What we do
1-to-1 coaching
We consistently provoke extraordinary results from 1-to-1 coaching. It's the most profound and precise personal development activity. That's the thing about personal development; it's personal.
We are a fairly diverse bunch - we have varied CVs and we use different methods. Please read our individual profiles in the 'who we are' section for an insight into our individual methods and ethos.
Group coaching (not to be confused with training)
You can't learn to ride a bike from a PowerPoint presentation.
Have you ever attended a training course and, although it may have been enjoyable, nothing really changed as a result? It may have broadened your awareness and given you some new knowledge but you never really got round to doing something with it? We believe that explicit, 'knowledge-based' training methods are ineffective when it comes to communication, behaviour or any other areas of human interaction - There's a huge difference between knowing about something and being able to do it.
Our group coaching is transformational - we consistently provoke a real change in behaviour because the experience is engaging, genuine and irrefutable by convincingly demonstrating everything that we cover. There are no artificial, scripted, one-size-fits-all, best-practice solutions. No 'chalk and talk' theoretical models. No 'seven point systems'. No acronyms, no 'buzz' words. Just real, accurate observation of what happens when humans interact and real experience of alternative approaches. We do not believe in telling you things that you could easily read in a book - we show you something that you have never noticed before and provide the opportunity to experience it for yourself.
Different, fun, challenging and certainly not run of the mill. To paraphrase two leading retailers: this is not just any training, this is Noggin group-coaching – try something new today.
Tim Parry, Training & Development Manager - FTSE 100 Company
People are not robots
Have you ever been told how to behave? Whether it's 'best practice' or a prescriptive set of instructions relating to behaviour, the result is something that is unlikely to be authentically you, and even more unlikely to lead to high-performance in terms of communication. We will never confine you with a one-size-fits all approach - we coach a deeper awareness of what's really going on when we communicate, and as such the resultant understanding more comprehensive than could be achieved with a more superficial model. You can gain a clear understanding of the communication dynamic and develop your own versions of the patterns and techniques. The result is effective change in behaviour that is still authentic to you, the individual. We will often switch into other contexts from every-day life to illustrate the real human element to any communication.
Their delivery style is very subtle, almost conversational - dealing with real experiences in and out of work. The whole learning experience is just effortless - and because it is all grounded in real life our people just got it straight away.
Richard Ness - Learning & Development Manager - ATS Euromaster
Utilisation for a live coaching environment
Have you ever felt a bit patronised by a scripted training approach where people with a quarter of your experience stand up and tell you things with little room for debate? Our design is well structured, and there are certain learning points that we guarantee we will hit, but we will deviate from the plan and shift timings around in order to utilise what is actually happening in the room - creating a real, fluid, 2-way conversational dynamic. It's all about using the experience you are having on the day, and no two days are exactly the same.
The partners were, in the best traditions of lawyers, somewhat sceptical of the need to recognise and respond to differing communication styles at an individual level. However, by the end of the first day, most were engaged and agreed that there was 'something in it' and that there was commercial value to be had from a recognition and application of NLP principles.
Nigel Bennett - Business Development Director - Watson Burton LLP
Human interaction is not a 'pen and paper' exercise
The topic of most of our high-performance workshops is human communication and interaction. As such, that's what we ask you pay attention to during the experience - not a piece of paper of a PowerPoint slide. We provide constant demonstration of what we are coaching, and create experiences for you to observe others in the group and become more aware of your own behaviour and reactions.
This is real, irrefutable, experiential learning - rather that simply acquiring knowledge so that, in the future, you know what you 'should' be doing.
You come away doing - not needing to 'remember'
Let's face it; the harsh truth of coaching sessions is that if you do not have a convincing experience of the content during the coaching session - you won't do it afterwards. How many of the reference material from training experiences have you never referred back to? Reflective learning is fairly (and not entirely) useless for high-performance communication - it can only be learnt through doing and receiving real feedback - it's how we learn to communicate as children.
Could you imagine a sports coach talking to you about how to swing a racquet or throw a ball, and providing some notes to refer to later, without asking you to have a go at actually doing it there and then? It would be ludicrous; yet somehow in corporate environments this type of non-participation is considered acceptable.
We will sometimes switch contexts out of 'professional behaviour' and introduce more light-hearted contexts from every day life where you are often more engaged and may be more resourceful, flexible and effective in your communication.
Methods
During our sessions we invariably provoke a positive shift in behaviour and we use a variety of methods to achieve it:
- Creating a group dynamic of engagement, contribution, enjoyment and playfulness
- Changing perception through provocative discussions, counter examples, case studies and quoted wisdom
- Creating realistic experiences to orient people with their current behaviour and consequences of their actions
- Providing demonstration and explicit input of what's going on under the surface
- Coaching new behaviours through clear exercises and a well-structured feedback loop
- Using high-performance states to change state-of-mind in relation to uncomfortable activities or un-resourceful behaviours
Training-the-trainer
We are very aware and understanding of reduced budgets and the need for self-sufficiency. We especially enjoy passing our methods on to trainers who can take them on and run with them. We make sure that such schemes are realistically priced and well supported. It could be an economical way of rolling our programmes out within your organisation...
Noggin helped us design and deliver a behavioural skills training session needed to be more proactive in selling. They adapted their tried & tested techniques to fit in with our company values so that they felt comfortable for our colleagues and appropriate for our customers. The methods Ben & Daryll used to coach the learning & development team were so effective and we were very confident in delivering this to 250 store managers and hardly needed to refer to notes!
Claire Thompson, Learning & Development Controller, HMV UK Ltd.
Pre-meditated mischief
Have you ever attended a session where the exercises are so clear and prescriptive that you can simply 'go through the motions' whilst checking your email on your mobile and without investing much attention or curiosity into the process? We often make the experience even more demanding of your attention by not being overt about the running order, providing deliberately ambiguous instructions, creating experiences without setting up an expectation and tasking you with multiple and differing observation criteria - so you will need to stay awake.
The Noggin approach to facilitated workshops is quite different to what is expected and enforced as best practice in the industry. However, having experienced it myself first hand, I can now understand how powerful this format can be. As an experienced facilitator/trainer myself, I am used to providing a detailed agenda which signposts every step of a programme. The Noggin style is almost the opposite of this, and having experienced it myself can validate the benefits of learning in this way. I was engaged from start to finish, and left the programme convinced that a little bit less overt structure is actually not so bad.
Kylie Roberts, Head of UK Learning-Corporate Finance; Global Professional Services Firm.
Credibility
As well as our interesting commercial backgrounds, we are published authors and generally regarded as leaders in our specific areas of psychology. Our delivery is compelling because we are not just facilitators who talk about ideas or deliver someone else's material - we created or developed our material so we can really bring it to life for you; providing a real and convincing demonstration of everything we cover. Our commercial backgrounds give us the experience and credibility for authentic delivery of the subject matter.
What's it really about?
When we first began coaching groups we used far less of our psychological techniques that shift state-of-mind, build confidence and provoke a changes in behaviour. We thought that these extreme techniques could be greeted with cynicism in corporate environments so we stuck to the more knowledge-based content such as what to think, precise linguistics and body language. Over the years we have learnt that the psychological change techniques are often what you really want and need from us.
Most people that we meet are intelligent individuals who have been subjected to more than their fair share of 'chalk and talk' training - so it's not a lack of knowledge that prevents them from communicating and interacting In a highly effective way; they need an experience that will liberate them to perform differently. As such - we take every opportunity to include our neurological high-performance games; including our own COLOURS game.
If you are really serious about attaining high performance we would urge you to break from the conventional and really challenge yourself with a noggin experience.
Having attended a noggin public group-coaching workshop myself, I booked them to come into the Royal Holloway, and I was a bit nervous. I really wasn’t sure how some people would react to the noggin style of delivery - of course, they loved it!
Melanie Loizou. Deputy Director - Client Services
Royal Holloway, University of London.
