Examples of NLP in Practice

NLP can be used everyday in practical situations – at work creating rapport with clients, in personal development by creating healthy relationships, in sales by getting a better understanding of customers issues and showing confidence. There are so many areas of life that can benefit with NLP, So I have outlined some of these below.

Business

NLP is widely respected by leading employers and has found its way discretely into many courses on presentations, planning, sales and team building, often without being credited by name. Why not study the ideas and techniques behind such training, and at the same time learn how you can apply them to whatever set of business activities you choose.

You can use NLP to:

Create rapport with customers, partners and staff
Align work with values to build motivation and loyalty among customers and staff
Set clear, practical outcomes
Plan effectively
Detect people’s decision making strategies
Improve your skills in public speaking and presentations

Personal Development

In personal development, NLP is an ideal way to address a personal issue, or build strengths in both familiar and unfamiliar areas. NLP offers a cognitive framework, a supportive environment and practical tools that can help you in many ways.

You can use NLP to help:

Resolve anxiety and negative feelings or habits
Create healthy relationships
Have more influence over change in your life
Communicate in a variety of contexts with diverse people
Bring out the qualities of the individuals around you
Develop realizable plans

HR and Training

More and more organisations today are recognising the added value that NLP brings to a variety of business activities. Whether in increased sales, improved customer or staff relationships or better communication (internal and external), NLP can help you bring these about, using practical, tested tools.

NLP will help you to:

Add depth to your training by working on beliefs as well as behaviours
Get the most out of your investment by making learning sustainable
Access powerful techniques for bringing about change
Provide practical ways for your people to achieve peak performance
Enable your people to communicate more effectively and persuasively
Learn coaching methodologies

Sales

NLP and Sales have a natural fit. Learning NLP tools will give you more influence, and more understanding of what motivates people to say “yes.”

NLP will help you to:

Understand customers’ listening styles and adapt to them
Use persuasion techniques ethically
Spot these techniques if they are being used unethically by others
Embed confidence when facing challenging sales situations such as a ‘big pitch’
Deal positively with the rejection that is a natural part of the sales process.

Management and Leadership

NLP is widely used in management training and coaching. It is clear and practical, focusing on outcomes and results rather than requiring people to master complex
theories.

NLP will help you to:

Get on the same wavelength as staff
Understand people’s communication styles and adapt to them
Set clear, reachable targets
Build, maintain and motivate teams
Understand your own values and priorities, in and beyond the workplace
Learn practical methods of using values for self-motivation & the motivation of others

Teaching

If you’re in the teaching profession you already value and have developed the ability to impart information so that people learn. NLP will help you build these skills even further. Outside the profession, many of us are involved in helping others learn. Assisting a colleague or employee to take on a new task, raising children and making presentations are all forms of teaching, and NLP will develop your skills there, too.

NLP will help you to:

Identify people’s natural learning styles
Develop your flexibility in presentation
Lead learners to the best state of mind to absorb and assimilate information
Overcome blocks to learning
Make learning easier and faster via presuppositions and language patterns

Coaching

Our trainer is the author of How to Coach With NLP, published by Pearson in 2010. Many coach-training programmes borrow from NLP or use it as a base, and our courses attract many coaches seeking to deepen their understanding of their profession.

They find that the presuppositions of NLP integrate into the belief system that works well to create effective, caring coaches.

Another key feature of NLP is the principle of transferring skills into different contexts. Great coaches are able to create trust and relationship with their clients, yet often find it difficult to market themselves. How can approaches which are effective in one context be transferred to those which seem more of a struggle?

Coaches have told us that they’ve found NLP useful in many ways, such as:

Understanding and communicating non-verbally
Noticing and utilising language patterns
Developing rapport and creating an atmosphere of possibility
Creating change rapidly and elegantly
Using the tools and techniques of NLP in a coaching environment

Coaching skills are also increasing valued within organisations and many managers are expected to play a coaching role as part of their job. Our NLP Practitioner Course provides a supportive environment in which to learn core coaching competencies.

Entrepreneurship

NLP can provide valuable tools to help face the challenges of starting, running, and perhaps eventually selling a business.

You can use NLP to:

Overcome unhelpful beliefs about risk and luck
Examine fears about leaving conventional employment and going it alone
Build and readily access your capacity to generate new ideas
Create and use a full entrepreneurial ‘skill-set’
Ensure that your priorities and those of your business don’t trip each other up
Clarify and stick to your long-term strategy
Create and stick to tactical plans
Finish the job; too many start-ups start well but fade away

Health

Mainstream medicine is becoming increasingly positive about the link between thought, behaviour and health. Numerous studies show behaviours like eating patterns, emotional reactions like anger and thinking patterns like pessimism have been shown to directly affect health. That is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.

You can use the tools that NLP provides to change the thinking patterns and the behaviours that they initiate to improve the health of yourself and others. Whether you’re a health professional or simply want to improve the way your health impacts your life, NLP has a great deal to offer.

NLP will help you to:

Lower general levels of stress
Plan for a healthier life and stick to that plan
Manage your mental state: learn to enter relaxed mental states that aid recovery and to react differently to stressful situations
Change unhelpful beliefs about body shape and other inherited conditions
Change habits and behaviours that damage your health into ones that sustain it

The Charity Sector

NLP School values the work of not-for profit organisations and offers a 20% discount to registered charities. The challenges facing organisations today are also keenly felt in the third sector. NLP has valuable tools to use with all of your stakeholders. We are the leading NLP provider to this sector and have significant experience of presenting relevant content to organisations ranging from the British Red Cross, Cancer Research and WaterAid through to Youth Net and Girlguiding UK.

Use NLP for:

Psychological techniques to encourage active fundraising
Management and leadership tools utilising a shared ‘vision’
Rapid stress releasing techniques that are used widely for distressed clients
Conflict resolution
Powerful coaching and therapy models

Consulting

Neuro-linguistic programming is the study of human excellence, with a focus on communication and change – fundamentals of effective consulting. NLP is also ideal for project management.

NLP can help you to:

Hone your coaching skills; many consultants are studying NLP to broaden their offering to clients
Extend your existing range of influence and deepen your connection with clients and colleagues
Communicate more effectively and persuasively as you influence and support individuals, groups or organisations.
Build rapport and help people solve problems, develop strategy and creativity.
Create outcomes which have the maximum chance of success
Generate business from existing clients and referrals

Marketing

NLP looks at human behaviour, our own as well as others, and from a marketing and advertising perspective gives a wealth of NLP tools to use.

Conversely, if you’d like to avoid getting your own buttons “pushed” without your consent, you need to know where they are.

NLP can help you with:

The language of influence – learn language patterns that reach out
Avoid pitfalls – maintaining integrity, and communicating in a way that fits you
Manage your state during important meeting, presentations and pitches
Embedded Commands – get your audience to subconsciously agree to and consciously act upon commands you can use in your advertising, conversations, or correspondence.
Adapt to different contexts, individuals and audiences – including hostile ones
Learn how to model success

Redundancy

If you’ve been made redundant or are considering taking voluntary redundancy, then our NLP training has the benefits of teaching useful new skills as well as providing an extended and inexpensive period of support during this transition.

Although it was your work role that was made redundant, people often feel that their very identity has been significant eroded. In NLP we use many powerful processes to overcome these negative ideas to ignite a new and lasting sense of hope. If you’re looking for a new role.

NLP will help you:

Perform at your best in interviews.
Boost your confidence.
Improve your influencing skills.
Obtain coaching to identify new goals and opportunities.
Overcome any negative feelings associated with the redundancy
Work with a supportive group over a number of months to allow new ideas and opportunities to germinate and flower.

Sports

NLP is now part of many professional coaching regimes. Whether you’re a professional athlete, an occasional amateur, a team coach or just a coach to your kids, NLP can help you improve performance and also get greater enjoyment from sport.

You can use NLP to:

Manage mental states and access ‘the zone’
Set and meet performance goals
Change self-limiting beliefs about performance
Model and learn from leaders in the field
Rehearse skills and performances mentally
Believe that every bad scenario can be overturned; the difference between fighting on and throwing in the towel