WE CALL IT SYNERGY

In 1994 I not only discovered the Meta-States Model, I also discovered an immediate and incredibly powerful application— an application that changed my life and one that hundreds of Trainers are training all around the world. I discovered the strategy of flow. Now in NLP at that time we did not call it flow, we called it genius. We also called it expertise or excellence. That was what we modeled— mastery of a given activity.

Grinder and DeLozier had worked on “the prerequisites of genius” in their classic book, Turtles all the Way Down. Robert Dilts had worked on the “Strategies of Genius” in his three-volume series by that title. Both quoted Bateson’s work on meta-levels and asserted that the secret, whatever it is, inherently involves meta-levels.

Then using the Meta-States Model, I took their work and the variables that these NLP founders had identified and simply meta-stated them. The pattern that I worked out became the “Accessing Personal Genius” pattern that I first ran on myself and then started teaching. Eventually I designed the training that we call APG, Accessing Personal Genius.

Now most fundamentally, “genius” or flow or expertise is a state. It is an optimal state of being at your best because you are singularly focused on what you are doing so that you are all there. You are not distracted or torn by competing interests. You are not multi-tasking. You are completely engaged in one thing. That’s why you have fuller access to all of your mental and emotional resources which, in turn, seems to amplify your problem-creating skills and your creativity. Plus, it is inherently exciting and fun to be so “on,” so much “in the zone.”

I mentioned that one of the first things I did was apply it to myself. My first “genius” state of flow was reading. Why? Because in those years I often found myself at the end of a page, and not having the slightest idea what I had read. I was somewhere else. I had lost focus and now I had to read the page all over again. So I built my first “genius reading state.” Next, I built a “genius writing state.” Why? Because I found myself often stuck and suffering writer’s block.

Once I did that, I suddenly found myself with an incredibly high reading comprehension, one that I had only experienced on unique occasions. One that ordinarily I could not replicate. And just as suddenly, I found myself free to write and not suffering writer’s block. In fact, I haven’t had writer’s block since 1994.

So, how do you get there? What is the strategy for how to turn on the flow state and operate at your best? It turns out to be a meta-stating process. Actually, a pretty simple one. Typically most people can fully run the pattern in thirty-minutes. You start with your primary state, the state that you need to be in to do what you want to do — a reading state, a writing state, a

presenting state, a listening state, a coaching state, a dancing state, a running state, whatever the state is. You then set up a barrier between when you are in the state and when you step out of the state. In this way you protect the state. Then your very physiology incorporates the state and because it does, it anchors the state. Now your body “knows” the state. It is embodied kinesthetically. Athletes do this all the time.

Once you set up the state boundaries, and you can step in and out instantaneously, you can screen out things which are irrelevant so that you can focus your awareness and attention on what you are doing. Next, we spend a little bit of time focusing on the activity of the flow state— the expertise you are developing. How do you do it? What skills are involved? What competencies? What is the strategy that you’re using?

Next comes the framing stage. Giving yourself to the experience in your imagination, you allow the facilitator to ask a series of questions which you answer with your executive prefrontal cortex. Each answer establishes more of the boundaries of the genius state, when to have it, where, with whom, etc.

Finally, comes the commissioning. You check for quality control so that it fits well with the ecology of your system and then allow the strategy that you’ve created as a “program” to be commissioned. Then your unconscious mind can allow it to run without you having to focus on it. You’re free to focus exclusively at the primary level on what you are doing.

With the Accessing Personal Genius pattern you create a unity between your highest meanings and values and your best performances. In Neuro-Semantics this is the Meaning axis (vertical axis) and the Performance axis (horizontal). When Csikszentmihalyi developed his flow model, he called the meaning axis challenge and he called the performance axis skill. Then he noted that “flow” was a function of the integration of the challenge/skill ratio. He diagramed it so that it comprised “the flow zone.” In the Meaning/Performance diagram, we call that same zone— the zone of synergy. Here you have integrated meaning (challenge) with your performance (skill). Now you are “in the zone.”

Today everybody knows about being “in the zone,” being in flow, and in the flow zone. What many do not realize is that this is the pathway to expertise, to accelerated learning, and to self- actualization. If you want to master something, you have to take what is a challenge or meaningful to you and integrate it into your actual skills, your skillful performance. Do that and you are on your way to developing expertise in your field.

Now you know that there is a step-by-step process for how to get there. We have demystified flow in Neuro-Semantics. And that’s what the APG training is all about. It is what Neuro- Semantic trainers train and what Meta-Coaches coach.

The pattern itself (Accessing Personal Genius) is in the APG training manual on “The Shop” and also in the book, Secrets of Personal Mastery.