This is a kind of pacing and leading that is much more subtle than the classic description of pacing and leading. It provides some lead time with initial pacing by contextualizing your client’s words with your subtle physical responses to their words and affect. As a training aid for practitioners, this system can help you become more conscious of your more subtle reactions to your clients so that you can manage your state and body language in subtle ways toward advancing your work as a healer. Your gestures will have the most significance if they are not too restrained or too wild. Many of your clients will be easily over-stimulated or be highly sensitive about trust and boundaries. When you employ this system, you will find that many of your clients respond well to your physical gestures. You might want to watch a video of yourself to see whether you already do this unconsciously, or whether you do it as well as you think you do already.

People gather a tremendous amount of information from people through “non-digital” aspects of communication, such as tone of voice and body language. By “flattening” the “volume” of your various non-digital communications, the more subtle elements become more obvious.  Also, by focusing on enhancing your state, you will have more unconscious alignment with your conscious gestures. Thus, your communication will be richer and more nuanced. To get used to this approach, practice this system in everyday conversations that are not high-stakes. Pay attention to your body language.

Do not attempt to pace your conversation partner. Instead, allow whatever body language you’d care to reveal to be expressed. However, keep your body language somewhat restrained, like water simmering instead of boiling. In order to do this, keep your hand gestures within the frame of your body. Do not allow them to move outside of your silhouette. Your gestures, whether you are reacting or expressing yourself, should be mostly very small or subtle. If you are prone to generous gestures or talking with your hands, this may take some practice. Once you get used to this, you will be able to be more selective about when and how you make bigger gestures. This will make them stand out more and have more meaning because you can produce more contrast in your movement. Also, you will not seem eccentric if your intensity and quantity of gestures tend to be too high. If you tend to sit very still, you will need to bring your reactions and self-expression out so that you actually have gestures that convey them.

Once you feel comfortable doing this, add awareness of your facial expressions and bodily positioning.

Make subtle shifts in your facial expression, such as a slight and gentle lifting of the eyebrows or widening of the eyes, or a slight shifting closer or farther from your conversation partner that expresses the amount of excitement or intimacy of the conversation. When you are comfortable with this, add more awareness of your non-word vocal expressions. This includes laughs, sighs, and exclamations of surprise. Practice using your voice instead of air sounds through your throat or nose, such as huffing or snorting. Notice that when you laugh, it is possible to project it as a very pure vocal release, a little like singing. Notice what it’s like to use restraint here, with just brief but clear laughter.

Phase two of this practice is to choose responses that consciously contextualize what your conversation partner is communicating. For example, get in touch with your most positive reaction to what they are saying and subtly adjust your body language and facial expressions to convey these positive reactions. It is as if you are somehow providing background music to their self-expression, but it is with your body instead of sound. If it is a very personal communication, you might foster in yourself a very empathic and understanding state, and saturate your subtle body language with that.

Once you are comfortable with this, phase three of your practice is to bring forward the state in yourself that, as background music or context, will influence your conversation partner’s state in a direction that can be productive. For example, if your friend does not feel understood in a situation and is taking it too seriously, you might exude understanding while at the same time feeling larger than the situation. If your friend is very sad, you might bring forward a combination of empathy and being resolved and at peace, as though you have experienced such losses and have found inner peace, but at the same time, feel deeply what the other person’s pain means.

Phase four is to bring this system into your work with your clients. To do this, you must have a good sense of what kind of leadership will be most productive. Rather than trying to force things in a productive direction, think more short-term, as in facilitating a state in your client that will foster a feeling that will pave the way toward progress. For example, if you have a client who is obsessed with having been betrayed by a lover, you can make space for them to vent; BUT, at the same time, promote a state in them which is about how commonplace such betrayals are, how complicated people are, and how your client has the capacity to betray as well. This sensibility is useful because it makes the experience of betrayal less dramatic and self-absorbed. But what kind of state would you be in to encourage their growth? The Symbolic Somatic Priming System, an extension of the system you are reading now, has the answer. And why do you think you’re paving the way for this new state? You might stop vengeance from harming someone, like your client. Helping them make objective decisions faster rather than merely commiserating or telling them to “get over it and get to work” By promoting a healing state shift, you will also help with reprocessing. State shifts can cause profound mental shifts. Changes in the state are often emphasized. It’s called “top-down” thinking. But a “bottom-up” approach that emphasizes the influence of primal resources on our thinking is often more effective. By primal resources, we mean the “older” (evolutionarily) unconscious NLP practitioner of the nervous system.