WHAT’S YOUR EXPERTISE?

Not long ago I had the opportunity to speak about NLP as a model of modeling. My subject was “Modeling with Meta-Levels” so I referred to the book I wrote on that subject, NLP Going Meta (1997). My theme involved speaking about what Neuro-Semantics had added to that subject. Namely, how can we further develop our ability to model experts because we have included the meta dimension into our modeling? Later in the presentation, a young man in the group raised his hand and asked, “So what are your people experts in? That is, what expertise do Neuro- Semanticists have and can demonstrate?”

For some reason that caught me off-guard. At that moment, I did not have an answer on the tip- of-my-tongue. Accordingly, I thought it was a great question because it forced me to stop and do some real thinking and that’s because in that instance, I did not have an immediate answer, I had to do some reflecting about that question. Later, I decided that the resident expertise that we teach, train, coach, and mentor in Neuro-Semantics is the expertise of modeling human experience.

Yes we train people in how to train, how to coach, how to use NLP as a communication tool, how to parent, how to be great leaders, how to collaborate, how to be resilient, and on and on. Yet above and beyond all of the specific applications, we teach something else—the structure of subjective experience. And when you know the structure, you know how an experience works. And when you know how an experience works, you are privy to how to make it better, how to streamline it, how to replicate it in your life and the lives of others. If the experience is a negative one, you know how to transform it into something positive and enhancing.

While NLP arose as a Communication Model and presented how expert therapists like Perls, Satir, and Erickson facilitated change in their communications, that was just the beginning. First came the Meta-Model which explained how “the talking cure” (e.g., psychotherapy) worked to create the “magic” of transformation in people’s lives. That was the theme of the two volumes of The Structure of Magic. Then came lots of patterns and techniques. In Magic the founders called them Meta-Tactics—tactics of matching predicts, challenging incongruency, etc.

Only later did they realize that what they had was actually something much higher and much more pervasive—they had a model for modeling. So Robert Dilts wrote the book, “NLP, Volume I” and the subtitle was, The Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience. So, what is that structure? There are many answers to that question. By the mid-1990s, the NLP structure of experience involved the following: Language: words, phrases, labels and the syntax of language. Representations: the inner movie in a person’s mind. Cinematic features or sub-modalities by which a person can edit his movies. Neurological patterns: breathing, posture, muscle tension, eye accessing, etc.

Strategies of representational steps that provide the syntax of an experience. Meta-Programs as thinking patterns that determine how one’s thinking constructs reality. Meta-levels as in Neuro-Logical Levels (1991) and in Meta-States (1994) which provides the higher level structures of the mind.

It was then left almost exclusively to Neuro-Semantics to continue the study of the structure of subjective experience.1 As I continued my study of the structure of subjective experience, several developments occurred.

First, Frame Games (1999): how the meta-levels operates as frames-of-references in the mind thereby defining the experience. Then Matrix Model (2002): by using the seven most common frames by which we define and structure our experience: meaning, intention, and self (person, powers, relationships, temporality, roles). This offered a systems way of thinking about how the various frames interact with each other. Now The Meta Place (2023): using what we know is in “the mind” as landmarks and sketching out a landscape of the mind. In this way we can picture how these landmarks work to create the specific strategies for any given experience.

If there is any singular expertise that characterizes Neuro-Semanticists it is this—the ability to know, recognize, and work with the structure of consciousness. Now true enough, most people in this field do not engage in formal modeling. Yet they do engage in modeling, they engage in pragmatic modeling as they assist a client in understanding oneself, in achieving a desired outcome, in learning a new set of skills, in becoming the best version of themselves. Their “modeling” is in service of these more practical objectives. And while very few ever write up a description of the model that their client started with or the model that they co-developed, they are working with and able to facilitate the structure of their mind-body-emotion system. That’s their expertise.

Footnote: 1: In the book I edited with Shelle Rose Charvet, Innovations in NLP (2011) there were only two models that extended the “study of the structure of subjective experience” in the 1990s and 2000s, Clean Language and Social Panorama.