DESIGNER STATES — I

Suppose you could texture your mental and emotional states... Suppose you could add various tastes, feels, qualities to your current frame of mind... Suppose you could make the way you move through the world richer and fuller so you beam with delight... Suppose that you were no longer stuck or limited in a bland or boring state...

These questions focus attention on the quality of your everyday states. They suggest that you could design the very quality of your life. How about that! This is one of the most exciting feature of the Meta-States Model. As you consider the quality of the following states, take a moment to explore their quality. You can do so regarding their—

When you think about your basic states— confidence, anger, joy, fear, playful, anxiety, respect, courage, sadness, excitement, curiosity, relaxed, etc.—how are they currently textured? What are their qualities? Here are some possibilities: Hesitating confidence, courageous confidence, foolish confidence, playful confidence, bold confidence. Slow awareness, dull awareness, bright awareness, brilliant awareness, curious awareness. Fear of commitment, stressful commitment, playful commitment, miserable commitment. Aggressive curiosity, rigid curiosity, humorous and silly curiosity, serious curiosity. Hostile anger, dreadful fear of anger, shame about feeling guilty for being angry Shameful fear, bold fear, curious fear, playful fear.

Meta-Stating to Texture a State When you apply one state to another (meta-state), the second state qualifies the first state. As you transcend the first state and apply a second state to it, the first becomes a member of the class of the second. Now the higher level state coalesces into the first state and textures it. In this way your meta-states get “into your eyes” and coalesce into your muscles. They become the governing frame-of-reference which is usually hidden from your view. To find them, you have to tease out the higher levels. To flush out the hidden meta-states ask about the quality of a state.

What’s the quality of your anger? Would I like you angry? Are you respectful and thoughtful when you’re angry? Or, do you lose your head and go ballistic when you get mad? Do you maintain civility and patience when you’re feeling upset and angry? Or do you become impatient and insulting?

The answers about the quality reveals the higher frames.

What do you believe about anger? What memories in your personal history informs you about this? What values or dis-values do you have about experiencing anger? How does this affect who you are?

How does anger play into or fail to play into your destiny, mission, and vision?

What do you expect about anger? About people when they get angry?

“Seeing” Meta-Levels in Your States These questions reveal the meta-levels of your states. As textured states, they have properties, features, and characteristics. Over the years, you have qualified your states. You have set your states inside of various frames. Using “anger” as a prototype, you experience your thinking-and- feeling and neurological somatic sensations about the state of anger. You like it or dislike it. You fear it or love it. You dread it or long for it. You believe it can serve you; you believe it turns things ugly.

Structurally, a meta-state relates to a primary state as a higher state about it. The lower state is a member of that class. The higher meta-state is a category for understanding the lower.

That’s why “fear of our anger” (fearful anger) differs in texture so much from “respect of our anger” (respectful anger). That’s why “shame about getting angry because it only turns things nasty” differs so much in texture to “appreciation of my powers to get angry because it informs me that some perceived value feels violated and allows me to respectfully explore the situation anger.”

As a higher logical level, the mental and emotional frames that you bring to your primary experiences represent a governing influence in your life. The higher frame is a message about the lower experiences and so modulates, organizes, and governs it. No wonder your meta-states are so important! In your meta-states, you have values, beliefs, expectations, understandings, identifications, etc.

Knowing all of this gives you choice about your states, your emotions, your attitudes, etc. You can choose the quality of your experiences and thereby create richer, fuller, happier, more fulfilling, and more robust states. Interested? That’s what the Meta-States Model offers as it takes the basics of NLP to a higher level.