About me –
Dr Daniel Köpke

Even as a child and teenager, I was fascinated by relationships. Of course, I was sometimes unhappily in love. Of course, I sometimes felt lonely and isolated. Who has not felt that way as a teenager? Yet, somehow, even back then friends and classmates came to me with problems in love and relationships to ask for my advice. At the time, I did not understand why. Today, I see it as an early sign of a hidden talent.

After leaving school, my first path did not lead me to psychology, but to pharmacy – a field to which I would later devote a doctoral thesis. From this time, I took away scientific thinking and practice, as well as the habit of critically questioning my own perspective.

Yet I always enjoyed my work most when it brought me into contact with people: advising patients at the pharmacy, supervising students during my doctorate and beyond.

In 2018, I discovered Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, a therapy and coaching method from the 1970s and a very pragmatic approach to helping people achieve desired and lasting psychological change. Although NLP does not have the best reputation in every context, the changes I was able to achieve for myself with it in a very short time fascinated me so much that this model would play an intense part in my life for many years.

I first began training with Ralf Stumpf and Chris Mulzer, later assisted in their programmes and now also contribute as an NLP trainer to the training of course participants.

NLP is more than a dry collection of coaching techniques for me. Soon after discovering it, a question gripped me that has not let go of me since:

How can people have happy, healthy and lasting relationships? And how can we support others in doing so, for example through their communication?

I soon began engaging with seminars on personal development, meditation, hypnosis, spirituality and communication – always with the question of how this knowledge could be used for better relationships.

I began researching scientific literature on relationships, getting to know attachment and personality models, and devoured one relationship guide after another. Of course, I also attended numerous seminars to expand my knowledge.

I naturally tested this knowledge in practice with the couples and coaching clients who placed their trust in me. Before long, I had accumulated so much knowledge that I felt a strong desire to share it in my own seminars and workshops and, later, in my podcast. NLP always provided the stable foundation that allowed me to experiment with confidence.

For most people, reading a book or attending a weekend seminar does not mean they will actually apply what they have learned in practice to themselves, let alone with other people. Most people have not completed several hundred days of NLP training either.

Over the years, NLP has become an extremely effective “meta-model” for me of how psychological change REALLY works.

It is like an operating system that makes psychological techniques for learning and teaching, personal development, coaching on psychological issues and couples counselling effective in the first place.

All the coaching and couples-therapy methods I learned later are like individual “apps”: I can learn them quickly, integrate them into my practical work and combine them more or less freely. NLP helps me distil the essence of a method that is new to me very quickly. This allows an intriguing theory to become a practical and functional method – without years of studying every detail.