THE ART OF ELICITING AS A COACH

How are your elicitation skills? You learned how to elicit a state when you learned NLP (or Coaching Essentials). The first distinction was to find the person’s code for an experience— what he sees, hears, and feels (the VAK). From there you learned to identify the elements of each system that makes the most difference for the experience under consideration. NLP calls these elements sub-modalities and because they come after the representational systems— you could easily think of them as smaller pieces. And while it’s easy to draw that conclusion, doing so is a mistake.

While the name “sub-modality” frames them as smaller pieces, when you call out one of them, you use a different kind of language: Distance (close to far) is not a specific item or element, it is a category. Intensity (bright to dim or quiet to loud) is a class or category. Dimension (2-D or 3-D) also describes a category and like the other words is a nominalization. Temperature (cold to hot). Experience (associated inside to associated outside). Pigmentation (black-and-white to color). Location (front, back, to right, to the left, above, below). Size (small to large picture). Movement (static, slow, fast).