Coaching Questions for Confidence Building

As an active NLP trainer and personal development performance coach, I often hear the phrase ‘lack of confidence’ from my students and clients.  I’m sure that you have heard the phrase many times too and perhaps used it yourself more times than you would care to admit.  What is this ‘confidence’ that we all value so highly as being party to our success? What does it mean for you (The Complex Equivalence in NLP language). Consider that for a moment, would you? How specifically do you map ‘confidence’ internally?

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Models of the world vary considerably from person to person and we all have a slightly different interpretation of confidence and what it means for our performance and capability. For example, when you think about the concept of being confident and how you map it in your mind, do you view it as a process or feel it as an emotion? There is no right and wrong answer to this question, however you map your confidence is perfect for you.

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As a coach, when you are supporting someone to increase or ‘get’ confidence, which often comes up during coaching conversations, the most important question you can ask them is, ‘How do you know when you lack confidence?’ The question is important because that is what they are doing right now and as their coach, it is useful to know how they are mapping ‘not confident’ in their mind so that you can guide them towards changing their internal processes and therefore create ‘confidence’. You can then guide your client to give you more detail about how they create ‘not confidence’ by asking this valuable question set:

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When you experience ‘not confidence’…

‘What do you feel inside?’

‘What does the physiology feel like?’  

‘What are you saying to yourself in your head?’  

‘What pictures do you have in your head?’  

‘Are there any sounds that are important?’

‘What emotions do you feel?’

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The answers to these questions will give you a crystal clear representation of how your client relates to and internally maps ‘lack of confidence’.

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The next key question to ask is ‘How do you know it’s time to feel lack of confidence?’ This question will give you the specific trigger, or set of triggers, that sets the client off doing their lack of confidence. A few well-constructed and carefully worded questions give you, the coach, valuable information that you can work with to help the client to resolve the problem and move their thinking towards confidence.

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To help you to move the client’s mental mapping, you can deploy new language patterns to change the client’s perceptions and view of their reality. In NLP, it is called reframing. Reframing is a linguistic tool used to break down rigid patterns of thinking and behaviour and make them more fluid and flexible, with more choice for the client. Everything we do in NLP Coaching is designed to increase choice and open up possibility and opportunity. When a client says that they lack confidence, then they are often stuck in a rigid loop of thinking which produces an undesirable set of behaviours and unacceptable performance levels.

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Here is a proven and widely successful general reframe for offering your client a new perspective, a new operational frame to address the presenting problem of ‘lack of confidence’. You can utilise the reframe within your coaching conversations. The reframe is elegantly enhanced with a healthy punctuation of quantum linguistics which you will learn as Master Practitioners of NLP:

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“Confidence is inextricably linked to familiarity.  The more we repeat or experience an action or an event, the more familiar we become and the more confidence we achieve.  This is how we create confidence now.  Accepting that this is true, then how can you be confident about something new, that you have never experienced before?  It’s OK not to be confident about something new because it is unfamiliar.  You know that the confidence will grow with familiarity, without you even having to think about being confident now.  Knowing that it is OK, how can you not not notice now how confident you are?”

(Note: The ‘not not’ statement is intentional and is taken from Quantum Linguistics, designed to confuse the conscious mind and destroy the linguistic boundaries that hold the problem in place.)

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Having the client think differently about lack of confidence is the first step to removing the issue completely.  As an NLP Master Coach, you can then move forward with your client and remove any limiting beliefs, values conflicts and negative emotions which you have discovered supporting the problem, during your questioning phase of your coaching model. An age old complaint, reframed and often removed in a few minutes, such is the power of NLP thinking, elegantly coupled with well-constructed language patterns.

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