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

takes to sell a luxury car are quite different from those it takes
to sell a software package. The skill required to motivate a
group of production line workers is quite different from that
needed to motivate advertising account executives. The skill
needed to communicate face to face may be very different
from that needed to communicate via the World Wide Web.
The skills you need in the rapidly unfolding Information Age
are vastly different to those that might have stood you in good
stead in previous times. Modeling enables you to uncover the
uniqueness of the model, the quality of the inborn talent, and
the natural skill.
A client of mine said, “This modeling is the secret weapon
for today’s business if everyone but knew it.” It is easy to
access the strategies you want, although it is not yet usual
practice to do this in business. Any individual or organization
that employs this kind of thinking is still going to be well ahead
of the game for several years to come.
We can find useful strategies behind any behavior. It is the
process of what we do that is always valuable, even if the
content is not. We need to look at all the behaviors we use to
uncover the strategies that lie behind them. By doing this we
can find that even behind some of our weaknesses we have
strategies that are invaluable used in the right context.

Take the example of someone who sulks. I know of people who
can sulk for hours, days, weeks, and in some cases years! This
might not seem a valuable skill to have, but behind the sulking
lies the strategy of maintaining one emotional state for a period
of time. In this context it is a negative skill, but suppose this same
person wanted to maintain a state of confidence or motivation
and had not succeeded in doing so. Where do they look for the
answer? Not to self-help books and not to other people—what
they want is what they already have. They have the strategy for
maintaining a state, all that they have to do is transfer that
strategy to another emotional state. In the rest of this section we
are going to explore how to do this.

There are companies that are modeling already. Examples of
business modeling projects include the following:

Modeling enables you to

uncover natural skill

There are useful strategies

behind every behavior

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