John and Carmen, I'm very glad for this thread, especially here on the Whispering Forum. John, you wrote to Martin: " 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....is a constant requirement, independent of the pattern being applied - analygous to rapport being a prerequisite to a successful application of patterning - good suggestion." I agree that congruence is essential for both NLP modeling and NLP applications. I can review my past behaviors and see when I was behaving congruently and times when I was certainly not. I can also sense congruence (or its contrast) in other people. In my walks through many NLP training centers and in talking with practitioners from all over the world my experience has been that the word "congruence" is semantically dense and is not well-defined. I've heard some use "congruence" as if it were a behavioral moral code while others strictly use it to signify that a communication in one output channel is aligned with all other output channels thereby carrying the same message. At this point, my understanding of congruence/incongruence seems to be very tacit and I would like your guidance in assisting me in defining the word with appropriate boundary conditions. I get very uncomfortable when I see an NLP practitioner hear the word, "congruent" and they start a "this is right/this is wrong" crusade. An example of this is when I overheard a student of an NLP trainer say, "Well you need to be careful taking classes from Dr. R. She smokes cigarettes and she's an NLP trainer--that's incongruent!" Your help is appreciated, Jeisyn