THE ART OF PRIMING— PART I

When you coach, do you prime? How about as a speaker, presenter, or trainer? How are you at priming? No, I’m not talking about putting on a first level coat of paint on a house, I’m talking about an advanced coaching skill. In fact, if you look in the Coaching Mastery manual you will see priming as one of the advanced skills of a coach. So what is priming and how do you do it?

What is Priming? In priming you are getting a person in a state of readiness for a thought, belief, emotion, and/or response. Milton Erickson thought of it as creating a “readiness to respond,” as creating response-potential or readiness. So yes, it’s a form of framing.

How do you Prime? In priming, you present a word, or some see-hear-feel stimulus, to an individual or an audience in order to activate the person’s mind in a certain way. You guide and gently nudge it to go in a certain direction so that it increases the possibility that the person will move in a given direction and that it will think, understand, interpret, feel, go into state, etc.