David had changed companies three times in the past two years. In
each company where he was employed he was always one of the
top salespeople. However, he felt frustrated as his goal was to lead
a team rather than to work as an independent salesman for the rest
of his career. He had been given a few opportunities to prove himself
and most recently had been put in charge of a team in his company.
Nevertheless, each time he assumed such a role he started having
problems in his relationships with some of the key people. The result
was usually that he got so frustrated that people didn’t cooperate in
the way he expected them to that he eventually left and found
another sales position. He did this until he worked his way once
more to a leadership role. The pattern kept repeating itself.
This is a familiar trend in many companies and there are many
similar examples of people who have ambitions they seem
destined not to realize. What is the typical solution? Usually it
is to let the person go. Some companies might invest first in
some management training, believing that there are
techniques of people management that can be learnt to
resolve the issue. Some companies might invest time in
personal appraisal, where David would be given advice as to
how best to deal with the person with whom he was having
problems. Some companies might just shake their heads and
say, “You always lose a good salesman when you try to make a
manager out of him.” So where does NLP coaching come in?
The aim of NLP-based coaching is to support people to realize
their true potential. It is based on the premise that most of the
limitations to our true potential are not represented by other
people but by unhealthy strategies that we have learnt and
that are entirely within ourselves. NLP is sometimes referred to
as “the study of the structure of subjective experience.” In
David’s case this means that there is a structure to how David
is creating this repeated experience. The fact that it is
repeated is a clue. His problems lie not in the other people (he
re-experiences the same problems no matter who the people
are) but in himself.
The study of the structure of
subjective experienceHIGH PERFORMANCE COACHING 351