On The Catwalk

This weekend's session was on modelling. In NLP this is quite the opposite of strutting your stuff!

This is all about learning something from someone else by getting inside their way of thinking about it. I found the most revelatory aspect of this to be the way we assume that everyone does things the same way we do. An example we played with to practice our modelling techniques was "How I get out of bed in the morning". What I found particularly interesting is that I remember when I was studying psychology, the same example was used as a stable representation of human behaviour!

In psychology, everyone wakes up because their cortisol levels start to rise about an hour before they wake up. This gets the brain active after sleep and sends signals to the rest of the body that it can start working on breakfast, or moving, or putting on clothes etc.

In psychology the system for getting out of bed is a cause-effect process: I am awake, therefore I get out of bed.

Now I know I'm oversimplifying. And I'm not suggesting that eminent psychologists are not aware that there are thought processes in between the "I am awake" and the "I get out of bed" stages. But I thought it was a nice comparison between the subject matters of psychology and NLP: Where psychology is the relationship, NLP is the gaps in between the letters of the word "relationship".

So back to modelling: I'm excited by this. John Seymour's analogy for it is about the pieces of the puzzle and how they fit together to form the overall picture. I suppose this is why I like this bit of NLP the most so far: it's tangible. I can actually write a list of codes that correspond to what type of thought a person has and copy that code to end up with the same behaviour.

Is it really that simple?

Well I'm not sure yet. Every behaviour that we do is loaded with our own preconceptions and judgements about that behaviour. I'm not sure to what extent we can overcome ourselves in order to feel comfortable doing something another way. I'm told that we can, and I have seen a number of examples where people have done just that. So I'm embarking on a modelling project where I need to go away and model someone on a behaviour of my choosing. Let's see if I can be my own proof!



Source: mark-rayan-pua.blogspot.com