A long time ago, a business consultant decided to take a much-needed break after years of working without a vacation.

After a bit of research, he chose to spend a week in Charlevoix, on the banks of the St Lawrence River, in Quebec. In order to rest well, he decided to go to a well-reviewed little bed-and-breakfast.

On a Friday afternoon, he packed his car and set off on an eight-hour journey to Charlevoix. After three Elvis albums and half an audio book on Neurolinguistic Programming, he made it to the inn.

There, he was greeted by a jovial and smiling old lady, who owned and managed the bed-and-breakfast. She let him know how happy she was that he had chosen her inn to spend a few days.

After two days, he was amazed at how much he had relaxed. Every morning, he came down to a fresh, homemade, hearty breakfast the old lady had made herself from scratch.

Fresh eggs from her little chicken coop, thick slices of bacon smoked locally by farmers who owned the pig farm, apple juice from the orchard... Every day offered him a new surprise at breakfast.

And every day, without fail, he helped himself to the old lady's preserves... 

God, did he find them delicious on her freshly baked bread! 

Blueberry, raspberry, blackberry, peach, and even her own special recipe of apple and pear mix... Seasoned with all the right spices and not too sweet, so as not to overwhelm the natural flavor of the fruit.

After a week of walking in nature, cruising on the river, and reading great novels lying in his room, he felt renewed and ready to go back into battle.

When he checked out, the old lady thanked him again for having spent a week with her, and given her the opportunity to take care of him. And before he set off, she handed him a gift: a beautifully decorated jar of apple and pear preserves.

"I noticed you enjoyed these," she told him smiling.

He was taken aback by the gesture. He asked her: "Do you do this for every guest?"

She answered: "Yes! It's my way of helping you take home a bit of the joy you felt here!"

He thanked her for her hospitality and kindness, and set off to his car.

On his way home, he couldn't stop thinking about the parting gift. "That's a heck of a way to build loyalty with customers and get repeat business..." he kept thinking to himself.

He then began to engineer ways in his mind for his clients to take advantage of that practice. By giving something to their customers at the end of an interaction, these businesses could induce loyalty and goodwill.

And that's how it began, the standardized, phoney practice of giving customers something after a transaction...

And it's ALWAYS what happens when you merely copy.

That's exactly what the second step in NLP modeling combats — the phoneyness.

You see, what the consultant and all his clients missed was the one key ingredient that made the gift work in the first place. And he wouldn't have missed this critical piece of the loyalty puzzle had he modeled the old lady instead of just copying her.

It's what enabled the Grinder and Bandler Brothers Band to effectively extract the genius of Perls, Satir and Erickson. It's what enabled Tony Robbins to model the firewalk and make it available to thousands, if not millions.

Modeling is an organic sport, not a spectator sport. While behavioral patterns are somewhat agnostic sets of instructions, they only flourish when embedded in fertile human soil. When they are, behavioral patterns grow healthy and solid, and performance can flourish.

No other human discipline offers us the power of improvement that modeling does. It's learning on steroids. That's why I've committed my life to it. It's also why I'm dedicating the inaugural issue of NLP Insiders to modeling. 

It is the lost art of NLP. 

Those who have the privilege of knowing how to use it live rich lives in the way they desire. They also live from a place of deep-seated confidence, one that isn't easily rattled by worldly turbulence.

Here's a practical and profitable way to use the phenomenon of anchoring I learned from my wife.

Before your truly stole her heart, and for a few years after we got together, my wife was a speech therapist.

One day, while one of her patients was finishing an exercise and we were texting, she told me she had to go because she was going to give him a facial massage to relax his tongue.

What?!

I was deeply intrigued by this. Later, when she was home, I asked her to show me how it worked. She obliged and performed a facial massage on me to relax my tongue.

Oh... My... God...

I then asked her if she did this for all of her patients. She said she did.

At that point, I understood why her office was always packed with patients.

It was simple. The instant they thought of her office, they immediately went into "facial massage" state. Best part was, they could justify to anyone going in to get the facial massage because, after all, they were working on their speech impediments.

That's anchoring applied at a masterful level, if you ask me — by someone who has NEVER spent a single minute in an NLP seminar or read one line from Frogs Into Princes.

I just happened to catch the pattern while it was happening.

Yesterday evening, my son and I were having fun with stereograms.

A stereogram is a type of optical illusion that creates a three-dimensional image from a two-dimensional image. It works by presenting the same image from two slightly different perspectives to each eye, which causes the brain to perceive the image as having depth.

The most common type of stereogram is called a "Magic Eye", which consists of a repeating pattern that appears to be flat, but contains a hidden three-dimensional image. To see the hidden image, you have to focus your eyes in a specific way, such as crossing your eyes or relaxing them while looking through the image, to create the illusion of depth.

OMG! This is sorcery!

You should have seen the two of us cross-eyed after our little fun session. If you've never seen one, Google "stereogram" and switch over to the images tab. You will have a cartload of stereograms to play with for weeks on end.

I love this kind of game because it reminds me of the secret NLP perception framework I use when coaching.

You see, most coaches listen to what their clients are saying. NLP Insiders, on the other hand, listen to HOW their clients are saying.

With practice, you can tune your senses to pick up all the signals of the HOW rather than the meanings of the "what." You sharpen your vision to capture the silent but visual cues. You heighten your audition to catch inflections and tone shifts. You tune your sense of touch to feel movement, even through a Zoom camera.

It works just like the stereogram. While most people look at what's happening at the surface and just see weird shapes in a repeating pattern, a trained person shifts his or her gaze and rapidly sees a 3D image pop out.

Likewise, the NLP Insider sees the "occult of the apparent." The client's obstacle is hidden in plain sight. Once you see it, you can instantly reveal it. 

Best of all, once you train yourself to perceive in this manner, you can never lose the ability. A lesson learned is a skill earned.

And by the way, NLP Modeling is also geared to help you capture the occult of the apparent. Instead of an obstacle, though, you are looking for the pattern that enables. If you know how to look, it will pop out at you while others spend years looking for it, seeing nothing.

It's unbelievable what you're able to say in coaching sessions when you have solid rapport with your client.

(By rapport, I don't mean the classic NLP definition of matching and mirroring. I'm talking about a specific frame that governs your interaction.)

You can say things that, if you were to say them to anybody off the street, would get you body-slammed to the pavement like a WWF second-rate wrestler.

However, in the context of solid rapport, you can literally offend your clients into selecting superior goals and targets for themselves.

In the Structure of Magic, the Grinder and Bandler Brothers Band  point out one of the most important distinctions in understanding a client's model of the world when it comes to goal-setting — right on page 105.

"[...] The way the client is representing his possible future experiences in the present - that is, his expectations of what he expects the outcome of his behavior will be."

(Not sure if you agree with me, but "expectations of what he expects" sounds like a redundancy... intentional attempt at trancing us out, or an editorial slip?)

When you take that piece of the puzzle and mix it with provocative therapy (oh, what the heck... let's take that a step further and make it "offensive therapy") in the context of solid rapport, you get an explosive cocktail that pushes your clients into empowering states from which to pick goals.

So push! Lean into them! Squeeze them to their core to get the good stuff out — and it does come out.

Remember: it's all just a model of the world. 

And when you're modeling, keep in mind that your exemplars also behave from a state of expectation as to what their outcome will be — and that their expectations inform their behavior and their evaluations. You just approach the interaction completely differently than you would with a client, of course.

Yesterday, I disconnected my satellites from the mothership.

It's been a long time coming, and I finally decided to pull the plug and get it done. The whole ordeal took no more than six minutes and presented zero discomfort. I told my wife last night I'm no longer a factory. Now, I'm an amusement park.

While I lay on the procedure table listening to Elvis Presley's rendition of "Suspicious Minds", staring up at a picture of trees viewed from the ground up (it literally felt like I was laying in the middle of a forest), I thought about how similar this process was to the work I often do with my clients.

Much of my coaching comes down to moving them into focused action. More often than not, when a client comes to me, his or her behavior is being diverted by a steady flow of counter-productive emotions.

OMG! These have to be stopped!

My job as a coach is to perform an emotional vasectomy on them, which cuts off the supply of these emotions to their performance center. Once done, they're able to move forward towards worthwhile objectives without constant diversion.

The key to performing successful emotional vasectomies is a solid understanding of emotional anatomy and how it relates directly to my clients' performance. I follow a general emotional anatomy map I've designed over the years using my NLP toolkit, and fill in the distinctions that each client brings.

The result allows me to design and perform a precise intervention.

Many of your clients probably need a similar emotional vasectomy to overcome some of the challenges they face. 

Let me tell you a story that most NLP veterans know about:

In 1988, Richard Bandler — one of the co-founders of NLP — was charged with the murder of a woman. Her name was Corine Christensen, a prostitute and NLP student, and she was shot dead in the face with Bandler's gun, while only he and a friend, allegedly his coke dealer, were present.

Bandler affirms he was set up for the murder — and, because of that, he points out the court acquitted him "in 20 minutes!".

He told the Independent: "And yes, I took coke for a while. But I also went on a binge of Hershey bars for a while too, and I was addicted to peanuts for a year, probably far more than I was to cocaine."

He used to get annoyed when people jerked his chain for smoking – a habit NLP is famous for ridding people of. He said: "I knew how to stop, I just didn't want to!"

Most people in the NLP world know that Bandler, besides his various past addictions, is diabetic due to his poor consumption habits of the past.

Despite all that, he's still extremely successful as a trainer.

Almost everyone in the NLP world respects him.

(Including his detractors.)

And he had a wife (who sadly passed away several years ago) and children that love him and depend on him.

Bandler's story offers two important lessons.

First, it's not because you have a powerful change technology in hand that you're immune to being a human. I can't tell you how many people I've come across in my life who believe that, because they understand a particular phenomenon (how people cheat on their spouses, for example), they're immune to the forces that produce it.

None of us are above the constraints of being human, no matter how significant and different we'd like to make ourselves. We're not. We're not above succumbing to any average, every day human weakness and flaw on the menu.

That's a sobering thought.

The second lesson from Bandler's story is the one I find incredibly empowering. It came to me during a walk in the forest last year. It was the most freeing insight I've had in the past ten years, and it liberated me from demons I'd been carrying since my childhood. I now use this lesson routinely in all my coaching work.

In the early hours of the morning of April 15, 1912 the immense body of the Titanic, rent in two, plummeted to its grave on the ocean floor. More than 1,300 souls were lost that night.

Fresh varnish, paint, and newly sawn wood were the initial smells that greeted a passenger aboard the ship. In those days paint was still made with lead and contained high amounts of linseed oil.

There would have been the smell of smoke from the coal driven engines and, on that fateful night, the wonderful smells of roasting duck, lamb, and beef, all of which were on the first class menu.

That same year, the famous French perfume house Guerlain had just released "L’Heure Bleue": “velvety soft and romantic, it is a fragrance of bluish dusk and anticipation of night, before the first stars appear in the sky.” It was expensive and in high demand and would have certainly been smelled by a lot of women on the first class deck. You can still buy that perfume today and there is no denying that it still has a quality that brings to mind that fateful night.

But at 11pm on April 14th, 1912 another smell began to appear: a mineral odor with a metallic edge.

It was the smell of an iceberg.

Just as ice in your freezer picks up the various odors of other foods stored there, icebergs will take on the scent of their surroundings. Interaction from sea dwelling animals contribute to this, as well as the chemical composition of the water from which the iceberg is formed...

*snap my fingers*

Hey there, can you come back to me?

You mean to tell me you were actually transported back to 1912 through your nose?

Then, reread this email and find out how you translated language into sensory experience.

Oh, and while you're at it, see if you can find the anchor in the text...

This weekend, my family and I spent a few hours by the Ottawa River.

It seems the groundhog was wrong this year. Spring is definitely upon us! Last year, there were still massive ice caps on the river in February. This year, they're already gone.

Watching the river flow reminded me how ingenious humans are at leveraging naturally occurring phenomena in nature.

We harness river currents to draw electric power for free.

We take advantage of the elasticity and pliability of sticks to propel arrows through the air.

We concentrate sun rays using magnifying lenses to produce fire.

Thinking of these activities reminded me of a common misconception NLP rookies fall prey to.

Take anchoring, for instance. New students think it's a technique.

It's not.

Anchoring is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Anchoring is happening constantly around us, all day, every day. It's happening right now, to me, as I write you this email. It's happening to you, right now, as you read it.

As a coach, you can harness that phenomenon to help your clients, just as human beings have learned to harness river currents and the elasticity of sticks to achieve their ends.

Most high-level NLP practice is about observing, catching and harnessing. The most elegant coaching work isn't even detected. When you play the game at a high level, you can coach people, but they believe they're just having a conversation. It can feel surreal at times.

Take another example: the fast phobia cure. It isn't a technique either. It's a phenomenon Bandler observed and captured. Once you understand how the phenomenon works, you can reshape and remold it in any way you want to achieve the result.

At the end of our initial coaching call, when I asked what was his main takeaway from the session, P.A. answered:

"I made the best decision in hiring you as a coach."

His words.

While it's great to hear he made the best decision, let me share to you my hallucination as to why he feels that way.

It's because of the coaching framework I've designed and have been operating from for the past ten years.

(It used to be laid out in plain view on dailyNLP.com, but I felt people took it for granted... so I removed it. From this point forward, it'll only be shared with my inner circle of clients.)

It's stripped from absolutely all the BS, down to the bare essentials needed to help someone move forward. And I've engineered all my NLP horsepower into it, to the point where clients can just have a conversation with me and shift happens naturally.

The reason I bring it up is because you need a framework from which to operate as a coach.

A model behind your model.

A distinctive approach that defines the way you work, one you build yourself based on your experience. One that incorporates your unique view of the world. One perfectly fitted to you, just as Air Jordans were designed to fit Michael's foot or a tennis racket was designed to enable Roger Federer's game.

YOUR framework.

It matters almost even more than the area on which you coach.

It's HOW you coach.

And how distinctly unique it is.

I guarantee you, if you begin incorporating elements of modeling in your coaching approach, no matter in what field you coach, you'll stand out like a raisin in a milk bowl. Nobody coaches using modeling, mostly because they don't know how to.

If you've been around dailyNLP for any amount of time, you know how much I hammer the importance of learning and mastering the...

Meh-ta Moh-del!

Now, I used to sell a program to help NLP Practitioners wrap their heads around the Meta Model (no longer available).

Thing is, I don't teach the Meta Model the same way it's taught in traditional NLP Practitioner trainings.

Soooooooooooo...

Today, I want to let you in on a little secret...

*Out loud* Huddle up!

*Thoughtful, calculated pause to appear mysterious and brilliant*

*kneeling on one knee and whispering* When you hear the Meta Model in the context of NLP, keep in mind they've truncated the name of the model...

OMG! There's actually another part to the Meta Model?!

*voice lowering* Yesssssssss... It has a last name...

They call it the "Meta Model" for short, but its full name is "Meta Model of language in therapy."

You see, the Grinder & Bandler Brothers Band put together the Meta Model as a tool to ask therapeutic questions, of the sort that Perls and Satir asked.

Then, they taught it within that context. And students took it at face value.

But what if...?

• What if there were a Meta Model of language in sales?
• What about a Meta Model of language in coaching?
• And a Meta Model of language in leadership?
• And a Meta Model of language in standup comedy?
• What about a Meta Model of language in modeling?

There is. There are. And they're sitting there, waiting for you to uncover them. Because everybody else is too busy focusing on the one about therapy.

To me, the Meta Model of language in therapy hinted at something deeper. Something even more "meta."