By: Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht

Modeling is an essential part of NLP. It is one of the seeds that gave birth to everything that now makes NLP what it is. As I shared with you in the beginning of this book, the originators of NLP wanted to under-stand and teach excellence. Fields such as linguistics, psychology, and cybernetics helped them analyze highly effective people. Much of the early progress in NLP was breakthrough ideas on HOW to analyze the behavior, seeing things that were not even seen be the very people that they were studying.

A key to how NLP creates models for excellence is to recall an interesting definition of NLP, that it is “the study of the structure of subjectivity.” This means that in brings together neurology, language, and pro-gramming as three key components of experience. Bandler had a great gift for modeling. One of the key methods for modeling is to attempt to emulate the person you are modeling, but without any theories as to why they are successful. This causes you to perceive what you would have filtered out if you had gotten at-tached to a particular theory.

Since you have experience in creating states, you will see that these masters create states within themselves to affect other people’s states. Of course, you would expect them to generate states within themselves to harness their own creativity and skills, but masters understand, at least on an intuitive or subconscious level, that their state can help to influence the state and the behaviors of other people. This is a huge part of the power of people with interpersonal mastery, such as master psychotherapists.

We haven’t delved into language patterns very much yet, and we certainly will. Language patterns can have a tremendous impact on people. Masters apply language patterns to themselves, and they also apply them to others in many ways. You remember how important breaking state can be to an NLP pattern. There are lan-guage patterns to do that and much more, without the client having to necessarily understand and cooperate.

This ability to move forward in a way that does not require conscious understanding and conscious coopera-tion is a great source of speed, efficiency, and power in NLP. If this sounds like it’s just manipulation, con-sider these two things. If a doctor gives you an antibiotic for an infection, do you have to consciously under-stand how it works to kill the infection, exactly what order it will go through the blood vessels, and how you will metabolize the end products of all this? Do you have to consciously know how to beat your heart in or-der to maintain your circulation in order for the antibiotic to work? Of course not, your body and the drug take care of this for you.

People who sincerely want to succeed will universally approve of a method that works, even if they don’t understand it every step along the way. The subconscious is much too powerful a resource to neglect. What makes this even more efficient and powerful is that you are training your subconscious to use these skills on you and those you work with. The more you enjoy practicing these skills, the more you will gain momentum and abilities from your own deep well of creativity and intelligence. This makes room for your conscious mind to concentrate on learning new things, and to have a reserve of conscious processing power so you can create new solutions for new challenges.

Did you notice that we just talked about neurology, or states, and linguistics, or language patterns? As you know NLP stands for neurolinguistic programming. So the part that remains is programming. NLP studies how masters use neurology and language in order to create new, durable patterns in themselves and others. That is programming. It does not turn people into robots, it gives them new, successful choices that are available to them in a way that they can trigger. A well-programmed behavior does not require a lot of will power or thought to act on, it is more like expressing yourself or singing a song that you already know very well. But, since NLP understand the magic of states and language patterns, these skills are much more pow-erful than mere steps in a manual. If NLP had a slogan, it might be, “You CAN get there from here.”

Speaking of powerful skills, one of the highly effective people that Bandler and Grinder studied was a fa-mous therapist named Virginia Satir. When they told her what they felt were the active ingredients of her approach, she found it difficult to believe. In fact, it was kind of disturbing to her, because it seemed to take the humanity out of what she was doing. She did not want to think of her self as applying technical skills that were effective on their own. But then, scientific exploration does not always flatter us. For example, there is a good body of research showing that experience does not increase the effectiveness of psychothera-pists nearly as much as one might think. Certainly not as much as highly experienced therapists would like to think.

In order to test this, Satir attempted to model therapy without using the ingredients that Bandler and Grinder had brought to her attention. Despite her heartfelt commitment and creativity as a therapist, this really hob-bled her ability to conduct therapy. She was less able to gain rapport and involve clients in therapy. She was not getting the results she was used to. In the upcoming sections, we will tell you exactly what those active ingredients are, and we’ll offer more from other models of excellence.

What is really interesting about this, as far as modeling is concerned, is that no matter what a trainer says about what makes them effective, you can use the universal principles of modeling from NLP to see even more. NLP embraces not only what people think they are doing, but what they don’t know they are doing. In NLP, this is called a meta-model. Creating the meta-model of language in therapy back in 1975 is how NLP really got its start in creating public interest.

The playwright Oscar Wilde said, “Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.”