Hi Karl I agree about it being in the eye of the beholder but that's kind of inevitable. A bit like the way people talk about subjective experience - what other type of experience is there? Restricting my response to the NLP context my own evaluation of congruence is very simple: do I see/hear/feel/read behavioural demonstrations of the message being delivered. For example : listening to a trainer using boring monotone delivery to talk about the importance of vocal range in training = incongruent (unless the boredom was a deliberate (high risk) outcome to illustrate the point!). For example : listening to a trainer using his/her vocal range to induce several different states while talking about the importance of vocal range = congruent. .. and so on in regard to any message Unless an NLP advocate can physically demonstrate or has actually achieved what he/she is claiming (or has concrete evidence of someone else achieving it) then for me congruence is lacking. One of the barriers to NLP being more widely respected (which is what I would personally like to see) is the unsubstantiated hype with which it is often promoted. Promoters of that type of hype are then easy (and correctly) targets for allegations of incongruence.  Ian