Elicit or eliciting information in NLP is the ability to ask questions, find ways of getting information from a person naturally and via typing the code to their library of internal information.
For instance when working with internal Values (or Hot Buttons as they Calle din the corporate world), you can ask the one magic questions “What’s important to you about…..” That is a key phrase that involved the internal library of the listener and literally invokes the key values that are pre-stored inside.
It’s a bit like having the keypad of your phone or laptop and knowing when you punch in the right keys, you will get the right response from your device. Remembering that people are not machines of course (not all anyhow) and you will need rapport to make it work.
Elicit = to be able to extract the right information by asking the right questions or using the appropriate signals to another’s subconscious mind for the data to come forwards.
