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I have had one of the most exciting, exhilarating, exhausting weeks of my, certainly working, life!!

It started, without my knowing, on the run up to delivering the Personality Alignment weekend, and totally took off after that. As you may know, I have been doing 1:1 Parts work with people for over 8 years, and was persuaded that what I had been developing would be worth sharing with others. Once I acknowledged this and put it on the schedule, I started the process of unpacking my unconscious competence. I became more aware of what I was doing, when I was doing it, and would mentally run a meta comment whilst working with explorers. Happily for me I was gifted some fantastic explorers who offered me tremendous opportunity to work with and expand my thinking. However I knew that I still didn’t have enough awareness.

So I determined that the workshop itself would take on a modelling approach – of me – whilst I was demonstrating my modelling approach with a willing explorer. I had written the article, which did give some details, but I was unwilling to produce lots of prescriptive handouts, or to give these up front. I had some slides which encapsulated some of the processes. What I wanted was for the learners to come not-knowing, and being happy to put on the filters of enquiry.

For me the results were fabulous, taking me much further than I would have ever anticipated.

Learners were asked to view each stage of the process – there were three stages – with either the filter of

• What: what are the verbal patterns Fran is using?
  
• How: what NLP Skills is Fran using?
  
• Why: what direction does she take, and possibly why. These people were also invited to compare that with where they would have instinctively gone.
  

They were then asked to sit through at least 60 minutes of modelling, being asked to concentrate fully, and follow the process whilst monitoring through their filters. I made no apologies for this ask, since we have to learn to focus and tenaciously concentrate if we are to stay out there in the unknown long enough to gather the information that will make the difference.

From the questions and observations I received, I was able to bring to the surface what I was doing and thinking unconsciously. Often I was made aware of aspects which were totally hidden to me – the realisation of the use of association and dissociation for example. I was able to find out from the explorers their responses – something that I couldn’t do normally. My pages of notes on the process will all combine to expand my own understanding and take me further with its development. I am eager to run the workshop again to gather even more information from the Learners.

If that was not all, a totally unexpected by-product took hold. Derek Jacson and James Lawley combined to describe modelling as an evolving approximation. And never has something been more true than what happened next.

On Day 1 a mind map emerged as we plotted the Skills of NLP which I the modeller would be using in the process. This in itself was another type of modelling in effect and I as well as the other Learners had never scoped the skills this way before. As the whiteboard became full, by varying degrees the intrepid band of Learners realised just how many skills they did or didn’t consciously under their belt.

By Day 2, I realised that the skills could be divided into either external behaviours or internal processes. The Modeller’s external behaviours were the ones that the Learners were witnessing and recording, noticed by the discerning eye or ear - verbal patterns, resourcing strategies, rapport patterns. The other group of skills are hidden from view, and can only be presupposed by the learner. These are the internal processing skills of making sense of the information once gathered. At the time we merely identified pattern detection, system management and frames.

I then realised that the skills generating external behaviours formed the bulk of the Practitioner syllabus, whilst the internal processes are only touched upon and more probably the domain of Master Practitioner, if they are taught at all.

So this set me off. I downloaded the mind map software and didn’t emerge for two days. Derek was away diving and I’m grateful for a visit from Peta Ackerley who nudged my thinking Mk 2 further. I am now on Mk4 and rising.

I lived the experience that comes from meta cognition – once you see something new, then so many other possibilities crowd into the picture, there is room now for so many new connections. All the teachers who have been coming to Station House over the past four years began to make their presence known, as well as though from the further past. I thought I had been making connections, but only on one systematic level. Now I was beginning to put the thinking together systemically. I was in the process of creating a totally new, certainly to me, understanding of the processes and skills involved in the fascinating world of modelling.

The mind maps just grew – and that was a learning curve in its own right!

And then by way of a mini distraction, Paul Smith, lobbed an email suggestion that I put myself through David Gordon’s Array. In the midst of this mental maelstrom I was now asked to self model my modelling. The Russian Dolls were having a field day – it was fractals all the way down. I thought my brain was going to burst.

This proved to be a really salutary experience, since I gained first hand understanding of the demands and possible limitations of that model. And as ever I continued to learn more about my own processes - two arrays down and more to go!

It is often said that the Exemplar gains tremendously from becoming consciously aware of her unconscious excellence. I have really gained. ..

• Belief that the Personality Alignment, or maybe the reworked title will be Parts Alignment, has ‘legs’ and could rightly become something that can be promoted and taken to a much wider audience.
  
• A totally new understanding of the learning I have been doing for nearly twenty years, which brings with it an even greater ability to offer it others in a way that is coherent and integrated.
  
• More ideas for more books – who knows ……
  
• Vibrant filters which are enabling me to view differently everything I am watching or listening to. I have just watched a programme on the making of Cold Mountain – an absolutely fantastic description of how to build a model.
  
• Tremendous energy that comes from making new sense of my world, and from the zinged awareness that there is so much more learning out there. It has affirmed where I have been, and why I sought the experiences I have.
  
• And yet more ideas of what we can be doing at Station House to take learning and development to greater heights, to meet a wider range of aspirations that NLP Learners bring to their training.
  

I am now going to take the weekend off. But before I do here’s a final piece to complete the circle.

During my beavering, one of the learners who has just completed the first weekend of the Autumn Practitioner called to see if he could drop in to discuss his learning project. When he arrived, he was full of enthusiasm and energy. “They don’t know what’s hit me at work” “I said to my boss, ‘If I don’t do the next 16 days, I’ve got my money’s worth already.” “I am seeing the world so differently, I can’t believe it”. And he went on to tell me of all the things he was now doing, and the different responses he was having to situations. His intended learning project is an absolute knockout. What a star!

Here’s me after 20 years and here’s him after 4 days, and we are both as excited, stimulated and moved by learning and what it gives to us. What more can we ask of the world or give back?

Fran Burgess

© October 2004