Coaching with NLP For Dummies®

Chapter 13

Moving through Life's Disappointments

In This Chapter

• Staying confident regardless of external events
• Building personal resilience through tough times
• Detaching from the drama
• Extracting the good from loss

Disappointment is a fact of life. Disappointment has two parts: your subjective perceptions of an event where the outcome you wished for doesn't come true, and how you resolve it. Controlling events is impossible; managing your expectations and how you respond to events is more achievable.

If you look back over the last couple of months, you probably faced some disappointments, some minor, others more challenging. While writing this chapter, I was fortunate that the disappointments in my life were minor ones: the end of a lovely holiday, some lost documents, a bid for work that wasn't successful and a filling that came out of my tooth. (Warning: soft mints aren't soft at all.) All were easily repairable, and I moved on quickly.

Other situations that you face in life cause more trauma. Whether you encounter illness, divorce, financial problems, violence or death, you're very likely to experience strong feelings of loss or failure when things don't go as you planned or desired. How do you pick yourself up, take the lesson and move on? The obvious answer is to hire a coach to accompany you on the way!

In this chapter, you find out more about pacing clients through feelings of loss and failure without getting caught up in the drama of the situation yourself. You also ...