META-COACHING AND MIND-LINES

Over the past couple years, several questions have arisen about Meta-Coaching and Mind-Lines. Among them are these:

1) How come Mind-Lines are not taught in Meta-Coaching?

2) When and how does a Meta-Coach use mind-lines in coaching?

3) If a coach uses mind-lines, isn’t that imposing and directing the client?

Mind-Lines is the term I came up with for the linguistic patterns in NLP originated by Robert Dilts as he heard and modeled Richard Bandler’s language patterns in actual demonstrations. Robert originally did that in 1980 and then his 13 “sleight of mouth” patterns was around in NLP as some handout sheets and that continued until 1999 when he finally wrote the book, Sleight of Mouth Patterns.

But several years before that, in 1996, Bob Bodenhamer and I began working to update the sleight of mouth patterns with the Meta-States model. The result was the book Mind-Lines: Lines for Changing Minds in 1997. Both Bob and I wanted to get away from the magic metaphor of “sleight of mouth” (sleight of hand) because we wanted to avoid the connotations of manipulation and to focus on the structure of meaning.