Coaching with NLP For Dummies®

Generating New Behaviours

Change requires people to do things differently – things they may find difficult as they seek to achieve their goals. The New Behaviour Generator allows your clients to mentally rehearse new behaviours by harnessing all their senses. In this exercise, they talk it through internally, picturing it and checking their reactions until it feels right.

In the New Behaviour Generator exercise, the coach sits or stands alongside the client and directs him to change the way he sits and moves his gaze. The eye-movement patterns tie in with the idea of eye accessing cues. The original co-creators of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, noticed that people naturally move their eyes around according to whether they're thinking in terms of images, sounds or feelings. (See Chapter 11 for more on eye accessing cues.)

In this exercise, like many in NLP, you can work content-free, which means clients don't need to tell you specifically what they want to do differently, nor even actually speak. Working content-free enables clients to stay involved with their own experiences, without any unintended distraction from the coach.

In the following sections, you can see how each round of the exercise works in turn. You may need to cycle two or three times round the steps until the client feels he's got it. In the first cycle, clients' responses can be quite vague, yet they typically ...