In the run-up to the Modelling Success workshop on December 15-16, I’ve been polishing my own modelling skills in a series of interesting modelling projects. I’ve given a few details below about two of these projects and plan to be adding more information on the site about these and other modelling projects over the next few months.
A Successful Language School Owner
How does a school owner attract clients or new students? Because of the increasingly difficult job market, more and more foreigners that I know in Japan are deciding to set up their own language schools and finding that attracting private students is not as easy as it might appear. When I modelled a successful language school owner recently, his core beliefs included the willingness to keep standing out from the competition, to be willing to experiment, and to learn from feedback–perhaps not surprising, these are beliefs that would support almost any business in today’s rapidly changing marketplace.
It is so easy to fall into habits or to fail to re-examine our habits and working patterns. NLP is all about creating richer maps of the world, and to do that we need to keep the presupposition in mind that “there is no failure, only feedback.” Like the school owner, we can all benefit greatly by experimenting, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and enriching our maps of the world in the process.
By modelling the skills of a successful school owner or any other role-model who has a skill that we admire, we can take a short-cut in this process by learning from other people’s experience and mistakes. We can then take on the useful aspects of their map of the world into our own map.
A Highly Effective Communicator
Some people are just simply better communicators than others – naturally … or is it natural? Is it something that we can learn? In NLP, we believe that skills such as communication can be learned and that modelling is a rapid way to achieve this.
Of course, modelling also happens naturally. People take on the accents, speaking styles, and communication styles of their parents, peers, and of the society around them. Clearly, some cultures promote different kinds of communication and this is a big influence on any particular person’s communication style because a person will naturally model the prevalent communication style.
For example, in Japan communication is often carried out rather indirectly, and one of the classic distinctions in Japanese communication is between tatemae and honne. Tatemae is the external mask that is worn whereas honne represents the true feelings or beliefs. In some countries, to hold differences between tatemae and honne might be considered to be a lack of sincerity. In Japan, while this could sometimes be true, it is more common that politeness and group harmony trumps ‘sincerity’. Indeed, in many circumstances, stating what you truly believe would be considered to be quite rude, poor communication, and even demonstrate a lack of ‘sincerity’. Japanese people (and foreigners who have lived a long time in Japan) naturally take on this communication style. ‘Sincerity’ can be a culturally-dependent word, but for most individuals in any particular culture, their map of the world does not allow for other interpretations of such a word. This can lead to inter-cultural misunderstandings.
In modelling an excellent communicator recently, a core belief that emerged from his map of the world was the need for constant calibration. By calibration, he means constantly noticing the response of the other person or people involved in the communication (both verbal and non-verbal responses), and then adjusting his own words and body language as appropriate. In NLP, this useful belief is encapsulated in the presupposition that “the meaning of your communication is the response that you get to it.” While we cannot directly change another person’s response, we can tailor our own communication to help achieve the response that we want. Through deliberately modelling a range of good communicators, we can learn to develop flexibility in our own communication so that we can communicate with any person in exactly the most appropriate way, not simply the ‘natural’ way that we have learned.
By deliberately taking control of our own patterns through modelling (rather than simply accepting the maps that we have ‘naturally’ or accidentally acquired), we can learn to better appreciate other people’s maps of the world and also to continually develop our own rich maps of mind which can support a rich tapestry of communication and life.
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For the recent modelling projects, I have been using a variety of NLP tools including the Experiential Matrix, a model developed by David Gordon. In the Modelling Success workshop on December 15-16, you can learn to use these modelling tools to identify and take on the skills of people that you admire.
©Copyright 2012 by Dr. Brian Cullen
www.standinginspirit.com