Understand your feelings → Manage your behaviour → Build emotional resilience.
The Ollie Model: Neuro-Linguistic Programming for Children, Teens and Adults
What is the Ollie Model?
***Winner - Children's Therapy Initiative of the Year 2024 (UK)***
"Ollie and his Superpowers" was developed by award-winning author and therapist Alison Knowles. It brings together several therapeutic approaches, including Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Parts Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Hypnotherapy.
The Ollie Model also draws from Positive Psychology. It is strengths-based, helping clients discover their own inner resources and build the confidence to resolve challenges independently.
This is Ollie.
Ollie teaches us about our emotions or 'superpowers'. He helps us to understand that our emotions are here to help us. He shows us that by working with our emotions, we can learn to control them, rather than letting them take control of us.
The Ollie Model is a playful and fun way to learn about your emotions and how to control them, making it an excellent choice for coaching for children and adults.
As a certified Ollie Coach, I support people of all ages, adapting the language and techniques as necessary to suit each individual client. I help them understand how their mind works, why certain feelings show up, and what they can do about it.
Supported by a series of books and resources, the Ollie method turns powerful therapeutic tools into playful, imaginative games. Kids and adults alike become active participants in their own emotional wellbeing, not passive recipients of help.
It’s designed to be empowering, practical, and effective—often helping people move forward after just a few sessions.
How Neuro-Linguistic Programming supports the Ollie Model
Neuro-Linguistic Programming, usually shortened to NLP, is a set of techniques that looks at the link between how we think, how we talk to ourselves, and how we behave. The idea behind it is straightforward: the patterns running underneath a reaction can be noticed, understood and gently changed.
It sits naturally alongside the Ollie Model. Where Ollie gives children a friendly, playful language for their emotions, NLP offers practical techniques for working with them. A child who freezes before a spelling test, or a teenager caught in a loop of negative self-talk, is running a pattern. Once we can see that pattern together, we can start to shift it.
With younger children this looks like games, drawings and stories rather than anything that feels like therapy. With teens and adults the conversation is more direct, though the principle is the same. We look at what's happening underneath the behaviour rather than trying to manage the behaviour on its own.