Modelling and the Transfer of Excellence

Given a specific skill, ability or behaviour that an individual can perform, we can replicate that skill, ability or behaviour and learn it in half the time it took them to learn the skill originally.

Now that’s very useful. We start from the idea that all people are equal in terms of mental and physical capabilities. The only difference is motivation, values, beliefs and attitudes that drive excellence. Some people have difference levels of motivation, different values, beliefs and attitudes – these are the variables. People are either motivated by sticks or by carrots, that is that they are either motivated away from or towards something.

All NLP was created by modelling. NLP is not new, it is however, a particularly effective collection of tools and techniques. The genius of NLP is the technique of modelling. First of all, they discovered what works and then transported it and created techniques with it which is what we teach today. For example, Rapport is from Hypnosis, it’s talked about in Hypnosis as that magical, mystically state that no one knows exactly how to get but the client will do whatever you suggest.

Now what NLP did was to take Rapport as a magical, mystical state and transform it back into a series of steps which are utilisable. Someone can learn to do Rapport. So what do you do in Rapport? You match and mirror and what do you match and mirror? Physiology. The specific elements in Physiology include breathing, gestures, posture, voice...in fact everything. So it’s a specific set of steps, in an order which if you go through you are able to do Rapport.

Another example is Anchoring. How do you Anchor someone? They get into a highly associated state and you touch them and you’ll create an anchor. Who noticed anchoring first? Pavlov did about 100 years ago who bought it into our awareness.  It’s the genius of NLP that says, “Ok how do you do Anchoring?” The first thing you do is get into Rapport and then you says to the person, “in a moment we’re going to do a process of anchoring and that will necessitate that I touch you on the knuckle (for example), is that ok?” And the third step is etc etc. So again we have a series of steps.

Think about strategies, Karl Pribram et al in 1961 wrote the book “Plans and The Structure of Behavior”, which is where NLP Strategies came from. Bandler and Grinder simply said how do you elicit a strategy and recorded it in a series of steps , Step 1, Step 2, Step 3 etc. The genius of NLP is denominialisation and that is the key to all of modelling. It’s taking pre-existing techniques and turning them back into processes and steps that is something that easy to do.

There are people out there worth modelling and there are people not worth modelling. If you model mediocrity you’ll get an excellent model of mediocrity. That’s not obvious to a lot of people.

I was at a seminar once where one of the delegates said I’m going to model my Granny’s cakes. I said to her do people come from all over the UK to eat your Granny’s cakes and she said “No”. Does she have a special product that’s famous or is somehow excellent and she said “No”. You can model that as a project but if you model mediocrity you’ll get mediocrity. That’s one thing that’s not immediately obvious. So you need to get a model of real excellence. Then what do you do?

What you do is you find out their beliefs and values, their strategy or mental syntax which includes everything they do inside their head. So submodalities, strategies and all the internal representations and then you also model their physiology.

Our NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner material provides you with anything that you will need to successfully model any skill, ability or behaviour that you choose to model in the future.

Once you have discovered the persons beliefs, strategies and filter patterns, in some case you might want to elicit their Meta programmes which goes along with beliefs and values. With regards to strategies you might want to elicit their submodalities – it depends on what you are modelling. You might want to elicit their language patterns which goes along with strategies as to how they represent it Ie what they say to themselves. Then find out how to do their physiology which again is matching and mirroring and then you install that in yourself. Then you install the whole thing in yourself. You can install a strategies in yourself using Chaining Anchors. Chaining Anchors is a kinaesthetic strategy, whereas you could install a strategy and anchor the other modalities too eg Visual or Auditory. We talk more about this process at the NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner Training. It’s an easy process you can learn.

Then once you get done you design a universal training and you then need to test it out and train others, when you know it works you then train trainers. That’s how to do modelling. It’s incredibly simple. Remember you need to have a model of excellence – that’s not obvious to some people.

The key elements are

Physiology (eg breathing)

Filter Patterns (eg Meta Programmes, values)

Strategies (eg for the different component parts for the behaviour)