Patterns Part 3 – Tracking

Walking down a wintery London street in late November 2008 I was having a conversation with Gabe Guerrero about tracking patterns and I mentioned that I felt I was alright at tracking but not so good at remembering. Now it makes sense to me that both of these words could mean the same thing and in some way to myself, they kind of do.  When I think back to how I was organising the way I was thinking about these things I start to notice how what most people call remembering I think of slightly differently.

When I think about remembering things, I think about a huge repository where ideas, concepts, experiences and other life events all get put together for later retrieval. Some of those items are placed into certain categories and linked together through various associations and information is stored in a type of archival space.

Tracking on the other hand is about tools. When I think about what it means to track the things a person is doing, this is more about having different tools for noticing temporal changes within a given scope and then being able to tie each of those individual tracks to other tracks in the same temporal space in different scopes so that a new meta pattern can be noticed that shows temporal changes within a larger set of behaviours.

An example of a type of tool that I use is one that tracks tone of voice. Inside my head I have what looks like an oscilloscope with tone being measured on the x axis and time being conveyed through the y axis. As time progresses and the person speaks, the tonal shifts are recorded on the oscilloscope so that I can notice rises and falls in tone and also compare the current level with levels at any given point in time. The wonderful thing about having a tool like this is that I don’t have to “remember” the different tones of voice because the tool inside my head is doing it for me (as if this isn’t what remembering really is).

I’m sure many of us have had the experience when watching old VHS home movies or videos when instead of being able to see the image on the screen as it’s supposed to be, we instead get lines of “snow” at either the top or the bottom of the image. When I was a kid and this would happen, my dad would tell me “it’s ok Jamie, we just need to adjust the tracking” at which point he’d fiddle around with some controls and the tape would once again start to correctly line up with the things that were reading from it and the pictures would become clearer and make more sense. If you’ve ever heard someone talking who goes off on a tangent, you’ll also have heard them use the phrase “anyway, getting back on track” and to use that old analogy of records, switching track was a literal action of changing from one specific groove of to the next.

When it comes to tracking different categories of things such as tone of voice, meta program sequencing, submodality shifts, use of metaphor, nesting of loops etc etc, I like to have different tools set up for each thing I want to track and to then zoom out and notice how over a period of time, specific patterns emerge between the combination of each of those things. So as I’m tracking the use of tone and I’m also tracking the use of certain sequencing in stories, at a larger level I’m tracking a pattern between certain tones used at the same time as those specific shifts in sequence in stories along with other things that happen at the same time. What this means is that as well as the patterns you’ll have noticed on one track, you’ll also have a type of Meta track that’s keeping note of patterns between tracks simultaneously.

This all sounds like a lot of hard work until you realise that doing this consciously is a pain in ass and the best way I’ve found to do each of these things is to first build the tool, then train yourself to use that once tool on its own and then let the tool do its job alongside the other tools unconsciously. Gabe talks about building in your mind a mock up of the person you’re talking too so that as you track different patterns and notice different things you’ll also be able to simulate responses from them and tailor your communication to lead into the direction you’d like to go. To me, this also works as a shortcut for unconscious uptake of skill or behaviour because as you’re watching someone else do what they do the way they do it, and if you want to learn those things then, once you’ve built inside your head (at an unconscious level) a mock up of what it’s like to be that person in that context, it’s very easy to step into that and become the person or thing you’re wanting to replicate. The key skill in my opinion in doing this is not to be just fantastic at internally becoming the person you want to learn from but also even more importantly (and I credit the formation of this idea to Chris Morris who’s said it to me in various conversations) to be able to bring back from that trance, the things that you want to be able to do. It’s one thing to be able to become someone else and to do the things they do and it’s another to bring those skills back with you into the trances you spend most time in and to be able to use those skills flexibly.

I usually find that when I’m tracking the things people do, I’m starting off with quite small chunks and as time progresses and I notice more and more things, I start to divide those up into larger sets so that it becomes even more manageable and easy to maintain those tracking’s over longer periods of  time.

Thinking back to what it means to me to remember things I start noticing how remembering is a larger set and tracking is one of the smaller sets inside of that which allows me to notice, align, match and predict patterns in the behaviour (verbal and non verbal) of the person I’m tracking.

It’s interesting how a short conversation walking down a sunny autumn street can be the catalyst for noticing how something so unconscious can be brought into consciousness, added too, adjusted, streamlined and then placed back into being processed unconsciously and all because of once small question.

I could probably keep writing on this topic all day but I’ll stick to these basic ideas and possibly expand upon them either in conversations I have with many of you and possibly some more in writing depending on how interested people are in reading more on this topic. I’m looking forward to your comments and ideas.

Love, Jamie