META-QUESTIONS AND THE SKILL OF ITERATION

The Meta-States Model opened up the whole realm of questioning at meta-levels and so introduced the meta-questions. Given that this will be new to many people, I’ll offer a little description about meta-questions. For more about them, you can find a list of 26 meta-questions in Coaching Conversations, Meta-Coaching, Volume II. Or, better, in the new training manual for the Ultimate Self-Actualization workshop you can find a list of 70 meta-questions.

Actually, meta-questions have been around for centuries, even millennia. In NLP, there was one meta-question that caught the interest of Bandler and Grinder, but they didn’t know what to make of it. So they dismissed exploring what could have led to the Meta-States model much earlier. The meta-question was Virginia Satir’s question, “How do you feel about your feelings about what is happening?”

Here’s what they wrote in the first NLP book: “When you ask questions like, ‘How do you feel about that?’ (Whatever that might be) you are, in fact, asking your client for a fuller representation (than even Deep Structure) of your client’s experience of the world. And what you are doing by asking this particular question is asking for what you know is a necessary component of the client’s reference structure.” (The Structure of Magic, Vol. I, p. 160) Actually, “How do you feel about that?” is a meta question which takes us upward to the next higher logical level inasmuch as it asks about thoughts-and-feelings at the next highest level. In terms of the Meta-States model, it elicits the person’s frame-of-reference and the conceptual or semantic state that governs the experience.

“The new question, which is characteristic of Satir’s work, is: ‘How do you feel about your feelings about what is happening?’ Consider this question in the light of the Meta- Model. This is essentially a request . . . for the client to say how he feels about his reference structure—his model of the world.” (p. 161)

But they all lost their way. First Virginia, then Richard and John. What got in their way from recognizing meta-states is that they blindly accepted the erroneous explanation that the “reference structure” elicited “was the client’s self-esteem.” (p. 161). Unquestioningly they bought into the equation “Referent structure” = “self-esteem.” So in spite of stumbling onto a meta-question in the work of Virginia Satir, Bandler and Grinder failed to see what it offered.

Now the power of meta-questions is that they allow us to enter into a person’s (including our own) matrix of frames of meaning, level upon level, and identify the full structure of a model of the world. Currently, we have identified 80 some terms and expressions that can be used as meta-questions. But the key is not how many terms or even what terms, the key to effectively using meta-questions is the iteration process.

Iteration refers to repeating a process. So with meta-questions the process is inviting a person to peak into the frames that hold an experience in place. And given that our frames are typically outside-of-conscious awareness, being unconscious of them gives them even more power to influence us. But by stepping back and holding our experience in place (or that of another) and simultaneously inquiring about it— we are able to make a meta-move to the conceptual structures that frame the experience.

If someone says that he feels upset and stressed by how another person is communicating, we ask, “So given that this seems to be the case, what do you believe about that?” Now typically the person will not answer that question but will speak about his or her feelings that derive from it or actions contemplated. “I feel putdown by him and that I never want to talk to him again!”

What we teach and model in Meta-Coaching, Self-Actualizing psychology, and Meta-States for handling this is to affirm the expression of the state and iterate again using another meta-term to find the frame that creates that state.

“Ah yes, you feel putdown and want to avoid talking. That’s what you feel and want to do. Yet I’m wondering what that means to you? What do you think about him doing that?”

Again, the person may go out with his or her responses instead of up to the structural frame. “I just want to avoid him . .. Forever.”

“Great. Now we know what energies is being generated that comes out of you. Yet how do you create that response? What is your frame that generates that? What are you aware of about his communications?

“Well, that it is disrespectful.”

“Great. So that’s what it means! Disrespect. That’s what you believe it means to you. Good, now we’re getting somewhere. And let’s say that’s true, it means disrespect, starting there — what does that mean to you? What do you think about that?”

Iteration —that’s the key. Keep repeating over and over meta-questions, dancing with the person round and round the experience, inviting, teasing, tempting, evoking, provoking, and exploring the frames that create and hold that experience in place. Once you can do that, you will become truly masterful in being able to enter and explore a matrix of meaning. And that, in turn, will give you the ability to tease out all of the layers as you go up the meaning ladder.

The key skills here are the following five: 1) the step back skill 2) the iteration of meta- questioning, 3) the flexibility in using multiple meta-questions, 4) the holding a previous level for yourself or another as you keep moving upward, and 5) distinguish state expressions from state frames.