Before we began I watched him do his magic with the microphone in a small room full of electronic equipment. Heseemed almost to have a relationship with the microphone.

Kevin also knew how to ask great questions and get to the heart of things very quickly. I don’t know if this was a natural gift or if he had developed it as a style. Wherever it came from, it was certainly one of his strengths as an interviewer.

All too often I’ve been interviewed by people who didn’t seem to know what they were doing or what an interview was for. Consequently, they would ask either placid questions which had no energy which weren’t worth answering or such conventional questions that would only bore people to sleep.

But not Kevin. Kevin intuitively went for the passionate center of things to see if there was any core. He also knew that to ask such fierce questions, he had to do his homework. So before showing up at the radio studio, we had sent him some of the promo material on Accessing Personal Genius and Neuro-Semantic. On the day that I met Kevin I noticed that he had marked up the written materials, had circled words and statements, had written large question marks on some, and that he had even been to the website and had downloaded some materials.

Seeing that, I felt excited knowing that this would not be a humdrum interview. I then discovered that Kevin knew about framing. He didn’t call it that, but that’s what he did as he introduced me, mentioned the trainings, and then set the structure of the interview. He would ask questions for the first half and then give the audience a chance to ask questions. With that, he delved right in to it.

“The first thing I think when I hear ‘Accessing Personal Genius’ is over-sell, that you are over- selling and over-promising. Surely you don’t mean that you can create geniuses or that everybody can become a ‘genius,’ do you?”

“That’s a great question! It’s great because what we call ‘genius’ is not something that’s created, it is something that is accessed and released and that’s because ‘genius’ is not so much about I.Q. intelligence as it is about being fully present.”

“You mean we are already geniuses? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes and no. No if the word ‘genius’ means high I.Q., but yes if you mean being at your best, being fully engaged in whatever you’re doing so that you are ‘in the zone,’ and fully ‘on.’ We call the genius state a state of flow because when we are in it, things just flow. It’s as if all of our mental, emotional, and personal resources are fully available.”

“That’s a different way of looking at ‘genius.’ So genius is more of an experience than a status. That must be why there’s no Universities that give degrees in ‘genius.’ So if it is an experience, then how do we experience it or as you say, ‘access’ it?”

“Suppose I told you that you were born for genius, that everyone listening to us right now was born for genius? Have you ever noticed how little children can get so lost in a toy or game as they play and become
so engaged in that activity that you have to almost shout or tap them on the shoulder to get their attention? If genius is being all there, then that child is in a genius state of full engagement, of one mind —single minded about that activity.”

“So genius is about focus and concentration? So it is the opposite of multi-tracking? Is that why we think of some geniuses as absent-minded and lost in their thoughts?”

“Yes,exactly. They are of one mind about something and because they are not splitting their awareness, but focusing it, they have a laser-beam focus and that’s what makes them so present, so engaged, so much in the zone.”

“That’s the best golfers do. They get in the zone and are able to stop all the mind-chatter so they aren’t disturbed by the things going on around them.”

“You’ve got it. Genius is a natural state of mind, we were born for it. The challenge we have is not in creating it, but in getting back to it. Our problem as adults is that we have too many things on our mind, we have too many things going on in the back of our mind. We need to ‘Lose our mind and come back to our senses’ so that we can be present and enter that zone of focus and flow.”

[Laughing] “That’s good. When I’m working at my home office on some of my projects, my wife is always telling me that I’ve lost my mind because she can call me for supper over and over and I never hear her. Now I’ve got the best excuse ever— I’m in my genius state!”

“When you’re in that state, what enables you to be so lost in your thoughts? How do you get so involved that you don’t hear the call for supper?”

“Well, I’m just doing what I love, usually searching for songs and clips that I can use on the radio. . . . And then it’s like I’m lost in my own world.”

“And when that happens, what happens to time, to your sense of time?”

“I don’t know, it’s gone.”

“And what happens to your environment?”

“Gone.”

“And to other people?”

“Gone.”

“Well, Kevin, sounds like in that context you already have accessed your personal genius state!”

“That’s great. Of course, the problem is that I can get lost in that state for hours and hours and then miss appointments, or not get sufficient sleep.”

“So how would you like to be able to switch that genius state of flow on and off at will? How would you like to be able to step into it and step out of it and to do so whenever you want to?”

“That would be great. I’d like that.”

“Well, that’s what our training and books about Accessing Personal Genius is all about. When we can do that, we have the state instead of it have us. That’s what I did with the states of both researching and writing. Prior to doing that, I suffered from writer’s block, but now that I can simply step into my writing genius state, I have not suffered from writer’s block since. Now, I can turn that state on for an hour or five minutes or however long I want it.”

“Now that would be different. Sometimes when I get into flow, I fear that if I stepped out of it, I couldn’t get it back.”

“Yes, that’s very typical. Because it’s such a joyous and powerful experience, when we are there we don’t step out and when we are not in it, we feel that we have to wait until it happens again. But once you recognize how you do it, then you won’t have to wait around for the genius state to occur. Because it is your state,you created it. And if you create it, then you can learn to turn it on and off at your choice.”

“So this is not more over-selling, is it? Just how can we just turn it on and off? How does that work?”

“Have you ever watched the Olympic athlete turn it on and off? Have you ever seen a gymnast, a diver, or a sprinter just step up to the time of their performance and just turn it on. When we watch them, we see them take their stand, access the state, and then explode into the activity.”

“Yes, that’s fantastic, but are you now saying we all can be Olympic athletes? That we can be or do anything we want to be or do? Does it go that far?”

“Perhaps. But who really knows? What I’m really saying is that we can take charge of the focus state itself—that we can learn to run our own brains so that we can get the best attitude, mood, and performance out of ourselves.
Wouldn’t that in itself be enough to make your day? What if you could simply step into a highly focused state when you are here in the studio or when you are creating a new show or when you are with a loved one . . . wouldn’t that make your life a little bit more wonderful?”

“Yes it would. That really would. . . . And you will teach how to do this in the training?”

“Definitively.”

“And what about you? Are you able to step into . . . what did you just call it, ‘the genius writing state?’”

“Yes, people often ask how I can write so much or how I come up with so many new models . . . and I can only say that since experiencing the genius pattern which I ran with myself in 1996, I have not had writers block.”

He was passionate enough about it that he was one of the people who traveled to Denver for the 1994 NLP Conference where I spoke on my modeling project on Resilience. He flew in from Washington DC and attended the presentation when I first discovered the Meta-States model and he was one of the three people there that I immediately began talking to after that presentation about Meta-States. Then, throughout 1994 and 1995, Doug was one of the colleagues who brainstormed with me about many of the factors and features that I incorporated into the first model of Meta-States.

Yet what I remember Doug Adams mostly for is that he was the person who invented the verb “meta-stating.” After reading my initial paper on Meta-States and contemplating it for a couple of weeks, we have a long conversation on the phone in December of 1994. That’s when Doug asked me about “the steps of meta-stating.” “The steps of what?” I inquired. “Meta-stating? I’ve never thought of it like that. What are you thinking Doug?”
“Well, if you’re not going to turn Meta-States into another nominalization so that people think that it is a thing rather than focus on the process and the mechanisms of reflexivity, then don’t you need a verb form of the term Meta-States?”

During that dialogue, Doug challenged me to come up with a meta-state process. When I later came up with the original meta-stating process. I think it had 11 steps! Talk about exhaustive, it said everything I knew and could think about reflexivity! Later as I began traveling and presenting Meta-States to various NLP Centers in the USA, I discovered one of the real benefits of presentation—feedback. People found 11 steps too much. So I began to simplify the process and to put it in a more memorable form. The result? The Five A’s of meta-stating:

1) Access a resourceful state that you want to set as your frame or meta-state.
2) Amplify it so that it is strong and robust enough to be felt.
3) Apply that state to a primary state or situation.
4) Appropriate it into the life context, environment, or relationship where you want it.
5) Analyze the result to make sure it is ecological, congruent, and empowering.

After coming up with the Five A’s, Denis Bridoux in England translated it into French using 5 A’s; others found 5 A’s in Spanish. When Colin Cox in New Zealand learned the 5 A’s, he applied his creative genius to them by turning them into gestures so that people could mime them for easy learning. He also added 2 more A’s– “awareness” and “accelerate.” He added

Awareness as the very first step and Accelerate as the last. 1) Awareness of the present and primary state that needs to be outframed, textured, or meta-stated with some higher resource. 7) Accelerate your actions and behaviors to make this new experience real and practical in your everyday life.

This gives us the current 7 A’s of the meta-stating process. Do you know those?

1) Awareness
2) Access
3) Amplify
4) Apply
5) Appropriate
6) Analyze
7) Accelerate

If you read the Meta-State Journal (1997 and 1998) you would have seen Doug Adams name in those monthly journals (which are now incorporated in the spiral book, Meta-State Magic). Before his untimely death at 38 years old, Doug was a beloved colleague as he contributed his insights and feedback for what has become the Meta-States model.

Now you know who first came up with the phrase, meta-stating. Of course, if you don’t know what a meta-state is you wouldn’t know what “meta-stating” means. That’s why from the beginning we came up with other phrases. The one that I used predominately for the first five years was “bring to bear” as in “bring this resourceful state of X to bear upon this primary state of Y.” Bob Bodenhamer still uses that phrase predominately.

One day in 1997 or 1998 I was in Austin Texas presenting Meta-States for business (“Genius at Work”) and a lady walked into the training on the second day with two teddy bears dangling on each side of her. She had tied them together with a string. It’s not everyday you see a woman walking round with two teddy bears strung around her neck and dangling on each side, so everybody was asking, “What’s with the bears?”

When I asked, she said, “You of all people should know! You talked about two bears all day yesterday.” “I did?” “Yes, you said ‘bring joy to bear on your learning,’ ‘bring ownership to bear on your awareness of your personal powers,’ ‘bring pleasure to bear on that pleasure.’ So that’s why I brought my two bears with me today.”

And that, of course, has become something many others have done. Just last year in Johannesburg South Africa, I walked into a training room sponsored by Anne Renew and Cheryl Lucas and there was Anne’s two bears in the front of the room!

We meta-state by bringing one state (thought, emotion, physiology) to bear upon another, by applying one to another, by embedding one inside of another (like Russian and Chinese dolls), by transcending and including (Ken Wilbur) to create new categories or logical levels, by finding out
“waz up about waz up” (how Mike Davis and Sterling Harris) defined it in songs that the Meta- Players created.

In this and other ways we speak about meta-stating ourselves and others with resources that make a transformative difference and that create new empowering frames of mind. As you can see, the introduction training to the domain of Meta-States (APG) did not arise full grown but has been developing and evolving and today has the richness that it does due to the creative contributionofmanypeople. And I’m convinced it will continue in this new year and in the years to come.

I still remember the shock that I felt when I first read that statement in the book review. Actually I was utterly shocked by the statement. That was a statement that I had never even entertained, I had not thought of Meta-States in that way. And given that it was presented so bluntly, I felt confused at first. Having not been my radar, I didn’t know how the Meta-States model could have consumed NLP.

That was 1996 and here it is a decade later, and I have to admit that Graham was more right than I ever suspected. Since his 1996 review of Meta-States, the Meta-States model has indeed almost eat up and consumed the NLP model in numerous ways. During the years in which this took place, I was mostly unconscious of it. Yet in review, I am able to take a broader perspective and to see the revolutionary effect of Meta-States on the original NLP model and domains.

None of these books or training manuals were set out in some futuristic Mission Statement as to what we would do in Neuro-Semantics to “eat up the NLP model.” And yet that is what essentially happened over the years. I did not know it at the time, it is only in looking back does that become evident.

At the same time, I was writing a series of articles as critiques of NLP. Some of the articles I wrote by myself and some of them I wrote with others. One of the first was “The Downside of NLP,” later I wrote an especially biting critique of DHE, “Ten Years and Still No Beef.” In all of them I attempted to address various problems in the NLP model as it had evolved over the years and to take NLP to a new level.

Yet through it all we discovered many things and began to distinguish what we were doing from NLP. What we have discovered? One of the things that we mainly discovered is that a large portion of the magic of NLP occurs above the representational level. Now, the representational level is indeed the genius of NLP. It is a genius and contribution that we readily recognize as the unique creation of John Grinder and Richard Bandler. What NLP does best and what NLP is mostly about is representation. That is, it is about what and how we represent information on the theater of our minds and how that some simple shifts can generate very powerful results.

In this, NLP is truly magical. As a cognitive psychologist, when I found NLP I immediately knew that it filled in the gaps of Cognitive Psychology, Rational-Emotive Therapy, and of Reality Therapy. That’s why I found it so compelling.

Yet while NLP is all about representation, we learned something unbeknowest to Bandler and Grinder. We learned that there was another part of NLP that created magic that actually operated at meta-levels, at meta-state levels, and that the founders and developers somehow never truly realized this. We learned that what we had found in the Meta-States model actually explained most of the so-called magic.

This is nowhere better illustrated than the whole mis-adventure into the so-called “sub- modalities.” NLP decided that the finer features of the various sensory representational systems were “sub” to the modalities and so thought and used metaphors about “going down” and probing to a sub-level to find the elemental particles of experience.

Yet these cinematic features of our mental movies, the qualities of our visual, auditory, and kinesthetic systems are not “sub” at all. As the features by which we edit our movies, they occur at a meta-level as one of our frames. Somehow the entire process of even detecting these features is discovered by stepping back and going meta. And when we discover them, we discover meta- programsandmeta-modeldistinctions. All these are strong indicators that the term “sub- modalities” was the problem and had mis-led us.

In all of this, the reductionistic approach of Bandler and Grinder that created NLP in the first place by identifying the “languages of the mind” in terms of the sensory and meta representational systems ultimately proved to be its own confusion. The result? There has been essentially nothing new produced within the basic NLP model in the past 20 years.

By way of contrast, Meta-States that originated as a NLP model and so recognized by the International Association of NLP Trainers has continued, year after year, to generate new models, hundreds of new patterns, new modeling of experts to create new training modules and programs, etc.

The reason for this? Meta-States is all about referencing rather than representation. Mere representation is a first level mapping whereas the frames that we set about a representation is much more governing. So the direction for finding more of the “magic” of NLP was not down but up. And that’s the direction that Meta-States took us. That’s why the idea of Meta-States becoming a model that “eats up NLP” was obvious to several people before it dawn on me.

The meta-level states and frames of Meta-States explains why and how the mind-body-emotion system operates as it does and brought forth a whole series of new presuppositions for the field of NLP and which later established the presuppositions of Neuro-Semantics. “The person who sets the frame governs the game.” “Someone always sets the frame.” “Where there’s a game, there’s a frame.” And that will be the subject of our next Reflection.

Reflexivity is a function of reflecting back on ourselves. As we reflect back on to ourselves, our experience, our thoughts, our emotions, even our physiology (the component elements of a mind- body state), we then entertain other thoughts-and-emotions about our first experience. On the surface, this sounds simple. It is not. As a system of interactive parts, when we step back and reflect on ourselves, we move to a higher or meta level and we set the second thoughts-emotions as the classification or category for the first. Now we have some system complexity at work.

Stepping back to reflect on ourselves is known in NLP as “going meta.” From Integral Psychology it is known as “transcending and including.” From logical levels, it is known as classifying and categorizing. From Korzybski’s General Semantics it is not as “abstracting at a higher level” and creating our human “psycho-logics.”

Wow, it means all of that! Yes, and even more but that’s enough to bite off for this Reflection on Meta-States. When we meta-state by going meta, we transcend the state of mind and body that we’re in and move to a level higher from which we then include the first state inside of it. In this we are embedding our states inside of higher frames.

As we transcend our first state and include it inside of a higher thought or emotion, that higher or meta-thought and feeling becomes the governing frame. It is in this way that we create layers upon layers of meaning. Let me give an example.

Start with the primary mind-body state of learning. Now step back to entertain some thoughts- and-emotions of delight, pleasure, even fun and joy about the learning. Do so by thinking about what the learning will do for you. Do so by considering what the learning will open up for you, what it will unleash inside you. As you now transcend your learning experience and step up into the delight and pleasure feelings about it, notice how you include your learning experience within the frame and category of joy.

Ahhh! Now you have the meta-state of joyful learning. Ready for another step back? Then go meta now to passion about your joyful learning. Transcend joyful learning to the state of passion, excitement, and love for so that joyful learning becomes embedded inside of that passion. Now you have passionate joyful learning. What class is learning a member of for you? Fun things. And what class if joyful learning a member of? Passion. Is this logical? Probably not. But is it psycho-logical? You bet it is.

The process of meta-stating is the process of transcending and including, going meta, setting higher frames, abstracting to create beliefs and belief systems, and abstracting to set up psycho- logical structures. Pretty profound, wouldn’t you say?

All of this is also a higher and different facet of “running your own brain.” In NLP, running your own brain mostly means managing the representations on the screen of your mind. This is the genius of NLP. NLP focuses mostly on representation. By zooming in to the movie theater of our mind, NLP looks at the sensory representation systems (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.) and the meta-representation of language, mathematics, etc.

NLP also discovered that there are even finer cinematic features within each of these systems and so developed the domain of sub-modalities. Yet the cinematic features like an image being close or far, clear or fuzzy, big or small, two-dimensional or three-dimensional, etc. are actually how we edit our movies and so operate as higher frames to our movies.
How the Meta-States Model of Neuro-Semantics takes this further to expand and enrich it is to recognize the meta-levels of our mind— the multi-dimensional nature of our thinking-and-feeling matrix.

Consider “sub-modalities,” as an example. Prior to the Meta-States model, all of us in NLP thought that the cinematic features of our movies were somehow at a “lower” level, a “sub” level. Then one day we began to realize that to make our pictures closer or further away, we have to step back, notice this feature of our representation, and then edit it in a new and different way. In other words, we had to go meta to detect and alter the close-far “sub-modality. This led to the Aha! Discovery that “sub-modalities” are meta-frames, that is, meta-states.

And it doesn’t stop there. Because of the infinite regress dynamic (the infinite progress dynamic) we can always step back, transcend and include, go meta, and meta-state yet one more level up. And it is this unending process that allows us to always outframe to get leverage on managing the meta-levels of our mind.

The art of learning Meta-States is that of learning to handle and manage the meta-levels that we dynamically create through the going meta process. And when you know this and become skilled in this process, you’ll understand that nearly all of the “magic” of NLP occurs at meta-levels.

For Training in Meta-States, check out the APG (Accessing Personal Genius) trainings. I will be in Portland OR. With Rich Aanrich and Cat Wilson in March Then will do APG in my home town of Grand Junction CO. in July

Other Neuro-Semantic Trainers present APG trainings in the USA and around the world. See www.neurosemantics.com schedule for such trainings.

I was involved in a modeling project on resilience as I was studying how people develop the quality of “bounce” in their thinking-and-feeling so that when they get knocked down they don’t stay down. In the process I took to interviewing numerous people who had suffered set-backs, who had been through a living hell of one sort or another, and who had recovered their passions about living and were back in the game of life. In the process I had been sketching a basic working schema for the stages of recovery from set back to being back in the game of life. So I prepared a 3-hour workshop at the Denver NLP Convention, it was accepted, and so I went and presented it there some 50 to 60 people.

After presenting the stages in the process of “Going for It – Again,” I invited someone to come forward “who had been through hell and had returned.” When several raised their hands and briefly described the traumatic events that they had been through and the degree to which they were back, I selected one gentleman and began inquiring about his strategy. I wanted to model out how he did it. At one point, he mentioned that he moved from one stage to another and I asked, “What was on your mind as you did that? What did you think or feel?” He said something about knowing that it would all work out. “How did you know that?” He commented that it was like a state about the first state, a meta-state.

That’s when the lights and bells went off. That’s when all of the studies in Korzybski and Bateson suddenly came together and made sense. That’s when the Meta-States model was birthed. Within a week I had the model detailed in a 40 page document and within two months Wyatt Woodsmall called and said it would be given the award for the most significant contribution to the field of NLP in 1995.

The aha! facet of this experience was that the term meta-state brought together things that had been percolating in the back of my mind for several years. Suddenly, lots and lots of things became clear. First and foremost was being able to understand complex states. Having learned about mind-body states in NLP, I described them by saying that we have “two royal roads” whereby we can access a state— mind (thinking, imagining, talking, hearing) and body (physiology, acting, gestures, breathing, etc.).

Yet having worked with more complex states like self-esteem, proactivity, forgiveness, and responsibility, I knew that there was something more, something missing. Mere representational images and sounds on the movie of the mind did not seem sufficient for most of the people I was seeing as clients for inducing and maintaining these states. How do you represent “self-esteem?” What picture induces “proactivity?” What sound track fully elicits “forgiveness” or “responsibility?”

But what was missing? Within such complex states, there was also typically a less direct and different kind of kinesthetic involved. So when the gentleman that I was interviewing started to describe a higher state, a state about the other states in coming back from a set-back, he said it was a “state of knowing that he would eventually get through it all.”
I echoed back his words. “So it’s a state of knowing that he would eventually get through it all. Ahhh. So what do you call this state?” He didn’t know. “I’m not sure, it’s a big picture state, like I’m above it all and know that I’ll get through it all.”

“How do you know that you’re in this big picture state of knowing that?” I asked again, trying to understand what he was doing in his mind, how he represented it and how I could replicate what he was doing. “Well, it’s like this state is about that other state of feeling the emotional ups-and- downs of the setback, but I’m not too concerned about my roller-coaster emotions because I know I will get through. It’s like a state meta to the other.”

“You mean it is a meta-state about the first state?” I reflected back. “Yes, a meta-state.”

Well, I’m sure I got through the workshop that day, but inside my head other things were going on. I was picture a circle of a mind-body energy state meta to a first one and governing it and framing it as its internal reference structure. Suddenly, I began to understand the meta-levels of learning in Bateson’s “levels of learning” in a new and more dynamic fashion. Suddenly the “structuraldifferential” of Korzybski also took on new significance. And so with that the search began in earnest.

Within six months I wrote the first book, Meta-States (1995), and immediate ran a new training here in Colorado that I called “Dragon Slaying” as I began specifying how bringing a negative state of thought-and-feeling against ourselves usually created meta-muddles of self-conflict and self-antagonism that creates the disordering of personality, self-sabotages, and wastes incredible mental, emotional, and personal energy. Dragon Slaying (1996) was then transcribed and written from that training.

So what are meta-states? Our meta-states are the thoughts-and-emotions we have within ourselves about our experiences. If our first thoughts-and-emotions are reactions and responses to the world, meta-states are our reactions and responses to ourselves. This includes reactions to our thoughts, to our emotions, to our experiences, to our concepts, to our abstractions, to all of our meanings.

My meta-states and your meta-states are our reactions to ourselves. So, how do you react to yourself? To you react to your thinking-emoting states with kindness and grace or harshness and judgment? Whatever you do, that sets the frame or meta-state for the first state. In this a meta- state is a “logical level” jump. We step back from ourselves as it were to then think-and-feel a second time, then a third time, a fourth, and so on.

In fact, the process is never-ending. It is an infinite process as Korzybski noted. Philosophers had noted this for centuries and called it “the infinite regress.” In Neuro-Semantics I began calling it “the infinite progress.” Why? Here the good news. Whatever frames we have set and whatever meta-muddles we have created with limiting beliefs and self-sabotaging understandings and decisions, we can always make one more step forward and set a whole new empowering frame. Talk about opening up things so that we are only as stuck as our frames! This is it.

Why meta-states? Stay tune for additional Meta-State Reflections and you’ll discover the power, extensiveness, and nature of meta-states and how to use them for fun and profit.