Tag Archives: Modeling

How To Model Others To Easily Achieve Excellence

Doin Some Cookin?

I was watching this cooking show on TV the other night. I don’t usually watch cooking shows, but this guy was pretty entertaining. One thing I liked in particular was he didn’t seem to measure any of the ingredients. It was a handful of this, a pinch of that, a little bit more of this. Even when he cooked some of the dishes, he never said what level to set the heat to or for how long to cook them. Just throw some stuff together, stick it in the oven until it’s done, and next thing you know you’ve got a gourmet meal on your hands.

I took a cooking class, two cooking classes a few years ago. Asian cooking. We learned to cook Chinese, Thai, and Japanese food. Two different course, and two different instructors. But they had two completely different approaches to cooking.

The first class I took (the classes were each four weeks, one night per week) she was extremely specific. Cut this exactly this way, measure this, make sure to shake the measuring spoon exactly three times to let the ingredients settle, but don’t shake too much, otherwise they’ll settle too much. Make sure to wash your hands and the instruments (cutting board, knives, measuring spoons, etc.) after each and every step. I was even lectured about placing the washed utensils in the drying rack at the proper angle so they would dry properly. Extremely detailed. The food, however, was magnificent. I don’t remember what we cooked exactly, but it was better than anything I had in a restaurant.

The other lady, who was from the course I took a few months later, because I had enjoyed the first course so much, was completely different. She was more like the guy on the cooking show. Put some of this in; add a bit of this spice, and a dash of that spice. Cook until it looks done. The food came out just as tasty, but not as “perfect” as the first class. This lady seemed to have the philosophy of showing us the general idea of how to make stuff, which we could later add to our own tastes. Whereas the method taught by the first lady didn’t seem to lend itself too much to improvisation. Being somebody who likes to cook, but rarely from a recipe, I rely heavily on improvisation. I have cooked some doozy experimental meals in the past, some good, some outrageously horrible. Once I tried making peanut butter popcorn, and it didn’t come out so good. One of the many tragedies of theory meeting reality.

One thing I noticed about the temperament of the two ladies is that the first lady seemed to be what I would describe as a type “A” personality. Detail oriented, always has a shopping list when they go to the store, lives and dies by their personal planner.

The second instructor seemed much more relaxed and a “make it up as you go along” type of person. While neither is better or worse, both characteristics have their strong points and weak points, there is evidence of type “A” people suffering more from stress related diseases. There’s also evidence of type “A” people making more money than the slackers among us.

One interesting idea I read in a book on personal development is that you can train yourself to be either type “A” or type “B” depending on the situation. If you need to perform some consistent behavior to get a specific result, you can train yourself to follow a specific set of instructions to maximize your success. Likewise, when it’s the weekend, you can easily switch into type “B” mode, and sit on a park bench and stare off into space when it’s time to unwind.

The trick is to develop a “switch” that sends you into automatic behavior mode when the situation calls for it, and being able to turn the “switch” off when the job is done.

One way to do that is through modeling. When you model somebody, you unconsciously soak up as much as their behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes as you can to achieve the same result they want. For example, if you are a student, and you have a difficult test coming up, it may help to model the most diligent person in your class. For the time being, simply pretend that you are them, as much as you can.

Where do they study, how long do they study, how many breaks do they take, how long, and how often. How do they motivated themselves, whey they are feeling lazy, what do they say to themselves to keep them focused, what do they visualize when they see themselves achieving their goals. Are there any authority figures from their past telling them supporting messages (in their imagination) while they are studying.

These some things that can collectively turn you into a studying machine. If you need to “switch” on this behavior, develop a kind of external anchor that you can use to put you in study mode. I had a friend once that was studying for a chemistry exam, and one of his “heroes” (as much as you can have a hero if you are a chemistry geek) was the guy that came up with the chemical structure for benzene from a dream he had of a snake eating it’s tale. This guy (the hero) had a relentless desire to figure out how stuff worked, so much that it permeated his dreams.

So when this guy (the student) wanted to get into “the zone,” he would sit at a table, place both palms on the table, close his eyes, and take a few deep breaths. Then he would imagine the ghost, or the spirit of the benzene guy slowly slinking into his body from behind, and giving him all his motivation and desire to figure out how stuff worked. He (the student) said this really helped to study, and he always did well on his chemistry tests.

So if you can figure out what you want to achieve, figure out somebody that has already done it, and come up some kind of physical “switch” along with a useful hallucination to help you take on their behavior. You may find that this can help you more than you realize.

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Success with NLP

Success with NLP

These Two Things Are Essential To Effectively Use The Law of Attraction

How To Properly Manifest Your Desires

I used to watch this TV show when I was a kid, I’m sure you’ve heard of it. “I Dream of Genie,” was the title. I watched it for two reasons, one because the girl that played the Genie was super hot, and was always wearing these sexy genie clothes. And two because I thought it would be awesome to just cross your arms and blink your eyes and make something come into existence. To have some sexy genie dressed in skimpy genie clothes doing that for you is pretty much a secret (or not so secret) dream of all men.

That is a pretty common theme in human history. Much has been written about metaphysics and alchemy. Alchemy is a specific category of metaphysics where you take any metal, and turn it into gold. This would be similar to today’s “law of attraction” and other metaphysical manifestation techniques. Most people would like to attract more money.

The whole concept of metaphysics is interesting to me. I see it as kind of a vague placeholder in our imagination to describe things that are just outside our realm of understanding. They aren’t really magical or mystical or beyond our capabilities, just outside of our normal every day realm of the cause and effect reality that we think we live in.

A couple of examples. Most of our physical laws make sense, but only because we see them happening on a daily basis. When we see something that “makes sense,” what we really mean is that it matches our experience, so it doesn’t require any extra thought to describe it.

The first time kids study gravity in school, it can be a little bit unfamiliar, kind of like a fish studying water currents. When you show a diagram of planets and the sun, it’s pretty easy to make the leap. Of course the math, which is pretty complicated, is another issue.

It can take an extraordinary imagine to figure out laws that aren’t so obvious. Maxwell was a physicist who came up with a bunch of very complicated equations that described electromagnetic radiation. These are both light waves and magnetic waves. These can’t be seen, so you have to have a very highly developed imagination to play around with pictures in your head and then describe them with complex mathematical equations that actually prove to be true when applied to everyday things like electricity and photo voltage measurements.

One of my favorites is when quantum physicists and solid state physicists were having a hard time describing these small spaces that had an extraordinary large number of particles bouncing around. They could pretty easily describer one or two particles, but after that, the math got exceedingly complex.

Then one guy thought of an idea. Instead of thinking of the system of a boatload of particles stuffed in there, each with it’s own mass and charge and spin and whatever else properties particles have, why not think of it as a system with a couple of holes, with all the properties associated with particles assigned a zero value? (To physicists, zero is as just a valid number as 43).

Well, it worked. It described the system perfectly and made the math a lot easier. All by pretending there was this hole there bouncing around, with zero mass, and zero charge, and zero spin, and zero whatever else particles have.

Ok, back to metaphysics.

My own personal belief about metaphysical laws is they are very similar to the holes in the above example. The “law of attraction” and other metaphysical laws of manifestation are simple placeholders to make our thinking about complex issues much simpler, much like the math was made simpler in the hole theory.

Example.

You are a salesperson. You’ve been around salespeople for a while. You’ve been around really good salespeople, and you’ve been around pretty cruddy salespeople. You are an average salesperson, but you’d like to improve your skills to become one of the best. You have two options.

Option One

You study sales book after sales book. You attend sales seminars. You take notes after every sales call, and analyze every sentence. You even ask some customers if you could bring in a video camera and tape yourself so you can later watch it and analyze your body language, your tone of voice, your inflection, the actual words that you use, etc etc etc. You buy some expensive statistical software and collect as much data as possible from every single sales call. From time of day, what color suit your wore, what color clothes your customer wore, where you sat with respect to North and South, the number of minutes that elapsed before you “asked for the sale,” every possible piece of data you collect, and plug into your software. Then on a weekly basis, you look at your sales, and tweak your performance to slowly and gradually improve your sales.

Option Two

You read a book on the law of attraction, and affirmations. Before going to sleep every night you tell yourself “I am the best salesperson at my company.” And just like all the books say, you put feeling and emotion into your affirmations. And just like the books say, when you go about your day, you release your affirmations to the superconscious, or whatever, and wait for the changes to take place.

So which do you think would work better? Believe it or not, method two would work much better. Not because of any mystical law or anything, but because of the massively powerful computational powers of your brain. When you tell your brain enough times that you want to be the best salesperson at your company, really program yourself to do that with powerful emotions, it will automatically do everything outlined in option one. But it will be doing it all unconsciously, so you won’t really notice. From a conscious mind point of view, you are only doing affirmations every night, and then magically in a couple months, you are the number one salesperson.

This requires a couple of things. First is a goal that is within your grasp based on your current situation. If you have sales experience, it’s pretty easy to go from average to excellent. Second, you are surrounded by some good salespeople, so you brain has something to model your behavior after.

This is the number one reason people fail when they “use” the law of attraction. They are either giving their brains some vague instructions, so it doesn’t really know what to go after, or they are giving specific instructions, but not exposing themselves to examples of how to get there.

When you make sure both of these are present, a clear objection, and sufficient examples of how to get there, with properly constructed affirmations, you can pretty much allow turn over any goals to your unconscious and let it soak up the behaviors from people around you.

Of course, this requires that you have the underlying beliefs that you are capable of actually performing the objective you claim you want, but that’s for another post.

For now, whenever you choose to do affirmations, remember the more clear you are the better, and the more examples you expose yourself to, in as many forms as possible, the better. That way you’ll have a much better chance of achieving your goals.

How To Use Neurolinguistic Programming To Maximize Your Sales Skills

If you’ve ever heard of neurolinguistic programming, then you know that it is an incredibly powerful tool to be used in almost any area of life, from almost any perspective.

Many people are aware of neurolinguistic programming, or NLP, as a tool for persuasion in both sales and seduction. Many sales techniques employ NLP to increase sales and income for astute salespeople, and others use it to improve their dating skills.

One of the often passed over areas of NLP is the method through which it was discovered itself. The word ‘discovered’ isn’t quite the right term, nor is invented, or created or any other terms that are used to describe a new technology.

The reason this is so is that NLP is not new technology at all. It is a collection of many techniques that were modeled and codified from people that were “natural’s” in there respective fields.

Many times people will look at somebody that is naturally persuasive, or naturally charismatic and say “Oh, look! He’s using NLP! I wonder where he studied?” usually the person in question is not using NLP at all, at least not to their knowledge. They really are a “natural.”

A natural is anybody that is skilled in on area. Salespeople, public speakers, and guys that are wildly successful with seducing women. Most of these people have no idea that they are using “NLP.” They just do what comes “natural” to them, and it gets them massive success in their field.

History is filled with people that use skills that are “taught” in NLP, even though they existed thousands of years ago. One good example is the letters of St. Paul. In case you’ve never heard of St. Paul, he a was this guy who used to be named Saul, then he had a vision of Jesus one day. At the time, Saul was against the rising cult of Christianity, and persecuted them every chance he got. When he saw Christ in a vision, he quickly changed his tune, and became a champion of Christianity.

He traveled to all of the Christian communities made it his life mission to spread Christianity. If any of his letters are an indication, he was a powerfully persuasive speaker. And his oration, if it was anything like his writing style, contained many elements taught in NLP.

Where the idea of NLP came into play was through the area of “modeling,” one of NLP’s most overlooked but perhaps most powerful application. Everybody wants to know the right patterns, the correct vocal inflections, how exactly to read people.

Having decent modeling skills is much more powerful. With modeling skills you have the ability to learn anything, from anybody, and apply in your own area of choice. You don’t even have to model all the characteristics of the person you are modeling, only the one’s you’d like to use for yourself.

The secret to modeling is to model everything about the person you are modeling What are they doing, how are they doing it, what do they believe about their own skills, how do they prepare themselves mentally for what they are doing.

For example, if you were to model Tiger Woods, you’d need to first model your body after his as closely as possible. Muscle strength, muscle flexibility, body fat percentage, etc. Then you’d have to model his technique as closely as possible. Exactly how far back he swings, his weight distribution on his feet as he hits the ball, the exact force with which he smashes the ball a million yards down the center of the fairway.

But you couldn’t stop there. You would next need to model his mindset, his beliefs, and his self-talk. What does he say to himself about his skills? What exactly does he visualize before he shoots? Does he get any physical sensations in his body while he is visualizing? If so where?

Most people (myself included) only get as far as holding a club and swinging it clumsily at a ball before declaring that they suck at golf.

One mistake many make when modeling is by asking somebody questions that they can’t answer. For example, lets say you want to model a fantastic salesperson at your company. So you ask them, “why are you such a good salesperson?”

If you’re lucky, they became a good salesperson because they studied sales technique after sales technique, tried them in different scenarios, kept the ones that worked, and improved on them while discarding the one’s that didn’t. They can then share with you the precise methods they studied, how they practiced, what exercises and drills they did to get to where they are.

Unfortunately, most people that are good in sales are just naturally good in sales. And they likely have no idea why they are good in sales. So you’ll get an answer like “Well, when I was a kid I always like mowing other people’s lawns and got really interested in figuring out how to make money, I guess.”

Not very helpful.

Better, more in depth questions would be:

How do you feel when you sell?
What do you say to yourself when you sell?
How do you feel when you don’t get a sale?
What do you say to yourself when you don’t get a sale?
What kinds of things do you visualize just before you meet a prospect?
What happens when a prospect has objections? What do you think, feel, and say to yourself?
How do you feel about our prospects as you are talking to them?
How do you feel about the product you are selling?

These are just a few of the questions that will help you to model somebody and be able to improve your skills.

All humans are natural modelers. Everything we learned, we learned from modeling. We learned to walk and talk by watching and copying others. We learned our ideas, beliefs and models of the world by looking at the adults as we grew up and simply copied them.

It would be fantastic if the top salesperson at your company would let you follow him around for a few months until you were selling as good as he was, but that isn’t likely.

As adults, we need to model consciously as well as unconsciously. One way is through a relaxed visualization. Take the top salesperson as an example. Say he or she let you tag along with them on a few sales. You just sat back and watched them in action.

Then later, you can relax, close your eyes, and visualize them making a sale. Then slowly replace yourself for them in your visualization. Do this a few times, and let your unconscious learn from them how to sell. This is a particularly powerful method, and when combined with asking them the right questions, you can dramatically improve your skills. When you add in learning proven methods from other materials, you can safely assure yourself of massive success.

Increase Your Learning Flexibility

I was talking to this guy the other day while I was waiting for the bus. I was going out to this local festival that being held in the next town over. In my local neck of the woods, all the little hamlets have their own local festivals, which they usually have around the fall, which is traditionally the harvest time.

Usually the local festivals have some sort of tradition which centers around the local Shinto shrine, which in turn is based on whatever gods they worship in the area. I’m not sure how it works out, but it seems to be a little bit similar, at least in structure to the patron saint system of the Catholic Church.

The Church has different patron saints for different vocations, or travelers, or people that are sick. Pretty much anything you can think of, you can safely assume that you’ll find a waiting patron saint to hand deliver your prayers to the Big Guy (Or Gal) upstairs.

One of the frequent complaints about Catholics from non-catholic Christians is that they pray to saints, or pray to Mary. What is really going on is they are literally asking Mary or the saint in question to put in a good word for them up the chain of command.

I don’t think whatever org chart they have in the Shinto tradition compares as far as levels of authority and command. I think maybe that each particular deity is pretty much a free agent. But I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.

So this guy was telling me about his daughter, who is taking entrance exams for high school. Private high schools are plentiful here, and there is a great deal of status on getting into the right high school. So the poor kids in junior high school have to start studying and hitting the books if they ever have a chance. Or at least that’s the way it seems.

It’s amazing when you can step outside of something you are familiar with, like your own culture and see how many similarities there are when you are looking from the outside in. I guess it all depends on how you sort things.

There is a meta-program called similarities-differences. This says there is one important filter that people carry around with them, and they are either looking for similarities, or looking for differences. Like when you see somebody preparing for something important, you can find similarities in their methods. Even if the thing they are preparing for is something completely different than anything they’ve ever experienced, you can look at their strategy and learn from it.

It’s always interesting when you look at things with a curiosity to find ways you can apply whatever you see to your own life. I heard a myth/rumor/urband legend about the origins of Kung fu. Some soldier was watching a preying mantic, and developed a whole new fighting style from it. Not likely true, but it’s a great example from being extremely flexible in who you can learn from.

So when this girl gets into the high school she wants to get into, her dad told me that she wants to get good enough grades to get into a good engineering school in Tokyo.

And I’m not sure how many deities they had at that festival, but the food sure was tasty. That’s probably my favorite part about going to local festivals, is they have some really good locally grown, and locally prepared food that you just can’t get anywhere else.