Teaching, coaching, mentoring and instructing: similar but different. These roles and methods are often used interchangeably and may shift during our interactions depending on what serves you best at any given moment.
Understanding the Different Approaches
Teaching
Teaching focuses on helping an individual learn the basic concepts and key points to perform a certain process, technique, method or subject. Teaching is given in an environment that allows the student to make mistakes and learn from trial and error in a relatively safe environment. A teacher is essentially someone who shares knowledge (though they may or may not have experienced it firsthand) but has an in-depth knowledge of the subject.
Coaching
Coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them. Part of this works with helping people to learn to silence that inner voice, allowing for instincts and subconsciousness to guide oneself. The coach's role is to help the practitioner adjust his or her performance based on the situation and improve efficiency.
Mentoring
Mentoring focuses on the individual and his or her path for fulfillment. As people become more mature and get more experience, they will rethink their goals for the future. The role of the Mentor is to help create a picture of the future and a path to get there, encouraging people to talk about their personal values, find emotional balance, and find meaning in life.
Instructing
The subtle difference between "teach" and "instruct" is that you can teach almost anything: concepts, ideas, theories or history. When you instruct someone, you're giving them a set of tools or tasks to do something specific. Example: A martial arts instructor vs a history teacher.
What is NLP?
Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a powerful approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy. It provides tools to understand how we think, communicate, and behave, and most importantly, how to change patterns that don't serve us.
Neuro
Referring to the mind, brain and neuro pathways, particularly regarding how states of mind (and body) affect communication and behavior. NLP teaches a structural way of viewing mind and body states, developing mental maps that show how things happen and how to change course.
Linguistic
Our mind and body states are revealed in our language and non-verbal communication. Language is the tool we use to gain access to the inner workings of the mind. By understanding and shifting language patterns, we can access and reprogram our thought processes.
Programming
This refers to the capacity to change our mind and body states. Someone trained in NLP knows how programs are structured in the mind and how to access them through conversation so that outdated programs and autopilot behaviors can be changed.
NLP for Fitness, Motivation & Positive Change
NLP for fitness, positive change and motivation is highly effective. It's a set of guiding principles, attitudes and techniques about real-life behavior.
NLP allows you to change, adopt or eliminate behaviors as you desire. It also gives you the ability to choose your mental, emotional, and physical states of wellbeing. It's a powerful tool you can use to create real and lasting change in your mental and physical wellbeing.
By becoming aware of any limiting beliefs you may hold and identifying them, you will be able to act on and change those beliefs, creating new ways of thinking which empower you.
"Coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them."
Applications of Coaching & NLP
In essence, NLP can help you become more aware of, and manage your thinking, feelings, speech, and behaviors in a way that serves you best and optimizes your lifestyle in all your activities. Just a few of the many ways coaching and NLP can be applied toward positive lifestyle changes:
Goal Setting & Achievement
Develop clear, compelling goals and create actionable pathways to achieve them. Understand what's truly driving you and align your actions with your deepest values.
Developing Motivation
Discover and cultivate intrinsic motivation that doesn't fade. Learn to access resourceful states on demand and maintain momentum through challenges.
Removing Obstacles
Identify and dissolve the mental and emotional blocks holding you back. Whether conscious or subconscious, obstacles can be understood and overcome.
Breaking Old Habits
Self-discipline comes from understanding behavior patterns. Break old habits that don't serve you and establish new, healthy ones that become automatic.
Eliminating Negative Emotions
Release negative emotions that impede progress: fear, anxiety, anger, guilt, or sadness that keeps you stuck. Create emotional freedom and resilience.
Building Self-Image
Develop a better self-image and unshakeable confidence. Change how you perceive yourself and watch how that transforms your actions and results.
Overcoming Plateaus
Break through physical and mental plateaus that have kept you stuck. Sometimes the barrier isn't physical. It's the story you're telling yourself.
Peak Performance
Access flow states and peak performance on demand. Athletes, executives, and high performers use these techniques to consistently perform at their best. Also see martial arts training for physical discipline.
Hypnotherapy Integration
By applying hypnotherapy to create a heightened state of concentration and focused attention, we create a powerful asset to access unconscious resources. This creates a deeper state of relaxation and allows individuals to utilize the power of the subconscious mind to bring about a positive state and eliminate obstacles.
"Hypnosis is a purely natural state that can offer direct access to the subconscious mind, where our learned behavior pattern-making systems reside."
By accessing the subconscious mind, we can start to change the default switch from old patterns that don't serve us, to new ones that do. Hypnotherapy is particularly effective for:
- Developing a better self-image
- Increasing motivation to workout
- Becoming more disciplined in eating healthier
- Overcoming physical and mental plateaus
- Setting and achieving goals
- Managing stress and anxiety
- Breaking unwanted habits
- Improving sleep quality
Mind-Body Integration
True transformation happens when we address both mind and body together. Physical training combined with mindset work creates lasting change that neither can achieve alone. Many clients integrate NLP coaching with personal training or yoga therapy.
Whether you're working on fitness goals, recovering from injury, or seeking personal growth, the mental component is often what makes the difference between temporary results and permanent transformation.
Sessions can integrate physical movement with coaching conversations, or focus purely on the mental and emotional aspects, whatever serves your goals best.
