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NLP and Coaching - Lindsay West

Coaching - Discussion between Michael Beale and Lindsay West, November 2007.

I am Lindsay West and I am an executive and career coach, a management skills trainer and mentor to business owners. I run my own practice LWCS and am a founder director of London Coaching Associates.

http://www.ppimk.com/nlp-podcast/Lindsay.mp3 

Michael : Good afternoon Lindsay, if I could firstly really thank you for taking part in this conversation, and if we could kick it off by you giving a brief introduction to yourself and what you do.

Lindsay : Yes, certainly. My name's Lindsay West and I have a coaching and training practice, LWCS. I'm also the director and founder of another company London Coaching Associates. I offer coaching services to individuals to help and support them in achieving their personal goals whether they're to do with their home lives, in their relationships, or to do with their career.

I also do training and management skills and things like stress management and time management. And also a mentoring service to small business owners. So that's pretty much what I do on a day to day basis.

Michael : And what experience of NLP do you have?

Lindsay : I'm a master NLP practitioner, I trained with yourself at PPI. I've been using NLP in my coaching techniques for over three years now. I also use NLP myself to help me overcome my problems, achieve my goals and keep a positive state.

Michael : And generally, how do you think it's helped you?

Lindsay : Well it's helped me myself in a lot of ways. I do use NLP techniques myself on a day to day basis, and in terms of my coaching practice I use NLP techniques to support my clients - for example helping them to change their state or their attitude. Helping them in solving problems, overcoming limiting beliefs, things like that - and visualising their ideal life.

Michael : Can you just expand on one of those and fill it out a bit?

Lindsay : Yes sure. One of the sessions that I run with one of my clients is looking at their ideal life - to help them look forward to the kind of lifestyle, including home, work or career, that they want to have. So we look at their outcome, we look at the goals that lead to that outcome, and we visualise that, and use we use sensory acuity, and use the senses to make that picture as real as possible.

And then I combine that with a backward timeline to help them work out what they need to be doing differently and what steps they need to take to make that happen.

Michael : And what sort of response do you get from your clients?

Lindsay : Very positive indeed. All the clients I've used it with have found it very, very helpful. It gives them a real good picture of where they want to get to and makes that goal really realistic to them and and makes it very real I think.

Michael : Taking a sort of wider picture of NLP and maybe looking at yourself - if I was to pick three areas which is - 'building in your current career.', 'expanding your current career.' or 'enable you to move into different things' - which of those segments do you think it's helped you with?

Lindsay : Certainly building my current career. The NLP techniques that I use are in combination with my coaching skills. They help my clients to make small changes very quickly and that has a very big difference, makes a very positive impact to their lives.

So my clients come back for more, and they also recommend me to other people. So it certainly helped me to build my coaching practice because I keep my clients for long periods of time and I'm constantly getting new clients so it's really helped with building my coaching practice.

Michael : Looking at things other than NLP, what else do you think has helped you become successful in running a coaching practice?

Lindsay :  Well certainly the coaching training that I did has been hugely beneficial. Also having contact with other coaches and having their support has been very helpful.
Working as a team with London Coaching Associates I work closely with three other coaches, so we're there to share our resources and our skills and support each other.

Feedback from clients as well is really important. You can understand what benefit they're getting out of it and things that haven't helped them much and you can adjust that for future clients.

Michael : Looking back to the NLP side, what advice would you give to anybody thinking of starting NLP training?

Lindsay : I would say definitely do the practitioner training course. People talk to me about NLP and say 'Oh I've read a book on it' or 'I've read some information off the web on it and I was quite interested.' But until you really start using the techniques in a safe and supported environment as you would on a training course, you really don't get the experience of NLP.

So I would say definitely do the practitioner training. Actually using the NLP techniques and also having people use them on you, that's really important too - so you can feel what it's like to have those techniques and the different aspects of NLP working on you so that you can see what that means for a client and the massive impact it can have on you.

Michael : And what advice would you give someone that's just finished their NLP training?

Lindsay : I think that the most important thing is to use the techniques and to use NLP in terms of your own language and your attitudes and so on, as much as possible. It's like anything really, if you don't use it there's a tendency to loose it. So I would say definitely practice as much as possible. Definitely make it part of your every day language, you're everyday way of doing things. And use techniques in whatever aspect of your life it's appropriate. So definitely use is as much as possible to keep the skills.

Michael : And before I ask you for your contact details so that anybody that wants to can contact you - is there anything else that you'd say as far as NLP or coaching, for anybody that's looking at these sorts of fields?

Lindsay : Well I've certainly found it a very rewarding career both using coaching and NLP, because of the benefits you see in other people.

My previous career was in bank and finance, and while I thoroughly enjoyed the job I had, it didn't personally give me the reward I get from having a coaching practice.
So I would say to look at what's important to you and what you want to get out of a career and go with that - and I think for me, coaching and using NLP has given me that.

Michael : Excellent. And your contact details?

Lindsay : My contact details - my website is  www.lwcs.co.uk my email address is lindsaywest@lwcs.co.uk my telephone contact details are 02083731127 and my mobile 07795975980.
And my other company address is www.londoncoachingassociates.com 

Michael : Excellent, thank you very much indeed

Lindsay : Thank you very much Michael.