Twenty minutes after getting on a city bus headed for downtown Los Angeles with my four-year old son, two men got on board and sat down across from us and started sharing in hushed tones experiences about their prison lives and some of the violent crimes they had committed and some of the violent acts they had committed while they were "inside." I glanced over a few times, just enough to notice the tell-tale signs of men who've done serious time behind bars: multiple prison tattoos done with pen ink, large upper-body mass and smaller leg development, prison tans, vacant eyes with cruel expressions, hard faces, the occasional paranoid glance-and-stare to see who was paying attention to them, all the signs that I've learned about from time I've spent around Orange County Sheriffs and prison guards (including a brother-in-law) who I've either spoken to, personally trained, or visited at their work places.

Having just started to learn NLP, it hadn't yet occurred to me that I could use what I was learning in "real-life" and not just a clinical or therapeutic situation. I was still relying on all my other "life" skills that had taken care of me up to now. In fact, I was learning NLP to promote my Pain Management/Pain Control Practice that I was struggling to get off the ground, and had spoken to Dr. Horton about ways that NFNLP could help me launch my business. The idea of using rapport skills to "connect" with someone that I would only normally "connect" with on a combat level was beyond the grasp of my mind.

At the time that this incident happened I still needed to rely on riding the buses for another two months, just until I got my driving privileges reinstated: the State of California needed to know I was recovering okay from my then-recent brain surgery, and that the meds I was taking wouldn't interfere with my driving ability. Public transportation was the only way my son and myself could see my wife for an occasional lunch.

I quickly ran some options: "Switching seats is out because the bus is over-crowded and people are in fact standing as well as sitting; there's still ten or fifteen stops to go before we get to my wife's work place, which puts us too far away to walk (he's a sixty-pound four-year old, which is a little heavy to carry very far); even if we did get off the bus now, this would be a bad part of town to walk through, much less wait around to catch another bus."

The fact that both of these guys were wearing army fatigue jackets and it's over ninety degree s outside didn't escape my attention, either. Then it came to me; something in the tapes that Dr. Horton referred to as "Targeting": I could start mirroring and matching their physiology. It did n't matter which one, and it didn't make sense to do both men because "pacing" doesn't work like that. I've got to pick just one, I told myself, so I selected the man closest to me and noticed how he was sitting. I crossed my ankles like I was a mirror reflection of him, and did the same with my arms. Whenever he moved, I waited a few seconds and then I re-adjusted my posture to match his. Then the bus stopped and he actually got off, leaving me with his "friend", who I immediately began pacing. I mirrored his movement at first, and then I matched it. Why mirror then match? For me, it gave me a chance to get into his particular rhythm gracefully.

After just a few minutes, I began noticing the rise-and-fall rhythm of his shoulders and thought I would make an effort to mirror his breathing patterns. He also had a habit of folding his arms across his chest, which made it easier to calibrate his breathing. Before I knew it, I was pacing his physiology INCLUDING his breathing. He even looked at his watch a few times, after which I looked at mine, after the appropriate pause of course; by the way, I wear my watch on my right wrist but for this occasion I casually changed my watch to my left wrist so I would continue to create the "mirror" effect.