Making Self-Actualization Actionable #1

After a lifetime of studying and modeling self-actualizing people, Abraham Maslow wrote a chapter about his experiences in a book, Challenges of Humanistic Psychology that James Bugental edited. He titled of the chapter, “Self-Actualizing and Beyond.” What I found wonderful about this chapter is how he described both his original motivations for the modeling project and how he then set about to create benchmarks for self-actualization. So given that one of our key discoveries in Neuro-Semantics is the “secret history” of NLP in the work of Maslow and Rogers and that benchmarking is one of our key contributions to the field of NLP, I thought I would quote extensively from the chapter and relate it to current work that we are doing in Neuro-Semantics.

Modeling: 1935

Forty years before Bandler and Grinder modeled the three Human Potential Movement leaders (Bateson, Perls, and Satir), Maslow modeled two people who showed extraordinary development of human excellence and began the Human Potential Movement. What he discovered was that in

“… trying to understand two of my teachers that he loved, adored, and admired and who were very, very wonderful people … [I] sought to understand why these two people were so different from the run-of-the-mill people in the world. These two people were Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer.” (The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 1971, Chapter 3, p. 40)

Maslow’s modeling then began out of astonished amazement at two individuals who “were most remarkable human beings.” Unlike the NLP modeling of skills, this model wasn’t about what they did, but what they had become- being more than doing. Now in terms of doing, they were both famous-Max was the co-founder of Gestalt Psychology and Ruth the founder of Cultural Anthropology, the mentor of Margaret Mead, first wife of Gregory Bateson.

“I made descriptions and notes on Max Wertheimer, and I made notes on Ruth Benedict. When I tried to understand them, think about them, and write about them in my journal and notes, I realized in one wonderful moment that their two patterns could be generalized. I was talking about a kind of person, not about two non-comparable individuals. There was wonderful excitement in that. I tried to see whether this pattern could be found elsewhere, and I did find it elsewhere, in one person after another.” (41)

This modeling is driven by the scientific attitude of seeking knowledge about human excellence, something that Maslow spent his entire life searching this out. He selected “wonderful people” “… and then tried to figure them out and found he was able to describe a syndrome-the kind of pattern that seemed to fit all of them.”

Maslow selected people who were visibly successful and who were also inwardly success because he wanted to discover the farther reaches of human nature:

“When you select out for careful study very fine and healthy people, strong people, creative people, saintly people, sagacious people- then you get a
different view of mankind. You are asking how tall can people grow, what can a human being become?”

What did he find as he searched for human excellence? He found that these self-actualizing people were living for what he defined as the being-values-the values of being-the values that were valuable in and of themselves, inherently, innately, and were not valued only for their instrumental use. He commented that these B-values are “the meaning of life for most people.”

“Self-actualizing people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside of themselves. They are
devoted at something … which is very precious to them … so that the work-joy dichotomy in them disappears.” (42)

Benchmarking Self-Actualization

In his 1967 chapter, Maslow was looking for the actual behaviors that led to and that indicated self-actualization- the benchmarks.

“What does one do when he self-actualizes? Does he grit his teeth and squeeze? What does self-actualization mean in terms of actual behavior, actual procedure?” (43)

That’s when he came up with “eight ways in which one self-actualizes.” I will be quoting him for each of these eight ways in the next weeks and adding comments about each.

1) Total Absorption

“First, self-actualization means experiencing fully, vividly selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption. It means experiencing without the self-consciousness of the adolescent. At this moment of experiencing, the person is wholly and fully human. This is a self-actualizing moment. This is a moment when the self is actualizing itself.” (44)

Maslow wrote that this “can be a very sweet moment” and that’s because in such moments of absorption, one can forget poses, defenses, shyness and “go at it whole-hog.” Such engagement! This is the very thing that Csikszentmihalyi has described in his description of a flow state. The flow state is where one becomes so completely engaged in an activity that one gets lost in it. One becomes so engaged with something, and the amazing thing is that it could be just about anything- an athletic event, a puzzle, rock climbing, reading a book, having a coaching conversation with someone, writing, cooking, making love, playing with a dog- the list is endless.

And it is this kind and quality of total engagement that e call “the genius state” in Neuro-Semantics. Building on the foundational work of DeLozier, Grinder, Dilts, and others, Accessing Personal Genius is all about this- how to turn on your “genius” or “flow” state so that it is yours- at your command. No longer do you have to wait for it, cross your fingers and hope for it, you can “turn it on” and step fully into the zone of your optimal state- at will.

Now given that this is one of the benchmarks of self-actualization, in fact, the first one, and that it is a total absorption and engagement with something outside of yourself- this again clarifies the old confusion between self-actualization and selfishness and why we say that Self-Actualization is not about you, it is through you.

Ready for living the self-actualizing life? Then get ready to move far, far beyond multi-tracking as you step into total absorption of a meaning and value that endows your life with a rich and robust meaningfulness.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Modeling Excellence Series #16

Earlier this year I wrote 15 articles in the “Modeling Excellence” series and ended that with the one back on May 27. Recently in a training someone asked, “When is modeling ineffective? What would be an example of an ineffectively modeling of some excellence?” At the moment of the question I did not have a poignant example, but now I do.

A number of years ago after Southwest Airlines demonstrated their excellence in creating a low-budget airline that stayed profitable and kept growing during the same time that every other airline in the US was suffering declines and losses, if not going through bankruptcy. So both United Airlines and Delta attempted to model what Southwest was doing and enter into the market as competitors. So both launched subsidiaries to compete with the Southwest’s business model. United invented “TED” which I often flew between Grand Junction and Denver. Yet while they were certainly able to copy the system, they were not able to actually model the excellence that distinguished Southwest.

That is, they were able to copy the planes, the processes, quick turn-arounds at airports, etc. but they were not able to model and replicate Southwest’s values or spirit. Southwest is known for their entrepreneurship, fun, and love and the airline trades under the ticker symbol LUV. They were the airline which first introduced humor in something as serious as the safety instructions given just before a flight takes off. They added little comments like, “If you haven’t been in a car since 1970,
here’s how a seat belt works.” So while United and Delta airlines could model the externals-what Southwest does, they could not model the spirit by which Southwest employees do what they do. Given their cultures, they could not model the culture.

This explains, I think, much of NLP modeling which has failed to be effective. People have examined and modeled the structure of some experience and have fully identified all of the external steps, actions, and responses required to be able to do whatever some high performer or expert is able to do. But they missed something. They did not get the internal stuff- the spirit of the expert. They did not capture the expert’s attitudes, values, principles, understandings, beliefs, decisions, identity, permissions, and frames of mind.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that while Neuro-Linguistic Program is superb at detailing the behaviors of an experience and some of the first-level frames of mind- beliefs, it is not equipped to flush out the multiple layers of self-reflexive frames. And why? Simple. The classic NLP strategy model does not include a model for modeling the systemic self-reflexivity of human consciousness. NLP is excellent for detailing the linear strategy of the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic steps in “thinking and “feeling.”

This explains why NLP needs the Meta-States Self-Reflexivity Model. That’s because above and beyond the strategy model, and each piece of the strategy model, are additional layers of reflexive thoughts-and-feelings and for each one of those are additional hidden layers. And it is the Meta-States model that is designed to identify these layers that hide within, above, and behind these “thoughts” whether they are beliefs, decisions, identities, permissions, prohibitions, understandings, etc.

Now, systemically when these layers combine they gestalt to create additional phenomena that are more than and different from the sum of the parts. Within human consciousness, they gestalt into attitudes-higher level frames of mind that hold together a synergy of multiple beliefs. And because of this, using the Meta-States model we can model the structure of an attitude to identify the spirit of the expert.

Here then is the difference that makes the difference within so many experiences. That is, above and beyond what the top achiever does is his or her attitude or spirit that actually drives the experience. It is the person’s spirit that endows the experience with the certain quality that takes it to a new level and gives it the quality that we are actually seeking to model.

The point is that our modeling will be ultimately ineffective if we do not get both the what and the why. The what is the performance, even when it is the micro-performance of the actions that make up the activity. The why is made up of lots of things:

•  The intention behind it, which is made up of the values or significance and which answers the why question. “Why are you doing that? What’s your intention?”
• The principles and understandings governing one’s assumptive frames about how it works and how to carry it off.
• The aspirations of one’s vision about the meaningfulness of the activity.

The point is that to unpack the expert’s attitude or spirit requires the ability to enter into his or her matrix of multiple meanings or meta-states that galvinize the person’s robust state. This explains why we really cannot, or should not, use NLP as mere technology- as merely a set of techniques. To be a technician alone will only model out the external activities as United and Delta did with Southwest and entirely miss the inner “culture” of the company. To model the culture, the inner spirit and attitude of the people who add the quality to the activity, we have to use a model that can handle the non-linear, systemic self-reflexivity of the human
subjective experience- the Meta-States Model.

For books on Meta-States, see www.neurosemantics.com and click Products.

For the APG Trainings that Introduces Meta-States, click Trainings and then APG.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Modeling Excellence Series #14

Modeling any experience inevitably involves modeling beliefs.  Whether you are modeling an experience of excellence or an experience of dysfunction and pathology, beliefs are involved.  They drive the experience.  That’s why every NLP modeling process that I’ve seen to date involves examining the beliefs that are involved in the experience.  We do that explicitly in Neuro-Semantics by examining the belief system, that is, the system of beliefs which make up the person’s matrix of frames about something.  Yet there is something more within complex human experiences- something that transcends beliefs.

“What’s beyond beliefs?  Isn’t it beliefs all the way up?  Isn’t that what you wrote in Meta-States and the Matrix Model?”

Yes, all of that is true.  From the perspective of beliefs, we could say that it is beliefs all the way up.  Yet when beliefs grow up, they become something more and something different.  So what do we have when a belief grows up?  We have knowledge, principles, premises, assumptions, etc.

This actually explains why we start with a principle or a concept when we do the Mind-to-Muscle Pattern.  We start with a general statement that is universally recognized by experts in a field as a legitimate and generalized statement, “Wealth is created by spending less than you make.”  And then we can turn it in to one or more beliefs, “I believe in spending less than I make.”  “I believe in earning more than I spend.”

When I first modeled wealth creation, I first had to establish some time parameters-how long does it take to create wealth as in financial stability, financial independence, and/or financial freedom?  Then I established the stages that a person would have to negotiate to reach these various milestones indicating different levels of “wealth creation.”  And as I wrote in the book, Inside-Out Wealth (2010, chapter 2) there are seven stages of wealth creation and for the average person this requires approximately ten years.  Hence, the reason we create in that book, and in the training, a Ten-Year Wealth Creation Plan.

From that arises the next question which is critical whenever it comes to any longer-term experience that a person has to persist in with constancy, regularity, and discipline,

“What do I need to hold as a higher level principle that will sustain me for the long haul?”

“What concept, principle, or premise do I need to set as my larger level frame of mind so that I can move through the various stages and steps within each stage, effectively and efficiently?”

What do the successful wealth creators believe about themselves as wealth creators, about wealth, about creating wealth, etc. that are expressions of an even higher meta-level frame- a principle or concept about wealth and one that sustains them over the years?  Consider these principles:

• Wealth creation is a long term proposition, seldom is it created overnight.
• Wealth creation has to be holistic (involving the whole of life) and not limited just to finances.
• Wealth creation depends on adding massive value via products, services, and information to people.
• Wealth creation is a matter of time if a person knows where he or she is in the process and what to do to move through the current stage to the next one.

Principles like these describe an understanding about the experience and how the experience works that can then sustain a person’s perspective over months, even years.  Such principles facilitates a realistic understanding of the experience that enables people to maintain the discipline with patience and persistence.

Because principles establish guidelines and rules for operating, once you set them as your frame-of-mind, they operate as a self-organizing attractor in your mind-body system.  And that’s why, in part at least, they represent such an important feature to model.  If you can interview in such a way as to elicit the functional principles in a person, you will be able to detect the dynamic structures that are so much more than just beliefs.  And this will give you a key to what enables the person to persist over time in making real his or her vision.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

When it comes to the heart of Neuro-Semantics and NLP— studying subjective human experiences and modeling those experiences, a first question that often arises is why.  Why model an experience?  And the answer is really simple.  It is to understand how it works. That’s because when you understanding the how of now (Jan. 28, #6) you are often handed powerful leverage points of change or replication.  That is, knowing how an experience works—if that experience is not helpful, useful, beneficial, ecological, etc.—you can change it.  And mostly you can change it by noting how it works, when, where, with whom, etc. and sometimes the tiniest alteration of a key variable will facilitate a systemic change.

In NLP, we often describe this using a dangerous word to describe this kind of change, “magical.”  That’s because the change that happens seems incredible, fantastic, and seemingly “magical.”  A good example is facilitating a change in a person’s “internal critic.”  Simple ask a group of people:

“Who here has an internal critic?”  “Who here has an internal voice that criticizes you, attacks you, insults, you, says ugly things to you and that makes you feel bad?”

What I find incredible is not that there are people like that, and who will raise their hands, “Yes, I have an internal critic like that!”  What I find mind-blowing is that anyone ever treats themselves that way!  My thought is, “Why would you talk that way to yourself?”  But the fact is, a large percentage of people everywhere in the world identifies with this experience and feel helpless to change it.  Of course, the helplessness rises from using a very ineffective method of trying to change it.  What do most people do?  They tell themselves to stop!

Ah yes, the “command negation.”  And by issuing a command to themselves, “Now I’m going to stop telling myself that I’m an idiot!”  “Don’t ever say again that ‘I’ll never get it!  I must be stupid!’” Of course, this does not work.  Of course it makes things worse.  Whatever you command yourself to not do, you have to represent and think about.

Using the NLP Communication Model, instead of using an ineffective change method like that, we first seek to understand the how of now. We ask exploration questions about the experience so that we can model the experience itself.  So we ask the modeling question: “How do you do that?”  And at first, most people don’t even know how to answer that question.  “What do you mean, ‘how’ do I do that?  I just tell myself that I’m going to make a fool of myself because I’m not prepared.  That’s all.”

Now what modeling enables you to do is to listen for structure or process. In that statement, I hear the person tell me the content words, “I’m going to make a fool of myself because I’m not prepared.”  Okay, so that’s what you say to yourself.  How do you say it?  What tone of voice?  Repeat the words using the tone that you use in your mind so I can hear the tone.  Okay, now where is that voice— in your head?  Behind you?  In front of you?  To one side or another?  Panoramic?  What is the volume?  After getting the answers to such process questions, then I begin to play around with the experience and alter the quality of the various variables and invite the person to notice the effect.  Common ways of doing this in NLP are:

• Lower the voice and notice how low you make the volume before it doesn’t feel bad.
• Change the tone so it sounds like Elvis Presley singing, “You’re a hound dog.”
• Make the tone very sexy and try very hard to feel bad.
• Put the voice into your little finger and hear it coming from there.

Typically such alterations create systemic change.  The experience of being berated by your internal critic completely changes.  Changing one of the qualities of how you do something, changes the whole experience. It becomes different and sometimes so different that it becomes something else.  It might become humor, ridiculousness, playfulness, non-sense, etc.  That changes things in a much more elegant and easy way.

What about replication?  What if you have an experience that’s a great experience and you want to experience it for yourself?  This is the case with modeling experts— modeling someone who can do something that’s extraordinary, wonderful, and empowering.  In this case, we do the same thing.  We embrace the experience, frame it so as to punctuate it and set it aside in our minds and the mind of the expert and then begin to discover how do you do that?

Now most of the time the expert cannot answer the question.  And there’s a good reason, he or she does not know how.  The skill is so habitual and so ingrained into personality and behavior that it is no longer in conscious awareness.  This, in fact, is a description of a competent skill.  The skill occurs in the right context without the person needing to “work himself up for it” or for “her to orient herself to the context.”  It just happens.  It happens outside-of-conscious-awareness.

That’s where a modeler comes in.  The modeler asks how questions and gives menu lists of possibilities and evokes the expert to do the skill or imagine doing the skill and calibrates to what the person does that re-establishes the expertise.  It is in this way that we can detail the steps of the strategy that have become streamlined.  And when you know that, you can replicate it.  You can use the step-by-step process to try it on and see how it works within you or use it with others.

Why model?  To change strategies that you’re not an expert at (or someone else is) and also to replicate new strategies that someone is an expert at.  If you want to know what NLP is about, it is this.  Yes, NLP is also a Communication Model — that’s what the originators created by modeling three communicators (Perls, Satir, Erickson) and that Communication Model is also a tool for modeling. But, more about that next time.

Modeling Excellence Series #3

In last week’s post, I highlighted the power of focusing on the how of detailing out what is happening in the now. For me, this was the most exciting thing when I first discovered NLP Modeling.  By asking questions and by closely observing people, a person could identify how any given person is currently, at this moment, creating his or her sense of reality.  And if we can do that, then we can figure out how that reality came into existence, operates, and can be altered.  Incredible!

Now in NLP Modeling, Wyatt Woodsmall (1990) was the person who first differentiated two dimensions or levels of modeling.  He labeled them Modeling I and Modeling II. I think that this distinction provides a valuable way to think about the range of the modeling that we can do.

Modeling I refers to pattern detection and transference. This kind of modeling detects a pattern of behavior that shows up in certain skills, abilities, and expertise.  By explicating the patterns of behavior in the skill or skills—the what that an expert actually does to achieve a result, this modeling focuses on reproducing the products of the expert.  This kind of modeling focuses on learning the sets of distinctions, procedures, and processes which enable a person to reach a desired outcome.

Modeling II refers to modeling the first modeling (Modeling I).  As such, it focuses on the how of an expert—how does the expert actually create and perform the expertise.  It doesn’t focus on the what is produced (that’s the first modeling), it focuses on the background competencies.  Now we focus on the processes which are necessary to generate the patterns that form the content of Modeling I.  In this modeling, we especially pay attention to the beliefs and values that outframe the expert.  Here we attend to the meta-programs, the contexts and frames, the meta-states, etc., all of the higher frames.

I like this distinction because, as Woodsmall points out, the field of NLP itself resulted from Modeling I, but not Modeling II.  Let me explain.  NLP emerged from the joint venture of John Grinder and Richard Bandler as they studied the language patterns of Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir.  First Richard used his gift of mimicking Perls’ and Satir’s speech, tonal, and language patterns.  Though untrained in psychology and psychotherapy, by simply reproducing the “magical” effects of these communication experts, he found that he could get many of the same results as the experts.  Incredible!  How was this possible?

In searching for that answer, John used Transformational Grammar and his unique skills in that field to pull apart the “surface” structures for the purpose of identifying the “deep” structures.  Both of them wanted to discover how this worked. Frank Pucelik also was a part of all of that, and he created the context and the original group in which all of the discoveries took place.

From the theory of Transformational Grammar, the assumptions of the Cognitive Psychology (Noam Chomsky, George Miller, George Kelly, Alfred Korzybski, Gregory Bateson), and the coping of Perls and Satir, they specified what “the therapeutic wizards” actually did which had the transformative effect upon clients.  That was the original NLP modeling.

This adventure in modeling then gave birth to The Structure of Magic (1975/ 1976) which gave us the first NLP Model.  This was originally called The Meta-Model of Language in Therapy.   Today we just call it, The Meta-Model. This is a model about the language behavior of Perls and Satir, that is, how they used words in doing change work with clients.  And that then became the central technology of NLP for modeling.

The amazing thing is that with that first model, they were able to model a great deal of the governing structure of a person’s experience.  That enabled them to peek into a person’s model of the world just by listening to the features that linguistically mark out how the person has created his or her map.  While this is not all that’s needed for modeling, it certainly gives us a set of linguistic tools for figuring out how a piece of subjective experience works. It answers the how questions:

• How does a person depress himself?
• How does a person take “criticism” effective and use it for learning?
• How does another person look out at an audience and freak out?

The Meta-Model gave the original co-developers of NLP numerous tools for both understanding and replicating the person’s original modeling.  Soon thereafter, as they modeled Erickson, they began adding all kinds of non-verbal and non-linguistic distinctions to their model, enriching the modeling process even further.   As NLP started with Modeling I and not Modeling II, the early NLP thinkers and trainers did not have access to the higher level of modeling until some time later.  Nor did they seem aware of it for some time.  Eventually this realization arose as people began asking some basic modeling questions:

• What strategy did Perls use in working with clients?
• What strategy enabled Satir to do her “magic” with families?
• What strategy describes Erickson’s calibration skills and use of hypnotic language patterns?
• How did any one of those wizards make decisions about what to use when?

Even to this day, we do not know.  We know what they produced, but not how they produced such.  We have the results from their magic, but not the formula that identifies the states and meta-states, the beliefs and higher frames of mind that enabled them to operate as “wizards” in the first place.   Woodsmall (1990) writes:

“In short, if NLP is the by-product of modeling Erickson, Perls, and Satir, then why are we never taught how they did anything?   All we are taught is what they did.  This means that we can imitate the powerful patterns that they used, but we don’t know how they generated and performed them to start with.  From this it is evident that the part of NLP that is the by-product of modeling is a by-product of Modeling I, but not of Modeling II.” (p. 3)

As the product of Modeling I, all that we originally received in NLP was the result of modeling.  We received the patterns and procedures which the modelers found in Perls, Satir, and Erickson, i.e., reframing, swishing, anchoring, collapsing anchors, etc.  We received the NLP patterns. Bandler and Grinder gave us a legacy of dramatic processes that enable people to change.

Only later was it that Bandler, Grinder, DeLozier, Bandler-Cameron, Dilts, and Gordon begin to wonder about the modeling itself that they started to explore the modeling processes, assumptions, patterns, etc. about modeling.  From that came the commission from Richard and John for Robert Dilts to write the second modeling book, NLP: Volume I.  That volume made Modeling II available.

They also left their theory about change, mind, neurology, language, etc.  Of course, they did not call it “a theory.”  In fact, they pulled off a big “Sleight of Mouth” pattern as they told us that they had no theory, just a description of what worked.  “It’s a model, not a theory.”  With that mind-line, they distracted our attention and offered “the NLP Presuppositions,” telling us that they were not true, could not be proven, but seemed like really nice “lies” that would take us to more resourceful places.  So we just memorized them, only half aware (if that), that within the NLP Presuppositions they had hidden away the theory of neuro-linguistic programming.

Modeling Excellence Series #1

What is NLP?  How can we define it?

There are two answers that I like to give.  First, NLP is a Communication Model and second, NLP is a Modeling Model.  Yes, it can be framed as involving other things- a technology of excellence, a format for self-development, the success formula.  Yet those ways of defining it are typically P.R. definitions, that is, definitions that serve the purpose of selling NLP.  They are not truly descriptions of what it is.

Do you want to know what it is?

It began as distinctions of language regarding how some experts in communication were able to do by just talking what seemed like magic with their words.  That’s why NLP began with the development of what was called “the Meta-Model of Language in therapy” (The Structure of Magic, Volume I, 1975).  This was, at that time, eleven linguistic distinctions that enabled a practitioner to recognize an ill-formed word or sentence and ask a question that would challenge the speaker to speak in a way that would be well-formed in terms of clarity and precision.  The Meta-Model is now 22 distinctions (see Communication Magic, 2001, which I wrote at Richard Bandler’s request to acknowledge the 25 year anniversary of the Meta-Model).

So it is a model of how communication works which was John Grinder’s contribution as he imported Transformational Grammar (T.G.).  And in a way that de-mystified and simplified T.G., he formulated the language patterning of Perls and Satir so that they were useable by anyone.  This contribution was modeled from Bandler by Grinder, and then practiced among them along with Pucelik and the practice group.  So by modeling experts NLP arose as a Communication Model and as a Model for Linguistically Modeling human experience.  In other words, the Communication Model of NLP became simultaneously the first Modeling tool of NLP!  So that’s why I like to say that NLP is first a Communication Model and then a Modeling Model.

Given that this is what NLP is, I thought I would write a series of articles during this year of Modeling Excellence.  There are several reasons I want to do this.  First and foremost, this is the essence of NLP.  To not know this (which is today all too common in the field) is to not understand what NLP is about, where it came from, what we can do with it, and where many of us are going with it.

This is also the essence of Neuro-Semantics, especially given that it began from my first modeling project on Resilience, and which ended in the discovery and creation of the Meta-States Model which, just as with the Meta-Model, is simultaneously a Modeling Model.  Since that time, I have spent the past twenty-some years on 16 additional modeling projects and that has led to the dozen or so Neuro-Semantic models that extends NLP.

Nor is this something that is for only a few special people.  My vision of NLP, and especially of Neuro-Semantics, is that this is something that every quality training in NLP should enable in practitioners.  That is, every practitioner in this science and art ought to be able to model human experiences. And modeling human experience simply means being able to understand the how of the experience: How does it work?  How do you do that?

After all, with the NLP models, you can begin to answer these how questions by using –

• The Meta-Model of Language and examining how the person talks and languages his or her reality that generates that reality.
• The Strategy Model whereby you can follow and make explicit the representational steps that comprise the person’s “strategy” for how he or she “thinks” and uses all of their physiology, neurology, to “make sense” and to create their reality.
• The Meta-Programs Model whereby you can begin to catch the meta-levels of frames and thinking patterns or styles that add to how the person operates.
• The Sub-Modality Model for how the person edits his or her representational movie which accesses various meta-levels of meaning and beliefs (because sub-modality distinctions work semantically, see Sub-Modalities Going Meta).

Then with the Neuro-Semantic models, you can complete the model of the how by using-

• The Meta-States Model of a person’s self-reflexive consciousness to track the thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, and meanings in the back of the mind and how they interface with the primary thoughts and feelings and how they set the frames for how a person operates.
• The Matrix Model so that you can track both the processes by which the person creates their matrix of frames and the content matrices that establish his or her sense of self.
• The Meaning- Performance Axes so you can determine the kind of meanings, quality of meanings and number of meanings that play into how the person creates their reality and the performances, implementing it in real life.
• The Self-Actualization Quadrants to measure how integrated the response is and how well it puts a person “in the zone.”
• The Matrix Embedded Volcano to relate how the person’s basic and meta-needs are met (or not met) in the process.
• The Axes of Change and/or the Crucible to evaluate the processes of change, how the change is occurring or not, and how to better facilitate the desired change.

All of this, of course, requires quality training in NLP and Neuro-Semantics, training that includes learning how to model.  This is one of the things we emphasis in our Trainers’ Training, that trainers enable participants learn how to model the structure of experience.  So to that end I will be writing a series of articles on Modeling.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.