Coaching with NLP For Dummies®

Finding Examples in Others: Models and Mentors

People create their own mental maps of the world, running strategies that sometimes work and at other times do not. The foundation of NLP lies in the work of John Grinder and Richard Bandler, who started modelling the processes of great therapists, including Milton Erickson, Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir, who were getting great results with their clients. From their modelling work, Grinder and Bandler created linguistic models, notably the Milton model and the Meta Model (see Chapter 2 more on these models).

NLP modelling is the ability to fully replicate another person's desirable competence. Modelling works by getting to the unconscious behaviours beneath a particular skill and coding the behaviours in such a way as to teach them to others.

Modelling is taught as part of Master Practitioner training, and it's a useful NLP skill to explore and bring into your coaching practice (see Chapter 22 for more on NLP training). Many excellent books and online sources cover modelling, including a chapter in Neuro-linguistic Programming For Dummies (Wiley) by Romilla Ready and yours truly.

In order to develop your own coaching skills, model a variety of different coaches you admire to figure out their successes and see what you can transfer ...