Written by Steve

That’s one of the questions I most often get in modeling seminars.

What do you think? If you had to successfully replicate someone’s behavior, chiefly someone who produces outstanding results, what would you focus on?

Physiology

When you begin modeling someone, you’ll immediately be able to observe their physiology. That word simply means “the way someone moves or uses their body.”

Pay attention. Where are they looking? Are their heads up or down? Where is their breathing? How open are their eyes? Are they standing fully erect or rather compressed? Where are they hands? What about their arm muscle tone?

Take notice of all these details and immediately duplicate their posture. This will take you a long way into the modeling process.

Intonation

Their intonation will give you great insight into their internal experience. Pay attention to and duplicate it. Someone who is speaking loudly will experience and produce an effect completely different from someone who is whispering.

Adopt their vocal behavior yourself. Notice the change in your own behavior and feelings as you begin to speak with the same vocal qualities as the person you are modeling. Adopt their volume, their timbre, their pitch and notice how that makes you feel.

To get a full list of auditory qualities, check out our post on auditory submodalities.

Beliefs

Beliefs offer the gateway to possibility. Those who produce outstanding results have a set of beliefs that unleash their potential. You want to identify those as quickly as possible and adopt the ecological ones (if you want to know more about this, post a question in the comments and we discuss it below).

Often times, you’ll notice that outstanding performers’ beliefs provide the fuel for their performance. It enables them to recover from failures, bounce back and keep moving towards their desired outcome.

Strategy

Outstanding performers organize and channel their resources differently than average and mediocre performers. When Ennio Morricone undertakes the writing of an Oscar-nominated movie score, he goes about it in a very specific and unique way. Pete Sampras had a very specific guiding strategy he used to obliterate his opponents quickly. Bill Clinton uses a communication strategy that enables him to garner the population’s sympathy even in the most trying conditions.

Every top performer has a specific strategy (s)he follows to produce results, albeit at times that strategy remains unconscious.

You, as a modeler, must make that strategy explicit. You must elicit it and then map it out so that someone else can learn it.

Other pieces

While there are indeed other pieces to the modeling puzzle that you will learn to attend to, I just gave you the most important chunks.

A few of the other pieces would include: values, representational system used, sub-modality preferences, and energy level. While these other pieces are very important, the first four I listed above will take you 90% of the way in replicating the results produced by an outstanding performer.

Give it a shot. It’s much easier than you think.