It's unbelievable what you're able to say in coaching sessions when you have solid rapport with your client.
(By rapport, I don't mean the classic NLP definition of matching and mirroring. I'm talking about a specific frame that governs your interaction.)
You can say things that, if you were to say them to anybody off the street, would get you body-slammed to the pavement like a WWF second-rate wrestler.
However, in the context of solid rapport, you can literally offend your clients into selecting superior goals and targets for themselves.
In the Structure of Magic, the Grinder and Bandler Brothers Band point out one of the most important distinctions in understanding a client's model of the world when it comes to goal-setting — right on page 105.
"[...] The way the client is representing his possible future experiences in the present - that is, his expectations of what he expects the outcome of his behavior will be."
(Not sure if you agree with me, but "expectations of what he expects" sounds like a redundancy... intentional attempt at trancing us out, or an editorial slip?)
When you take that piece of the puzzle and mix it with provocative therapy (oh, what the heck... let's take that a step further and make it "offensive therapy") in the context of solid rapport, you get an explosive cocktail that pushes your clients into empowering states from which to pick goals.
So push! Lean into them! Squeeze them to their core to get the good stuff out — and it does come out.
Remember: it's all just a model of the world.
And when you're modeling, keep in mind that your exemplars also behave from a state of expectation as to what their outcome will be — and that their expectations inform their behavior and their evaluations. You just approach the interaction completely differently than you would with a client, of course.
