THE ART OF TRULY LEARNING THE META-MODEL

You can know the Meta-Model and yet not know it, at least, not know how to use it effectively. And worse than that, you may not know how to not be able to hear it in everyday conversations. If you have read through some literature on the Meta-Model or even if you have memorized the 11 or the 21 linguistic distinctions along with their corresponding questions, you may think you know the Meta-Model. Yet if that’s the extent of your knowledge of it, then I would say— you do not really know the Meta-Model.

The really sad thing is that while NLP began with the Meta-Model, most NLP trainers that I have met around the world don’t bother themselves very much with the Meta-Model. Many skip it entirely in their trainings. And those who do teach it, will only spend perhaps a few hours or, at best, half a day on it. They will read through the definition of each distinction (usually only the first 11 distinctions of the 1975 version), read an example of it, and perhaps give an exercise or two. They then wipe their hands. “Okay, done with that, now let’s get to the good stuff!”