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| Introduction to Modeling | Read David's Keynote Speech |
The world is filled with human beings manifesting an endless variety of behaviors and abilities. These human abilities are as diverse as being able to effectively negotiate, tell a joke, empathize with others, manage a large group, compose music, write a book, promptly pay bills, be thrilled by an abstract painting, plan the future, learn from the past, or ease the fears of a child. Every human being is a repository of abilities in which they are an expert, or in our terms, an "exemplar."
Is there a way to transfer the ability of an exemplar to someone who needs and wants that ability? The purpose of modeling is to enable us to answer this question with a "Yes."
The fundamental presupposition of Modeling is: Experience has structure.
Our experiences are comprised of various elements: behavior, emotions, patterns of thinking, and the beliefs or assumptions on which those patterns are based. Differences in experiences are a direct result of differences in how these elements are structured. That is, your behaviors, what you are feeling, what you are thinking, what you are believing, and how all of these elements interact with one another, combine to give rise to your experience at a moment in time. That array of content and relationships constitutes the structure of the experience.
It is within these structures that we find the differences that distinguish someone who is adept at an ability from someone who is not. In modeling, we are "mapping" out the underlying structure of experience that makes it possible for an exemplar to manifest his/her particular ability. If we - or anyone - structure our experience to match that of the exemplar, that structure will enable us to manifest (to a great extent) that same ability.
Modeling, then, is the process of creating useful "maps" (descriptions of the structure of experience) of human abilities.
The overall Modeling process involves the following stages:
Why Model?
Modeling is a doorway into the vast storehouse of human experience and abilities, providing access to anyone willing to turn the key. For the individual who pursues modeling, this means:
From Past to Present...
Our experiences with modeling human experience began in the mid '70s when we were involved in the development of the field of NeuroLinguistic Programming ("NLP"). Although originally intended as a vehicle for the study of subjective experience, during the last two decades the focus of NLP has generally veered off toward the creation of techniques for changing experience. While a valuable aim in its own right, the technique orientation implies there is no necessity for understanding how experience works; it is simply a matter of running experience through the "black box" of a technique. In contrast, our interest in the field continues to be the exploration of the structure of experience. With its many distinctions about experience, processes for gathering information, and underlying presuppositions, NLP has provided some broad shoulders for our current efforts to stand upon.
The Modeling processes that we use within the Experiential Dynamics framework incorporate both "classic" NLP distinctions and some revealing and useful new ones we have discovered in the course of teaching modeling during the last ten years. In particular, we have developed two formats for gathering and organizing relevant distinctions when modeling: the Experiential Array and the Belief Template.
| Read David's Keynote Speech |