Michael Indeed, as you wrote, "...'being Milton' with your clients, did you judge the feedback you got from your clients, as you worked with them, completely unconsciously?" The implicit and unconscious standard of comparison was the responses that Erickson secured from his clients. You are correct that during this phase (unconscious assimilation and imitation) the judgments were global. During phase 4 (coding after reaching the criterion - of being able to reproduce the responses Erickson elicited from his clients from our clients), we began to decompose the sessions into component parts as part of the testing for the distinction between accidental, idiosyncratic characteristics of Erickson and those portions of his behavior that were essential to the patterning and its effectiveness. At this point (coding) we used everything we could develop to segment and test the resultant decomposition of what we had manage globally previously. You also asked, "...wanted to check in with you as to whether you recommend I rely totally on my unconscious to know if what I'm doing is getting the same results as my model" Yes, this is an excellent move to confirm what you will curious about. It does presuppose that you have robusts signals that are demonstrated to be involuntary. It is also often very useful to have a confederate, well-trained and especially sharp at the sensory level, to give you feedback - essentially "yes" and "no" without, at the assimilation stage, attempting to indicate how specifically there are differences. This was one of the advantages of working in a team as did Bandler and me. All the best, John