques taught on the course and used them on the HR department (the three techniques I used were the building rapport, the redefine and agreement pattern). I only practised the three patterns for 1 week prior to having a meeting with the HR department and instead of losing my job, I have gained an extra six months employment from my current employers which has given me “breathing space” from an almost certain dole queue.

Rintu, what can I say, I am so astounded by the results of applying the techniques from your book and course, the information I have used has not only given me real options but has also saved me from certain financial hardship.

I look forward to applying yet more techniques and continue practicing the ones I have discovered, I can’t thank you enough for producing such a fantastic course, the materials should be made illegal, just because they work so well so fast.

Very best regards,

Persuasion Newbie,

(John)

Personal Development for Real

When you find yourself doing great things you start to recognise more of what you are capable of and expect more from yourself. But this really only happens when you are prepared to stop navel gazing and start doing.

I think the biggest thing John has got is nothing to do with what he has achieved and everything to do with a shift in his perception as a result of what he has achieved. As a result I would say he has completely changed his world and that is what I would call real personal development.

If you would like to quickly, easily and dramatically change your world here is a link to the same course as John is studying. And please note you are responsible for your results, so take your learning out into the real world and do something with it.

Being Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

If we define our comfort zone as all that we know how to do. All the situations, behaviours and thoughts that are habitual and ingrained into your life might be another way of saying comfort zone.

Then all of your learning, growth and development must be outside of your comfort zone and therefore uncomfortable to some degree. To me this means that if you want to learn, grow and develop being a little bit uncomfortable is a natural part of the process.

A Persuasion Skills Interlude

I am currently working on a new course, Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed. It consists of three hours of video recording of a Hypnotic Persuasion Skills Seminar that starts at the same level as the Persuasion Skills Black Book but builds hugely on those foundations with some really cool new techniques and ideas.

But that is not what makes this course special. If you have read some of my articles, books and seen my videos you already know that I use hypnotic persuasion techniques to teach hypnotic persuasion techniques. The beauty of Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed is that the whole training is transcribed and deconstructed. All my patterns, anchors and sneaky trainer tricks that are demonstrated throughout the videos are deconstructed, written down and explained in the accompanying report. It seems to have created a little bit of a stir. You can click through and read a few of the responses here.

The Importance of Mindset

One of the things I deconstruct on the course is how to preframe a conversation so that people are already thinking the way you want them to before you get to anything contentious. For example if I wanted you to donate to a save the elephant fund (I don’t even know if they are endangered it was the first thing that came into my head when searching for an example) I would want to set a frame around the conversation first.

After introductions and any scene setting that we needed to do I would discuss the ivory trade, the near extinction of certain types of elephant, the cruelty and barbarism of it all. The important thing would be to engage you into the conversation in such a way that you state open support for doing something about helping elephants. I guess you can see how much easier I could now get a donation from you, and you would, depending on how the conversation was managed be even happier to donate the money.

On this course I used the idea of comfort zones and turning confusion to understanding as an important element of preframing the mindset that I want the students in. What has completely amazed me is what Bill managed to do with this little concept. Here he is in his own words:

 Some Concluding Thoughts

When I look at accelerated learning for a subject I look for three things. The easy one is the tools and techniques. For example with NLP language Patterns the patterns are the tools we focus on. The trouble is there is no point in learning these tools if you have beliefs that don’t support you using them.

In short I want to work on a beliefs and identity level with you before I introduce you to any content. The tools are generally easy to learn and apply once the beliefs are in the right place. The beauty of Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed is that you get to see me work that process with the students on the recording and that also works on you as you watch the course.

You can then go through the deconstruction and break it down so you see how I constructed it in the first place and how you can build it up for your own purposes. You get it again on a third level when you look at the whole course overall and notice that I have applied the same process again to the whole course.

The best thing about this is because you have to think through the course on multiple levels we can bypass much of your conscious faculties and you can take on a lot of the information on an unconscious level. Here is an example of how powerful that can be.