NLP At Work : The Difference That Makes the Difference in Business

❏ Worry.
❏ Resist change.
❏ Respond aggressively to others.
❏ Panic.

By modeling any of these you can develop a conscious
awareness of the process, and with conscious awareness you
have a choice, which is to continue the same process or to do
something else. Merely the process of studying what we are
doing and how we are doing it lifts us to a level of detachment
in which we can choose what we do and, more importantly,
what we continue to do in the future.
Many companies now have a system of mentoring whereby
members of staff, as part of their development, are allocated to
a more senior or more experienced employee in order to learn
from them (“sitting by Nellie” relabeled). All too often, the
success of this system hinges on the experienced employee's
ability to impart their skills. Often they don't know their most
powerful skills nor how they use them. If, however, the learner
is equipped with NLP modeling skills, they can elicit the skills
they need to learn irrespective of the awareness and skill level
of their mentor. The subject being modeled can also benefit
from this process by learning from feedback on how they
structure their experience. With this awareness they can
achieve greater consistency in the skills they have.

My very first full-time job was as a computer operator in the
glass-manufacturing firm Pilkingtons. I had never worked on a
computer before and I was allocated to Geoff to follow him
around and learn what he did. Occasionally Geoff would
explain what he was doing, but more often than not he would
just do what he did (and at that time operating the computer
sometimes meant a bit of engineering and a bit of fixing
programs that crashed in the middle of the night when the
programmers weren’t around to sort out the problems). Geoff
was very good at all of these things, but he wasn’t very good at
explaining to me what he did nor how he did it.

You can apply the process of modeling to yourself. You might,
for example, want to reproduce an ability or skill that you have

With conscious awareness you

have choice

Mentoring

Transferring a skill

MODELING 157