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

Parkinson’s disease. When you know your own strategies you

can use them, modify them, develop them, transfer them to

other contexts in your life, and if you wish replace them.

You may be thinking that I am introducing the concept of

gambling to modeling! Far from it—modeling is a way of

ensuring certainty and consistency in the results we achieve.

The TOTE I refer to here is not the betting kind but stands for

Test➔Operate➔Test➔Exit.

The principle is that our behavior is driven or motivated by

an outcome and we recognize when we have achieved our

outcome by a unique set of evidence criteria (i.e., what we will

be seeing, hearing, and feeling when we have achieved the

outcome). We are constantly comparing our present state to

our desired state to find out if they match. When they do

match we know that we have reached the exit, i.e., we have

achieved our outcome. If the present state does not match the

desired state, we have to do another operation to discover if

that makes a difference.

We are running TOTEs throughout our lives comparing

where we are with where we want to be and taking actions to

bring us closer to the exit and eventually to the exit itself. An

180 NLP AT WORK

TOTE

TRIGGER Present

state

Desired

state Are

equal

Yes

EXIT

No

Operate 1

Operate 2

Operate 3