I spent the weekend in Montreal with my wife. She has officially begun rehearsals for her upcoming concert, and her band is all based there. I see lots of traveling in the near future for us.
One of the musicians' wife is a coach. We ended up having an interesting conversation about coaching and NLP while samba was running loose in the room next door.
After I explained to her how modeling works, she asked me: "I fully get the value and power of modeling, but how does it apply to coaching a client? Do you mean I should model a great coach?"
Yes! But it's not just that.
Beyond a skillset, modeling is a mindset. It's a lens through which you view the world and how you move through it.
When you're coaching, you're generally asking yourself two questions:
- Where is my client right now?
- Where does my client want to be?
When you bake the modeling mindset into coaching, you add a third question to the initial set of two:
- Who used to be where my client is now, and is now where my client wants to be?
Answering this question inevitably leads to a proven path to the result, in two powerful ways.
Numero Uno: since someone else was in that situation and made it to the desired situation, there's implicit proof that it's possible. This reinforces the belief in the transformation.
Numeros Dos: since someone else went through that exact journey, we know a specific route exists that leads to the desired destination.
Checkmate!
That's why I encourage all my clients to operate from the modeling mindset AT ALL TIMES!
Why?
Because it comes with confidence + competence built-in.
