THE META STRUCTURE OF AN ATTITUDE

From the first article, you know that an attitude involves a meta-level structure. It is far more than just a thought, feeling, or mood. And often, we find it difficult to identify our own attitude (although others seem to be able to pick up on it better than we do) and that’s because the attitude is what you and I are thinking in the back of our mind, and not in the front. Having learned it over the years and having habituated it, we are frequently completely unconscious of it. It sets us up for an orientation in life, a style of interacting, and yet you and I can be unaware of it. Amazing, right?

Consider the attitude of being cheerful and optimistic. It is so much more than just feeling positive about one specific event. Something goes well, you feel good about it, you like it but that, alone and by itself, does not equate to having a cheerful optimistic attitude. A pessimist can have that experience, and have it often, and still be basically pessimistic. How is that possible?

“Aren’t you delighted that you got that raise?” “Yeah, but that doesn’t change the crappy things that goes on at work.”

It’s the thoughts in the back of the mind that sets up an attitude. It’s the beliefs, the values, the understandings, the decisions, the identity that you’ve created, the permissions, the memories, the imaginations, and on and on. It’s these meta-level thoughts that establish the overall attitude so that it seems you’re stuck with it. This explains a lot.

It explains why a single event, or even a good number of contrastive events, may not change an attitude. It explains why a person can hold an attitude constant for years upon years—decades. By building up a meta-level system of beliefs upon beliefs, decisions upon decisions, etc., you and I can lock in an attitude so that it seems stable and unchangeable. Now true enough, counter- examples are powerful mind changers. And sometimes, just sometimes, even a single counter- example can change a mind. Accordingly, in the Mind-Lines model, we use counter-examples to see if we can shock a rigid mind into some flexibility.

But what really helps with the transformation of an attitude, is another attitude—an openness to information and a willingness to change one’s mind. Talk about a wonderful attitude to adopt— that is it! And that explains the NLP presupposition that the person with the most flexibility will have the most influence in a system. It explains the tremendous importance of openness to feedback and why those most open to consider and re-consider things are those who are the best at learning, the best at accelerated learning, and the best at making important changes to be more effective and productive.

All of this explains something else about attitudes. Namely that within every attitude there are beliefs and belief systems and values and value systems. So with cheerful optimism, lets go meta and see what we can find in the back of your mind.

What do you believe about being cheerful? What do you believe about being optimistic? What do you understand about these words? How do you define them? What memories or imaginations come to mind with them? Do you have permission to be cheerful or optimistic? Has either of these been tabooed or forbidden in your experience?

These are a few of the meta-questions that you can use to begin your journey into the meta place, your own personal meta-verse. Once you have some answers, continue with the meta-questions. Once you get a belief, “I believe that being cheerful is being shallow and superficial.” Ask, “If that’s the case, what do you believe about that?” Then continue up the meta-levels. See where it goes. See how far the rabbit hole goes!

Generally, when you have a negative or unpleasant meaning, things will get worse as you move up. That means that you have more and more negative beliefs, decisions, values, or whatever holding the first negative ones in place. That’s why unpealing the layers of your previous thoughts, which are now incorporated in the back of your mind, like pealing an onion, enables you to get to the problem frame that’s spoiling your life.

Now this is what we do in Neuro-Semantics as we model the structure of an unpleasant attitude that’s creating stress and distress in your life. This is what Meta-Coaches do. In the end, we facilitate people discovering the structure of their experiences thereby putting into their hands the tools for transformation if they choose to use them.