Detecting the unconscious
patterns“It is impossible to not communicate.”
Paul Watzlawick
G
iven that NLP is a process of identifying the
difference between outstanding performance and
everything else, we need ways to elicit this
difference if we want to reproduce the performance. And
this difference is very often the elusive part of what we do.
Suppose that I am skilled in the way I can build rapport
in business meetings with potential new clients and you
want to know how exactly I do that. I could tell you that when
I prepare for a meeting with a new client, I think about the
outcomes for the meeting. I can also tell you that I review
what I know about the company and pay attention to how I
build rapport throughout the process, but especially in the
first few moments of our meeting. That is all very sound, but
the question is: Does what I have told you contain the piece
that really makes the difference?
If you were skilled in modeling you might notice that
between talking about the outcomes for the meeting and
reviewing what I know about the business already, I look
fleetingly up and to my right. What I am doing for this
moment is imagining visually what this company would be
like if it were to do the kind of developments I have
imagined will make a difference for it. I do this each time I
approach a new client, but I take this thought so much for
granted and it is so unconscious that I don’t include it in my
description of what I do (until recently when I modeled the