THE TRUE META OF NLP

If anyone is interested in an updated version of NLP, they need to knwo what happened in 1994. That was the time frame that the International Association of NLP Trainers (IANLPT) ran a contest to encourage people to work on new developments in the field of NLP. I first heard about it when I was at the Denver NLP Conference (September 1994).

It was there, at that conference, that I presented for the first time a workshop that I can created on resilience. It was actually the culmination of having worked on the subject of resilience for nearly four years. I was in my eighth year of intensely studying NLP and I was attempting to identify and present resilience as a strategy, a step-by-step process that people could use as a protocol. By then I had interviewed perhaps 35 people who “had been to hell and back” regarding resilience. Then came an opportunity—to present a workshop at the Denver NLP Conference. It was there and then that I discovered the presence of meta-states in the experience of resilience and later I was able to put together the Meta-States Model.

What I discovered in the workshop was that robust and authentic resilience involves so much more than a linear strategy. Looking back on that now, I realize that I was attempting to force ‘resilience’ into the basic linear Strategy Model. Yet true resilience involves a meta-structure of a state-about-a-state or even a state-about-multiple-states. Deep within true resilience, a person has a higher state of believing and intending. The person optimistically thinks— “I will survive this set-back!” “I will get through this set-back; it is just a matter of time.” “I will not let this set-back defeat me!” “These are just the stages of grief and recovering, that’s all.”

Yet the discovery did not come out of the blue. For four years I had been reading and re-reading Gregory Bateson on meta-levels, levels of learning, and systemic structures. For four years I had been reading Korzybski on levels of abstraction, self-reflexivity, and multi-ordinality. Korzybski took me to the field of General Semantics. Then his work on reflexivity took me to the field of Meta-Cognition which was good stuff, but ‘dry,’ academic, and mostly conceptual.

What was more alive to me was the NLP focus on state as in state-of-mind, state-of-emotion, and state-of-body. That’s where we all live. We are always in a state—an energy field of thought, emotion, and action. And from state, NLP’s Strategy Model identifies how we get into a state —the step-by-step process. The problem is that the Strategy Model is a basically linear structure which is not how the mind-body system works.

For me the Aha! moment came together in a conversation with a volunteer at the workshop. As with the previous interviews, I asked for someone whose life had fallen apart, and who, in spite of everything, refused to be defeated and who eventually bounced back with hope, determination,

purpose, and meaning. I was truly fortunate that day because the volunteer was a man who had enough self-awareness (probably from NLP training) that he could answer my meta-questions.

Previously with the others, I had asked, “How did you know that you were in this stage of resilience and ready to go to the next stage?” All of the answers up to that point were mostly mundane: “I just know.” “It seemed like the next natural step.” But this volunteer said, “I knew I would get through.” He emphasized knew. “What did you know which enabled you to know that?”

I didn’t know it at the time that I had just asked a meta-question. Nor did I know that he was ready to “go meta.” So it was an accidental breakthrough into the meta realm of consciousness with a person who could go there in response to a question.

“I knew that above and beyond all of the steps and stages, I would survive, that’s who I am. It’s like I have a meta-state about my states.”

My Aha! at that moment was the realization that above his state of being in a certain stage, he had other states. He had states about the stages and the states of resilience. Resilience arises as optimism about persisting in the journey of recovering, as a problem-solving mentality (“it’s just a problem to solve”) about finding the resources by which to ‘bounce back.’

It was that conversation that gave birth to the Meta-States Model. I immediately recognized that this was a model and not just a pattern. It was not merely discovering that we can have a state about a state (fear of anger; anger at fear, guilt about surviving, joy about learning, etc.), but that we now have a way to track a person’s self-reflexive consciousness up the levels reveals the structure of the thinking mind. That’s the discovery! If you ask a primary question (what, when, where, how), people give you primary sensory-based answers. If however you ask a meta- question, you ask a person to go into his or her meta-domain of unconscious awareness— what we now call the Meta Place... a systemic description of the mind.

Now mind not only thinks and feels, but can think about thinking, feel about feelings, and each time it does, we construct another higher (meta) level which makes up the layers of our mind. And because mind has layers, it has frames, categories, and a self-reflexivity which provides a way to manage our mind.

When you recognize that your mind has meta-levels, you have a critical key for understanding how you know what you know (epistemology). You now recognize that what may be linear at the primary level is non-linear at the meta-levels. It’s a system and that makes your knowledge psycho-logical depending on how you classify and frame things. Now your very thinking processes creates your thinking patterns (e.g., beliefs, values, identity, memory, imagination, anticipation, intention, etc.). These are processes layers thinking and emoting repeatedly to create layers of meta-states that define the content of the meta domain.

“What difference does this make in the field of NLP?” It makes the most difference of all! That’s because Meta-States explains NLP. Meta-States reveals the back story and the epistemological structuring of mind, consciousness, and personality. NLP without Meta-States is

like a computer without DOS or some operating system. Given that—here is one of the greatest insights of Meta-States: Meta-States is NLP’s operating system. Without it you really do not know, and cannot know, how NLP actually works.

That’s because the Meta-States Model models self-reflexivity—it models how your mind and my mind operates as it reflects on itself creating its next level of framing which then establishes its interpretative schema. For example, when you take a simple one-level meta-state like joyful learning, the second state (joy) is the frame of reference for the first state (learning). It is the classification so that ‘learning’ now is a member of the class of joyful things. And because it does this—it does so much more at the same time.

Joy defines the learning, governs the learning, determines the learning, and qualifies the learning. It does a lot! And at the same time, the frame of joy is also a belief— “I believe I can learn joyfully.” A value — “I value learn for the delight it brings me.” A decision— “I will learn joyfully.” An identity— “I am a joyful learner.” An anticipation— “I see myself in the future joyfully learning.” An intention— “I intend to have fun learning.”

When you understand the meta-stating process, you have a description of the epistemology of the “going meta” nature of NLP which makes it all work. While any resourceful state is powerful and important, more important is the higher state that the resourceful state is embedded in. The higher state, while usually hidden and invisible and even unconscious, is the actual process that’s making things work as they do. And that’s the true meta of NLP. And that’s why we have one day of NLP Practitioner devoted to the Meta-States Model and why we call it Meta-NLP.