This article is about the many different ways we can trip ourselves up in setting goals, particularly with New Year Resolutions and what you can do to change.

Many people evaluate their lives and set new patterns around the New Year. There are several ways that this can deliberately set you up to fail.

Often this is done because there is an expectation from others that you should set resolutions at this time of year. Also there is often a sense of giving things up or a judgment about not having succeeded the previous year. Typically these type of resolutions have the word ‘must’ associated with them. Here are a few examples I have collected over the years as an NLP Coach:

I must change jobs
I must be able to get into this new dress by February
I must do this, give up that…and so on. I’m sure you get the idea.

This approach has a few pitfalls. How committed is the person to their goals if they feel forced in to them? The judgments and the sense of giving things up attaches negative emotions to the goals so they don’t seem like fun or excitement. Is it any wonder that so many people fail with New Year Resolutions before the end of January?

NLP Techniques – A Solution

Three elements of NLP Techniques include examining intention behind behavior, emotional state and belief changes. By taking these three elements we can start looking at our New Year Resolutions differently.

Goal Setting and Intention

By examining what we gain from our goals, who they are actually for and why we want them some interesting things sometimes fall out. The motivation to succeed or not comes from this element.

Emotions – The Secret to Success

Have you ever seen or experienced the situation where the closer you got to success the more anxious you got about it? And then possibly fell at the last hurdle? The problem with being too emotionally attached to your goals might lead to failure. How well would your crops grow if you were constantly digging them up to see how far they had got?

NLP Techniques – Belief Changes

What you believe about yourself and the world around you will determine your success or failure. Any NLP Practitioner Training will show you a whole number of techniques for changing beliefs, letting go of limiting beliefs and installing empowering one.

Using these NLP processes you can ensure that the goals you set and the New Year Resolutions that you take on are meaningful and that you will succeed. But the real power for making big sweeping changes to your life comes from NLP Coaching Systems.

NLP BreakThrough Coaching Process

Many coaches are also NLP Practitioners and they have integrated some powerful tools into their coaching practice. But there are a few very skilled Hypnosis and NLP Trainers that have developed the NLP BreakThrough Coaching Process that can help in making serious and deep changes in a person’s life.

This highly specialized NLP Coaching process starts by examining your goals, expectations, unconscious behaviors and repeat patterns of behaviour. Through this we can determine the key limiting beliefs and negative emotions that will let you really achieve anything you want. Then through systematic Interventions you can let go of the past and embrace powerful new ways of being. The whole process usually takes as little as three or four hours. Many people that are serious about their goals and achievements have taken this route to success.

When you think about how you and the people around you set their New Year Resolutions you might be considering doing things differently. A little imagination and creative thought might give you the opportunity to achieve more in the next twelve months than you have in the last twelve years. How much of a result would that be for you?

Throughout your life, you may have unknowingly built up barriers in your brain. It is these barriers that tend to hold you back from success. NLP can help you overcome these barriers by retraining your brain.

A good NLP Coach will use a number of techniques on themselves and with their clients to get results fast. This article demonstrates the use of a great NLP coach and the techniques they use.

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.