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What is NLP?

Who uses it?

The Empowerment Model

The Coaching Model

Personal Development

Evolution

Transformation

What is Empowerment Coaching?

Who Benefits from Empowerment Coaching?

What is the Next Step?

What is Spiritual Direction?

What are Individual Empowerment Sessions?

Contact the Coach

 What is NLP? 

Differing Answers
Defining NLP is somewhat complicated. Years ago during my NLP learning process, we would play a game where each person would have to come up with two unique definitions of NLP a piece. We were often quite successful. There are several accuate defintions of NLP. Flexibility is key to understanding and using NLP. In order make changes a NLP practitioner looks for evidence of what is going on in the now. So rather than offer all of them here. I will offer one that works for me, and several uses for NLP.

Definition
NLP is Neuro-Linguistic Programming. A good working definition of NLP is the scientific study of how the brain codes learning and experience. The effect of this coding results in human communication and behavior. It shows how you learn, and how you experience the world. NLP can be used as a key to reaching goals and personal transformation. 
(For a very extensive definition from Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, click here)

Applications
NLP can literally be applied to any area of your life to maximize your personal and professional development. NLP helps modify and redesign thinking patterns and their resulting behaviors. Increased flexibility as well as, new capacities/abilities frequently result. As part of your coaching, I use NLP to clarify your dreams for the future; identify barriers that may be holding you back. Identify and even change the unwanted habits and behaviors that are standing in your way. Using NLP's ability to break down complex behaviors, you can understand your partner's, co-worker's, and children's needs and communication styles more fully. NLP integrates well with other psychological or even spiritual models enhancing their effectiveness, by making their operating parts more explicit.
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Who uses it?
People from all walks of life use NLP personally and professionally. For example:

Businesses can use NLP to improve sales & customer service results -- and to implement organizational change effectively. NLP provides cutting edge techniques to enhance communication and effectiveness between managers, customers, and administration.

Educators have used NLP to study children's verbal and nonverbal language. This makes it possible to train teachers to use children's learning strategies effectively. Frequently a love of learning results. As the pressure to show results in the classroom become increasingly intense, NLP skills are becoming far more useful in producing those results.

Coaches & Counselors use NLP to help clients become more functional in a shorter time frame. One of the most limited resources in our modern lifestyles is time. Limited time makes it crucial to achieve maximum results in the shortest time frame. NLP gives coaches fast access to people's strategies for accomplishment, and easy means for impacting it. Therapists use NLP to substantially impact long-standing defenses quickly, giving them broader access to deep levels of healing.

Medical and Dental Professionals use NLP language based skills to mitigate patients' fears and anxieties about procedures. This translates to higher client satisfaction.

What are the personal benefits?
Recognize how others are using language to influence you.
You'll find it easier to achieve your personal and professional goals, because you'll gain greater access to your internal resources.

Where can I go for more information / How do I get started?
There are several ways to experience NLP for yourself. Check out our store, for books and tapes on NLP.Click here to see specialized links.

Books and Tapes Selected best-selling books and audio and video tapes covering all aspects of NLP. Introduce yourself (or your colleague, friends, and family) to the life- and career-expanding possibilities of NLP at our Store.
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What is: The Empowerment Model

Developed by David Gershon and Gail Straub, the Empowerment Model is a comprehensive methodology for positively changing lives. It focuses on 7 key areas. The emotions, relationships, sexuality, the body, money, work and spirituality. The model emphasizes making a shift from a pathological worldview to a vision-based model. By defining a compelling vision, attention is shifted away from energy draining obstacles. Possibilities open up that were previously difficult to see. Powerful vision helps us fully engage all of our talents and abilities. To feel fully alive. The second large scale shift, from a static model of growth to an organic model. Modeling how nature accomplishes growth. Not digital, on and off like switching on the lights in your home. Either you have it or you don't, but modulated, unfolding through the best available resources at a given time. A full empowerment workshop, builds from the ground up, starting with the 5 key core beliefs, and the 7 elements of personal power. A four phase technique for manifestation completes the model.

The Gershon-Straub model has literally helped hundreds of people around the world to develop the lives they want to live.
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What is: The Coaching Model

I define coaching as helping people to be the best of who they are, and the most effective they can be, in the environments they choose. Primarily coaching is a means of getting people to take the actions necessary to make their dreams come true. This also involves helping clients to clear away obstacles in their way and release the tethers we use to hold ourselves to our pasts.

The coaching relationship differs from other kinds of relationships. The coach holds the clients goals as the only agenda. A coaching session is focused solely on the clients. Unlike friendships, relationships and family, there is no reciprocity. The coaching relationship differs from consulting. The coach does not have the answers, the client does. A coach's expertise is surfacing those answers. A coach does not focus on healing their clients emotional difficulties, the way a therapist might. Coaching assumes that a potential client is resourceful enough to set challenging goals and follow through with the action necessary to achieve them. A coach will not work with clients that are in need of emotional healing, unless they are working with a therapist in conjunction with their coaching.

Different schools of coaching have their own versions of the coaching model.
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Personal Growth or Development
Becoming better at what you do, improving your skills and increasing your capacity is personal development. Personal development happens over a continuum. Somewhat like a steady progression. The way wine gets better with age. This is the process of mastery.

Evolution
Personal Evolution a term coined by the master coach and trainer Thomas Leonard. His heirs own the trademark. Personal Evolution differs from personal growth in that evolving suggests moving spontaneously to a whole new level or playing field. Using a metaphor from the natural world, an infant develops into an adult. That is a different process from a one-celled animal evolving into a complex multi-celled one. There is no way an amoeba can develop into a crab. It has to become new in some way. So it is with personal evolution. We move directly to a new level of being. Combining the action orientation of the coaching model with the cutting edge technology of NLP, makes these kinds of evolutionary improvements probable. This opens the door to totally new ways of being.

Personal Transformation
Like the alchemist transforming lead into gold, or the caterpillar changing into a butterfly inside its cocoon, personal transformation is about taking a less valuable form and changing it into a different and more highly prized form. While personal growth maximizes an existing form. Evolution advances form in unexpected and exciting ways. Transformation is a more directive process that results in one form completely giving way to another. NLP is extremely useful as a change technology. When used in service of a finely crafted vision, via the Empowerment Model, old forms give way to new freer ones.
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What is: Empowerment Coaching

I developed my Empowerment Coaching by combining NLP with the coaching and Empowerment Models. Into that potent mix I draw from many other disciplines such as Gestalt Psychotherapy and motivational, spiritual and self-help therapies. The goal is to release to talents that all humans have within them, allowing that unstoppable force to generate extraordinary success.

All three conditions of change are actively triggered by empowerment coaching. The 3 processes support each other synergistically by developing new skills, enriched environments and a superior sense of well being. Developing without transforming will give you a better version of the same. If what you are looking for is change, transformation must occur. At the same time you cannot transform without having developed enough capacity to support transformation. Using the popular metaphor of caterpillar into butterfly. The caterpillar spends it's entire life storing enough energy into its cells enabling it make it's transformation. All through its life it grows larger increasing it's capacity to store the energy needed for transformation.

In nature evolution leads to variety in spontaneous ways. Evolution applied to coaching focuses on using environments to trigger growth. Personal growth without evolution quickly stagnates into a long, boring, arduous road. Transformation without evolution places the newly transformed into environments suited to old forms, a real mismatch. Through active experimentation and focus on maximizing environments, evolution paves the way for the newly transformed to thrive, rather than struggle. That's how you create a life that fits you like a glove. It's comprehensive, it's transformative and it's very very doable. Most of all the journey can be fun. Success is in the process. I know. I'm a coach. I guide you along this path.

Who Benefits From Coaching?
Solo-Professionals (An entrepreneur who owns their own one-person professional practice) and entrepreneurial professional services(professionals whose services operate like entrepreneurs) like: financial planners, attorneys, chiropractors, physicians, psychologists, real estate agents, social workers, dentists. Also, Entrepreneurs, Educators, Activists, and Visionaries

Among other individual concerns, empowerment coaching is used to:

• Learn to Treat Your Practice Like a Business, Rather Than a Hobby
• Go Beyond Direct Service: Writing, Teaching, Mentoring
• Build A Practice Based on Attraction and Quality Service
• Re-capture the Joy and Challenge of Their Dreams
• Develop and Follow a Business Plan and or a Marketing Plan
• Expand or Diversify Products for New Markets
• Respond to Changes in Professional Status or the Market Place
• Create a Satisfying Life, More Than Mere Affluence
  
• To move beyond everyday concerns to the next level . . .

What's the Next Step Beyond?

Sitting in a week long training with popular author and writer Caroline Myss, I had a revelation. As a writer, Ms Myss can easily articulate ideas that transform my tongue to blubber. She said that many people go to therapists to resolve things that are really spiritual issues. It was like a lighthouse being turned on inside my head. I had always felt that people frequently seek therapy when coaching might address their needs better. Now Ms Myss identified a powerful compliment to existing approaches. She said that what we really need are more spiritual directors.

What is: Spiritual Direction?
Spiritual direction is a discipline that serves as a container for developing a rich, full relationship with the divine. Direction oriented coaching helps the participant interpret reality from a spiritual perspective, illuminating the difference between feeling-good happiness, and value-based happiness. Value-based happiness is the definition meaning by the way. Spiritual direction offers an alternative to the structured obedience of organized religion. The work is aimed at answering the question, "Why am I here? What is my life purpose?" The answer to this question, helps remove us from the trap of the ego, and it's fear based suffering. Operating from our own mainstream, the nature of obstacles and problems are experienced from a healing context. It is much less about operating from any structured context, than it is about enjoying a strengthening bond between yourself and your spirit.

How Does Spiritual Direction Coaching Differ From Other Disciplines?
The answer to this question is most easily distinguished by looking at the differing goals of psychotherapy and coaching.

• Traditional psychotherapy helps answer the question, "Who am I?" The goal of most therapy is to strengthen the ego identity, and heal the sense of self as an individual. The result is increased effectiveness.
  
• The goal of most coaching is to improving skills and producing results. Coaching answers the question, "How can we get there from here? What is the best way?" The result is achievement.
  
• The goal of spiritual direction is to finding a way to live from your soul. Letting that which is the best of us, inform everything we do. The result is the ability live powerfully from purpose, with an open heart.
  
• The disciplines are mutually supportive of each other. Therapy healing the past. Coaching shaping the future. Spiritual direction opening the present and making it more available.

How Does Spiritual Direction Relate to The Empowerment Coaching Model?
Empowerment Coaching is designed to access development, evolution and transformation, for personal, life and business reasons. This makes Empowerment Coaching a perfect methodology for surfacing life purpose and making it the central guiding principle in business, work, and every aspect of life.

How is Spiritual Direction Delivered?
Spiritual Direction Coaching is delivered in a similar method to other coaching. Three 45 minute sessions per month. Assignments are given, that help the client delve into their own stories. Readings are assigned. Principles are discussed and addressed. Live sessions and workshops, and teleclasses are also available.

Contact the Coach to discuss how Spiritual Direction Can Help to:

• Have a greater sense of inner peace, security, & self-acceptance
• Choose to pursue grand vision of change and make it happen
• Discover and live your purpose
• Become more fearless, in the face of a dangerous world
• Develop a more compassionate way of being, in an increasingly coarse society
• Have greater meaning in your life
• To focus more on your family or your most important values
• Unleash the diva in you
• Embrace life, in a deep and fulfilling way

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Individual Empowerment Sessions
Coaching is based on developing a synergistic relationship moving effectively through time. The shortest recommended time period is 3 to 6 months. A sense of momentum is built up.

Sometimes people are ready to commit to long-term coaching. Other times when there is a very short term goal a couple of individual sessions are a better fit. The average number of live sessions is 3-4. There is a 7 consecutive session limit. These 90 minute solution-oriented sessions for individuals, clubs & groups, are focused on a specific outcome like:

• Having a personal breakthrough
• Overcoming a specific fear
• Brainstorming to build a compelling vision
• Reframing a limiting belief
• Managing internal success states
• Preparing for a specific situation like an interview, or a presentation
• Developing a quality like confidence, gentleness, or detachment

What Techniques Are Used During Live Sessions?

NLP
The Pure Empowerment Model
Core Transformation
Self Relations