What is a strategy? Why elicit a strategy in NLP?

The NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming definition of a strategy is “a specific syntax of internal and external human experience that consistently produces a specific outcome”. In easy to understand terms, a strategy is the steps that you take to produce certain behaviour.

In life, at work or in your own business you have a strategy for everything. You have a strategy for learning new material at work, you have a strategy for playing football on the weekend, you have a strategy for being happy, and you have a strategy for anything such as wealth, relaxation, motivation, marketing, procrastination, eating, or buying. In fact everything you do each and every day of your life has a strategy.

In NLP a strategy is elicited so that it can be used to improve outcomes/behaviour and in other cases a strategy can be modified to get rid of behaviour you do not want or serve you in some way. When eliciting a strategy various questions are asked to determine internal and external modalities such as visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or auditory digital.

As an example, you may want to determine someone’s buying strategy. In asking questions you will determine initially whether they see something (visual), hear something (auditory), feeling something (kinesthetic) or saying something to themselves (auditory digital). A buying strategy may result in the following modalities: a person is purchasing a new pair of running shoes and initially they see the shoes in the store window (visual), then they picture them on their feet (visual) and that picture gives them a good feeling (kinesthetic). In further questioning it is elicited that they know the shoes were the right ones and the price was right (auditory digital). The modalities of this buying strategy are visual, visual, kinesthetic and auditory digital. If this strategy was resulting in impulse buying then additional steps could be placed into the strategy to prevent the unwanted behaviour of impulse purchasing.

In summary a strategy are the steps you take to produce certain behaviour or achieve specific outcomes. In NLP a strategy is only changed when the existing strategy is not producing the most effective behaviour. Are there any strategies you would like to change?