Perceptual Positions an NLP Technique



Perceptual positions is an NLP exercise geared to looking at a situation from multiple perspectives. Any given situation has several different perspectives and different information can be gain from each. The first is obviously your own, the second is the perspective from another person that is involved in the situation and the third is a neutral, unconnected perspective. Each of these positions would give you more information about the situation and the opportunity to influence what is happening. A fuller explanation of perceptual positions can be found on my website.

A Business Coaching Example of Using NLP Techniques

There are many NLP tools that a coach might use in the first instance, but for illustration purposes we will restrict this to just using perceptual positions.

The coach might use this technique for themselves initially to get a flavour of what their client is thinking and, if it is a business context how the business views the situation.

A typical business coaching situation might involve a client who has a new role that they have some doubts over. Perhaps they also don't know how to approach their new team and are unsure about what is expected of them.

You could use Perceptual Positions for every part of this situation.

Getting the client to look at the situation from the perspective of their new boss and doing a skills analysis from this perspective would give them confidence. They were employed for the role therefore someone has faith in them and seeing their skills from this perspective will help.

Seeing the role from the perspective of the job and the organizations might yield clues as to direction, goals expectations.

Looking at the new team's perspective and then getting the client to plan their approach from this and the organization's perspective might give them a different view of how to meet, motivate set expectations with the new team.

Also, getting the client to imagine a future version of themselves that is happy, comfortable and settled in the role may help. But what if you took a neutral, observer perspective on the difference between the two and develop the action plan to take you from the current state to the future state?

Coaching using NLP Techniques

The illustration above was just to demonstrate how a foundation level NLP Tool could be used in multiple ways in a single coaching situation. The reality is that there are many powerful NLP Techniques a good coach will employ for you to get results.

As an example, whatever you happen to be doing there is an ideal frame of mind associated with it. Athletes recognize this as being in the zone or a flow state. Any good coach will have a coach state they have anchored and can fire off to be in the right frame of mind to assist you as a client. If appropriate they could be showing you how to do the same for your role.

The Real Power of NLP Coaching Techniques

Language (both verbal and non verbal) binds the relationship between coach and client. But language is just a filter on our thoughts and impacts how we represent the world to ourselves.

A good coach is trained to notice these filters in themselves and others and then can open or restrict them to provide a better frame on the situation. A good NLP Practitioner Course will show you how to do that and much more. This is why all good coaches study NLP.

My expectations of a good hypnotic NLP Business Coach to that coaching situation described above would be to linguistically given you change strategies, installed empowering beliefs and set preframes that eliminate self doubt before you have even started the session. All of a saddened you might find yourself filling in the detail and getting results within a framework of fun coaching session.

Anyone interested in getting great performance out of themselves should consider a coach?but if you are unreasonable, impatient and want those results faster then a NLP Coach is a serious consideration.