The concept of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is several decades old, but it has gained momentum among the corporate and business industry recently. It is a set of tools and techniques that help people contemplate the potential of their minds and achieve their goals subsequently. When you go through your executive coaching under the guidance of an NLP coach, you learn to understand how a client thinks and can use that knowledge/deduction as leverage to get the desired outcome.

There are some key Neuro-Linguistic Programming principles that an executive coach applies to build a rapport with clients through powerful questioning, exploring the obstacles in achieving professional goals, and supporting to remove these obstacles.

Different NLP Principles that Can be Applied to Executive Coaching:

First Principle

The first principle of NLP is known as the Subjectivity Principle -every one builds their roadmaps of reality. These roadmaps or worldviews are filtered and influenced by our perceptions, beliefs, experiences, and neurology. Most of the challenges we face are based on our perceptions.

We produce subjective representations of what we experience in our daily lives, and these representations consist of five senses and language.

Whenever we recall an event or anticipate the future, we see images, hear sounds, taste flavors, feel tactile sensations, smell odors, and think in some language. Our behavior can be described and comprehended in terms of sense-based subjective representations. By working on them, these representations can be modified.

Second Principle

The second principle of NLP states that the subjective representation of our experiences can be differentiated by structure or pattern. Therefore, sometimes, NLP also refers to the study of the structure of subjective experience. Every person in this world arranges experiences in a specific pattern in their mind that determines what those experiences actually mean to them and how it affects them in the present moment.

By integrating this principle into executive coaching, an NLP coach can help clients understand how they perceive their beliefs and values, how they create their emotional states and internal world, and how to give it a meaning.

Third Principle

If a person can do something, another person can also learn how to do it. That’s the principle of learning. This principle takes you back to how NLP was created. It shows you that excellence and achievement have a structure that can be imitated. In other words, when people utilize their brains in the same way as successful people, they can also generate similar results.

In this principle, NLP makes use of an imitative method of learning, called modeling, that enable you to codify and reproduce exemplary expertise in any field.

Fourth Principle

This principle states that our mind and body are part of the same system. If people change their body language, then they can also change their feelings and abilities.

For instance, if a person changes to posture, expression, and breathing patterns, he/she can improve the way he/she feels and thinks.

Fifth Principle

In this world, every individual has the resources they need or can obtain them. You can think of an image, a sound, or a feeling as a resource. People can easily imagine pictures in their minds, and those pictures can be transformed into great visions that assist and guide them. People can recall memory, transfer the feeling to the present, and use it as needed.

By integrating the basics and principles of NLP, one can bring speed, rapport, trust, appreciation of uniqueness, and pragmatic approach to executive coaching.