DON’T CONFUSE STACKING OF STATES WITH META-STATING

When you first learn NLP, you learn to “stack states.” This is most obvious in the Circle of Excellence pattern. You identify a positive and resourceful state such as learning, joy, love, calmness, optimism, etc. Next you “stack” other positive states on top of your first state. It’s like wildly throwing any positive state that comes to your mind so that you start stacking state upon state. Sounds simple, obvious, and harmless. Right?

That’s what I thought. I thought that for years after I learned that and for many years, I never questioned it. I did not even question it in the process of discovering meta-states or in formalizing the Meta-States Model. Why? I don’t know. I just did not. Then recently as I have been pouring over many, many NLP books and manuals, I encountered this “stacking” process again. In one book, the author treated this as mana from heaven. It was his baby, his greatest diamond, and he talked about it as “a super Circle of Excellence state.”

In one example he took a person formally hooked on drugs, who had gotten clean and he asked him what state would he like to make his circle of excellence. The man choose calmness. After he accessed a calm state of mind and emotion, the trainer asked him to stack onto that state another one, he chose focus. Then add another, he choose decision, then competence, then fun, then confidence, and so it went. As he stacked each state, he was asked to experience it. So in the end, he had an incredibly large amounts of states, one upon the other, that he was experiencing.

So what is the problem? Several things. If you had experienced the Meta-States Training called APG (Accessing Personal Genius), then you have seen the list of 16 interfaces in the back of the manual. These are also in the book Meta-State as well as several books. Now 16 different interfaces means that when you bring one state and apply it to another, there are 16 different kinds of interactions that could occur.

Apply passion to love, joy to learning, or curiosity to learn and you increase the intensity of the first state. So also with fear to fear, anger to fear, fear to anger. Apply calmness to anger, mindfulness to fear, play to seriousness and you reduce the original state’s intensity. Apply anger to anger, fear to fear, love to love and you can distort the original state. Apply doubt to doubt or flexibility to compulsiveness and you can negate or neutralize a state. Apply anxiety to calmness or humor to seriousness and you can interrupt a state. Apply silliness to formality to create confusion. Apply a command (‘be X’) to something that’s spontaneous (‘on the spur of the moment, do X) and create paradox; namely the ‘be spontaneous’ paradox.

Apply observing to anxiety, or distance to a pain and create dissociation. Apply courage to have courage, willingness to being willing and create a response potential. Apply calm to anger or appreciation to shame and radically shift attention. Apply nominalizations and non-referring nouns and create a state of trance. Apply three or more states and create gestalt state such as ‘seeing opportunities.’ Apply any state that radically and incongruously jars with a first state that is not threatening, and create humor. Apply joy to learning, charming to lying, ruthless to compassion and texture the original state. Apply belief to a thought, identity to an idea and solidify or strengthen a state. Apply doubt to a belief, humor to a commitment and loosen a state.

The problem with stacking states is the problem of relationship. A state (which is comprised of thinking, feeling, kinesthetic registering) inevitably sets up a relationship with another state. If you are feeling anger (there are also thoughts and kinesthetic sensations abreast) so when you apply respect (which has its own set of thoughts and kinesthetics) —the interface of respect with anger will create a texturing of the original anger state. That builds up a new potential. But if you then apply doubt and questioning to the respectful anger, you then reverse things. You tear down or loosen when you just created.

So the idea of “stacking” states can do a lot of damage if you are not careful. It is actually reckless to just throw a bunch of positive states in a circle of excellence. In the end, you may not have excellence at all.

Can a positive state negate or distort a positive state? Certainly! Apply love to power and depending on the internal thoughts and kinesthetics of these states, you may create a dictator. Apply pride to confidence and you may get a know-it-all who can’t learn from others.

While applying one state to another state sounds simple, and something anyone can do— to do this meta-stating properly and ecologically, you need to think in terms of the interfaces between the states.