Neuro-Coaching

Lately, I come across a lot of people questioning me on neuro-coaching.

I am a Neuro-Leadership & Business Coach.  

What does it mean?  

How is it effective?  

How do you do it?  

How is it different than other forms of coaching?  

Do you really think, people will opt for this kind of coaching?

The term neuro-coaching refers to brain based coaching interventions that helps modern day CEOs, entrepreneurs and founders to take up challenges and overcome limitations much more easily.

The word neuro refers to the neurological processes:  the interaction between the nervous system and the brain.  

This is followed by more another questions:  

How do you coach the brain?  

How can you not acknowledge emotions and feelings that comes up in the mind?

Does this deal with sub-conscious & conscious minds?

My answer to these is:  Neuro coaching is a potential differentiator.  It is a deeper form of coaching.  This major involves neuro-coaches to understand the functionalities of the human mind and its workings.  It is a form of cognitive science.  And cognitive science is the study of thought, learning and mental organization.  

Neuro-coaching, therefore, is a term that focuses on removing you as a blocker to your own success.  Plenty of times, it becomes important for executives take important decisions.  It may be that due to some past experiences in almost similar situations, a lot of bad residue stays on in our minds.  In that case, making a quick decision or taking a faster action becomes a little more challenging so as not to repeat the same mistake twice.  This affects the efficiency and effectiveness of leadership at the time of urgent need.

Therefore, in this article, I would like to point out few things you need to know as how neuro-coaching can assist you:

1. Time is of essence.  Attention to detail is equally important.  Professionals are very busy bodies.  If scientifically delivered, neuro-coaching can help you to take a faster step towards considering what works best in a particular situation.  This can be in terms of delivery methods, timings, stickiness of content and spacing of interventions.   What do you mean by spacing?  Spacing is a term that is used by your mind to identify or prioritize your roles and responsibilities in a mental map.  This is how you perceive how close or far an object of interest is in your life.  You define how much of your attention span it needs to fulfill your obligations.  You also analyze as to how much time it will take you to complete that task - 1 week, 1 month, 6 months or 2 years.  Neuro-coaching, hence, helps you build some traction.
2. Traction in neuro-coaching refers to the form and format of the interventions that are attempting to work on you and how they get your time and attention.  This means, that you have to assess what holds maximum impact for you.  For example, some people need a face to face level of interaction.  They are ready to pay a higher cost for this.  Only in this way can they give you their time and attention. The traction here comes from the time slot. Other people want shorter, more frequent interventions.  These can be done using mediums such as  SMS, email or video.
3. Awareness of self.  An awareness of your knowledge, skills and the gaps to optimal performance is often insufficient.  In order to succeed, you have to learn and retain new knowledge and skills.  Neuro-coaching can help you unblock or enable the moment.  It helps you to increase your intelligence, to learn new skills, which enables you to be optimally effective in all levels of your business effectiveness. 
4. Coaching is about change.  Neuro-coaching is about working with the brain's malleability and rewiring it.  This helps you to accept the nature of change internally; which helps you to start thinking and taking actions differently and achieve your goals.  When your goals are achieved, this results in Success.
5. Mindfulness.   Mind is a section in your brain.  Brain is a muscle.  Therefore, mindfulness is about exercising your muscle of focus and attention.  Neuro-coaching challenges your existing flow of thoughts, habits and emotions which directly define your current behavioral patterns.
6. Emotions.   All your memories contain emotions.  All of your experiences - be they good or bad contain emotions. Neuro-coaching helps you to become more self aware by disallowing these emotions to hijack your decision making and reason making abilities powers.
7. Energy in terms of Motivation and Will power.  Your body is not a machine and you are not a robot.  Your body is composed of biological matter and requires sufficient intake of food, water and rest to sustain its daily functions.  When you are stressed, you tend to run out of energy, which could have had otherwise be invested into thinking.  Neuro-coaching helps you to de-stress and boosts your confidence levels.  This helps you to have a positive and productive mind frame around you, thus, increasing your productivity levels.
8. Self - efficacy is the measure of your beliefs.  In work, this belief is your ability to achieve goals and targets.  The higher your sense of self-efficacy, the greater your ability to do better in business due to increased self-belief. Here, neuro-coaching empowers you to give you the tools to work on yourself and your own abilities. This empowerment increases your own beliefs.

To summarize:

Neuro-coaching involves -

1. The first step in engaging with neuro-coaching is understanding and increased belief in its potential effectiveness. 
2. The second step is to get a sense of the value to be gained in improving your leadership skills. Try mapping your skill set to an ideal leadership skill set. 
3. The third step is to do something about it and close your gaps.

Neuro-coaching is derived from applied neurosciences and organizational neurosciences.  This is an emerging field that has more of a human touch to the field of coaching as compared with other coaching streams.

As everyone has to take a decision at some point in their lives, neuro-coaching assists in removing personal limitations to achieve professional excellence.

Article contributed by experiences of our Entrenador Shruti, a Neuro-Leadership & Business Coach