Within NLP, the concept of modelling is often taken to mean “find someone who does something really well and figure out how they are doing it.” This is common sense.
Like so much common sense, it leaves some questions:
• what if I don’t know someone who is really good at what I want to do?
• how can I figure out what they are doing if I am just getting started?
• is it useful to only be curious about people who are “better” than me?
While it is obviously a benefit to be able to learn with a master, there are also benefits to being curious about how people do things even when they’re not “better” than you.
For instance, at a recent workshop, I modelled someone’s strategy for staying focused to do deep work. My deep work is writing alone at a computer. Her work was making prospecting calls. That seems very different.
Yet as we talked, I came to realize how much her states and strategies overlapped what I needed in different circumstances. My curiosity allowed her to uncover the specifics of how she combined habits and states to move through her calls. And it allowed me to uncover the importance of habit (well-known to writers) with a commitment to making something happen (for the salesperson, it was filling a sales funnel; my goal needs to be equally well defined).
The point was never that the model was “better” than me: she wasn’t even doing the same thing. It was more significant that she was managing similar states in ways that made it clearer to me what I was doing already and what I might try to do differently.
The world is less stressful when not everything is a competition (who is the best?!) and we can be curious about other people’s strategies without feeling they are ‘better’ than us. And when we learn from difference, we have lots of people to learn from, no matter our field or circumstances.
