SEE The Invisible
(Acquire Skills Far More Quickly)
Tom O'Connor
So did you figure it out?
“Every day at noon, a ship leaves Le Havre for New York and simultaneously another ship leaves New York for Le Havre. The crossing lasts exactly 7 days and 7 nights in either direction. The shipping company Bounjour operates just one departure per day in both directions.”
The question is:
If you leave La Havre on a Bounjour ship today, how many other Bonjour ships will you pass at sea before you arrive in New York? You should count only the company’s ships, and only the ones met at sea (meaning not in the harbour).
Take a moment to figure it out.
Many people guess either six or eight. Most folks after some thinking conclude the number is…
…drum roll…
…7
If you said seven, congratulations you are in excellent company!
Alas sadly – you’re wrong!
The actual number is 13.
I’ll explain why in a moment.
THE DANGER OF A LIMITED FRAME
The Le Harve – New York problem illustrates a common pitfall that occurs in problem solving and also to NLPers when they try to model someone who has a really cool skill.
The pitfall of framing the activity space too narrowly.
In order words, creating too tight a boundary around what they think goes into creating the exceptional performance of the person they are modeling. How we frame things carries profound consequences. And it happens at the speed of thought.
Take Charisma.
Many people want to be more charismatic, so they want to model Bill Clinton. But invariably the way they frame ‘modelling charisma’ is all wrong. How Bill Clinton acts and how the audience responds affects how Bill acts and vica versa.
The two together make ONE SYSTEM.
To separate either is asking for trouble. If you draw the boundary line at just modelling Bill Clinton’s behaviour, you will be missing one of the most important elements of someone being charismatic – the role of the audience!
Many modelling projects are doomed because the person(s) involved arrived pre-loaded with a fixed idea of what any modelling solution will look like.
Holding a preconceived frame about the solution literally obstructs their ability to SEE what is most important. Typically, they enter the project with fixed expectations, specific tools and frameworks they must use before they have clearly defined the behaviours they want to model!
They have created a narrow FRAME.
Everything within the frame is assumed to be important but everything outside the frame, receives ZERO attention.
This situation is made worse because many of the things they teach you on NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner courses about modelling – that you need to model someone’s beliefs, elicit their strategies and meta-programmes is largely WRONG.
It’s backwards. We aren’t looking to create a checklist of things to model but to model the OUTPUTS. (More on that in a future email.)
MODELING IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK
Most NLPers (including myself for a long time), have a totally misguided understanding of what modelling is. Modeling is not copying someone. Nor is it imitating what they do. Nor is a strategy elicitation “modeling.”
Models do not capture the behaviours of the exemplar.
So what do they capture?
They capture OUR assumptions about the key activities of what someone else would need to do in order to create a similar class of result as the exemplar.
In essence, a good model gives us a useful guide that allows us to modify our own behaviour, such that we can create a similar class of result as the exemplar, consistently.
Over to Master Trainer Michael Breen for more.
Michael is one of a very small and rare group of NLP masters who has been paid large sums of money to model professionally for clients. In this video he debunks many of the most common misunderstandings and elaborates on how modelling is done in the real world.
You don’t need to profile people to create a model. It starts by framing the modelling project right. Getting really clear about what specifically you want to model and then following 7 steps:
- Clarify Your Desired Goal
- Identify The Model of Excellence
- Test Your Assumptions, Outcomes & Outputs
- Access & Observe the Model of Excellence In Action
- Detect & Distinguish the Pattern
- Eliminate The Non-Essential
- Link Up the Learning Transfer
(This helpful methodology is from C.I.T.A.D.E.L. - the missing masterclass on modeling.)
SEEING THINGS CLEARLY
Speaking of 7, let’s revisit why 7 ships is wrong and why the correct answer is 13.
Most people think about the problem like this:
“One trip takes 7 days and nights. So that’s a total of eight ships leave La Havre in that period. Of course, we will meet all those ships at sea, except for the 8th and final ship. That one is launching just as we are arriving.”
But just like our modelling project on Charisma, we’ve left an important bit out.
We’ve missed the ships that sailed before our departure and are already at sea when we depart New York. We will meet all those ships at sea.
Incorrect Framing: 7
Correct Framing: 13
If you got 13, well done. You are already showing you may have one of the key skills to be a great modeler. But if you got it wrong – and most people do – pause and reflect:
Why did you miss those 6 ships?
Where was your attention placed? How did your filters obstruct you from seeing what Feldenkrais called, ‘the elusive obvious.”
When it comes to learning new skills quickly and compressing decades of learning into days, there is no more useful skill to learn than modelling.
That’s why I’m excited to announce that tomorrow…
…I’m going to reopen access to the most complete and advanced behavioural modelling system ever created in NLP:
C.I.T.A.D.E.L: An Introduction To The Lost Art Of Behavioural Modeling & Artful Skills Acquisition.
It’s only going to be open for a few days and enrollment will only be for a maximum of 20 people.
C.I.T.A.D.E.L. is the training I wished was available when I first started exploring modeling and NLP.
It would have saved me so much time, money, trials and errors.
While I can’t change the past, I’m hopeful for the future...
Thanks to C.I.T.A.D.E.L., you don’t have to go down all the cul-de-sacs and wrong roads (and lies) that abound around behavioural modeling and rapid skill acquisition.
In one intensive program, you’ll have everything you need to make a massive leap forward in how you learn and how you model others. (At last!)
Stay tuned for your special invitation tomorrow.
To your success,
Tom
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