Hello Loren, Carmine here-

This is such an easy one Loren, the other person's state becomes the anchor, you just mirror it back to them. Last weekend I had my brother and his family over for about four days. They live in Florida and were on their way back from business in New York and decided to stop by. My brother, like everybody else I know of, has his own world model. And, there was this particular place were he had reached the limits of his world model in a particular context. He wanted to begin playing with HTML and Java, but didn't quite think he had a knack for it.

Of course I, like you, know how easy these languages are to use, but I was not about to challenge his view directly. Instead I changed the subject. You see, for years he was in the restaurant business and was very skilled at taking a new, or failing restaurant and making it successful. His ability to understand numbers with relationship to statistical demographics allowed him to make uncanny projections. His ability to plot and track how these numbers made sense in relation to a "real world" scenario allowed him to plan, with near absolute precision, the course he needed to take in bringing a particular restaurant into profit.

But then again my brother was always good with numbers in general. Even now he can calculate accurately in his mind faster than I can enter the data into a calculator. Well anyway, I changed the subject and began talking about this relational database I was working on. I asked for his assistance in the form of a gentle challenge, telling him that with my computer I could surely calculate faster than his mind. He looked at me, smiled, and said, "Let's go!"

After about twenty minutes of playing this game with him, he was on top of the world. After all, he was able to command the challenge. And as if in the same moment, I changed the subject again. This time to share with him a Java applet I was writing. The difference now was that as I began talking about it, I stepped into the very same state that he had used when he was performing the mathematical calculations in his mind. I mirrored that state back to him right down to the accessing cues he was using when he was in it. I never mentioned any of this consciously, I just stepped into the movie I had in my mind of him being in that phenomenal state.

What happened next was great - about ten minutes of my mirroring that state, discussing Java, he looked at me and said "You know what, what you are working on is no different than math, at least at a structural level." I looked back at him and said that I didn't get it. He then gave me one heck of a great lesson in Java.

Be well Loren

Carmine