Hi John That thing with mountain... You wrote: "The mountain is the context for the challenge - the performance of the model is the reference point." That's what I'm talking about. Your book says  (damn, I left it at home again) that you're okay with the unconscious uptake phase when you can secure the same response from the client your model does. The only thing I want to say is that this criterion cannot be applied in the mountain case due to the absence of any client involved. The criterion should be reformulated: "... if you can secure the same result your model does in roughly the same time frame" or whatever. These formulations are surely sort of boring. :-) You wrote about the New Code in Russia: "Let's us know how you want to do it. BTW, I suppose that it would be appropriate for me to mention that I am not in a popularity contest; I am however interested in creating the finest models in this field." Well, John, are you really sure that you do NOT express your values and interests thru your activity and your books? ;-) I see the New Code approach as a headway towards modeling as in NLP. You'll need a know-nothing state to model - and the New Code games are good at mastering it. To play'em you should know what is it and what is it for. Franly speaking, before I read Whispering I had considered the Alphabet game as a piece of crap. Now that I don't :-) BTW, thank you for NOT telling me about New Code games other than Alphabet. I perceive it as a personal challenge :-) And here we come to the book issue I raised in the last post. You seemed to avoid the direct answer to the question about book-based modeling and just commented some of my arguments. You wrote: "You have no appreciation of Ericksonian hypnosis if you in any way believe that such patterning is used competitively. Surely, Erickson's gracious response to the induction I did with him on the phone lays to rest such nonsense." I put the word 'against' in quotes deliberately. Competition isn't the issue here (Ericksonian patterning still can be used competitively, as I think, but this is definitely not the best application). The issue is that you used books for some kind of preliminary modeling. And the question I would like to get an aswer to is just how do you consider such things? Are they in any way related to modeling described in Whispering? Or just another "valid strategy for learning" as you call it? You know why am I asking? I'll tell you. I just don't want to miss anything useful. Not that I love the Dilts' approach and due to my great love cannot decline it. No! I have been just wondering (and that was the reason for my first post here) if there is anything in this world that cannot be modeled using your approach. If there is, I'd use the mixed approach. Otherwise I could just forget about Robert Dilts' modeling and dive into modeling as described in Whispering since I like it. Do you see my point now? Oleg.