Coaching with NLP For Dummies®

Developing a Unified Identity

While this chapter's preceding sections focus on recognising the various parts of people's personalities, this section examines ways to shift to a sense of wholeness at an identity level – ways to integrate all those disparate bits and quirks to establish a unified person.

As you go through the following sections, consider situations where you sense tension, perhaps even in your own life. You may sense conflicting roles, values that are hard to honour and unhelpful ways of behaving. For example, you may have a client who talks about a problem behaviour that conflicts with a better one, such as smoking conflicting with healthy eating. Or you may experience role conflict, such as when a client is someone's manager as well as his personal friend.

Integrating conflicting parts

NLP assumes that all behaviour has a positive intent, so when working on behavioural change, you must recognise the positive side of the things you want to change. Parts integration activities work by honouring and keeping the positives and finding the common ground between separate parts.

The following parts integration exercise adds insight for the client who has two or more parts that are in conflict with each other. It involves chunking up each part to a higher level of positive ...