Institute courses are developed to maximise your learning experience. Your course is self paced and extremely flexible in the range. This means you can easily fit your studies around your lifestyle, allowing you to accelerate through your course or progress at a moderate pace. Regardless of how fast you choose to progress with your studies, you will have the full academic and administrative support of your Local Student Fulfilment Centre.

As one of Australia’s leading Life Coaching training providers you are assured that your course curriculum is of world leading standard and will equip you with the knowledge and skills you require to practice as a professional Life Coach.

The Institute’s academic team is there to assist you with your studies from enrolment to graduation. The comprehensive academic support systems have been designed to make your studies as enjoyable and enriching as possible. Some of the support services you will enjoy include:

1. Access to local Student Fulfilment Centres and specialist support in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth and assessment supervisors in Hobart, Darwin, Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast.
2. Cleverly written, purposefully designed and easy to understand learning materials that include individual workbooks, unique industry specific coaching case studies, practitioner tools and worksheets and fully referenced and categorised books of readings that represent over 55 leading coaching texts.
3. A dedicated national Study Assistance Hotline that puts you in direct contact with a team of accredited Coaching Advisers who are on hand Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm (EST) to support and guide you on your way to the successful completion of your coaching qualification.
4. A comprehensive and easy to navigate virtual campus on the web gives you the option to submit assessment via e-mail, access practical workshop timetables for each state, contact your coaching advisers to ask a question and network with other students through the community forum.
5. Weekly FREE Tele-Classes allow you to be part of an interactive study group which focuses on particular units of the course. Each week you can listen in and interact with your accredited coaching advisor and fellow students as you learn how to apply the knowledge, skills and coaching expertise presented within the course.
6. There is also a series of required 2 day Skills Workshops that allow you to apply, practice and refine your newly formed coaching skills under the guidance and expertise of an experienced Life Coach. These workshops are conducted in a class room setting with a small group of fellow students. Your confidence will grow as well as your skills and coaching know-how as you move through each training session.
7. You can also elect to be a part of an active student network where you can communicate via phone or e-mail with other local students and become part of an active study group or form a study partnership with someone you connect with.

For more information, visit www.lcia.com.au/lz.

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a popular theory used in the world of coaching. It focuses on how people perceive and make meaning of their world and works with these perceptions to help people understand and make changes to the way they perceive their world.

In this article, we explore some techniques used by NLP practitioners.

Rapport

As many of the current theoretical models advocate, rapport is an essential ingredient in building the relationship between coach and client. Within the theory of NLP, it too states that rapport is essential to any successful communication including the coaching environment and that it is one of the three essential elements for creating change (Collingwood & Collingwood, 2001).

Rapport, in NLP, is developed through the use of a number of aspects including:

1. Matching the representation systems.
2. Matching body rapport including posture, breathing, gestures and eye blink rate.
3. Matching voice rapport including tone/pitch, volume, timbre/resonance, speed and intonation pattern.

Read through the following and have a go at the exercise in your own time.

Practising Rapport: “To practise rapport building, matching another person’s non-verbal signals; the rate and rhythm of their movements, the rate of their breathing, the rate of blinking their eyes, and the postures they assume. If they do something which would be uncomfortable for you, match it by doing something else in the same rhythm. This is called cross pacing.

When non-verbal signals are relatively easy to match, turn your attention to their voice. Match the relative pitch between theirs and yours; match the rhythm and speed of speech, the resonance and the intonation patterns” (Collingwood and Collingwood, 2001).

Reframing

Reframing is a technique used in NLP to consider a situation or conflict from another perspective to bring about change. For example, Kelly has just separated from her husband of ten years and is feeling uncertain about her future. A reframe of this situation could be that Kelly can now go out and investigate what she likes and focus on herself for a while.

There are numerous techniques used by NLP practitioners working with clients to reframe a situation. We will now investigate one such reframing technique.

Reframing With Two or More Parts: This technique is used when two or more parts are in conflict with each other. For example, work versus leisure. It investigates the intent of each part (ie. Work pays my bills which makes me happy vs. leisure time make me happy) and invites them to work towards the same intent (makes me happy) to lessen the inner conflict (ie. I have to work to pay my bills so I can enjoy my leisure time and this makes me happy).

Let us investigate the steps that can be applied to coaching (adapted from Collingwood & Collingwood, 2001). There is an example of the steps on the script below.

1. Externalise each part that has an interest in the conflict. This can be by imagining each part outside yourself, see a representation of the part, hear it as a voice, or feel it outside your body. See the diagram to the right for a visual representation. Refer to lines 9 to 12 in the script.
2. Assume each part has a positive intention, purpose or function for its behaviour. Invite each part to state its intention both to conscious awareness and to the other part/s involved. This can be done by expressing the intent as images, in words or in feelings. For example, the intent of work is to earn money. The intent of leisure is to have fun. Refer to lines 13 to 14 of the script below.
3. If the intents of the parts seem incompatible, investigate the intents further (ie. the intent of the intent of the intent) until coming to a mutually compatible intent. For example, the intent of work is to earn money to pay my bills so that I can live comfortably and have leisure time which makes me happy. The intent of leisure is to have fun to make me happy.
4. Now ask the parts if they would prefer to integrate with each other to become one composite part or if they would prefer to work together in mutual cooperation. Acknowledge the responses and ask them to wait until you invite them to proceed. Refer to lines 21 to 22 of the script.
5. Turn your attention inward and ask yourself if there are any objections or concerns in relation to integrating the parts. For example, how do I feel about these parts working together or becoming one? If there are objections, use the same process to establish intent and do not proceed until all objections are clarified (ie. go back to step 2). Refer to lines 23 to 24 of the script.
6. Invite the parts to either integrate with each other to become one composite part or work together in mutual cooperation (depending on what was decided in Step 5). The diagram shows a visual representation of this step. Refer to lines 25 to 26 of the script.
7. Now ask the new super part to integrate back into your body and spread evenly through all your physical and personal space. See the diagram for a visual representation. Refer to lines 27 to 28 of the script.
8. Now imagine being in a similar situation where the conflict had arisen before and ask yourself the following questions: How is it different? Is it more comfortable, resourceful and useful? Refer to lines 29 to 30 of the script.

Adapted from: Collingwood, J., & Collingwood, C. (2001). The NLP Field Guide. Double Bay, NSW: Emergent Publications.

Transcript

The transcript begins as a normal coaching session with the coach working towards establishing rapport with the client through matching voice and body movements.

Coach: Hello (name), welcome to your first coaching session. What brings you to my office today?

Client: Well, I’m just so frustrated with work at the moment.

Coach: Mm-hmm.

Client: I’m just sick of having to go to work… I just got back from holidays and it was great not to have to worry about anything and just have a great time.

Coach: So, you feeling frustrated with work and you’d rather be on holidays.

Client: Yes, that’s correct.

Coach: I’d like to do an activity with you to look at the situation at hand. Would that be ok with you?

Client: Yes that’s fine.

STEP 1

Coach: Let’s get started. Firstly I want you to externalise each part- one for work and one for leisure. I would like you to imagine the parts outside of your body as a representation.

Client: (Imagining that one side they see the word “work” and on the other side “leisure”).

Coach: How did you go with that?

Client: (using hands to explain the process) Great, I am visualising the word “work” on my left side and “leisure” to my right.

STEP 2

Coach: Now what I’d like you to do is to assume each part- work and leisure- has a positive intention. It is important for each intention to be positive so that we can move forwards. State each intention out loud for me.

Client: Ok… The intention for work is to pay my bills. The intention for holidays is to have fun.

STEP 3

Coach: Great… Let’s look at the intention of work for a moment… to pay your bills. What is the intent of paying your bills?

Client: So that I can afford to live comfortably and take holidays.

Coach: And what is the intent of you being able to live comfortably and take holidays?

Client: To make me happy.

Coach: Let us take a look at your holiday intent… What is the intent of having fun?

Client: I guess it is to make me happy also.

STEP 4

Coach: Excellent, so both underlying intents are to make you happy! Now for each part, ask them if they would like to integrate with one another or whether you would like them to work separately in mutual cooperation.

Client: They would like to integrate to become one.

STEP 5

Coach: Ok, now what I want to do to is ask yourself how you feel about the two parts becoming one. Are there any concerns or objections that you might have?

Client: (thinking) No, I am ok with that.

STEP 6

Coach: Now I would like you to visualise these two parts coming together in front of you.

Client: (thinking)

STEP 7

Coach: (pause whilst client is thinking) Once you have done that, I want you to visualise bringing this one super part back into your body spreading throughout your personal and physical space.

Client: (thinking)

STEP 8

Coach: (pause whilst client is thinking) I want to take you back to the thought of preferring to be on holidays and not going to work. How do you feel now?

Client: I feel ok with going to work because that will lead to my happiness.

References

• Collingwood, J., & Collingwood, C. (2001). The NLP Field Guide. Double Bay, NSW: Emergent Publications.

Source: www.counsellingacademy.com.au

Your client approaches you with the following question: “I’ve just been promoted but I don’t have a clue how to manage people. How do I start to do learn what I need to do?” Master Coach Terry Neal answers…

In this situation your client may have come to you with a feeling of panic or at the very least feeling “ill at ease” with the thought of being a manager of people. They may have never been in a working situation where they had to interact constantly with their fellow employees face to face (for example, they may have been an “on the road” representative for a company visiting and staying in contact with their customers sometimes face-to-face, but mostly over the phone and/or via email).

They may also have been working in the same office each day and have gone from being one of the staff to being the manager for a section of the company. Also, they may have come from an entirely different organisation to work for this new company and this is a promotion for them.

Whatever direction they’ve come from, it would be useful for the coach to know this background information in order to assess the client’s current knowledge and skillset against their needs.

Exercises

A suggestion is to start by helping the client to determine the details of their role in this management position. Ask them to describe their new role in as much detail as possible. Through your questioning and summarising you can help your client first to have a clear picture of their new role within the company.

You could also ask if they’ve had any management experience in any area they were involved in the past, whether in business or otherwise e.g. community organisations, sporting clubs and so forth. This could help tease out where they may have utilised management skills before - and what they could transfer to their current position.

Then you could ask questions such as pertaining to the number of people they have to manage and their individual details (their names, location, working area within the organisation, networks or communication circles they belong to within the workplace, experience levels, time working in the company and so forth). This allows your client to assess how well they know the people they are now being asked to manage and where the gaps are in this knowledge.

From this information gathering from questions about themselves and the people they will be managing, you could suggest that they set up a meeting with these people ideally individually as soon as possible.

Now this may or may not be logistically easy but remind your client that they need to give these people an opportunity to meet with you face-to-face to talk about their new working relationship and to get to know each other for the first time in some cases.

To assist your client to understand how this initial meeting could be structured, ask your client to imagine themselves as an employee who is going to be introduced to their manager for the first time. Ask your client to consider such questions as: What would you like your manager to ask you as an employee? What types of things would you like to say to your manager? How would you like your manager to act towards you? Where do you think such a meeting should take place?

So as their coach, you have started to assist them in a number of ways. You have:

1. Helped them to identify questions that could be asked as well as reminding them to allow time for each employee to talk about what they feel they need to talk with you about. This could be done by asking the question: Is there anything that you’d like to talk about with me?
2. Identified appropriate time and venue for such meetings.
3. Initiated a process of building up confidence in your client through suggesting some concrete steps as well as helping them to be aware of skills and abilities that they may have already developed, which they had not been aware of or which they hadn’t thought they could transfer to this new situation.
4. Reminded your client that both they and the people whom they are now managing will possibly take some time to feel comfortable enough to talk openly and honestly with each other. The relationship here will take time to develop.

Having worked with your client to create a ‘first meeting’ plan, encourage them once again to set up these meetings with staff on a one-to-one basis. Other meetings may have to be in groups due to the numbers of staff but if this one can be individual, it could potentially provide your client with much more relevant information about the group they’re managing as a whole.

Over time you may need to be a sounding board for your client to help them assess their progress in their techniques of managing people and to suggest some next steps in their learning. For example, you could suggest that they contact someone who your client knows, who’s been in a management role and who is willing to be a support person for your client; in other words a mentor.

You could also suggest networking with other managers in similar fields of work, management courses, management journals, seminars and informal gatherings of those who are in a similar role to your client. There are loads of useful articles and information readily accessible over the web.

Through activities suggested above, over time your client will potentially begin to feel more confident and skilled in the management of people.

Your client is in a relationship but has doubts about the validity of his emotions. He asks you the following question: How do I know if I really love my partner? As his coach, what would you do? Master Coach Terry Neal answers…

Initial Questioning

A client with this question needs to be treated sensitively. The client may be in a position of concern about ‘what is love really’ which may have come from comparing themselves in their relationship with other couples that they know personally or have observed in recent times.

Their concern may also have come from reading, hearing about or seeing reports on celebrity couples who are quite often held up in the media to every possible scrutiny and public comment by those who claim to ‘know’ what is and isn’t “real love” in a couple relationship.

On the other hand, your client may be asking this question because he is feeling that the fire or spark that may have been in the relationship in earlier times now seems to have diminished or even disappeared.

The feeling that they may now have towards their partner may not have much or any resemblance to the feeling that they experienced in earlier stages of the relationship.

Initially, you would need to let your client talk about what they see as the core of this questioning. Through careful listening, you will be able to begin to determine some important aspects of their relationship at this time and why they have come to you for coaching.

Perhaps they’re in a relatively newly-committed relationship that has begun to settle into the daily routine (that’s part of most relationships at some stage) or perhaps they and/or their partner have talked about commitment and living together and your client is wondering about their current feelings towards their partner (and whether this will be enough to make this move and to support them in the next stage of their relationship).

Thus, sensitive questioning will help you to establish where the relationship is according to your client and some of the challenges that it’s bringing.

Strategies

Now, if you realise that issues were raised through the initial questioning stage which need to be addressed by a relationship counsellor, then you would be ethically bound to let your client know this (and therefore you will need to talk with your client about a referral to such a practitioner).

However, if you believe that your client is wondering in general about whether they really love their partner, you could begin by asking them to write down what they think and/or feel are the qualities that express love in a couple relationship.

Ask them not to limit themselves with or judge the expressions they write on this list: ask them to write down as many qualities as they can think of, including those they’ve heard others say to be such expressions. This list could consist of actions, words, thoughts, feelings… whatever they feel or think constitutes an expression of love.

Next, ask them to indicate which qualities they consider to be the most important expressions of love in a relationship. Finally, ask the client to indicate the qualities they are expressing or doing now within their current relationship.

Encourage your client to look at the complete list, particularly noting those that they’ve indicated as important in general and especially those that they use now as expressions of love towards their partner.

You could then follow the creation of this list with questions like:

• What do you notice about your list of qualities in general?
• What is the correlation between the expressions you’ve considered to be important and those that you actually express now?
• How do you feel about this correlation?
• What aspects (if any) of your expressions of love that you already use now towards your partner would you like to change?
• What would you like to include from the larger overall list?

Once again, sensitivity would be required as your client could start to make negative comparisons about themselves through how they currently express love towards their partner by comparing themselves with their ideal list.

However, there are three things you could do to alleviate this comparison:

1. You could remind your client that the list of the expressions of love came from them and so this means that they do have the awareness of what love and its expression can look and feel like. If they reply that they were just saying what they’ve heard others say to be expressions of love, suggest that this is OK as initially you asked them to list as many as they could think of or felt were expressions and not whether they would use them.
2. You could ask them if there are any qualities in the most important list that are ’shoulds’ for them ie: “I should express this or feel like this”.
3. You could also suggest some web research about love and relationships from reputable sources that present a ‘down-to-earth’ approach e.g. Relationships Australia, Counselling Connection Blog (www.counsellingconnection.com), etc.

By the end of the session, your client may at least have a more positive perspective around the qualities of love that they already express and can be supported to see that they are perhaps already expressing some or many of those qualities that they regard as important to their partner.

Further sessions with you may assist in highlighting those expressions of love that your client may choose to include and express within their relationship.

One of the main reasons small businesses, coaches included, fail to maximise their potential, is that they do not focus on selling. Small business operators by nature are technicians.

This practice is obviously counter productive to success. If you can not effectively sell your service, you’ll have little to no clients to deliver your service to. It’s similarly counter-intuitive to believe that high technical competence will underpin sales.

If you have few clients, and provide them the best service available, your business will still only grow organically at best. And besides, your clients have little to no ability to discern good technical competence from excellent technical competence. The effective marketer will ALWAYS outperform, in multiples, the technician.

Why selling effectively is crucial?

We often talk leverage. In business, how you leverage each function of your business will differentiate whether you just scrape by or make massive profits. If you can make an advertisement generate 100 leads instead of 20; get clients to purchase 5 times per year instead of 3; upsell clients to a $3,000 ‘package’ instead of the standard $1,500 offer; develop a referral process that generates 1.5 new clients per client.

These are examples of leverage. And this is where massive hidden profits exist in your business. How well you leverage your sales is critical to your success.

Advertising and marketing is one of the biggest cost bases in small business. The money you spend to acquire new clients directly impacts your bottom line profit. If it costs you $1,000 to acquire to new client worth $1,500, you make $500 bottom line profit. If you can reduce the cost to acquire that client from $1,000 to $500, you have effectively DOUBLED your bottom line net profit.

If you extrapolate that across your business you can effectively double your net income almost immediately. You can easily move from $30,000 income, to $60,000, to $100,000. Simply by improving this one stage in your sales process. This is the power and importance of selling.

One of the most important steps in effectively selling your coaching services and products involves building value. Once you’ve identified your prospects buying criteria through the qualifying phase, you need to build value into your proposition.

There are several ways to build value, including:

Quantifying cost/pain of NOT buying. Humans are a bazaar species. They’ll often go years and years in discomfort without seeking a simple solution. It’s likely your prospects have experienced the same problems and challenges, which you can assist them overcome, for a significant time.
 
This means they can survive without your service. It also means they’re well aware of the cost of NOT finding a solution. To make survival easier, people diminish the extremity of the problem or push it into their subconscious. You need to bring it abruptly into consciousness. You need to attach an emotional and financial value on it.

Theory of Contrast. Once you’ve brought your prospects challenges into their consciousness you can contrast the cost/ pain of not having it solved, with that of solving it.

Social Proof. You can build value in a very leveraged way by showing that your prospects peers (and particularly authority figures) are already using your service.

Focus on benefits. When building value it’s important to focus on benefits rather than features. Your prospects invest in, and emotionally attach to, the benefits of your service, not its features. As such you must communicate to them in terms of benefits.

Authority. When you establish yourself as an authority in your niche, rapport is a natural side affect. It’s like social osmosis.

Provide Proof. Where possible provide evidence that your service delivers value. This can be provided by detailed testimonials, data, reports, etc. Use this information in a manner that supports your claims and relates directly to the core benefits desired by your prospects.