Coaching with NLP For Dummies®

When You Accomplish Your Goal and Look Back on Your Success, What Will You Experience?

The wording of this question assumes positive results: success, accomplishment and knowledge. You're acting as a sponsor or champion, encouraging your clients to achieve what they've set out to achieve by having them envision the end-point on their time lines or their desired state. You're also implicitly demonstrating that the results they envision are not only possible, but also that you believe they can reach them, even if they are feeling some doubt. You're inviting them to taste success – the completed project, the culmination of the hard work and everything they strive for.

Help them to explore the future experience in sensory detail by asking follow-up questions including:

• What will it look like?
• What will it sound like?
• What will it feel like?

The main question also acts as a test of whether clients have chosen goals that they truly want to pursue. By shifting their thinking into the future, which NLP calls the as-if frame, you're testing their choices. Sometimes a client decides that the goal doesn't justify all the challenges along the way and changes the goal.