LETTER
Your articles on neuroscience and NLP in the September/October issue (vol 7, issue 5) had my neural pathways lighting up and making connections! Drawing on NLP as a fundamental part of my coaching practice I found Trish Riddell’s article on research into aspects of NLP thought-provoking.
First for its content, but second for making me curious as to why there is no systematic or comprehensive research into how and why NLP works.
I’d be intrigued to know what other practitioners believe to be the reasons for this. Is it partly because there is just so much to it, in both its range and depth? If you take one of the subjects Trish highlighted, Rapport, the research she identified examined merely two small aspects of this: language style and body language matching.
It would be fascinating also to investigate the impact of eye movement and eye contact levels, breathing depth and pace or physical distance, not to mention voice pitch and pace, values and beliefs, and so on.
My own experience is that the deepest rapport comes from a positive intention to serve the best interests of your client and that you start to mirror each other’s body language as a result of this. Mimicry can, in fact, destroy rapport and trust as it smacks of manipulation.
I wonder if there is a difference in brain activity, in both coach and client, depending where the matching comes from – physical imitation or a deep connection – and whether the impact is identifiable or measurable?
I do hope that neuroscience will look deeply into NLP to provide scientific reasoning as to why and how it works, reinforcing its credibility and answering those who criticise its lack of evidence. I’m looking forward to further research and more articles on the subject.
Caroline Talbott, coach, consultant and leadership developer (caroline@carolinetalbott.com)
Volume 7, issue 6