What is NLP Modelling really?
Before I explain what NLP Modelling is, I would like you to do a small exercise …
Can you think about a person whose voice you admire? They could be an actor, an anchor or even a friend. It could be Morgan Freeman, David Attenborough or Amitabh Bachchan - a person who really inspires you when they speak.
Now, I would like you to read the rest of this article in their voice.
So, back to NLP Modelling.
Let me first ask you what is NLP? Often, NLP is referred to as a set of tools and techniques that help create change. Although, that statement is accurate, NLP in itself isn’t those set of tools and techniques.
If someone were to define NLP as the process of modelling, I would find that definition closer to the essence of NLP than it being a set of tools and techniques. In fact, those set of tools and techniques are the result of NLP Modelling.
Modelling can be defined as a process through which you can learn to identify and replicate the internal strategies of excellence in successful people so that you can start experiencing similar results in your life.
Let’s take an example.
In an organization, you would often notice that some people perform better than others. Given that all the team members have the same manager, access to the same resources, etc, how do few people perform better than others?
Clearly, if everything on the outside is same then there has to be a difference on the inside. The people who perform better would have developed a way of thinking and being that allows them to perform better. That could be because of their past experiences, the beliefs they hold about themselves and the world, their sensory perception of the world or any other factors.
Now imagine, if you could study ‘how’ exactly these high-performers build their internal representation of the world and replicate them for others, chances are that every single person on the team would perform extraordinarily well.
And the process of doing that is what we call NLP Modelling.
So, you might be wondering, where do the NLP tools and techniques fit into this grand scheme of NLP and modelling.
Once we recognize the ‘how’ of the high performers, what are the ways through which we could replicate that for others?
By building the models, tools and techniques of the ‘how’, we would have a step by step process that we could teach everyone on the team so they could start performing at the same level. This step by step process ends up becoming an 'NLP Model'.
That is why at the start of this article, I mentioned that these are tools and techniques of NLP and not NLP itself.