THE STORY OF META-STATING

When you hear the name Doug Adams you probably think about the guy who wrote A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But there was another Doug Adams and one who played a key role in Neuro-Semantics at the beginning. The Neuro-Semanticist Doug Adams was an IT guy who grew up in Kansas City Missouri (where I first met him) and later moved to work in Washington DC. I met Doug in the mid-1980s and later introduced him to NLP which he took to passionately.

He was passionate enough about it that he was one of the people who traveled to Denver for the 1994 NLP Conference where I spoke on my first modeling project on Resilience out of which arose the Meta-States Model. He flew in from Washington DC and attended the presentation when I first discovered the Meta-States Model and he was one of the three people there that I immediately began talking to after that presentation about Meta-States. Then, throughout 1994 and 1995, Doug was one of the colleagues with whom I brainstormed about many of the factors and features that I incorporated into the first designing of the Meta-States Model.

Yet what I remember Doug Adams mostly for is this: he was the person who invented the verb meta-stating. After reading my initial paper on Meta-States and contemplating it for a couple of weeks, we have a long conversation on the phone in December of 1994. That’s when Doug asked me about “the steps of meta-stating.” “The steps of what?” I inquired. “Meta-stating?” I repeated, “I’ve never thought of it like that. What are you thinking Doug?”

“Well, if you’re not going to turn Meta-States into another nominalization so that people think that it is a thing rather than focus on the process and the mechanisms of reflexivity, then don’t you need a verb form of the term Meta-States?”

During that dialogue, Doug challenged me to come up with a meta-state process. When I later came up with the original meta-stating process. I think it had 11 steps! Talk about exhaustive, it said everything I knew and could think about self-reflexivity. Later as I began traveling and presenting Meta-States to various NLP Centers in the USA, I discovered one of the real benefits of presentation—feedback. People found the eleven steps far too much to remember and practice. So I began to simplify the process and to put it in a more memorable form. That resulted in the Five “A”s of meta-stating:

1) Access a resourceful state that you want to set as your frame or meta-state.

2) Amplify that state so that it is strong and robust enough to be felt. It’s the feeling of the state that counts.

3) Apply that state to a primary state or situation.

4) Appropriate it into the life context, environment, or relationship where you want it.

5) Analyze the result to make sure it is ecological, congruent, and empowering.

After coming up with the Five “A”s, Denis Bridoux in England translated it into French using 5 French words starting in A; others found 5 Spanish words. When Colin Cox in New Zealand learned the five English words starting with A, he applied his creative genius to them by turning them into gestures so that people could mime them for easy learning. He also added two more “A”s—“awareness” and “accelerate.” He put Awareness as the first step (aware of the primary state to be outframed) and Accelerate as the last (accelerate into life).

1) Awareness of the present and primary state that needs to be outframed, textured, or meta-stated with some higher resource.

7) Accelerate your actions and behaviors to make this new experience real and practical in your everyday life.

The meta-stating process then involves these seven steps: 1) Awareness. 2) Access. 3) Amplify.

4) Apply. 5) Appropriate. 6) Analyze. 7) Accelerate. Back in late 1990s Doug Adams’ name occurred in most of the issues of The Meta-State Journal (1997, 1998). Those monthly journals are now incorporated in the book, Meta-State Magic. Before his untimely death at 38 years old, Doug was a beloved colleague as he contributed his insights and feedback for what has become the Meta-States Model.

Now you know who first came up with the phrase, meta-stating. Of course, if you don’t know what a meta-state is you wouldn’t know what “meta-stating” means. That’s why from the beginning we came up with other phrases. The one that I used predominately for the first five years was “bring to bear.” “Bring this resourceful state (X) to bear upon this primary state (Y).” I think Dr. Bob must really love it because I see and hear him using it most often to this day.

One day in 1998 I was in Austin Texas presenting Meta-States for Business (“Genius at Work”) and a lady walked into the training on the second day with two teddy bears dangling on each side of her. She had tied them together with a string. It’s not everyday you see a woman walking round with two teddy bears strung around her neck and dangling on each side, so everybody was asking, “What’s with the bears?” When I asked, she said: “You of all people should know! You talked about two bears all day yesterday.” “I did?”

“Yes, you said ‘bring joy to bear on your learning,’ ‘bring ownership to bear on your awareness of your personal powers,’ ‘bring pleasure to bear on that pleasure.’ So that’s why I brought my two bears with me today.”

Others have done similar things. I have walked into training room in South Africa and Australia and other places to find two bears in the front of the room. We meta-state by bringing one state (thought, emotion, physiology) to bear upon another, by applying one to another, by embedding one inside of another (like Russian and Chinese dolls), by transcending and including to create new categories or logical levels, by finding out “waz up about waz up” (to quote a couple of Neuro-Semantic trainers).

In these, and other ways, we speak about meta-stating ourselves and others with resources that make a transformative difference and that create new empowering frames of mind.