THE NEURO-SEMANTIC DIFFERENCE Part IV

“Why ‘Neuro-Semantics?’ What does Neuro-Semantics offers that NLP does not? What would you say is the biggest difference?”

In the last Meta Reflection I promised to write about the solution that will cure the reductionistic, simplistic, linear, technique-driven forms of NLP that are given to using NLP in manipulative ways. Now to deliver on that promise.

The solution actually involves several things — minimally it involves the following:

1) Think and work systemically with the human system.

2) Work with respect and care of people.

3) Work with the higher and highest frames of people.

The first item warns that we should never treat people as if they are things to manipulate. They are not. Things can be manipulated— “handled” efficiently. People cannot. People have to be related to as persons, and not handled as if impersonal things. Do that and stand back and watch the anger, frustration, stress, fear, and other negative emotions arise! With human beings, we have to relate to them as persons of value and significance. Violate that principle and you will not be able to understand the actions and responses of people or get along very well with them.

So we start with rapport—with connecting mentally and emotionally with people so as to seek to understand them and support them as persons, respecting their values, beliefs, and world-view. Rapport is the way into another person’s reality. But if you treat rapport as a technique, you are back where you started! Rapport-as-a-technique is a reductionistic attempt to short-cut the process and merely operate on-the-surface without encountering the person heart-to-heart. And this is the problem with a lot of superficial, linear, technique-driven NLP.

Just because you can learn how to pretty quickly gain rapport with another person does not create what is called “instant rapport” in spite of NLP books, promotional materials, and websites that promise such. I am now convinced that we should stop making such promises. Yes we can teach a person the required things to do and say that matches or paces another person and that is part of the external behaviors of rapport. But if there is not an attitude of respect and care and compassion in the person doing these things— the “rapport” will eventually be seen as superficial, shallow, and manipulative. Those who teach such things are short-circuiting the person and the inner attitude which are essential for it to be real and authentic for the long-term.

At best it can only create a short-term results. And those short-term results will soon fall apart. And that’s the difference between traditional NLP and Neuro-Semantics. It is not only what you do that makes NLP effective and successful as a tool, it is who you are as a person and your higher level attitudes (your meta-states).

That’s why “competency” in Neuro-Semantics involves both. We care just as much (actually more) about who you are as what you are able to do. Merely being able to do, without being a decent human being, is just another path to being ineffective. Ultimately, it is in setting your own personal frames of respect, care, and compassion that enables you to be a respectful, caring, and compassionate person. Then what you do is able to convey that. Then when you match behaviors and words and pace another person it creates a significant connection. It creates an I- thou relationship rather than an I-it one.

The NLP pattern of “instant rapport” is sorely and disastrously used when it is used by a person to get something from someone or to use that person for some advantage. In Neuro-Semantics we consider that an ethical violation of the principles of NLP. And we will confront and address the person among us who does such. Why? Because that’s not what we are about. But in the field of NLP generally, there is no other body or organization that does that.

It is the higher frames of a person’s meta-states that creates and governs the mental-emotional dynamic that we call “attitude.” This is also what the Meta-States Model models. With the meta-layering of beliefs, decisions, intentions, permissions, understandings, identities, etc., we are able to fully model the construction of an attitude. And we can not only model it, we can treat the “attitude” as a meta-state strategy that we can then refine, streamline, and enrich. That’s why we often train the introduction to Meta-States, the APG training, as “Kick Starting Your Attitude,” because we can!

With the Meta-States Model we think of the human system as a system of many interactive parts and variables and so as we work with new behavior on the level of performance (matching, pacing) we simultaneously work on the level of meaning (respect, care, and compassion for the person). Together these enable the actualization of the highest and best in a person for connecting to others and creating a relationship rich enough and robust enough to collaborate effectively.

This is the Neuro-Semantic difference that the Meta-States Model offers. We can now identify and work with the highest frames of people, the belief frames that govern their intentions, designs, and understandings.