New Behavior
Generator

Creativity as a structured process. How to generate entirely new behaviors by taking the best elements from existing experiences and combining them in new ways.

Where New Behaviors Come From

There is no such thing as a truly original behavior. Every behavior you see or experience is made of elements that exist elsewhere in human expression. The brilliant negotiator's style is composed of elements borrowed from other negotiators, from parents, from teachers, from cultural models. The creative artist's work is composed of influences that have been metabolized and transformed. New behaviors are not invented from nothing. They are synthesized from existing elements.

The new behavior generator is the NLP tool for doing this synthesis deliberately and systematically. Rather than waiting for inspiration, or trying to generate a new behavior from scratch through willpower, you identify the specific elements you want from multiple existing experiences and combine them into a new whole.

This is not copying. The person who generates a new behavior using this process has genuinely created something that did not exist before — their nervous system synthesized it, and it is theirs. But they built it from existing materials rather than trying to conjure it from empty space.

The Four-Stage Process

Stage One: Define the Context

The practitioner and client define the specific context for the new behavior. What situation requires a behavior the client does not currently have? The more specific the context, the more targeted and useful the generated behavior will be. "I want to be better at difficult conversations" is too broad. "I want to have a specific conversation with my manager about my workload" is specific enough to generate something useful.

Stage Two: Find the Source Experiences

The client identifies three to five past experiences where they demonstrated elements of the desired behavior — even partially. The criterion is not "where did I do this behavior perfectly?" but "where did I do any element of this, even once?" The most useful source experiences are often ones where the client was surprised by their own performance.

Stage Three: Extract the Sub-Elements

The practitioner guides the client to identify the specific sub-elements of behavior they want from each source experience. Is it the tone of voice? The specific words used? The physical posture? The way of framing the issue? The breathing pattern? These sub-elements are extracted and noted. The client is not trying to take the whole behavior from any single source — just the specific elements they want.

Stage Four: Synthesize and Test

The client synthesizes the extracted elements into a single new behavior — assembling the elements from multiple sources into a coherent whole. Then they future pace: imagine encountering the target context and executing the new behavior. If the future pacing feels natural, the synthesis is complete. If it feels like a patchwork, more work is needed on the integration.

The Modelling Connection

The new behavior generator is modelling applied to oneself. In formal modelling, you model an expert's internal process. In the new behavior generator, you model your own best moments — extracting the elements that worked and synthesizing them into a new whole. The two techniques are the same process at different scales.

The most powerful application is for people who have demonstrated competence in pieces but not in whole. The person who is brilliant in some situations and mediocre in others already has the materials. The new behavior generator reveals where the brilliance lives and how to extract and deploy it more consistently.