Description
“Genius does not only pertain to the brain,
it belongs above all to the heart.”
Juliette Drouet
“True expertise is the most potent form of authority.”
Victoria Bond
Experts are special. They are able to do what most people cannot do
and they perform with unique skill and elegance. Often the expert is
so amazingly good that we stand in awe as we marvel and wonder.
“How can he do that!?” “She is so incredibly exceptional; no one can even
come close to her excellence.” For millennia, expertise was viewed as
miraculous—the gift of the gods, an innate talent given to a special person.
Yet that way of thinking created a problem. As long as people thought that
way, they didn’t even ask the learning or modeling questions, “How can I
learn to do that?!” They just assumed, “That’s the way it is.” “Some people
have the gift, others do not.”
Today we have learned better. We have learned better methods for
studying, learning, remembering, practicing, transferring, adapting, and
developing specific skills. We learned that we could identify best practices
and invent increasingly better processes for replicating them more
effectively and efficiently. In a word, we learned how to model expertise.
In fact, this has become the specific focus of NLP. Yet it didn’t begin that
way. NLP began as a Communication Model with a focus on
communicating professionally, accurately, and precisely. Eventually we
discovered that the components of communication could be used to specify
the structure of an experience.
