5 Ways NLP Transforms Women’s Confidence, Health, and Wellness
How I use NLP to help women shift limiting beliefs, support hormonal balance, and reclaim vitality
NLP gives women tools to bridge the gap between their minds and body and create holistic wellness
“Most people are prisoners of their own brains. It's as if they are chained to the last seat of the bus and someone else is driving. I want you to learn how to drive your own bus.” - Richard Bandler, co-founder of Neurolinguistic Programming
Introduction: NLP and Taking Charge of My Life
I discovered Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) at a turning point in my life. I was emerging from a six year journey with Lyme disease and re-examining how I wanted to live and what I wanted at age 30. At the right moment, an ex-boyfriend gave me a book called “Transforming Your Self” that explained how to shift self-concept from an NLP perspective. Coming out of a dark period where I believed “I am sick,” I realized that I could shift to “I am healthy” and even “I am attractive.”
NLP has often been called “the study of subjective experience” by its founders, Bandler and Grinder. On a practical level, it’s an approach to understanding how we construct our experiences and learn from them - and how we can reconstruct those experiences like a movie editor when they don’t serve us.
Around the time I discovered NLP, I was starting a business as a Women’s Wellness Coach with a focus on hormonal wellness, and realizing that most women needed more than a new food and exercise routine. While high protein breakfasts and micronutrients have their role to play, most women I worked with needed to peel back their words and mental patterns and realize how they were contributing to where they were stuck in their lives.
Over the past couple years, I’ve been using NLP to do just that and want to share the five most powerful ways NLP has helped me boost my work as a wellness coach.
#1. Getting Clear on What You Want:
Because of its origins in linguistics, NLP has taught me how to zero in on vague or distorted language like someone panning for gold.
I listen especially for phrases like “I should” or “I have to” to hear what demands women put on themselves and words like “attractive” or “healthy” that are so full of societal meaning, we often forget to define what they mean to us. Each client conversation is a verbal striptease, where we peel back layers of assumptions, beliefs, and stories to get to the bare truth of what she herself wants.
The guiding concept I use to help women define their target state is the well-formed outcome. A well-formed outcome goes beyond a SMART goal, because it emphasizes a goal that is not only clear and measurable, but one can be described in sensory terms - how a woman will look, feel, and behave when she reaches it - and will integrate into the rest of her life.
Generally, this is the most crucial part of a session: when a woman has locked in on her outcome and is describing what it will feel like to reach it, and I see her eyes light up and her energy rise.
#2. Retraining Your Immune System
One of the earliest successes of NLP was the fast phobia cure (FPC), which allowed practitioners to help people resolve phobias within minutes rather than months. Well-known Coach Robert Dilts extended this idea further to create an NLP Allergy Process, after a conversation with a biologist who remarked that allergies are like “phobias of the immune system.”
I’ve used this technique multiple times for clients struggling with food sensitivities or environmental allergies and have found it shockingly effective. A few weeks back, I checked in on a family member who had struggled for years with a chocolate sensitivity to see how the technique worked for him. Within minutes he replied: “I’ve had two chocolate desserts this past week. So far so good!!” (Note: I haven’t used it for anaphylactic allergies, due to the high risk)
The NLP Allergy Process showcases one of the greatest superpowers of NLP: It’s so fast and subtle, it often makes people incredulous. For women who have struggled with food or environmental sensitivities for years, it can be a godsend.
#3. Upgrading Limiting Beliefs
In my first few months of working with women who came to me for hormonal challenges, it became clear that limiting beliefs were the biggest block for most of my clients.
One client in particular struggled with gut challenges and we quickly identified the pattern that she felt great on vacation and with friends and only had gut issues while eating at work. Her issues had nothing to do with food, but with her beliefs about her capabilities and ability to handle stress at work. Underlying everything was a giant belief of “I’m not capable” that created a persistent knot in her gut.
Using the Reimprinting Process, we were able to identify the situation when she first formed the belief and explore new ways to view the situation. The knot in her gut released, and with it the worst of her symptoms eased, and we were finally able to help her move forward with confidence.
Belief work has been one of the most crucial parts of my work because beliefs hold the framework of my client’s lives in place. Beliefs like, “If I don’t make my husband happy, I’m not a good wife” or “I’m not attractive” or “It’s not safe to be attractive” often run in the background of their minds, steering behavior in unexpected ways. Once we shift the underlying programs, many of their behaviors change on their own.
#4. Discovering Your Best Strategies
Often, women I work with are successful in many areas of their lives. They may run their own companies, be talented dancers or artists, or have any number of successes behind them.
From an NLP perspective, that means we’re never starting from scratch. If they’re struggling to cook or speak their truth, we look for other areas of their life where they’ve embodied the skills they need without realizing it. For example, a woman who is able to paint and improvise art may not realize she can take these skills into the kitchen to improvise creative meals; a woman who’s able to own a meeting with authority may not realize that she can take this authority home with her to her family.
Unlike most types of therapy, NLP doesn’t focus on pathologies or categorizing illness - it focuses on modeling successful strategies and behaviors.
#5. Honoring Positive Intentions
In any sort of wellness work, knowing why someone does what they do is crucial. After all, most women reaching for ice cream, alcohol, or their instagram feed are really trying to satisfy basic needs for things like comfort, social connection, or calmness.
A basic tenet of NLP is that behind every behavior is a positive intention. When you know what positive need you’re trying to satisfy with a piece of cake, an hour of Netflix, or even by yelling at someone else, you’re able to find a better way to satisfy that need. The founders of NLP created an elegant process for this called Six-step Reframing, which guides someone into internal exploration to find out what positive intentions their serving and what other behaviors they could replace it with.
This process helped a client recognize that the job she “stayed at even though she hated it” was keeping her safe and comfortable from having to venture out and risk failure at something she cared about. It’s helped me realize that I tend to reach for sugar when I’m bored and want to distract myself, and that a better substitute is to make tea and read or go for a quick run.
Just believing that everything you do is, in some way, intended to serve your own good is already a powerful shift.
Conclusion
Once you see your thoughts and habits this way, it’s like finding the steering wheel of your own bus. The question is, where do you want to drive it?
