Hi Oleg Serious set of questions - I will handle a couple of them here and depend on you to indicate what else you want commentary on. 1. You asked, "Two times within the description of this phase you make a remark that the genius modeled could be either an individual or a team. As for individual, things are more or less clear. But modeling a team... how specifically?" You have the key question here - let me begin by saying that an adequate answer would require a small book. However I can offer here the following: 1. you suggest the possibility that given a 5 man team (you used soccer as an example but your question is perfectly general - it applies with equal force to a work team in industry or for an ER team, for example) you wish to model, you need 5 modelers. Yes, this certainly is a possibility - there are alternatives that do not fit with precision into the 5 phase modeling model Carmen and I present in Whispering but nevertheless work powerfully (remember my comment in another thread that the modeling as defined in Whispering is NOT the exclusive learning strategy, it just happens to define modeling ala NLP - as we suggest). You, however, focus on a different question in this area: you point out correctly that the roles that each of these 5 players have overlap - that is, the so-called defensive players also sometimes form a part of the attack and vice versa. You then state, "Should one take assign one modeler pro one team member, so 5 modelers, and each of them would unconsciously uptake patterning from their party? Or should every modeler uptake patterning from every team member?" While we agree that the roles overlap to some degree, part of the coordination of the entire squad is that there are priorities for each position a defender has as his or her primary responsiblity defense and participates in the attack just in case the context permits with the overriding priority being the defense. Now this prioritization would fall out automatically in the unconscious uptake (phase 2 of the modeling process) through imitation based on unconscious uptake - in other words, the actual behavior imitated by the modeler would implicitly respect this priority although this would remain implicit. You also state, "If we are willing to model some specific activity that requires a thorough background in its field? Maybe some engineering activity, for example, bridge construction" and then you ask, "Should modeler educate oneself in this field before unconscious uptake or not?" The answer to this question is the same - that is, for a significant portion of the background material, if the modeler suceeds in capturing the behavior, the behavior itself will imply the missing background material. And you are correct, there may be some background material that must be separately mastered for a complete model. The answer I propose to your question, then, is that the modeler may proceed without mastering the background material with the caveat that in phase 3 (imitation) or more likely in phase 4 coding, the modeler may well discover that while he or she can imitate, they cannot generalize the behavior to novel problems (since this requires the background competencies) - it would be at these points that the modeler could identify the what specific background material is missing and with precision focus on this and master to generalize the model already assimilated. This is far more efficient strategy. It is perfectly analygous to eliciting the desired state in a business prior to investigating the present state. By refining the representations of the desired state, the consultant can with precision know which portions of the present state are of relevance to achieving the desired state. If you lead with an investigation of the present state, you will develop many times more information than required to achieve any particular desired state. 2. You state, "There isn't any serious methodological problem when you discover such patterning from the 3rd position explicitly but if we accept your proposal that explicit coding should occur only after unconscious uptake is finished we just cannot move to the 3rd position in this phase, can we?" I find myself in a very different position on this issue. I request that you re-read the arguments in Whispering about the strong advantages of modeling (phases 2 and 3) from a suspended f2 1st position). More specifically, you state, "..."There isn't any serious methodological problem when you discover such patterning from the 3rd position explicitly" I would say that there is grave methodological problems modeling from 3rd - modeling from 3rd implies a full set of f2 mappings and the methodological problem is that such a modeler is not model the model but in significant part him or herself. That is, modeling without the suspension of f2 mappings is largely the imposition of the modeler's personal filters and maps and partially the behavior of the model. This is a deeply flawed approach for reasons presented at length in Whispering. You end with the question about whether we can move to 3rd in this phase (I take this phase to mean phase 2 - unconscious uptake) - you are correct - by the model in Whispering, such a perceptual shift with its attendant activation of the f2 mapping is not permitted - again the arguments are available in Whispering. As suggested above in responding the first issues, an excellent phase 2 and 3 (unconscious assimilation) will yield a robust model that will indicate things never considered in those phases - for example, the overlapping roles with their prioritization automatically in order to make sense (in phase 4) out of the patterning captured.      3. You wrote, "By the way, in the description, how should one attest that he's OK with unconscious uptake you mention some clients. I think the description should be refined because in many activities there's just no clients involved. Who would be the client if we modeled a tennis player?" In the case of a champion tennis player, the clients would be aspiring tennis players who either wish to be competitive at this high level of performance or any tennis player who wished to significantly improve their game. I honestly couldn't understand the first portion of your statement in this quote. 4. You wrote, "And what's your attitude towards such content models? Do you propose not to deal with 'em at all in the field of NLP?" Gee, I don't think that there is much ambiguity about my atitude about content - I have an atitude. Leaving aside the important question of ethics, it seems very clear to me that NLP has spread like wildfire for the simple reason it works across languages, cultures, personal histories... precisely because it has no content - yet handles any content - this is the value of the syntactic or formal approach. Content models require a certain acceptance of beliefs, values and presuppositions - none of which are required in the operational application of a formal model. This is also, of course, the basis of the critique that Carmen and I offer of the so-called presuppositions of NLP. The caution you suggest is what we attempted to argue for in section three of Whispering - if you have a more effective way of making this point, we would be happy to receive it. Interesting material - thanks! John