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Tom O'Connor
Anders Ericsson and Michael Breen has made careers studying top performers figuring out what they do.
Michael Breen, as one of NLP’s most accomplished and experienced behavioural modellers. Ericsson, as an internationally acclaimed researcher specialising in the nature of expertise
and human performance.
It was Ericsson’s research that helped inspire Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book ‘Outliers’.
While these two men came to study the behavioural patterns of outliers using completely different toolkits, they both converged on a single distinction:
The myth that in order to reproduce the results of an expert all you need is their strategy.
It’s not true. (I’ll explain why in a moment.)
In case you are new to NLP or perhaps a bit rusty on what we mean by an NLP strategy, let me quickly elaborate.
A strategy is a change in the sequences of representational systems that a person uses to produce a specific outcome.
For example, Warren Buffet has a strategy for picking investments. Elon Musk, for thinking through complex problems. Jeff Bezos will have one for thinking disruptively.
There are strategies for everything. For getting rich, getting in ‘beach-body’ shape, getting motivated, learning new skills, making decisions, falling in love, staying in love, feeling happy etc. And countless more.
People are dropping their strategies in front of you and I all the time. And with unique knowledge that the NLP strategies model provides, we can add other people’s best strategies, their best methods, other expert processes, the product of potentially decades of life experience and practice, to our toolkit.
And do it in a fraction of the time it took the person we are speaking with to learn it.
Typically, when people learn about NLP strategies, they are taught that strategies are like a telephone number. Find out what ‘digits’ (aka what representational systems) a person uses, dial the same number and you can produce the same outcome!
You can even teach it to other people, who in turn can achieve similar results.
Sounds great, right?
It is and it’s also more complicated than most people have been taught.
Having the right sequence (aka a person’s strategy) is only ONE component to being able to recreate other people’s results.
To reproduce the patterns of excellence of others, you need not one but three things:
- Their strategy (What is the syntax of rep changes that lead to a specific result.)
- Their resources (or at least access to sufficient resources to use the strategy.)
- Their refined ability to discriminate within a given representation system.
Having the first one is not enough. Having the second one is essential to be able to use a strategy, to begin with. Having the 3rd is what many NLPers miss entirely … so they struggle to
reproduce the results of the exemplar.
The failure to understand how strategies actually work (and what you actually need to know and be able to do) is one of the big reasons so many students who have come across the NLP strategy model don’t (and can’t) use it well and don’t use more widely.
Because, through no fault of their own, they are missing huge pieces about how the strategy model works in the real world. They’ve only ever been taught the basics from courses and books.
But there’s actually so much more which when you know, makes the strategy model so much more powerful and turns it into a tool will want to use every day to decode and install the patterns of excellence that are present all around you.
Experts as I mentioned earlier have very specific ways of representing things. As Anders Ericsson, author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise noted:
“The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.”
People who have a really effective strategy to achieve a particular outcome have developed the ability to make really refined discriminations within specific representational systems.
Not alone does this allow them to process large amounts of information, make better inferences of what is likely to occur, and sort ‘signal’ from ‘noise’, but it enables them to monitor, and error corrects their performance. Allowing them to get better and better at a skill much faster.
As Ericsson noted in his book:
“In any area … the relationship between skill and mental representations is a virtuous circle: the more skilled you become, the better your mental representations are, and the better your mental representations are, the more effectively you can practice to hone your skill.”
So how do NLP masters keep on top of all the information they get when eliciting someone’s strategy and keep it organised in such a way that they 1) don’t get overwhelmed and 2) are able to pattern what is most important to produce a similar class of result?
We’ll talk about that in my next post.
Stay tuned,
Tom
I’ve got a great video talking about the importance of ‘Mental Representations’ waiting for you on the other side.