Coaching with NLP For Dummies®

Gaining Something from Tough Times

Remember the old saying: ‘What doesn't kill you makes you stronger’? When you hit tough times in life, the experience is intense and affects things that are important: your health, wealth and happiness. As you come through the experience and extract some new wisdom, you build resilience for when tough things happen again. Next time round, you react differently. However, the journey through the tough times may be extremely challenging.

In this section, I explore classic NLP work on resolving grief, which offers insight into what is happening for your coaching clients as they experience significant loss.

Following the grief and loss process

Back in the mid-1980s, two outstanding leaders in the field of NLP Steve and Connirae Andreas began teaching the grief resolution process. They based it on modelling the experiences of people who were particularly resourceful in the ways they handled significant loss in their lives. Other NLP trainers subsequently adapted this process and teach it as part of NLP Master Practitioner training; you hear it referred to as the loss pattern or the grief and loss process.

The grief response describes a feeling of sadness and emptiness and can refer to perceived as well as an actual loss. I've coached several senior business women who put career before marriage and family. Later in life they experienced a deep sense of loss when they realised that they no longer have the potential to have a family. Other people reach ...