GOING DEEPER: Capturing Experience

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Stepping In

Where experience makes sense is IN experience. Therefore, modeling is best done by "stepping into" the experience of the exemplar. This makes it possible to check our understanding directly through experience, to directly discover possible connections and implications operating in the structure of the experience, and to eventually reproduce the ability itself. The process of stepping into another person's experience involves learning to distinguish what is "me" from what is the "exemplar," and gaining range and flexibility in adjusting the elements of your experience.

Half of the livestock handling facilities for meat processing plants in North America use systems designed by Dr. Temple Grandin, an Assistant Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. Because of her ability to understand farm animals in ways that few others do, Dr. Grandin has brought to the industry a unique perspective on the humane handling of animals, namely, the perspective of the animals themselves. Her lectures, her television appearances, and her over 300 publications continue to influence and change how animals are handled in slaughterhouses throughout the world. In addition to her publications about animal processing plants, she has written several books on her own life. What makes her personal life interesting - and her professional life all the more remarkable - is that Temple Grandin is autistic.

Autism is a term that covers a wide range of developmental abnormalities, including repetitive behavior, extreme narrowing of attention, impaired language development, and impaired ability to interact with others. There is also a range of severity of impairment among people with autism, from those individuals who are "low-functioning" to those who are "high-functioning." Temple Grandin is certainly a "high-functioning" autistic, making her way in the world brilliantly. Nevertheless, many experiences most of us take for granted are either not available to her, or come only through struggle. Because she organizes experience differently than most of us, Grandin's accounts of her world and her struggles open many windows on the often hidden experiential dynamics that operate in all of us. One of those experiential dynamics is the ability to empathize, to understand the emotional and experiential significance of other people's verbal and facial expressions and behavior:

When I have to deal with family relationships, when people are responding to each other with emotion rather than intellect, I need to have long discussions with friends who can serve as translators. I need help in understanding social behavior that is driven by complex feelings rather than logic. I do not read subtle emotional cues. I have had to learn by trial and error what certain gestures and facial expressions mean. (Grandin, Thinking in Pictures, p.134-135)

Her experience with animals is different, however. During an interview with Oliver Sachs, she remarked, "'With farm animals I feel their behavior'...'With primates I intellectually understand their interactions'" (Sachs, An Anthropologist on Mars, p.281). For reasons we can only guess at, Temple Grandin is able to enter into the subjective world of farm animals with the same ease and naturalness that most of us enter into the worlds of other human beings. And it is clear that she truly is empathizing with these animals; she can predict how they will respond in various interactions, and therefore knows how to create environments for them that respect their experience. Her understanding of farm animals does not seem to be something that is simply given to her. Rather, it is something she discovers. That is, she re-creates in herself the subjective world of these animals and then discovers in her own experience what they themselves must be experiencing in that world:

When I put myself in a cow's place, I really have to be that cow and not a person in a cow costume. I use my visual thinking skills to simulate what an animal would see and hear in a given situation. I place myself inside its body and imagine what it experiences. It is the ultimate virtual reality system, but I also draw on the empathetic feelings of gentleness and kindness I have developed so that my simulation is more than a robotic computer model. Add to the equation all of my scientific knowledge of cattle behavior patterns and instincts. I have to follow the cattle's rules of behavior. I also have to imagine what experiencing the world through the cow's sensory system is like. (Grandin, p.143)

Temple Grandin is not the first person to try to make sense out of the behavior of farm animals, of course. But as her accounts of what is generally found in the stockyards and slaughterhouses of the world make clear, the animal's behavior is typically viewed from the human perspective of those charged with caring for and handling the animals. To understand these animals, Grandin instead enters into their world, taking on as her own - as much as she can - their perceptions and behaviors. She makes sense of their experiences in the only place and in the only way that experience makes sense: in experience.

Making Sense

How do we make sense of someone else's experience? Suppose you meet an Indian on a street in Calcutta and ask him if he would like to join you for lunch. He responds by wagging his head from side to side. How do you make sense out of that response? That is, what does it mean? The meaning of this person's head wagging is not inherent in the gesture itself; it does not contain meaning, like a box of chocolates that actually contains chocolates. To speak of words and gestures as "carrying meaning" is misleading. The meaning is not in the words and gestures themselves. Instead, the meaning emerges as an interaction between those words and gestures and the person who is perceiving them. 'Meaning' is what happens when the observer of that gesture connects it to his own experience. Meaning is made by the connecting of perception to experience.

For instance, we know what a smile means because we have had experiences in which we discovered that smiling people are feeling pleased about something, that there is a connection between the expression of smiling and feeling pleased. When our Indian acquaintance smiles, we immediately connect it with our experiences of this facial expression and recognize that he is pleased. If we had never made that connection, smiling would make no sense; we would perceive it (see it), but it would have little or no meaning for us. (The accounts of feral children, for instance, reveal that responses we consider innate - such as smiling - may still require timely experiences to be "released" or "imprinted." Without these experiences, these responses may never become meaningful.) The fact that we try to connect our perceptions to our personal history of experiences becomes obvious when those connections are not immediately available. For most of us, the Indian wagging his head side to side has no meaning because it does not immediately connect us to anything in our previous experience. We actively sift our personal history of experiences, seeking some kind of connection with what we know. Perhaps we decide that the wagging head means he is unsure (or that he has a crick in his neck, or is trying to empty water out of his ears, or is trying to hypnotize us). We search for meaning and, finding it - regardless of whether or not it is in fact accurate - we feel we understand and can move on. Suppose, however, we have an Indian interpreter with us who explains that wagging the head from side to side like that means, "I am very pleased with this suggestion!" This is a moment of connection for us. We have plenty of experience in our personal history regarding what it is to be pleased by a suggestion, and now we can connect those experiences to this Indian gesture. From that point on, as we walk the streets of Calcutta and observe people wagging their heads from side to side, we know that they are very pleased about something. Now their behavior makes sense to us. Now it has meaning.

The same relationship between perception, personal experience and meaning holds true for language: words trigger representations of those experiences that have somehow been connected to those words. The sequence of characters (or, when spoken, the sounds) "RED" means something to speakers of English only because they have had that sequence - that word - attached to the experience of seeing a particular color. Similarly, "brother," "run," "love," "divide," and "freedom" all have meaning only because we have attached each of these to certain kinds of experiences. For those who speak only English, however, the Swahili words, "saa ngapi" mean nothing; they are just sounds, unconnected to anything in our experience. But if a speaker of Swahili says "saa ngapi?" as he runs his finger around the face of a clock, we have the opportunity to connect those words with the notion of asking for the time. Experience can be described in words, but that description is only understood by someone experiencing that description. Words become understood only when we are able to connect our experience to them.

The extent of correlation going on moment to moment between perception and stored experience is enormous. (Just consider the amount - and speed - of correlations you are making to understand these sentences as you read them). This is possible because of your brain's ability to simultaneously process input (parallel processing in the parlance of computer models), and to do that processing largely subconsciously. Except in those moments when we are offered some input for which we have no experiential connections, this process flashes along automatically.

The point we want to emphasize here is that understanding is built out of experience. Words, symbols, gestures or behaviors - no matter how concrete or abstract they may be - are only understandable through and within the medium of our subjective experience. The correlating of perception to experience operates automatically and unnoticed in our human interactions because we are swimming in the same species waters, and usually in the same cultural and social waters as well. When we do not understand another person, we have two ways of resolving it. One is to make what that person is doing or saying fit into our own map of the world. We rationalize the behavior into something that fits with the connections we already have in our experience for such behaviors (such as when we reasoned that the Indian gentleman's head wagging meant he was unsure).

The other way to resolve the lack of understanding is to change our own map of the world to more closely match that of the other person. In these instances we seek new experiential connections. This is what happened when the translator revealed to us that the head wagging signified pleasure at the suggestion of lunch. When we do this we are opening ourselves to someone else's experience; we are "stepping into" the experiential world of another person. (Had we been determined to maintain our existing map of the world - that the Indian gentleman was unsure - we could have done so by deciding that the translator was trying to fool us, or that he was not truly well - informed, or that our degrees in psychology made us superior judges of behavior, and so on. You can find further discussion about the function of deletion, distortion and generalization in maintaining our maps in Going Deeper: The Primacy of Beliefs.)

"Teach Me To Be You"

As modelers, our intention is to reproduce in our own experience as accurately as possible that which is operating in the experience of our exemplar. If we simply shave off the corners of the exemplar's experience so it can be jammed into the round hole of our own, already existing experience, we will learn nothing from him. Instead we need to make room in us for the exemplar's experience, corners and all. When modeling, the gathering of information needs to be an active and intentional attempt to understand the exemplar from inside his experience. This "teach me to be you" orientation toward information gathering we call "stepping in."

An obvious and important entree into the experience of our exemplar is through his behavior. Matching our behavior to that of our exemplar may give us important elements of his ability. This is particularly so for those abilities that rely primarily on behavior, such as batting a ball, splitting logs or administering an injection. In addition, matching the external behavior of an exemplar can reveal aspects of his internal experience as well. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas "always wanted to enter into the consciousness of a non-human creature... to know what the world looks like to a dog, for instance, or sounds like, or smells like... to visit a dog's mind, to know what he's thinking and feeling:"

In the late afternoon sun we sat in the dust, or lay on our chests resting on our elbows, evenly spaced on the hilltop, all looking calmly down among the trees to see what moved there. I've been to many places on earth, to the Arctic, to the African savanna, yet wherever I went, I always traveled in my own bubble of primate energy, primate experience, and so never before or since have I felt as far removed from what seemed familiar as I felt with these dogs, by their den. Primates feel pure, flat immobility as boredom, but dogs feel it as peace. (Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Hidden Life of Dogs, pg. 120-121)

Here Thomas is stepping into the world of her dogs through their behavior. This example immediately raises a question of whether her experience really does match that of the dogs. We are using her example because it points up that very important question. When we step into the behavior of other human beings it is easy to assume that what we are feeling, they are feeling as well. Nevertheless, as made evident by countless misunderstandings between human beings, being in the same species does not guarantee that our internal experiences match those of anyone else.

In modeling, however, we need accurate access to the internal experiences of our exemplar. As we discussed in essay 3, all abilities are the result of beliefs, strategies, emotions and behaviors operating together. Although the contribution of each of these elements to a particular ability will vary, for the most part the structures that make them work will be found in internal processes, rather than in the behaviors through which those internal process find their external expression. Although there are many things we can learn about our exemplar's ability from observing his behavior, most of what is significant in terms of the underlying structure is either not at all revealed by behavior or can only be inferred after a great deal of observation. Even then (like Ms. Thomas with her dogs) we will be faced with the question, Do the internal experiences I am having match those of the exemplar? How can we gain surer access to our exemplar's internal world? Fortunately, we have that emissary of experience: language.

One of the beauties of language is that it can reveal much of the inner behavior and experience of the speaker. The way language reveals that inner world is, in a sense, by recreating it in the listener (or reader). And so we can use the descriptive language of our exemplar to step more deeply, thoroughly and accurately into his experience. That is, we can step into his subjective world by allowing his descriptions to access and form experience in us. (Of course, since no two people can ever have exactly the same experiences, the fit between language and experience will never be perfect. In casual communication this is fine, since the slippage between the words used and the differing experiential references is usually not enough to create significant misunderstanding. Though, of course, this slippage IS the source of miscommunications and of most problems between individuals, groups and countries.) The purpose of asking questions, then, is not to simply gather information. The purpose of a question is to stimulate the exemplar to describe his experience in such a way that we can step into it ourselves, by accessing our own references for what he is describing.

THE IMPORTANCE OF STEPPING IN

Why bother to step in? Why open and adjust your experience to that of your exemplar? The reason is that your intention as a modeler is to do more than understand. You do not want to simply hear about the subjective land of your exemplar; you want to walk in it. Taking this journey means altering the structure of your experience to match that of your exemplar.

We do not want to go just anywhere in experience, however. We want the exemplar - guided by our questions - to describe those aspects of his experience that are relevant to our being able to reproduce his ability. The most direct way to know whether or not the exemplar is offering us relevant information is by discovering how our own experience is affected by those elements. Does adjusting our experience to match the exemplar's take us closer toward manifesting his ability, or not? That is, Is it useful information? This question can be answered only in experience. When it comes to the alchemy of experience, we must test the information we get in the crucible of ourselves. It is there that we discover whether or not we are getting the elements we need from the exemplar. More specifically, stepping in allows us to:

Test whether or not the question was answered

Remember that the fact that a person responds to a question does not mean that the question was answered. Our modeling questions are intended to orient the exemplar to certain aspects of his experience, but that is only our intention. He will answer as it makes sense to him to answer. But by stepping into the context of the ability with his answer, we can immediately know whether or not it relates to the specific aspect of experience we had asked about.

For example, suppose our exemplar has the ability to forgive others, and we ask him, "What are you feeling as you consider the wrong that has been done to you?" He answers, "I recall times when I have made a similar mistake." When we step into the context of trying to forgive someone with "recalling times I have made a similar mistake," we find that it does not take us to a feeling (but to a way to think). Recognizing this, we know to ask again for the feeling (perhaps adding clarification or examples this time), and now he answers, "I'm feeling cautious."

Discover elements of experience to explore

Because of the systemic nature of experience, stepping into the exemplar's world will generate systemic changes in our own experiences beyond those particular elements we have learned from the exemplar. We can then ask the exemplar if the changes in structure we experience are ones that are true for him as well. For instance, when we try on, "I recall times when I have made a similar mistake," we notice that we feel curious. We can describe this to the exemplar and check if that is also true for him. Regardless of his answer ("Yes, I do; it's kind of a combination of cautious and curious, actually" or "No, not at all"), we get to fine-tune our experience relative to his. That is, we either keep "curious" as part of the experience or, recognize that it is something we brought to the experience, and eliminate it from our model of the exemplar.

Determine where the "holes" are

By stepping into the context of the ability with the exemplar's structure of experience we can directly test in our own experience what is working for us and where we still need clarification. After all, the exemplar should not be expected to know what we need to know about his experience, and he may well be unconscious of significant aspects of the structure of his ability until our questions direct his attention to them. On the modeler's side, an intellectual assessment will not necessarily reveal what we still need. Indeed, such an analysis can be very misleading. From inside the experience we can more readily identify where, for us, there are still "holes" in the structure. For example, when we step into the process of forgiving a certain friend, feeling "curious and cautious" as we recall "times when I have made similar mistakes," we might notice that the person hurt us intentionally. It was not a "mistake." This then becomes something to ask our exemplar about, that is, "How do you forgive people who hurt you intentionally?"

Understand the systemic significance of information

All of the advantages of stepping in are, in fact, branches growing on this trunk:

Stepping in allows us to access and assess through direct experience how the ability (or some element of the ability) "works."

Knowing how the ability works is the aim of the information-gathering phase of modeling. A model that makes sense on paper but not in experience is of little use. If it "works" on paper but not in experience, we have good reason to suspect that what is on the paper is either insufficient or does not capture the experience as it is lived. The experience of our exemplars will necessarily be converted into, and communicated to us through the abstractions of language and our observations of their behavior. Our goal as modelers is to convert those abstractions back into experience - our experience - with as much fidelity to the experience of the exemplar as possible. To step in is to deliberately pursue that goal.

RED HERRINGS

We want as much as possible to identify what is genuinely operating in the experience of the exemplar. But how can we know that the elements of experience our exemplar is offering us are genuine? Might not exemplars make up or manufacture their answers? Or confuse what they would like their experience to be with what it actually is? Or simply be misguided about the nature of their own experience?

Yes, all of these red herrings can and will occasionally surface. As a fellow human being, the exemplar will want to be helpful and, so, may make up answers to fill voids in his knowledge of his own experience, or perhaps to satisfy some particular desire he detects in us as we ask our questions. Or, like any of us, the exemplar may occasionally be blinded by the light in which he wants to see himself. Furthermore, the exemplar's experience is the water in which he swims, and may not be something he has paid attention to before we showed up with our (probably) unfamiliar distinctions and questions. Consequently, he may make mistakes in characterizing what is going on in his subjective world.

Because of these potential sources of communication slippage and misinformation, some modelers prefer to pattern only that which they can see or hear while the exemplar is actually engaged in manifesting his ability. This will provide useful and important information. But simply duplicating external behavior will often not be sufficient to also produce the underlying cognitive structures that give rise to most abilities.

We must rely on language to create an experiential bridge between us and the exemplar. We cannot remove the possibility that the exemplar will (unintentionally or intentionally) mislead us in his description of his experience. What we can do, however, is test what we are getting through "calibration," considering "does it fit, does it work?" and using "multiple examples, multiple exemplars."

Calibration

The authors once had in their seminar a professional poker player who amazed us with his account of how he played. For him, the most essential aspect of the game was learning to "read" the other players. As the play of the hands proceeded, he would carefully note the behavior of his opponents (known as "tells"), correlating what he saw with the choices of play they made and the cards they were actually holding. In this way he would eventually be able to "read" by these "tells" what his opponents were holding in their hands and what they were thinking. (Other professional poker players "read" as well, of course. When playing together, they try to create mis-reads by intentionally displaying false behavior. These too can be read as "false tells," which soon creates many levels of complexity and subtlety during play.)

All of us have a great deal of experience in "reading" other people. We recognize when someone is uncomfortable, confident, unsure, convinced, struggling, content, and so on. All of these states reveal themselves in external behavior: in the tempo and quality of body movements, in characteristic facial expressions, and in distinctive changes of timbre, tempo and intensity in the voice. During a lifetime of interacting with one another we have calibrated ourselves to recognize the "state significance" of these external behaviors, shared by most or all of us as human beings.

Calibration is the process of getting to know what is going on with your exemplar based on what you see and hear him do consistently. Your exemplar is a fellow human being, so to a great extent you are already calibrated to him. That is, you will probably be able to recognize when he is unsure, confident, confused, pleased and so on. Being calibrated to the exemplar's responses affords us our initial test of the reliability of the information he is offering. For instance, if his answer is accompanied with a furrowed brow, pursed lips, facial asymmetry and ends in an upturn of his voice, we can be pretty sure that he is unsure of what he is describing. This is an indication to not immediately accept the answer, but to probe further and help him sort through his experience until he is (and we are) confident about what he is describing.

These societal calibrations should not be taken for granted, however. (This is particularly true when people from different cultures come together.) Everyone is an individual, as well as a fellow human being. Therefore - like a professional poker player - it is important to calibrate to this individual exemplar. That is, learn how to read when this particular person is confident about a response, wanting to please, confused, and so on. For instance, you may discover that when your exemplar is answering but not looking at you he is actually not answering, but that he is verbalizing possibilities to himself as a way to really consider them.

Does It Fit? Does It Work?

Remember that the ability is the natural manifestation of the exemplar's structure of experience, and that this structure is a system in which the necessary elements work together. Any element of our exemplar's experience, then, will satisfy two tests if it is indeed a part of the Array for that ability: first, it will fit with the other elements of experience that we already know are a part of the ability, and second, it will contribute in some way to the ability working.

How do we know whether or not a particular element of experience fits and works? First by trying it on in conjunction with what we already know about the exemplar's structure of experience. When we add that element into our own experience, does it bear little relation to anything else or disrupt everything else, or does it fit in? Does it make sense with the rest of the experience? We want to emphasize again that "making sense" is an assessment that is done as much as possible from inside the experience. It is not an intellectual assessment from the outside. Something that sounds odd or counterintuitive may, when it is actually experienced, reveal itself to be completely sensible, to fit.

Furthermore - and this is the second test - when we imagine stepping into the context of the ability with that new element of experience added to what we already know, we will discover if it "works." That is, we can notice if the added experiential element seems to contribute to our being able to more fully manifest the ability, or if it does nothing to help, or even hinders the expression of the ability.

If what our exemplar has told us does not fit with the rest of the Array, or if it does not contribute to the working of the ability, then, again, we need to sort out with the exemplar whether or not that element does, in fact, belong in the Array, and if it does, how it contributes to the working of the ability. In the course of that sorting out, you will either set that element outside of the Array, or you will come to correctly understand its role in the ability and include it.

Multiple Examples, Multiple Exemplars

A corollary of the idea that experience has structure is that there is a consistent relationship between a particular structure and the ability to which it gives rise. In practice, then, anything that is truly characteristic of the structure of a particular ability will be found in all examples of the exemplar manifesting his ability.

For instance, our forgiving exemplar describes two incidents: in one, someone cut him off in traffic, he recalled having done the same himself, and he saw humor in the situation; in a second example, he was betrayed by a friend, he recalled having done the same to someone himself, but he did not see any humor in the situation. If we had explored only the first example, we would likely have concluded that "finding humor in the situation" was necessary. But the second example reveals that whether or not he finds humor in being offended depends upon the situation. What is essential to the exemplar's strategy in both examples, however, is the step of recalling how he has made a mistake similar to the one the other person made. So another test of the veracity of the information you gather will be found in the consistencies and discrepancies you discover as you compare several examples of the exemplar manifesting his ability. Similarly, comparing across exemplars can help us identify where there may be red herrings in the information we gathered from one or another of the exemplars.

It may be that differences in how an exemplar handles different situations reveals what should really be considered two separate abilities. In our example, for instance, perhaps the ability to "forgive a trespass by a stranger" is a different ability than that of "forgiving trespasses by loved ones." Similarly, comparing two exemplars who you assume have the same ability may reveal that they are, in fact, better seen as exemplars of two different abilities. It is for this reason that we recommend getting at least three examples from an exemplar (to sort out what is situational from what is truly characteristic of the ability for this particular exemplar), and three exemplars for an ability (to sort out what is idiosyncratic to the exemplars from what is essential to the ability). These topics were also discussed from a slightly different point of view (that of choosing what to model) in Going Deeper: Getting Started, and will be treated in more depth in Going Deeper: Elegance and Going Deeper: Generic Models.

THE FISH IN THE DREAM

Many years ago, we were delighted by a comedy routine on the radio. The host encouraged listeners to call in to describe one of their dreams, then the host - playing psychiatrist - would interpret them. The first call went something like this:

Caller: I was sitting on a hill, out in the country.

Host: Was there a fish there?

Caller: No.

Host: Are you sure?

Caller: Yes. There was no fish there.

Host: Well, you were in the countryside. Was there a stream nearby?

Caller: Maybe. Could have been.

Host: And there would have been fish in that stream, wouldn't there?

Caller: I suppose so.

Host: Aha! Just as I suspected! You have unresolved Oedipal fixations!

And so it went. If a caller dreamt of being on a city street, the "psychiatrist" would find a nearby market that undoubtedly sold fish; if the caller dreamt of working in an office, the "psychiatrist" helped him discover a coworker who loved to fish; and so on. And in every case the diagnosis was therefore obvious: "unresolved oedipal fixations."

How can we know that when we are modeling we are not doing the same thing as this radio psychiatrist, "discovering" in our exemplar's descriptions the fish that we expect or want to find there? The three tests that we describe above - calibration, does it fit/does it work?, and multiple examples/multiple exemplars - will certainly help us avoid throwing our own red herrings into the exemplar's experience. But they do not guarantee it.

In fact, it is guaranteed that we will introduce aspects of our own experience into our model of the exemplar. Remember that we understand through our personal experience, not in spite of it. But because the goal in modeling is to alter the structure of our experience as a way of opening doors to new abilities, we want to tip the scales in favor of the exemplar's experience as much as possible. The task, then, is to sort out what is you from what is the exemplar.

Our suggestion is to be alert for anything you discover in your exemplar that also fits for you, or is just what you expected, or you know is true or right, or seems immediately familiar. Whenever you have any of these responses, a red flag needs to be raised. These are the kind of responses that come from finding a match between your own experience and what you are hearing from someone else. When that red flag goes up, the question you need to ask yourself is, "Is this an element of experience we actually share, or am I putting my fish in my exemplar's dream?" You answer this question by probing a bit more carefully with your exemplar - perhaps taking some more examples - to sort out what is "me," what is "him," and what is "us."

How To Step In

The ability to step into the structure of someone else's experience is so essential to the ability to model, that we will go into some detail about how to do it. That is, we will be offering you a model for stepping in. Like most models of complex abilities, merely reading about it - even if you understand it thoroughly - will not transfer the ability to you. It must be put into practice for you to become familiar and adept with its elements, and to integrate it into the rest of who you are and how you operate. In addition, as we are unable to interact with you personally, the model can only be presented as a description of elements and cannot be tailored to you.

Nevertheless, that description will include suggestions for how to access the elements of stepping-in into your experience. If you find yourself simply reading through those acquisition suggestions now, don't worry. When you are finished with this essay those suggestions will still be here, and you can return to this essay to devote as much time as you need for acquisition. It will be time well spent.

THE CENTRAL BELIEF: "EXPERIENCE HAS STRUCTURE"

Essential to acquiring the ability to step in is the recognition that experience has structure. We have already discussed this idea as a presupposition fundamental to the very notion of modeling (in What is Modeling?). When you are gathering information it is important to keep in mind that you are there to discover what the structure of this person's experience is and how it works in manifesting his particular ability. The orientation to adopt, then, is one of wanting to learn how to think, feel and behave as the exemplar does. You are not there to confirm what you know or believe, but to help your exemplar reveal to you what aspects of his experience are significant in being able to manifest his ability. And you want to know this because, as a fellow human being, you know that if you adopt his structure it will organize your experience and behavior in much the same way as his is organized.

Taking on and being affected by other people's structure is not an exotic notion, but a fact of experience. You have benefited countless times in your life from other people sharing with you some aspect of their experiential world. It could have been something you read, heard in a movie, were told by a friend, or overheard on a bus. Regardless of where it came from, that tidbit of behavior or different way to think about the world changed how you understood and responded to the world from that point on. A striking example of this with which your are probably familiar is the general concern raised in the 1970s regarding "workaholics." Articles, books, television programs, support groups and back fence discussions pointed out the pathology of people who seemed to devote most of their time and energy to their jobs. Plenty of people who previously thought of themselves as "hard workers," "dedicated," or "achievers," suddenly realized that they were, in fact, "workaholics." As a consequence, not only did they think of themselves in a somewhat different light, they also changed their behavior, setting aside the weekend as sacred personal (or family) time, leaving work at 6pm no matter what the state of their in box, taking yoga, frequenting meditation retreats, and so on. Then, in the 1990's, these same people read articles describing the deleterious effects of stress, articles that revealed that, for people who like to work hard, not working is stressful. Once again how they thought about themselves shifted - this time from "workaholic" to "workaphile" - and so did their subsequent patterns of thinking, choices and behavior with respect to work.

Take a moment now to identify examples of times when the structure of your thinking changed (though you may not have recognized it at the time) and, so, caused your experience and behavior to change as well. It is important to find enough real examples to convince yourself that experience does, indeed, have structure, and that changing the structure changes the experience.

THE NECESSARY STATE: "OPENNESS / INTERNAL SPACE"

The relevancy and effectiveness of these experiential structures must be tested in your own experience. This means that you must "open" yourself to the exemplar's experience; that is, that you must be willing to create "space" in your own internal experience for that of the exemplar. It is through being open that you get the greatest chance to have personal access to the experience of your exemplar.

Recognizing that experience has structure will, in and of itself, help open you to the experiences of your exemplar. It is worth taking this a few steps further, however, by accessing examples from your personal history of being open in this way. Although we are sure you have such examples, they may have gone unnoticed by you. Let us suggest a few that you might recognize:

- Getting down on the floor to play with a child (not to entertain the child, but to be with the child in her world).

- Standing before an awe-inspiring landscape.

- Being with someone you love and soaking up that person, noticing and appreciating how she moves, the sound of her voice, what she says, the play of expressions, and so on.

- Being whisked into a theme ride at an amusement park, and giving yourself over to the world of puppetry and painted plaster you are passing through.

- Entering the impossible world created by a movie fantasy.

- Meditation.

- Listening to a dear friend who is hurting and needs to be heard, without judgment and without expectation of solving the problem.

- Being in the presence of a respected and admired mentor as she or he is teaching you what they know (like a grandfather showing you how to use tools, or a professor teaching you how to identify a butterfly).

Re-connect with personal experiences such as these to give yourself a more immediate sense of the state of being "open." In addition, if you find a memory that is particularly effective, you can use it to access the state of openness when you are modeling. Use that memory until modeling itself accesses in you the state of openness.

THE SUPPORTING STATE: "REVERENCE"

Your exemplar is not a box to be opened, nor is he a machine to take apart, nor is he a "useful source of information." He is a human being who has a lifetime of joys, sorrows, secrets, triumphs and memories. He has skeletons in his closet, monkeys on his back, pearls of wisdom to offer, and soap boxes on which he likes to stand. And like every human being, he has countless abilities. He is a human being, layered and complex, unique and irreplaceable. It is therefore appropriate that we feel reverence for this person.

When it comes to modeling in general, and "stepping in" in particular, it is especially important to cultivate a feeling of reverence for this person who is serving as your exemplar. When we speak of "reverence" we mean appreciating and honoring this person's experience as something that is unique, valuable, hard won, and inseparable from the person himself. "Reverence" is a feeling of deep respect for someone (or something) plus the added quality of awe. Reverence, with its tinge of awe, is tremendously important. First, it helps ensure that you treat your exemplar with respect. It is necessary for your exemplar to feel respected if he is going to freely open his experience to you.

Second, it opens you to the exemplar's experience. You probably do not feel reverence for any of the hundreds of postcards you find on display at some tourist trap. But the only postcard you ever received from a loved one may very well be something toward which you feel reverence. When we feel reverence for someone, we recognize that there is something tremendously unique and special about them. They bring that which is unique and special about them into our lives. And so it is with your exemplar, who is bringing something that is unique and special about him into your life. Your relationship, then, becomes less one in which you are doing something to or for your exemplar, and much more one in which your exemplar is offering you something: the gift of himself. In addition to nurturing respect and trust, the effect of this reverence on us as modelers is to encourage our curiosity about how this person's wonderful ability works, and thus opens us to the person and his experience.

Think of several people who you know (or know of) toward whom you feel reverence, so that you create for yourself a solid sense of what that feels like. If you are having difficulty finding examples, begin with something or someplace toward which you feel reverence. Once you have that feeling well in hand, search for a time when you felt the same toward a person. When you begin to work with your exemplar, recognize that this person has something unique and special to offer - just like those special people in your own life - and recapture that feeling of reverence.

HOW: INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL BEHAVIOR

In the context of modeling, stepping in requires that you be oriented to structure, that you open yourself to the experience of the exemplar in order to experience and assess that structure directly, and that you approach the interaction with a feeling of reverence for your exemplar's experience. Organizing your beliefs and states in this way will naturally engender many of the internal and external behaviors that are important for stepping in. But probably not all of them. Therefore, it is worth being explicit about those internal and external behaviors that make a significant difference in being able to effectively step in:

1. Make sure that you are sitting or standing either on the same level as your exemplar or that you are below your exemplar as you work with him. Not only does this help the exemplar feel at ease, but you will find it easier to step into his experience, as well.

2. Get a description of the context in which they manifest their ability, that is, the who, what, where and when. This tells you what "world" to step into as you gather and try on for yourself the elements of the exemplar's experience. Knowing the context is essential to assessing the meaning and significance of what you are learning. For instance, if your exemplar says, "I see red," you will understand that experience differently if the context is "my wife is criticizing me," or "I'm planning a painting" or "I'm at a family gathering (Hey, there's Uncle Red!)."

3. When you ask questions of the exemplar, become very still and quiet inside, and devote your full attention to the other person. (This may include tunnel vision and a lower, slower and softer voice.) While the exemplar is thinking about and answering your question, remain still. Your stillness will support your exemplar in feeling free to explore his own experience, as well as avoid distracting him from it with speculation about what your behavior (facial expressions, glancing around, etc.) means. In addition, by remaining still you can feel more easily and precisely the effect his description of experience has on you as you take it on for yourself.

4. Let the exemplar's description take over your body, using the exemplar's words to guide the reorganizing of your experience. The exemplar's words will almost certainly carry more of the exemplar's structure than any words that you might use in their place:

- Feel in your body what you see them doing with their body (especially anything unusual, characteristic or exaggerated).

- Things they say, say to yourself (internally).

- Things they describe seeing or feeling, see and feel yourself.

- After your exemplar has offered you some element of his experience, feel free to shift your body as necessary to "try on" the experience. This may involve matching a behavior you have observed in the exemplar or in some movement, change in breathing, facial expression or so on that you need to more fully access the experience.

It is not the words themselves, but the dynamics they create in your experience that is important. You need to be asking questions of yourself that enable you to make sense out of what your exemplar is describing:

- The overall, ongoing question is, "How does this affect my experience?"

- Also ask yourself: "What element is it? Is it redundant? Is it relevant to this array/ability or to some other?"

- Look for the structure of your exemplar's experience that works to generate his ability. Looking for "the one way" will help you sort what is new from what is redundant, what is relevant from what is irrelevant (though perhaps relevant to some other ability), and what is essential from what is non-essential for manifesting the ability. Look to see if you can form the structure in more than one way and still support the expression of the ability. If so, ask for more detail until you have identified the one way the exemplar does it.

5. Check for confirmation of how you are understanding and experiencing your exemplar's structure by feeding it back to him. You are also always checking for confirmation by being alert to matches and mismatches between your experience and what your exemplar subsequently describes as you continue with the elicitation.

If you find that you are not at all able to step into the experience of your exemplar, consider first the possibility that "I have not set myself aside enough." Re-set yourself (empty yourself of the former structure) by shifting your body posture. Also, it may useful to re-access a personal experience of being open (as described in the section "Openness/Internal Space" above). Then take on again each element of the structure, but checking each one first with your exemplar to make sure you understand it.

A second possibility is that, "I've come at this from the wrong direction," that is, you have you have not elicited the elements you need to be able to step into the exemplar's experience. Again, you need to re-set yourself (empty yourself of the former structure) by shifting body posture. In this case, however, rather than take on again the elements you have elicited, you need to elicit the elusive element(s) anew, but this time using a different line of questioning.

Naturally, the real acquisition and integration of these elements comes when you put them into practice while engaged in an actual elicitation. If bringing all of the elements to bear is too much to get your arms around at first, start with one or two: for instance, simply making sure you are on the same level as your exemplar and remaining still while he is thinking and answering your questions. Notice what effect that element has on your ability to step into the exemplar's description of his experience, then add another element to your experiential mix. Naturally, you will be clumsy with stepping in at first. But, like tying your shoes, through practice it will become something you do effortlessly and automatically.

* * *

Throughout this essay we have been talking about using the words and phrases of description as a way of stepping into your exemplar's experiential world. We do not, however, want to leave you with the impression that the goal here is to stuff ourselves with the right words, courtesy of the exemplar. Our real quarry is the structure of experience that lies behind those words. We are reminded of the proverbial blind men patting down their first elephant. Each of them has their piece of the creature in hand and mistakes that piece for the whole. Good enough. For our purposes, however, we need to take the tale a bit further. What happens when the mahout standing nearby informs them that they are all holding onto different parts of the same beast? What creature will they put together in their heads from the disparate descriptions of their blind fellows? We cannot throw together, "A long muscular thing, a ropy thing, a tree-like thing, a thing like a wall, and a thing like a palm leaf" just any old way and end up with something that looks like an elephant (much less be an elephant). The elements of the elephant need to relate to one another in specific ways for there to be an elephant. Similarly, abilities are not made up of a pile of experiential elements, but of experiential elements operating in relationship to one another in particular ways. Structure is the dynamic relationship between elements, and it is structure that gives rise to cells, blind men, elephants, ideas and human abilities.

When modeling, we step into the exemplar's world with what we know about the elements of his experience in an effort to discover how those elements alter and create new relationships, new structures in us. And if we can elicit descriptions that re-structure our own experience in a way that allows us to manifest the same ability as our exemplar, we have a model. Identifying and eliciting those underlying structures and relationships are the subjects of the next two essays.

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