7. Different Contrast
At this point it can be extremely useful to compare your model of an exceptional skill with:
- Someone who is only moderately skilled, to gain more understanding of the relative contribution of individual components to the overall ability, and to highlight aspects that may interfere, or that were not obvious in your previous modeling.
- Someone else who is also exceptionally skilled, to learn different ways to do a particular component of a process, and/or to learn additional supporting elements that your first model never learned--and that you can teach them to improve their performance even more. This potential improvement can be a useful incentive to offer a highly-skilled person to interest him/her in participating in your modeling project. Another incentive is that when you are successful, they will have an explicit model that they can teach to clients or associates, to their benefit.
- Special cases. Some clients will need more than a small adjustment to deal with objections, concerns, problems, or unique aspects. Often you can simply add a “standard” step that checks for congruence (“ecology”) or that preframes or reframes common objections, so that the model can be successfully applied to a wider range of clients without further modification.
Refining could theoretically go on forever. Typically when you have experience with 20 or 30 clients, you will have encountered most of the variations that exist. One way to speed up this refining process is to meet with a group of people and run them all through the process at once, with explicit directions to please report any and all concerns, hesitations, objections, or difficulties to you so that you can learn about them and build solutions into your model. (A tape recorder will help you get all this information quickly, and you can review it all later.)
Modeling is the basis for the continuing development and progress in any field. Physics began over 250 years ago; NLP only about 25. It's a nice beginning, but so much more must lie ahead.
