Life Coaches Blog

There’s a presupposition in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) that goes:

You Already Have All The Resources You Need, Or You Can Create Them.

You have all the resources you need inside you to make any kind of change in your life. The internal building blocks that successful people use to create their lives are the same building blocks you possess, it’s only a matter of method.

When you look through the NLP presuppositions there is one major thread running through them. Sample a couple:

The meaning of your communication is the response you get.

There is no failure, only feedback.

So what is this major thread, if it isn’t already obvious?

You are responsible. You are at cause.

If there is one major stumbling block I’ve seen in people’s self-growth, it’s the belief that they are not at cause. That they cannot possibly hope to change this problem they have created and need an external agent to change.

It’s the old, ‘if only I had this, then that’ problem again. As human beings, we seem to have this need to pin our hopes on the next ‘miracle man’ or ‘miracle cure’, it’s easier to believe that something outside of ourselves will help us effect a change rather than taking the harder road to admit everything in our lives, good or bad, is here now and we’ve had a hand in every single bit of it.

But by admitting your power in creating your life’s problems, or your responses to these problems (because as you make life happen, life happens back), you also admit your power to uncreate your own creations.

At the same time, you lose the bullshit that says it was because that person, technique, skill, seminar didn’t work that you didn’t change. Uh uh. You didn’t change because you didn’t change, not because someone else failed to make you change.

And that’s the reason why, if you’ve ever coached with us or been coached by us, you’ll understand why we insist that we never make anyone change, and neither should you. The worst thing a coach could ever do is to make someone feel that they’ve changed because of the coach, that way the coach is responsible and they are not. In other words, coaching that way has taken away the person’s sense of personal power.

Whereas a responsible coach will never take away power, but give it. Our job is not to make people feel like they’ve changed because of us, but they’ve changed because of themselves. Instead of putting the cause on us, we give them back the sense of cause on them.

This takes skill

The thing is, techniques, skills and knowledge are definitely essential. But if you do not have the first belief that you are at cause, and you are already powerful enough to change the cause and thus the effects, you’ll be chasing the end of the rainbow your whole life. Especially in a junk-food culture where everyone wants to promise that you can have it all in 3 easy steps. The truth is that growth, like always, takes time. There are no 3 quick easy steps to a bountiful harvest.

Change and life happens here and now, and there is no quick-fix, there is no permanent change, because as you change, life is changing, and changing with change is the only constant.

Now, is any of all this I said so far true?

I won’t guarantee an absolute.

But think about the effect of taking on this belief. That instead of believing that someone or something outside of you can be responsible for your change, that instead of chasing that next elusive something that will ‘change it all’, you recognize that you already have the power to change yourself, that you are at cause, and then finding out how to help make that change easier, faster and more effectively (maybe even more fun) will be a welcome add-on, not a crutch without which you are helpless upon.

You choose. You are at cause, after all.

Update: Thanks to a timely reminder from my fellow coach Paiboon, I’ve updated the presupposition to its entirety:

You Already Have All The Resources You Need, Or You Can Create Them.

It turns out you either already have all the resources you need, or you can create them, or you can forget them and have the resources outside you remind you ;P