Coaching with NLP For Dummies®

Becoming a Time Traveller

After clients have a sense of their time lines (see the earlier section ‘Creating a Personal Time line’), they can put their time lines to work in various coaching exercises involving time.

Scheduled spontaneity

Cheri lives life by the clock with a classic through-time pattern. Ideally, she'd have her life mapped out for the next ten years – at least. Planned, organised and with all the details under control to the last minute, she thrives on organising complex trade shows and corporate events. She hates to waste a minute doing nothing. She hired an NLP coach when she began suffering mild panic attacks after being made redundant and worrying about finding her next job.

One positive aspect of losing her job was that Cheri now had time to take her dog for a walk in the local woods instead of paying the dog walker she'd hired when working in the City. However, she felt guilty that she ought to be job-hunting more furiously all day instead of enjoying herself.

Cheri's coach began with a time line session to work through unhelpful negative emotions that may have caused her panic attacks; they also worked on letting go of fear, guilt, anger and anxiety from the past.

Cheri also worked to switch her time line from through-time to in-time. Cheri's coach suggested she experiment with being in-time for at least half of every day, just allowing the days to unfold and responding to spontaneous events and requests that she'd normally be too busy to accept. For the ...