Hi John and Martin, John your response to Martin's following statement genuinely surprised me. Martin said :"Could we say that states are the context? Our filters might prevent us from entering the states needed for the pattern to run. Is that one of the places where physiology plays such an important role?" And you replied:"is interesting and is at a higher level than the context proposed in the format. It is interesting as we did not propose (and your point suggests that it might have been wise to do so) that congruency on the part of the agent of agent is a constant requirement, independent of the pattern being applied - analygous to rapport being a prerequisite to a successful application of patterning" It surprised me because it seems to me that the answer was already presupposed in your insistence on the development of high performance states. From which there is access to all the kinds of other states from which behaviours of excellence flow.(see high performance state thread). As I see it now, behaviour flows from state and is thus dependant on it. If you are not in the right state for the job in hand performance deteriorates precisely because there is little or no access to the relevant behaviours. In a narrow sense then, congruency may be defined as "the optimum state for full expression of the relevant behavioural choice." And this state may differ depending on the chosen behaviour. As an example, 1992 UK Olympic 100m champion Linford Christie used to get into a high performance state which showed trance like features, complete tunnel vision, blocking out all extranous distractions, even the other competitors. He was totally focused on his own lane. In this state he was almost unbeatable. If however he remained in an uptime, peripheral vision state, attentive to competitors and audience alike, he was unable to execute the same high quality behavioural performance. Indeed we could say that a narrow definition of incongruency is "when a particular behaviour is attempted without the supporting optimal state for expression". In a sense, external context then becomes a moot point. Moot because regardless of whatever single or multiple contextual cue triggered a state, this can be changed by re-anchoring. Perhaps then, instead of looking for behavioural change patterns we ought to be concentrating on state changes per se as the context of change. A by-product of this of course is that cross-contextual change becomes easier - we're not attemting to change behaviours singly, context by context. Does this fit with your original thinking and intention - or am I way off beam? Regads, Lewis.