Hello Thorsten,

I remember once - I was in front of a room teaching. Or was it entertaining? I guess for me there isn't much of a difference. If you're not entertaining and making the process of learning fun, you're not going to make an impact. And if you don't make an impact...well - you just won't make an impact.

You ask a question of me that I think is very challenging. At least for me to answer in this forum. You want to be able to model behaviorally a set of very powerful skills that are based in your being able to use the nonverbal elements of your communication more powerfully. Yet, in this forum we are lacking just that - the nonverbal elements.

Now, I could offer verbally coded descriptions that you could use as a means of building in a workable answer to your question. But there is no doubt going to be a great deal of slippage between the words I use, and the experiences that you sort through in providing yourself meaning for those words. Which of course doesn't necessarily mean that you won't come to some kind of comprehensive understanding here which drives an acting behavior. However, what you eventually come up with may or may not mirror what it is you are wanting to learn, the nonverbal skills that I have said that I can effectively use.

Are you still with me here? Good. That is the beauty of attending a training. You get the words, the states, and the strategies all together in real time. In a training, with a skilled trainer, the group hallucination is one that becomes centered around a shared vocabulary. Which is to say that a given word is attached to a very similar set of experiences for all who attend. In a quality training you are packaging information so that it corresponds to the model being offered by the trainer. Even NLP means many things to many different people, all based on where, when, and with whom they received their training.

That aside. I am not wanting to not offer you an answer. Nor am I wanting to say that I think it is totally impossible for you to gain some insight into what it is I do that you are interested in. My point is, I could teach you the skills that you are asking about so much quicker and easier by leading you into the state, than I could by describing it. In other words, the best way to teach nonverbal communication skill is nonverbally.

Take sex for an example. Or at least the activity of sharing sexual experiences with another person. Have you ever gotten totally and completely lost inside of a really enjoyable sexual experience? One that left you completely speechless! You know, you look for words to describe the depths of passion, the intense pleasure, but each time you do, you only wind up stepping back into that experience. And even if you do find words, how will they ever do justice to what you have shared and enjoyed physically? After all, to be absorbed that fully in the moment is a very kinesthetic experience.

It's kind of like the terrible two's. Where children are discovering what they can do with their own kinesthetics. This is a time where children like to touch everything they see. It doesn't matter what it is. If they see it, they want to have the experience of touching it. Often times you can find them totally lost in the moment, fully absorbed in whatever kinesthetic experience they are indulging in at that moment. It's like a moment frozen in time. As they sit there manipulating that object, time passes, but for them there is no awareness of time, only the moment.

A couple of days ago, I was driving from Roswell over to Norcross here in Atlanta. I passed up were it was that I needed to make a right turn. And in the interest of saving time, rather than drive to the next intersection about five blocks up, I decided to take a short cut through the hospital parking lot. I turned into the hospital parking lot, followed the narrow road around to the right, and then to the left, and wound up having to enter into the bottom level of a an eight level parking lot, with the only exit being on the eighth and top level. There was no quick way out of this situation, I had to go through every single level, all eight of them, just to get back out into the sunlight.

Not being one to waste time, and with the parking garage being full of activity, I had some time on my hands. Besides the obvious, having to make my way to the top, what else could I do with that time? I thought I would listen to the radio, but the building I was in interfered with the signals that would normally make their way out of the speakers as music. Here I was, stuck in traffic on the bottom level of this parking garage, and in total silence, and with very little scenery to enjoy.

The experience reminded me of one of the fads of the sixties. What they called sensory deprivation tanks. You would crawl into this tank where you would be deprived of any external sensory input. The only thing left to do was to hallucinate. Feel what I'm saying?

Well anyway, now that I have answered your question, and I did, will you be able to understand the answer? I don't know. But I do know that unconscious abilities are better left to the unconscious. And if you find your self becoming confused about how what I have written here addresses your question, I planned it that way. After all, you got to ask the question, the least I could get to do is answer it any way that I wanted to.

Oh! One more thing. What is the meaning context specific of unconscious competence? And how do you know when you have it? Also, how do you know when you are changing the way in which you understand the world? On an average, do you even know, or is it that you discover that the changes have occurred after they have already occurred? And finally, after you have eaten a meal, when are you finished with that meal? After you have eaten it? After you have digested it? After you have used up the energy that was provided by that particular meal? After you have used up the ideas that were created while you were using up the energy that was offered by that particular meal? So tell me, when are you actually finished with meal? If ever!

Be well

Carmine Baffa