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.

Modeling Excellence Series #13

In the last article in this series, I contrasted two very different kinds of “subjective experiences,” short-term and long-term experiences.  In doing so I also contrasted the genius of NLP to the genius of Neuro-Semantics. My point was that what NLP began regarding modeling the structure of experience, Neuro-Semantics has continued and expanded with the Meta-States Model and the Matrix Model.  Here as I continue that discussion, I’ll use resilience as an example.  I’ll do that because it is easy to comprehend and because it was the modeling project from which I discovered the Meta-States Model.

Consider the state of resilience.  What does it feel like?  If you accessed this state, what are you feeling in your body?  And where?  What are you thinking and representing in your mind?  What is happening in the auditory channel?  Difficult questions, are they not?  And why?  Simple – resilience does not occur in a moment of time.

Instead, resilience is what happens over time. Resilience is what you call your experience or your state when you look back and notice how you kept coming back every time something knocked you down.  No wonder resilience is not a primary state!  No wonder it is next to impossible to point to some place in your body where you feel resilience.  Resilience is as much a meta-feeling, that is, a meta-evaluation and a way of orienting yourself to life or work or sport so that as you anticipate set-backs, illnesses, mediocre results, big challenges, losses, etc., you see those things through a certain lens- the resilience lens.

And when you see them through the resilience lens- what do you see?  You anticipate that you’ll get through, that you will not be stopped, that you’ll figure out a way, that you have lots of resources to tap into and fix whatever is wrong, that your vision and dream is too big to let go, etc. These “thoughts” also are typically not coded in see-hear images like an internal movie (although they can be).  More usually they are the belief statements that you say to yourself, the decision beliefs that you have made, the identity beliefs you have created, etc.

And they do not all apply at the same time.  Some apply for the first stage of resilience, the getting knocked down stage.  Some apply for the second stage, the emotional roller-coaster stage when one’s emotions are all over the place from shock, anger, begging, demanding, crying, etc.  Some are for the coping stage during which you develop the skills to cope with the challenges and solve the problems that they create.  Others are for the mastery stage when you finally get some things figured out and you’re able to master certain challenges so that they are no longer any challenge at all.  Finally, some are for the I’m Back! stage.  The experience of resilience is a multiple-stage experience so that we need multiple strategies, each of which contributes to the whole.

And what holds all of the stages and strategies together?  Usually, many higher level frames about those frames.  That is, meanings and intentions that create a self-organizing attractor in your semantic system and which endows the whole with the quality or texture of “resilience.”

• I know I will get through it, it’s just a matter of time and learning.”
• “I will bounce back with renewed energy and inspiration.”

Here then is a multiple-stage experience.  And this will hold true for the majority of the most highly desired states and experiences.  Health and fitness also is not an experience that occurs in a single moment of time, but like resilience over a period of time.  So also with wealth creation, leadership, and mastery in anything.  Given the studies of Anders Eriksson on expertise, every competence requires multiple-stages and therefore time- and in the case of expertise, 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (that is, 10 years).

None of these experiences will ever fit the pattern of accessing a primary state where you access, step in, and presto! you have the full experience of the primary state- joy, love, relaxation, focus, etc.  When you set out to model any of these primary state experiences, you will not have multiple stages, but a single stage.  That’s why the experience is as close as your skill for accessing and stepping in.  That’s why you can have “instant relaxation” hence the book by that title that I wrote with Debra Lederer. You can have “instant joy,” “instant love,” etc.

Multiple-stage experiences are very different.  Here you will find no such thing as “instant resilience,” “instant wealth creation,” or “instant health and fitness.”  So modeling these means identifying the stages, finding the strategy for each stage, identifying the triggers that indicate when to move into and out of a particular stage, and much more.  This does not mean that each of these stages operates independently, that each represents a separate experience.  It does mean that when put together under a larger over-arching frame, the steps and stages is the meta-detailing of the larger experience.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.