~ Article by DrL.Michael Hall and Shawn Dwyer ~
Finding, building, developing, and applying resources to a problem or the person is perhaps NLP’s par excellence contribution for creating solutions.
That makes it inherently a solution focus approach as a Meta-Coach. When you learn NLP, you learn from day one to begin asking the resource question, “What resource do you need so that you can handle that?” The resource question is built into the SCORE model- “R” in that model stands for resources. Resources is what enables a person to move from today to tomorrow.
What is a resource?
It could be something external- time, money, personnel, friends, network, books, library, a computer, iphone, and on and on. It could be something internal- an idea, a belief, a decision, an understanding, a strategy, a state, and on and on. The word itself, re-source, speaks about getting back to your source- what you’re about, what you’re trying to do, your purpose, your center. Whatever it is, a resource enables you to function more effectively and productively. You are able to achieve your goals, actualize your intentions, and take effective action.
Feeling Resourceful
For all of those reasons, we all want to feel resourceful- capable and able to do, to perform, to achieve what’s important to us. To feel unresourceful is to feel incapable, to be confused, to not know what to do, etc. Being unresourceful is a problem that needs solving. So often in co-creating a solution with a client- the objective is to enable the person to gain a sense of internal resourcefulness. And often that is a state- confident, resilient, persistent, courageous, loving, compassionate, firm, etc. To co-create solutions, ask about your client’s life. What are her hobbies, interests, strengths, talents, etc. What is he really good at?
Solution premise #5:
Solutions are built out of the resources people have within, therefore provides a basic solution orientation for you as a coach.
Help your client become resourceful. Accordingly, this is one of the first things that you will always want to check on and work on with your clients.
Is she resourceful? How resourceful? How much more resourceful does he need to be? What resources does she need? What’s preventing him from being resourceful?
People Have All The Resources They Need
An important implication from this premise is another basic NLP presupposition, namely, People have all the resources that they need. This does not mean that they have the skills, in fact, they do not. But they do have the basic ingredients for the required skills. What are these resources? This is a contribution that Neuro-Semantics has made and what you learned when you learned the Meta-States Model. We have identified them as the four basic powers (or responses): thinking, emoting, speaking, and acting. These form the internal structure of every skill on Planet Earth. From these arise all of the ways that we act to take effective action to achieve our objectives. From these arise our secondary powers- initiative, proactivity, responsibility, relating, creating, innovating, and on and on.
Four Responses
The essential resources that every client has begins with the four inescapable responses of thinking, emoting, speaking, and acting. And these can be put together to construct all sorts of strategies. Here the NLP Strategy Model and the advanced listening skill of listening, detecting, exploring, and eliciting strategies enables you as a coach to co-create with your client the customized strategy your client needs to achieve the realistic goals that he or she sets.
Strategies
Strategies speak about how a person has ordered his responses to achieve a particular state and/or behavior. If it doesn’t work, then the strategy- as a mental map- is inadequate and needs to be updated. If it works, but is inelegant, the strategy needs to be streamlined and made more elegant.
Here, as a co-creator with your client, you find out what strategies the person has and what strategies the person needs.
1. Do they need a decision-making strategy?
2. Do they need an inside-out persuasion strategy?
3. Do they need an inside-out wealth strategy?
4. Do they need a resilience strategy?
Whatever strategy they need, if the objective is realistic, actionable, and compelling, then you can coach your client to develop the strategy that will be the solution for their life situation. If the resource is a state, you can facilitate your client accessing, developing, and anchoring the best state for whatever task lies before them.
To co-create solutions with your clients, think of this as a formula:
Identify the situation, find gap between now and then, ask “What resource is needed?” access that resource, apply the resource.
In solution development you do not inherently need to know the person’s history. Where it came from is not a requirement of the resources needed to achieve one’s goals. As a solution focused Meta-Coach, you don’t need to know the why, you only needed to know the what and the how.
