SELF-RENEWAL AT THE META LEVEL

When you go meta, you rise up above your current experience so that you can then reflect on your experience. And when you do, you then think-and-feel about that first level experience. You’re now engaged in second-level thinking and feeling. If you do that again, you arrive at a third level of thinking and feeling, and so it goes all the way up the levels. I say “levels” but that’s not exactly the right word because there are no levels as static things. There is the process of leveling— that is, layering more ideas and emotions upon ideas and emotions.

Now we call this meta process, meta-stating. Yet it is so much more than just bringing “a state” to a state. Yes, you can do that. You can fear your fear, get angry at your anger, become afraid of your anger, etc. Yet because “a state” is comprised of thinking— that means that the particular kind of thinking you are doing at any given moment may be a whole range of different kinds of cognitions. You could be believing, valuing, evaluating, judging, imagining, remembering, prohibiting, permitting, modeling, and on and on.

Additionally, each and every kind of cognitive idea that you bring to your previous ideas sets off particular kinds of emotions. That’s why I hyphenate thinking-feeling. It’s a system and it works systemically. We can only separate these words linguistically; they do not actually operate separately.

Now with each meta move that you make, you establish the next-higher level psycho-logics for your mind-body-emotion system. That is, the logics or reasoning that you do in bringing any particular cognitive idea to yourself sets an interpretive frame. This explains why healthy, empowering beliefs, values, decisions, permissions, identities, etc. give you the power for productive change, transformation, and renewal.

In Mind-Lines (2007) we call this outframing. You move above all of your current framing and layering of thoughts-and-feelings and you set up a higher and more enhancing one. Most of the NLP presuppositions are enhancing outframes. When you set them, you establish an empowering frame of reference that enables self-renewal.

The map is not the territory, but if it corresponds structurally, it can provide a good guide. The meaning of your communication is the response you get regardless of your intention. Mind and body are a single system. You cannot not communicate.

Renewal, change, transformation, empowerment, learning, development, etc. all originate from the meta-level, not the primary level. It is at the primary level that the change or enhancement occurs. That’s only where it shows up at.

Now when you know that, it gives you entrance into the secret of how nearly every single NLP pattern works its “magic.” The patterns are ways to influence the way you think (and therefore feel) and with the new mental mapping inside, you are able to create new skills and competencies on the outside. Transformation is, after all, inside-out. Inner game first, then outer game.

By the process of going meta, you are able to step out of the old mapping, the old framing, the currently layering of thoughts-and-feelings and set up better and more productive frames. By stepping out, you move to choice point. This is the place where you truly have choice. You can now make new decisions, empowering decisions, that will set up the new “rules of the game.” And when you win the inner game in this way, the outer game becomes a cinch. It becomes a piece of cake. Details about how all of that works is in the book, Winning the Inner Game (2007).

What prevents self-renewal and the true choice for change is being caught up and captivated by content. This was the failure of first psychologies that were developed— they focused on what you were thinking, rather than on how. The same problem arose in the education system as the focus went to teaching children what to think, rather than how to think. Yes, content is important, but it is not the whole story. When I work with someone as a client, 15 to 20 percent of the focus is on content and 75 to 80 percent on structure— on the code.

Content is important because it grounds the conversation in the real world and actual referents. Structure (or process) flushes out the hidden meta-levels of interpretative frames that controls the experience. And when you get there, you’re in the land of transformations.