CIRCLE OF EXCELLENCE1. Imagine an invisible circle on the floor in front of you. Make it at least threee or four feet in diameter. Choose a color for the circle that to you represents confidence.

2. Recall a time when you were very confident, a time when you were capable and a great success at what you were doing. Re-live that time, seeing what you saw, hearing what you heard, feeling what you felt.

3. As you feel the confidence build, step into the circle noticing how the feeling of confidence increases as you physically step into the invisible olored circle. Let yourself be fully aware of how the confidence feels in your body. Look down into the circle and notice the color vibrating with a soft hum that indicates how powerful it is.

4. Step out of the circle leaving the feelings of confidence inside the circle.

5. Now think of an upcoming situation when you want to have those feelings of confidence. Think about what will be there present in your environment just before you want to feel confident. Perhaps your boss's voice, or a person you want to seduce, or seeing your phone just before you pick it up and make a sales call.

6. As soon as the cues are clear in your mind, step back into the circle of excellence and feel these confident feelings again. Imagine being in the situation with those confident feelings fully available.

7. Step out of the circle again, leaving the confident feelings there in the circle. Now think again about the upcoming event. Notice how you now have feelings of confidence as a natural response.

RAPPORT, PACING AND LEADING

Rapport is defines as the ability to make a person feel that they are understood by you, so that they can trust and comprehensively communicate with you. Rapport is a process not a state. Rapport is not about being sympathetic, but about symmetrically responding to another's model of the world.

The ability to establish and maintain rapport is essential to the gathering of behavioral information necessary to model an expert and well as to powerfully and usefully influence another person's experience and behavior.

Using rapport building skills is the most gentle way of entering another person's model of the world. We do this by pacing. Pacing means to mirror or become like the other person - matching another person's body language, verbal language, breathing, beliefs, and opinions.

After we establish rapport through pacing, we may lead. Leading is taking someone's model into new territories. It also represents the ability to elicit desired behavioural states in others.

Rapport is a critical NLP skill on which all other techniques and concepts are built.

SENSORY ACUITY

Sensory acuity is placing your attention on your physical sense experience and noticing things that you had not previously noticed. Sensory acuity is recognizing the difference between subjective evaluations and objective information. This is a requisite skill for rapport. Pattern recognition is fundamental in sensory acuity skills.

With the development of sensory acuity skills you can identify and recognise micro-behavioral shifts in yourself and ohters and through this knowledge gain additional choices in any interaction. In other words you will better know what is happening.

Sensory Acuity observations are descriptive of the experiences that can be verified through physical senses. You can see another person folding arms, crossing legs, blushing; you can hear another person changing voice tempo, you can see and hear another person tapping foot.

Non-sensory observations are your interpretation of what is going on and it may or may not be true. For successful communication it is important to verify that what you think is happening with another person is actually happening.

In one of the workshops I participated a trainer told us a story.

During one of his earlier workshops which was taught over a period of four days, a participant was present who would, ever once in a while, sigh and shake his head. By the third day, the trainer could take it no more, convinced that the man is so disappointed with the workshop and is definitely going to ask for a refund - he pulled the man aside, and actually offered him a refund. The man responded that he thought the workshop was brilliant and every once in a while he'd hear something at the workshop, he'd realize how useful it would've been having all this knowledge before, how much trouble it would've saved him, and how his life would've been different now.

CALIBRATIONCalibration is an important key in successful communication. Calibration is the recognition of a certain internal state in a person by non-verbal signals.

When you are astute in your observation (calibration) you begin to know more accurately what is going on in another person's experience. Calibration is a means of checking the process of rapport.

You can calibrate (pay attention and notice the changes in) the following:

Voice : verbal predicates, tempo, timbre, tone, volume

Breathing : location, pauses, rate, volume

Eyes : accessing cues, pupil dilation

Skin Color : flushing, blushing, paling

Physiology : muscle tone, lower lip size, position, posture, etc.

P.S. Guys who play poker games are fully aware of the importance of calibration.The first act of a teacher is to introduce the idea that the world we think we see is only a view, a description of the world. Every effort of a teacher is geared to prove this point to his apprentice. But accepting it seems to be one of the hardest things one can do; we are complacently caught in our particular view of the world, which compels us to feel and act as if we knew everything about the world. A teacher, from the very first act he performs, aims at stopping that view. Sorcerers call it stopping the internal dialog and they are convinced that it is the single most important technique that an apprentice can learn.

"Stopping the internal dialog is, however, the key to the sorcerers' world," he said. "The rest of the activities are only props; all they do is accelerate the effects of stopping the internal dialogue."

Casteneda, "Tales of Power"- 1974.

NLP corresponding presupposition:1- The "map" is not the "territory".

2- People respond according to their internal maps.

Our beliefs act as neurological filters that determin how we perceive external realities. Our beliefs about what we value as important or not, powerfully shape our perceptions. Try as we may our perceptions are consciously held stead fast. Contacting our unconscious, is the true key to our own sorcerers' world.