The key to changing someone's knowledge, emotion or behaviour is to understand how they are creating their current state. This is true when you want to change yourself and also true when you want to influence others. In NLP, modeling is the process by which we observe how someone achieves a particular result. We may model so that we can replicate that process, or so that we can change it to allow for different results.
There are significant differences between the ways that Practitioners and Master Practitioners experience an NLP training (and it's not just that Masters have written homework). Master Practitioners come into a practitioner training and recognize the way the course has been constructed and the relationship between the exercises, the explanations, and the verbal and non-verbal behaviours of the trainers. They learn how to construct experiences while the practitioners learn to identify and shift them. They learn to apply the elements of modeling that they developed as practitioners so that they can effectively identify, replicate and change complex behaviours in themselves and others.
Master Practitioners develop these new abilities:
1) the ability to create new patterns for specific applications
2) the ability to model skills and behaviours, including talents and values that are not normally considered teachable
3) The ability to model in real-time and to adapt the patterns for use in a wider variety of situations and relationships.
The NLP Master Practitioner training is not a sideways move to create more building blocks. Practitioners have all the skills and knowledge they need to identify, isolate and transfer patterns of behaviour. NLP Master Practitioners move to a new level of understanding of how the exercises of the practitioner training can be generalized or applied. They learn to "chunk up" to guiding principles so that they can "chunk down" to specific applications and situations.
The Master Practitioner certification involves three kinds of training:
1) a one-to-one coaching session with Linda Ferguson that identifies personal outcomes, strengths and areas for development
2) two days of training with other Master Practitioners that involve answering a series of questions using a variety of resources and experiences
3) six days of NLP Practitioner training in which the Masters practice leadership and framing; develop their ability to identify and modify behaviours in real-time and provide written answers to questions designed to challenge their ability to integrate the training into their overall understanding of motivation and communication.
When you are ready to move beyond the exercises and edits you learned as a practitioner, Master Practitioner certification will give you the understanding and the expertise of what you need to practice next. You will gain new perspective, increased flexibility and a stronger grasp of how human beings structure their experience, change their experience and use language to create new possibilities.