Supporting people in major life transitions and changes frequently requires coaching at an identity level. Identity is the underlying foundation of all other levels of change: behaviors, capabilities and beliefs. Identity has to do with such questions as Who am I?, What are my limits?, What is my purpose? (my mission). Clarifying the “deep structure” of our identity allows us to express ourselves even more fully at the level of our behavioral “surface structure”.

Coaching at the level of identity involves helping people to:

• find and clarify their life’s direction,
  
• manage boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘others’,
  
• become clear about beliefs that support your identity and those which limit them,
  
• expand their sense of self to the most profound, essential core,
  
• incorporating new dimensions of being.

Working at the level of identity also opens up the possibility of transformational and “evolutionary” change. Most NLP techniques focus on “remedial” or corrective change (fixing something that is broken). A few techniques focus on “generative” change (taking something good and making more of it). Still fewer address “evolutionary” change (creating something completely new).

To make an analogy, remedial change is like pulling weeds; generative change is like planting new seeds; evolutionary change is like altering the landscape upon which the weeds and the seeds are growing.