Episode 2 - A Deeper Dive Into Coaching vs Mentoring and How NLP Fits Within These

In this episode, executive coaches Kylie Roberts and Mel Wombwell of SHIFT unlimited explore the concepts of coaching and mentoring, discussing how they differ from each other.  

They define coaching as being question driven and more transformative, focusing on unlocking potential through personal introspection. Mentoring, on the other hand, is portrayed as a wisdom-sharing endeavor, typically guided by more experienced individuals.  

The duo also introduce Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) as an essential toolkit in coaching and mentoring, focusing on its role in assisting understanding of language patterns and behaviours.  

Tune in to this weeks episode to hear Kylie and Mel discuss how NLP can enhance relationships, communication and personal understanding, thereby empowering individuals and businesses. 

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00:00 Introduction to SHIFT unlimited and the New Normal 

00:26 The Shift in Leadership and Business 

01:16 Exploring the Concept of Coaching 

03:24 The Impact of Coaching on Personal Lives 

03:50 Understanding the Difference between Coaching and Mentoring 

04:58 Introduction to Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) 

08:12 The Origins and Attitudes of NLP 

10:33 How NLP Supports Coaching 

13:40 Conclusion: The Power of Coaching, Mentoring, and NLP

Please find all images mentioned in this episode available HERE

Transcript

0:00

Hi, I'm Kylie Roberts and I'm Mel Womwell, and we are Shift Unlimited. We are both qualified executive coaches, coach supervisors, and trainers of NLP and coaching. The world is a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous place. Every day we wake up to a new surprise. Uncertainty is chronic. Instability is permanent. And disruption is common. This is the new normal. The game has changed. It's time to rip up the old rulebook. It's time to define success differently. A shift is happening. The shift is unlimited. We need leaders to live more purposeful lives and to lead more impactful businesses. In this podcast series, we will be doing a deeper dive into many facets of living and leading in this modern world from founder to scale up right through to leaders of global established organizations. We will explore how we can be more holistic and authentic as we connect more deeply with ourselves, our relationships with others, and the wider world. In this podcast series, we'll engage in conversation together on topics that support the modern leader. We have one wild, precious life to make change for good. And whilst change is daunting, so is staying the same. Let's begin. In this podcast, we will do a deeper dive into what coaching is and how it differs from mentoring and the various tools, techniques, and capabilities that underpin it, which we will also be covering in podcasts later in this series. So this podcast is a deeper dive into coaching versus mentoring and how NLP fits within these. So let's start first of all with the question that many leaders ask, what is the difference between coaching and mentoring? So specifically, let's start first with coaching. So we believe coaching or a coaching approach is one of the greatest and most transformative of leadership behaviors. So we can use coaching to liberate others to think broader and deeper about key aspects of leadership. what they're working on. So it's a really important part of empowering or being an empowered leader. It's changed a lot in the last decade even in the way it's defined. Now we have some more specific definitions. So coaching either as a professional coach, which is, of course, what you and I are, Kylie, or as leader, as coach, is about being question led rather than solution read. So it's about asking questions to unlock the answers in someone else. It's creating a creative space for people to think for themselves about an issue or challenge. And it's really key to getting this agility and dynamic culture that is so important today. In a such a competitive environment. So Sir John Whitmore, who's one of the founders of coaching said, coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximize their own performance, helping them to learn rather than teaching them. So coaching can transform our beliefs. Our attitudes, behaviors can change people's lives for the better. We've experienced it firsthand in our own lives. My life has been transformed through coaching. My beliefs, my behavior has been completely transformed through coaching. What would you add to that, Kylie? I wholeheartedly agree with the fact that my life has been transformed through coaching as well. And I feel very privileged to be a coach too. And there is a difference between coaching and mentoring. They used to be used interchangeably. But mentoring is more about a leader who has been there and done that. So a little bit like a wise sage. Not always having done the same role that you're doing, but someone who's more experienced and can offer advice and guidance and share stories and experience that might shape the decisions that you then make. So the challenge with mentoring at the moment is that because of the six disruptors that we mentioned in the previous podcast, because we live in a VUCA world, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world, some of the solutions that worked yesterday won't work today. So the wise sage who might have a lot of experience to share around their past, their history, and what worked for them may not actually work for the person that they're mentoring. Should we explore NLP and how that fits within it? Because some people are quite aware of NLP, other people it might be a brand new concept for them. I think there are two definitions of NLP that we use, Kylie, when we're asked about it. Should we just talk about those two? Yeah yeah, there are two. And the first definition of NLP that you and I use, Mel, is, follows the acronym NLP. So the N is neuro. It's our nervous system. It's how our nervous system gathers information from the world through our five senses and make sense of the world through our five senses. That's the neuro. Linguistic, the L. Linguistic is the language, the communication, but also the non verbal communication as well, through which we process information. So we can make pictures in our heads, or we can feel feelings in our belly, we can smell, we can taste, we can self talk. All of these things we use. It's linguistically to make sense of the world and also to communicate with others. And the P The NLP, the P, is programming. This refers to the habits, the routines that we have programmed into us, usually from birth, but also the strategies that we develop as we experience life, and they then become our habits. and our routines. So NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming. There's a second definition. Do you want to share that one now? Yes. Yes, absolutely. So the second definition describes NLP as an attitude and methodology that leaves behind a trail of techniques like the technique of unconscious rapport. Or a technique called reframing. So the three main attitudes that we talk about for NLP are having an attitude of curiosity, real childlike curiosity, being really open so that if something new comes into our world, we almost explore it like a child. It's lovely seeing the way children explore things that are new to them. I've certainly got a brand new grandson and watching him as he explores things that I've taken for granted for many, many years is really refreshing and is an embodiment of the attitude of child like curiosity. The next one is wanton experimentation. So this willingness to give things a go and do them badly before we can do them well, rather than deciding they just won't work for us. So the third one is acting as if that's acting. If we, as if we know it's going to work. So quite often we can literally talk ourselves out of things or talk ourselves into doing something badly. So it won't work. This is an attitude where we're acting as if it's true, acting as if it will work, so that we give it a go, a real opportunity to work. So those are the three attitudes in the second definition. And not many people are aware of the origin of NLP. Should we talk a bit about that, Mel? Would you like to share? Yes. So I certainly first heard about NLP, it would be about, I'm going to show my age now, about 30 years ago when I had delivered a presentation so badly that I started with an audience of 70 people and ended up with an audience of three. And I decided that if I wanted to have the career I'd chosen, I needed to improve somewhat. And so I went and saw someone who I held in very high esteem and said, can you please help me? And he said, you need to put yourself on an NLP program. And I said, tell me more about it. And he shared about the research that had been done in the 1970s about two people doing their doctorates. A gentleman called Bandler and another one called. Brinda. So as part of their PhD, they were looking for examples of incredible changemakers, people who had the ability to work with people who were totally stuck and help them move from their stuck place to a much more empowered place. So they found three people that they particularly wanted to model. And modeling means understand the language they use, the behavior you use, the thinking they're doing that enables them to be the transformational people that they are. And they spent their time modeling a gentleman called Milton Erickson a lady called Virginia Satir and another gentleman called Fitz Perls. And they were recognized in the area of transformational therapy. So all of them great change makers in their field. And what they discovered was that all of these three exceptional transformational people held these attitudes that we've just talked about in NLP, that they held the attitude of every person who came to see them. They had a real childlike curiosity around how do they do what they do, rather than just assuming that they knew what they were doing. So that's just an example of the kind of things they were looking for. And the kind of. Modeling they were doing to understand how transformative these people were. So NLP is based on their, their research for their PhD. It's very interesting. You might be wondering as a listener, like what on earth this has got to do with coaching. So how does NLP support with coaching? NLP is a, as Mel said in the second definition, it's a series of practices and techniques that we can apply. It enables us to build a lot more rapport with people and rapport can be supernatural with some people, but it can feel really stilted with others. I don't know if you've ever felt just completely at ease with somebody you're meeting for the first time. And then on the other hand, you felt completely at odds with somebody that you're meeting for the first time. The practices of NLP can really support you to build great rapport in both of those examples there. You can have a better understanding of how you make meaning of the world, and then also how Others make meaning of the world. And when you have a better understanding of how others make meaning of the world, we can speak their language. We can speak in a way that they hear and build influence and rapport with in that sense as well. We can create a lot less judgment and we can be in a lot more service. of the person that we're speaking with. NLP helps us to get below the surface of things as well. So quite often we take for granted just what we see and what we hear. But there's an awful lot going on beneath what people are saying and what they're showing us. So it does help us really understand what's going on beneath the surface of things. people to uncover their own deeper structures of what's happening beneath the surface. It also is just a really great myriad of tools and techniques that just, we can put in our coaching toolkit that, We can call upon if we've got a conversation with somebody in our team as a leader, or perhaps somebody that we're coaching that is stuck and we can call on these tools and techniques to really help them become unstuck and liberated. What have you got to add to what I've just shared there Mel? I think one of the things that really helped me in terms of NLP in my coaching was the understanding of language. So in NLP, there's quite an in depth exploration of language and the structure of language and it helped me see when I was talking with someone beyond the content to maybe some of the language they were using and how that might be holding some of their beliefs that weren't working for them and how they might be stuck. So the linguistic patterns are really good to understand and then it means we can relate and connect but see below the surface of what our clients or team leaders or teams are saying to us so that we can really get to the heart of the issue. And we have so much more to share on that in future episodes. In this episode we've been exploring the definition of coaching, mentoring, The difference between the two with coaching being question led and mentoring being more experience led and then NLP in a bit more detail and how NLP sits so nicely with coaching and enables us to really build an expansive toolkit of coaching.

mel_9_01-22-2024_165044: 14:16

Thank you very much for your time today.