“If have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”

Sir Isaac Newton

NLP all started with Richard Bandler and John Grinder, In the 1970’s they became fascinated with therapists, such as Virginia Satir and Milton H. Erickson, M.D.

They wanted to figure out what made these individuals so remarkable.

Observing them they put together a method for finding the very thing that makes someone great at something.

They called this method Modelling.

Dr. Bandler defined modelling as the process of observing and mapping the successful behaviours of people.

Essentially, this empowers people to understand the inner workings of someone else’s mind.

In practice, if a person is a great public speaker, then through modelling , others will understand precisely how that person thinks and therefore be capable of duplicating their excellence within their own thinking.

Ultimately this new modelling technique uncovered the fundamental strategies used by the remarkable to achieve their goals.

These strategies combined with the other exceptional strategies gathered from world leaders in areas such as communication, business, law, education, and professional sports eventually evolved into a scientific discipline called NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming).

But NLP is more than just a series of strategies; it is the very technique that allows practitioners to understand precisely what makes anyone great. It enables users of NLP to duplicate this greatness.

The Power of Indirect Modelling
Because all remarkable people are not accessible for modelling, a new approach was developed called Indirect Modelling. originally pioneered by Robert Dolts, co-founder of NLP and primary researcher.

Mr. Dolts famously stated, “It has been said that human history is nothing more than a record of the deeds and ideas of great men and women.

Ever since people began to turn their attention inward to examine their own thought processes, one of the hopes and promises of psychological inquiry has been to map out the key features of the mind that will allow our own thoughts to soar with the giants of history.”

The difference between indirect modelling and the modelling strategies used by Drs. Bandler and Grinder is it enables for the modelling of a person who has not been met.

Exploring How to Model the Success Principles of Greatness.
First, you need to read the Biographies and Autobiographies of your targeted great achiever.

Biographies and Autobiographies contain the words and thoughts of the person you intend to model.

These works reveal precisely how the great person thinks.

Using NLP-type models, your target’s greatness strategies are assembled into a simple and usable success formula.

These success formulas are called, strategies.

The next step is to study multiple great people to find the recurring success strategies or principles of greatness.

By comparing multiple strategies of different great people you uncover the common ones which lead repeatedly to greatness.

It is hard work involving literally mountains of research but peeling away the outer skin to the inner core of greatness is essential for sustainable life change.

The final step is to teach your conscious and unconscious minds how to operate in a similar way to the thought patterns of the great people you have modelled.

The concept is to adapt the strategies to your own personal style and essence to help you achieve your own personal growth goals.

This adaptation process unfolds through specialized questioning and mental training to make it natural, easy and spontaneous.

So What Does This Mean for Your Personal Growth?

It means that there are strategies based on scientific research through forms of modelling that lay the footsteps for you to achieve the same greatness experienced by history’s most successful people.

Sounds too far-fetched?

If you doubt then you have just identified your first major obstacle to greatness.

You must dream anything is possible even for you.

As Dr. Edward Hall, an inventor of the theory of personal space (Proxemics) said in 1960:

“Like the creative composer, some people are more gifted at living than others. They do influence those around them, but the process stops there because there is no way of describing in technical terms just what it is they do, most of which is out of awareness.”

“Some time in the future, a long time from now when culture is more completely explored, there will be the equivalent of musical scores that can be learned, each for a different type of man or woman in different jobs and relationships, for time, space, work, and play.”

“We see people who are successful and happy today, who have jobs which are rewarding and productive.”

What are the sets, isolates, and patterns that differentiate their lives from those of the less fortunate?

We need to have a means of making life a little less haphazard and more enjoyable.”

NLP consists of a number of models, and then techniques based on those models.

The major models usually associated with NLP are:

Sensory acuity and physiology.

Thinking is tied closely to physiology.

People’s thought processes change their physiological state.

Sufficiently sensitive sensory acuity will help a communicator fine-tune their communication to a person in ways over and above mere linguistics.

The “meta-model.”

A set of linguistic challenges for uncovering the “deep structure” underneath someone’s “surface structure” sentences.

[Sorry for the transformational grammar lingo.]

Representational systems.

These actually appeared in Erickson’s work and the work of others, though Bandler and Grinder took them much further.

Different people seem to represent knowledge in different sensory modalities. Their language reveals their representation.

Often, communication difficulties are little more than two people speaking in incompatible representation systems.

For example, the “same” sentence might be expressed differently by different people:
Auditory: “I really hear what you’re saying.”
Visual: “I see what you mean.”
Kinesthetic: “I’ve got a handle on that.”

The “Milton-model.”

This is a set of linguistic patterns Milton Erickson used to induce trance and other states in people. It is the inverse of the meta-model; it teaches you how to be artfully vague, which is what you use to do therapeutic hypnosis with someone.

Eye accessing cues.

When people access different representational systems, their eyes move in certain ways.

Lots of research has been done on accessing cues, because it seems easy to test.

Most research has “proven” they don’t exist.

My thesis was on accessing cues and concluded the same thing.

My real conclusion was that a person is too complex a black box to test this effectively.

Also, eyes move in ways that are not related to information accessing. While I can visually tell the difference between an “accessing cue” and a non-accessing movement, I can’t quantify the difference enough to base research on it.

Submodalities.

The structure of internal representations determines your response to the content.

For example, picture someone you really like.

Make the colours more intense, as if you were turning up the colour knob on a TV.

Now turn the color down, until it’s black and white.

For most people, high color intensifies the feeling, and B&W neutralizes it. The degree of color, part of the STRUCTURE of the representation, affects the intensity of your feelings about the content.

Metaprograms.

These are aspects about how people process information and make decisions.

For example, some people are motivated TOWARDS GOALS, while others are motivated AWAY FROM non-goals.

TOWARDS or AWAY-FROM tells how they respond to their world; which one a person prefers in each context will dramatically change how they behave.

NLP has several techniques for diagnosing and intervening in certain situations.

NLP practitioners have a phobia cure, a way to detraumatize past traumas, ways to identify and integrate conflicting belief systems that keep you from doing things you want, etc.

Neil Benbow

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