Coaching with NLP For Dummies®

Chapter 16

Turning Time to Your Advantage

In This Chapter

• Understanding your relationship with time
• Playing with time lines
• Cleaning up negative experiences
• Creating an exciting future

Are you the kind of person for whom whole days or weeks drift by, or do you like to account for every minute in your schedule and book yourself solid without wasting a minute? Does time sit heavily on your shoulders or slip through your fingers like sand?

You constantly make choices about how you spend your time and how you relate to it: the hours you spend in one place compared to another, the moments you spend with one person compared to someone else. Becoming aware of how your approach to time differs from other people is interesting. For example, if you've faced a life-threatening experience, you may find each moment more precious than those around you.

When you first begin coaching others, you may be surprised at how time takes on a different dimension. You're working with the arc of time that spans from the start of a coaching conversation, through the coaching itself and into the conclusion. Substantial change happens in minutes. Just a 30-minute telephone call can shift a client from chasing her tail in circles to contentedly knowing that she's arrived in a better place. Time invested by both parties in being fully present and attentive in the coaching space yields results.

People often ...