In the past two weeks, I watched my four-month-old son learn to blow raspberries. Inspired by reading that this would be good for his language development (seriously!), and knowing that his mother can’t blow raspberries, I made the sacrifice and regularly blew raspberries at him. He was surprised at the start, then he started laughing. Then he started trying it out for himself. It took a while, and he ‘fell over’ a bunch of times. Even now, his raspberries are particularly sloppy. But he watched me and he did it – today, he can reliably exit a room and blow me a raspberry!

Interesting skills are usually the most difficult to transfer. We can learn Newton’s Laws, but it’s another story entirely to learn to think as Newton thought. Those tacit and almost invisible skills that sometimes leave behind traces of brilliance are the ones where we lack the language to teach the skills. Often we lack the explicit knowledge as to what is being done at all. Yet an infant can learn without language. They just look out at the world with eyes wide open and a willingness to explore, experiment and experience.

In NLP terms, we could call this modeling. Modeling is how Dr John Grinder learned to do Gestalt Therapy from Richard Bandler and Frank Pucelik, the process yielding what we now know as the “Meta Model”. Modeling was then applied by them, and the original study circle, to learn from Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson, Frank Farrelly and others, thereby creating the original foundations of NLP.

NLP Modeling (or NLP^Modeling) is more than just Strategies, and seems mostly taught explicitly and comprehensively as part of New Code NLP trainings.