There is a particular kind of stubbornness that comes from having learned something powerful.
You have done the training. You have felt the shift. You have sat in a room where real change happened in real time and you have thought, quietly but with some conviction, that you know enough to go and do this now.
And so you go. Alone. Because you have what you need. Because the next step feels obvious. Because you are ready.
I know this feeling well. I lived it for the better part of a year.
This article is about what that year actually looked like, what it cost me, and what I learned that no mastermind, no speaking course, and no amount of business strategy could have taught me on its own.
What I Was Trying to Build
After my first NLP practitioner training in September 2022, I set out to build a coaching business focused on the chronically ill.
Not broadly. Specifically. People living with long-term health conditions, many of them on benefits, who had been told in various ways by various systems that healing, progress, and a life they actually wanted were not particularly available to them.
I knew that audience intimately. I am chronically ill myself. I have cystic fibrosis and live with type-related diabetes. I understand, from the inside, what it is to navigate a world that was not built for your body or your energy levels. And I genuinely believed, because the training had shown me it was possible, that I could help people in that situation heal.
The brand that emerged from that period was The Stigma Coach™. Built around the idea of dismantling the stigma around chronic illness, disability, and the assumptions people carry about what someone in those circumstances is capable of.
The vision was right. The foundations were not.
The Problem Was Not the Coaching
Here is what I want to say clearly, because it is the thing I did not fully understand at the time.
The problem was not that I could not coach. I could. The training had given me real skills and I was using them.
The problem was not that I was coaching the wrong people. The chronically ill are exactly the people I want to serve, and still do.
The problem was that my values were out of alignment. And when your values are out of alignment, no amount of strategy, masterminds, or speaking courses will build something that holds.
John Grinder, one of the co-founders of NLP, observed something along these lines: the problem is not the problem. The problem is the state you go into as you approach the context where you think the problem is. In other words, the issue is rarely what it appears to be on the surface. It is the internal state you bring to it.
The problem is the state you go into as you approach the context where you think the problem is. In other words, the issue is rarely what it appears to be on the surface. It is the internal state you bring to it.
Captain Jack Sparrow, somewhat less formally, put it this way: "The problem was never the problem. The problem is your attitude to the problem. Savvy?"
I prefer the Sparrow version on a bad day. But both are saying the same thing. And both were describing my situation more accurately than I could at the time.
I was trying to help people who genuinely needed support but who, understandably, could not easily pay for it. Which is not a reason not to help them. But it creates a real tension when you are also trying to build a sustainable business. Helping people in need does not have to be free. But it should not be forced payment either.
I had not yet found the model that resolved that tension cleanly. And as I write this, if I am being completely honest, I still have not fully resolved it. That is not a failure. It is an ongoing piece of work, and I think it will be for a long time yet. What changed is that I stopped pretending the tension was not there, and started working with it honestly instead.
What I Tried
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I joined masterminds. I worked on my speaking. I invested in business development support. I tried to build systems around a coaching practice that did not yet have a solid foundation underneath it.
Worth saying: many of those systems were not wrong. The frameworks I built around the business of coaching, around structuring client journeys, around how to think about growth and sustainability, are still part of how I work and how I teach today. The problem was not the systems. The problem was the sequence. I was building the first floor before the foundations were poured.
None of it produced what I needed it to produce. Not because the masterminds were bad or the coaching was wrong. But because you cannot build lasting structure on top of misaligned values. The business kept telling me something was off. I kept trying to solve it with tactics.
It cost me. Significantly, in time and in money. Looking back, as I mentioned in the previous article in this series, I am not sure it was purely a financial decision. I think I would have tried to go it alone regardless. That particular lesson needed to be learned the hard way.
The Session That Changed the Direction
In mid-2023 I was invited to an Intervention Academy session focused on values. Specifically, on the order of values and the rules we attach to them.
The Intervention Academy is a follow-on programme from Human Change Therapy, for those who want to go deeper into the practice after their initial NLP Practitioner training. I had not engaged with it properly before that point. That session changed things.
It got me reacquainted with Imran. It put me back in a room where the work was real. And it showed me, clearly and without much room for argument, that my values were not wrong. They were simply in the wrong order.
That reframe was the thing that unlocked everything else.
What Values Out of Order Actually Looks Like
I want to explain this properly because I think it is one of the most underestimated ideas in coaching and in business.
Your values are not a list. They are a hierarchy. And the order matters enormously.
When I was trying to build The Stigma Coach™, my drive to help people who needed it most was sitting at the top of that hierarchy. Which sounds like the right instinct. Caring deeply about the people you serve is not a flaw.But when "helping people in need" is your highest value and it is sitting in direct conflict with "building a sustainable business," the business will lose that argument almost every time. Not because you are making a conscious decision. Because your values are making it for you, underneath the level of strategy.The work in that session helped me see the hierarchy for what it was, understand the rules I had unconsciously attached to each value, and begin to reorder things in a way that let both the mission and the business exist without constantly undermining each other.That is not a business coaching fix. That is an NLP fix. And it required going back into proper supervised practice to get there.That session became so pivotal for me that I eventually built a whole series of workshops and tutorials around the same ideas, available to my community, whether paying clients or people who simply need access to the thinking and cannot pay for it right now.That is not a business coaching fix. That is an NLP fix. And it is one worth making.
The Model That Eventually Made Sense
One of the things that emerged from that period of realignment was a clearer approach to serving people who cannot easily pay full price.
The model I now use, where better paying clients can choose to donate a percentage of their investment toward supporting others, is one way of holding the tension between genuine service and genuine sustainability. It is a model built on values rather than tactics.
I want to be clear that none of what I am describing here is tax advice, and the specifics of any donation arrangement should always be discussed with a qualified accountant. But the principle, that a business built around your actual values will find solutions that a business built around someone else's strategy will not, is the point worth taking.
What This Has to Do With NLP Practitioner Training
Everything, as it turns out.
The skills I developed through proper NLP practitioner training with Human Change Therapy were not just tools I could use with clients. They were tools I needed to use on myself before I could build anything that worked.
The Meta Model gave me the language tools to identify and challenge the limiting beliefs I had not even noticed I was carrying. Beliefs about who deserves help, what that help is worth, and whether someone like me was the right person to provide it. Once you can hear the structure of a limiting belief in your own thinking, you cannot unhear it. That alone changes things.
From there, techniques like "Back to the Future" (Human Change Therapy's name for what NLP calls Changing Personal History) allowed me to revisit and reframe the experiences that had shaped those beliefs in the first place. And for deeper or more persistent patterns, timeline-based approaches, including Timeline Reimprint and my own Timeline Stacking™ method, get to the heart of what is holding someone back regardless of whether the original experience was a small-t or large-T trauma.
Perceptual Positions helped me see my business through the eyes of the people I was trying to serve, rather than just through my own. Values work, done properly in a supervised environment with real feedback, gave me the map I had been missing.
None of that came from a mastermind. None of it came from a speaking course. None of it came from trying harder with the wrong foundation.
It came from going back. Doing it properly. And being willing to look honestly at what needed to change.If you are building a coaching business and something keeps not quite working despite your best efforts, I would invite you to consider whether the problem is strategic or structural. Because in my experience, when the foundation is solid, the strategy stops being the hard part.
Key Takeaways
- Going it alone after initial NLP training is a common pattern. It is also an expensive one.
- The problem is rarely what it appears to be on the surface. The state you bring to the problem shapes everything.
- A misaligned values hierarchy will undermine business strategy every time, regardless of how good the strategy is.
- The order of your values matters as much as the values themselves.
- NLP practitioner training gives you tools to use on yourself, not just on your clients. That is not a side benefit. It is the point.
- Techniques like the Meta Model, Back to the Future, Timeline Reimprint, and Timeline Stacking™ are not abstract concepts. They are practical tools for getting to what is actually holding you back.
- When the foundation is solid, strategy becomes significantly easier.
If Something Keeps Not Working
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Join the NewsletterThis is part of an ongoing series on NLP, coaching practice, and building a business that fits how you actually work. Start at the beginning with Why NLP Is Business Infrastructure, Not Personal Development Fluff.
