Neuro Linguistic Programming

We all notice patterns in human behavior. When the boss walks into the room Bob starts working. Whenever money is mentioned everyone goes quiet. Kate takes a deep breath before she makes important announcements.

In NLP, noticing patterns of behavior is called calibration, defined by Joseph O'Connor and Ian McDermott as 'Correlating signs you can see and hear with the other person's state'. It's the process of using sensory acuity to pay precise attention to changes in another person's state by detecting patterns in the nuances of their behavior - the way they breathe, their voice tone or volume, skin color, micro muscle movement, posture and gestures.

You can forget the 'one-size-fits-all' approach to body language taken by most books on the subject, in which looking away always means you're avoiding the issue. NLP doesn't see things like that at all. Although there are similarities between us, we are each unique individuals with our own pattern of responses. And calibration is the process of identifying the behavioral cues that go with or before a particular state - 'x' always accompanies or precedes 'y'.

The more well developed our calibration skills, the more connections we pick up. This doesn't mean guessing, it's essential you