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The Remarkable Power in your Hands is brought about through a technique called NLP modelling. This is best described as making it possible for you to do something the same way as someone who has been very successful at doing it for a significant time. By knowing and talking to a successful marketer, you will discover how he or she achieves things, thinks, acts, feels about everything they do. This is a process you can start and develop to a point where you can apply the results and enjoy the benefits.

Modelling was the starting point for Messrs Grinder and Bandler, the founders of NLP, as they found ways to reproduce the way of working of celebrated therapists.

Children are natural modellers, they exhibit a quality of exuberant curiosity without thought of the consequences or expectations of their learning. They have a talent to learn at very fast rates given the appropriate supportive conditions.

Given this, a child has the potential to learn anything.

NLP Modelling uses the same process of learning that you used as a child. The learning of a set of skills and techniques without any rationalisation or conscious intervention. This allows you to develop the necessary skills, behaviours, motor skills and unconscious processes that the other person has, without trying to interpret what they do.

Children do not learn by rationalization. They learn by mirroring and copying. Similarly if you were to rationalise and unravel the process of learning complex and unconscious processes and strategies that a person has spent years developing, you would spend 10 times longer trying to understand it.

So the rationalisation of NLP Modelling is to NOT understand what you are wishing to learn at the level of consciousness, but to engage your unconscious resources by mirroring and matching the other person, or shadowing what they do.

What I am going to describe is a way to do modelling which needs you to work with your subject. In the context of this blog I will not be able to do that in the interviews I undertake, but I hope you will hear the same principles at work in what I say and hear from the guru I am interviewing.

The Stages of Modelling

1. You must find someone who is very good at what they do and for us that will be in marketing. They may have started with nothing and achieved excellence in a business which has given them a great lifestyle and experience.

How do you identify excellence? This is a subjective matter, but we can look for elegance, minimal effort and congruence in the model when they are performing in their context. Congruence means a state of being unified, and completely sincere, with all aspects of a person working together towards an outcome.

A suitable model is someone with whom we can spend time while they work. NLP modelling does not use written work or sound recordings.
2. Having identified one or more excellent models in a skill, the act of modelling requires us to spend time with them while they work or perform their work. Ideally this will be with them in person so you can observe their posture and movements.
Our state should include open peripheral vision, internal silence and minimal tension so we can be aware of everything. In this state, we observe, listen, match and use micro-muscle movement to mimic the model’s micro behaviour over time, while we remain comfortable with not knowing. It is essential to keep everything we take in at this stage, uncritically, with no speculation and no searching for meaning.
3. The third stage of modelling is reaching criteria. This will only happen cleanly if we are thorough in our conscious and unconscious uptake. We continue modelling with conscious uptake until we can achieve the same class of results as the model and in the same time frame. When we can do this, we continue to practice our skill until we do it unconsciously. We need a period of unconsciously led skill practice before conscious awareness starts to happen spontaneously. We use our skill in real time with unconscious, automated flow.
4. The fourth stage is necessary when modelling is intended for skill transfer to others. The skill can become unconscious after a period of practice and will begin to be done spontaneously. Often, there is choice in how to represent something depending on the desired outcome and the capacity of the learners. Finally, the model is developed into a form we can use it to transfer our knowledge and for others learn the skills. The evidence for successful training and transfer is in the performance of the learners.

Questioning Skills

Questioning is a skill in itself and can be improved with practice. There are 2 main categories of question we can ask.

1. Closed question – the answer can only be Yes or No
2. Open question – the answer cannot be Yes or No

To find out information we must develop our skills in asking open questions. Closed questions are most useful when we are trying to seek agreement or closure in a negotiation. Open questions allow us to gather and learn information.

Who?
What?
Where?
When?
How?
Why?

These are the words used to ask open questions. ‘Why’ has to be asked more carefully because it could be made to sound confrontational in the wrong context.

So my next step is to put this into practice. You will see from my blogroll that Yaro Starak is my mentor in putting together this blog. I am still learning lots of things from Yaro whose mentoring programme BlogMastermind.com is a masterpiece in marketing.

Where do we go from here?

I will be talking to Yaro about his ways of working to try and see how I can use his ways to build my marketing skills. You will be able to download our 20 minute session next week so make sure you set up your RSS feed to know exactly when that happens.

This Remarkable Power in your Hands will soon be a reality for you.

Tags:   excellence · Modelling · nlp · power · questioning skills2 Comments