Coaching with NLP For Dummies®

Dramatising What You Hear

An insurance company had an advertising slogan: ‘We won't make a drama out of a crisis.’ This is a good slogan for your coaching sessions too!

When you dramatise, you shift into the realm of entertainment through action and excitement that's engaging. If you become really animated and entertained by the drama, then unconsciously, your client takes on the message that the coach wants to be entertained by one crisis after another. He'll get into the habit of bringing drama to coaching to entertain you further, so the coach becomes part of the problem.

Drama is an act that masks the deeper and more important issues. It's fun, but ultimately, it's a distraction. As with storytelling, you can find yourself caught up in the drama of your clients' lives where the emphasis is on all the buzz of interesting characters and their activities.

Your clients need to step from acting into the directing roles, finding the perspective to recognise ‘What are the underlying patterns here?’ and ‘What is the movie I really want to create for my life?’ NLP offers various tools for clients to step back and look impartially at their lives, including time lines (see Chapter 16) and perceptual positions (refer to Chapter 12).