NLP Modeling

NLP was originally developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder based upon "modeling" of three famous therapists, Fritz Perls the developer of Gestalt Therapy, Virginia Satir, one of the pioneers of family therapy, and Milton Erickson, the father of modern hypnosis. 

The process by which these three giants of modern therapy were modeled in many ways showed NLP in a microcosm. For this reason, John Grinder has defined NLP as being "the modeling of excellence".

Of course, it is also true that through modeling our clients, we can assist them in the change process. In the posts that follow, we will explore some of the modeling techniques that NLP uses. However, in this post we will give an overview of the NLP modeling process.

As with much of NLP, NLP Modeling describes a natural process, namely how we learn to “do” a new skill. Whether we learned how to ride a bicycle by playing with our friends, learned fishing with our grandfather, or learned to play softball at school, we naturally went through the modeling process.

NLP Modeling makes the processes, which we naturally use to learn a new skill, explicit. This allows us to model people we admire to take on their skills, more easily share our skills with other, and practice our NLP skills at the same time!

What is Modeling?
In NLP, Modeling is defined as taking one person’s “skill” and breaking it down in such a way that it can be learned by another person.

Modeling includes the NLP concept of ‘elegance’ which is defined as achieving the desired result in as few steps as possible. Hence, Modeling includes identifying which steps are essential to the process and which steps are not. The superfluous steps can then be deleted from the process.

We can think of modeling as describing a skill in multiple ways. The juxtaposition of the various descriptions gives us the requisite richness in the model.