with Michelle Duval, CEO Equilibrio

In previous articles I have written about Neuro-Semantics as a model, a field of study, a set of patterns, and even as a business and community.  Now I want to write about another facet of neuro-semantic, what we have designated as the neuro-semantic approach.  Why?  Because it is the neuro-semantic approach that gives Neuro-Semantics its power, dynamic, magic, and appeal.  In this, neuro-semantics is an attitude, style, an approach and has its own M.O.— modus operandi.

• Do you know what the Neuro-Semantic approach is?
• What distinguishes the Neuro-Semantic M.O.?
• What are its qualities and features?
• How does one learn or adopt this modus operandi?
• Why would one want to?  What are its values and benefits?

The Birth of the Neuro-Semantic Approach

First there was Meta-States as a model and a set of patterns.  That later gave birth to Neuro-Semantics and a wide range of applications.  When we first introduced Meta-States as a third meta-domain of NLP (1994) we didn’t know that there would soon be an explosion of creativity in its applications.  Yet as that happened and as the way of presenting Meta-States and Neuro-Semantics evolved, it began taking on its own style and feel.  It is that which has given birth to the idea of a neuro-semantic style.

Of course, this was inevitable because of the different kind of thinking involved in Meta-States.  In contrast to NLP which is mostly a linear model, Meta-States involves thinking in circles, looping around the spiraling of the mind, fluid levels, and reflexivity.  Ah, reflexivity—what a very different kind of thinking-and-feeling that is!  How mind-and-emotion-and-body loops back onto itself to create matrices and funnels and eddies in the mind.  Reflexivity, the central mechanism in Meta-States, refers to reflecting back onto ourselves, our experiences, our states, our thinking, our emoting, etc.  And it is reflexivity that enables us to keep stepping back from ourselves.  And that, in turn, allows us a more reflective mode, a more apply-to-self attitude, a broader perspective, a more ecological concern, and the ability to quality control our states and experiences.

This began the neuro-semantic approach.  Soon after constructing the Meta-States model several of us began reflecting on the “downside of NLP” and commenting on how to hold ourselves to a higher standard.  Others, including NLP trainers, quickly began saying things like Meta-States would be “the model that ate NLP.”  They saw that the self-reflective nature of Meta-States would not only enable us to transcend and include NLP within higher frames, but that as we kept stepping back, we would not get caught up in the P.R. of over-promising results.  They recognized that there would be a greater passion and care for the long-term consequences of what we’re doing.

Then the day came when Bob and I began reflecting on what we would make the vision and mission of Neuro-Semantics.   That not only led to the first vision statements, but led me to writing about “The Neuro-Semantic Difference,” and how it differed from traditional NLP.  (If you’re interested, you can still find these are articles on the website.)

More recently, Michelle Duval and I co-created the Meta-Coaching trainings and materials and presenting the first certification trainings.  It was then that the very way Michelle used the Well-Formed Outcome pattern and other patterns caught the attention of many.  While they had seen and heard and experienced those basic patterns—they found that in her hands these patterns seemed different, more alive, more dynamic.  There was a difference.  But what?

When I first interviewed and modeled Michelle’s Life Coaching business plan at Meta-Coaching, people sensed that there was also something very new and different about how she does business.  It wasn’t the content, it was something else.  But what?

It was the attitude and the approach.  Michelle described some of the criticisms that she first received when she started her coaching business, Equilibrio and explained how she would run the coaching practice and sell a process coaching program.  Business people, coaches, and NLP people repeatedly told her that she could not run a coaching business that way.  “No one does it that way!”  “It won’t work.”  “Nobody will buy a 12 week coaching program.”

Yet it did work.  She did, and does, sell 12-week programs.  Within six months she had a full coaching practice with a three-month waiting list.  She even has a 90% closing rate from her free Introduction sessions, and she has three of her associate coaches at Equilibrio who has a similar closing ratio.  How that is possible is, in part, the Neuro-Semantic approach.  If this establishes the importance of the neuro-semantic approach, then what is the neuro-semantic approach?

The Neuro-Semantic Approach

1) Frames. One of the most important and critical processes that we know and work with in Neuro-Semantics is frames— identifying the frame, detecting it, deframing, setting new frames, entering the matrix of frames, working with the fluid “logical levels” of frames, and outframing.

That’s one of the big secrets in Michelle’s Intro. Coaching Session.   She sets the frame.  She sets the frame about what Neuro-Semantic coaching is and how it differs from other forms of coaching, consulting, mentoring, counseling, and training.  To this day, she continues to set the frames every week with every new client regarding what coaching is, how it works, the way she coaches, expectations, etc.  And the wonderful thing is that “whoever sets the frame controls the game.”  So, people naturally and easily buy it.  It is in this way that she makes it happen.  That’s because they recognize that it serves them.

2) Relationships. Does that sound “manipulative” or  “controlling?”   It would be if it wasn’t for another facet of the neuro-semantic approach.  Relationship.  The critical importance of rapport and caring for people  and making sure it is ecological for the person makes it powerfully influential, but not manipulative.  For in setting her frames with clients, she works uniquely with each client to deliver exactly what they really need, and more.  In that, the ego is completely out of the way because “it’s all about the client.”  In doing so, Michelle follows that client’s energy.  She follows their lead and adapts her processes to fit them.  Rather than manipulating or controlling the client to fit her models and patterns, she follows the client’s energies, passions, values, and visions.

The neuro-semantic way recognizes that to work effectively and successfully with any client, business, corporation, audience, friend, colleague, etc., we have to accept the other on the other’s terms.  After all, each person, group, and business comes from his or her own unique Matrix of frames.  Respecting this, honoring this, and acknowledging this is the first step.  That’s why part of the Neuro-Semantic way involves non-judgmental awareness and acceptance.  It involves respectfully getting permission to work with another.  It involves spending the time and effort to earn trust.

3) Walking the talk. The Neuro-Semantic approach fully applies to self the basic premises that people are not broken and don’t need fixed, that resistance is a meaningful communication, and that operates from abundance, faith in others, and cooperatively as a fallible human being.  In other words, the Neuro-Semantic modus operandi is living the vision statement.  Our M.O. is to walk the talk, close the gap between what we know and what we do, and always first apply to self.

The Neuro-Semantic Approach for “Trainings”

Because Neuro-Semantics developed from those of us in the field of psychology, training, consulting, coaching, educating, etc., the primary expressions of Neuro-Semantics is working with people one-on-one or in groups.  Yet what we have been discovering in the past year or so is that the Neuro-Semantic way is inviting us to shift our “trainings” so that they take on some new and different features.

What’s driving this?  Again, the basic premises of this field.

People don’t need fixing, they rather need a self-reflexive exploration of their Matrix of frames which facilitates them finding and creating their own resources and solutions.  The client does the work, not the coach, consultant, or trainer.

People don’t get better by having things done to them, they get better and tap their own hidden potentials when they are empowered to take charge of their own minds and lives.

People don’t need to be taught, instructed, or lectured as much as challenged and teased and provoked to recognize that all of their mapping frames are their mapping frames and that they have plenty of power to change and be transformed.

People’s internal communications create their framed realities —they are the architect of their own Matrix.

People experience the greatest magic of them all in the power of applying-to-self.  That’s how they make it their own, close the knowing-doing gap, and become life implementers.

What is emerging from this awareness?  Where is this taking us?  How is “therapy,” “coaching,” “consulting, and “training” shifting and changing with Neuro-Semantics?  AT this moment we don’t have the full answer, yet we do see some hints of the future beginning to appear.  Our sense is this, that in the near future, the self-organizing frames that we have set and that we are applying-to-self with more and more success will result in some new emergent properties that will revolutionize these professions.

Soon (perhaps this very year) it will be said that when you come to a Neuro-Semantics event you will not just experience a training, or a workshop, or a discussion, or a life-changing transformation.  There will be parts of it that will remind you of a training for new skills.  Parts of it will remind you of coaching to enhance and refine those skills.  Parts of it will seem like a keynote presentation that offers inspiring ideas, or a presentation that offers some theory or framing.  And yet it will not be that.  It will be something different.  People will begin to say, “No, no, it’s not a training or a workshop or a seminar or a conference, it’s Neuro-Semantics.

A Hint of What’s Emerging

Perhaps the Axes of Change model that we developed in 2003 can offer some insight into what may be emerging now and the changes that seem to be forming in a womb and soon to be delivered.  The Axes of Change maps out the change process and, like Meta-States, is non-linear in that the change dance moves back and forth between 7 different roles or experiences.  Sometimes it feels like an awakening, sometimes like a challenge that can be even threatening or very unpleasant.  Sometimes it can feel reflective and probing for understanding while at other times it can feel provocative, teasing, and pushing.  Sometimes it can feel creative and insightful and like an interior decoration, while at other times the giving birth to a new way of acting or relating, and celebrating the emergence of new life, and sometimes testing as in being put to the test to see if it passes muster.

What a dance all of that can be!  What vitality arises!  And perhaps it is easier to say what it is not than what it is.  It is not living comfortably in one’s Comfort Zone.  The Drone Zone of too much comfort, too much familiarity, too much predictability— it is not that.  Nor is it the Panic Zone, the Anxiety Zone.  It is much more the Flow Zone of just the right amount of challenge to make us feel uncomfortable and just the right amount of competency and skill to feel excited, hopeful, celebrative, and anticipating.

In trainings, coachings, consultancies, workshops, etc. this means the Neuro-Semantic approach goes for the Challenge—Awakening dance first, then the Reflective Probing—Provoking dance second, then the Co-Creating and Actualizing, then Testing dance third.  Expect the Neuro-Semantist to say,

“You’re uncomfortable?  Great!  Discomfort means that the frames of your old Matrix are loosening up and you’re about ready to embark on an adventure to a new World!  Good on you, mate!”
“You’re scared about the unknown?  Great!  Hey, everybody, John’s about to embrace a new dose of ambiguity, let’s hear it for John!  Hip, hip, porah!”
“It’s too hard, too involved, too complex, demands you think too much, etc.?  Really?  These are just silly excuses that you’ve used to excuse yourself from excellence, aren’t they?  Are you going to sell your soul to them again?  You are?  Okay, then I want you to wallow in your complaints for 10 more years before you make this change!  You have to.  You’re not allowed to be transformed yet.  You want to?  No, you don’t!  You do?  Nah, you’re just saying that!”
What has passed for “training” or “coaching” is going to give way to a neuro-semantic methodology which may mean being more real and authentic with people, more passionate and compassionate, more ready to identify the governing frame and getting to the heart of things and persistently honing in than we ever imagined possible.
The neuro-semantic approach will challenge the non-sense and myth that there is some singular and simple “magic bullet” that will solve all problems, cure all illnesses, win all sales, and defeat all interferences. etc.  Recognizing that the person is never the problem, but that the frame is always the problem—we will forthrightly face the illusion that “things ought to be simple.”  In an interactive system of many, many interactive parts (like the mind-body-emotion system), things are not simple.  People are not simple.  We cannot categorize them into 4 types.  Nor even 19 types.  We will confront and challenge people to think systemically, to follow the system loops, and to not only “run their own brains,” but use them above ninth grade reading level.

Do people not want “theory?”  That’s funny.  Why?  Because everybody in every training and every coaching session already has a theory about things in his or her head.   We don’t have a choice about whether we think about theory or not since theory—our presuppositional frames and beliefs is already what we have mapped out about ourselves others, business, relationships, etc.  It’s our theories (frames), in fact, that are often what creates our problems.

Since “the higher frames govern everything” —when a training, skill, process, pattern, etc. does not work or generates lots of resistance, the resistance is always a function of some frame.  It’s always a function of some theory-frame in a person’s head.  For the Neuro-Semanticist this is where the fun begins!  This is where we get to be an explorer of the other’s Matrix as we empower others to tap their own potentials for mastering their own Matrix.

A seduction typically occurs whenever people show up to a training or coaching session or consultation and operate from “The Quick Fix” frame so that they want us to tell them what to do, or they want us to “just hypnotize them” and make the problem go away or make them extraordinarily successful.  Will you take the bait and play the game of “I’m the Expert, I’ll fix everything!”?   Or will you recognize the frames (theories) that inform that game—the frames that undermine that person’s success?

If we truly believe in people’s ability to rise up, think in terms of structure (the structure of their frames and matrix), and to set new frames that will self-organize in new ways, then we will not take the bait.  We will play the Facilitator Game— the Explorer Game.  This is the neuro-semantic attitude.

The neuro-semantic approach means that we recognize that the power within has to be identified, accessed, and tapped into.  We do not truly help people when we solve their problems.  We are the provokers and teasers and challengers and testers who push and probe to get people to step into their own power zones, take the initiative, accept ownership, and from that create the gestalts of responsibility and proactivity.  Empowering another means dancing with the change processes that facilitates the transformation desired by that other person.

This basic neuro-semantic principle that each of us is always and only responsible for ourselves is the only foundation for self-mastery.  Every Neuro-Semantic training, presentation, and session focuses on seducing people to take ownership for their own response-able-ness in their areas of responsibility.  That’s the key to any and every success.

It’s not the coach’s job or the trainer’s job to do the work for the client or audience.  Only the person can wake up to his or her own power matrix.  This is the key to learning, to sustaining learnings, and to applying oneself fully as an adult learner.  Anyone who would take ownership for them to get their outcomes only plays into the sick frames that encourages victim-hood.  This is precisely why business is inundated and sick of the “fad of the month” programs that keep promising some magical solution.

Finally, the neuro-semantic approach to leadership is that when everybody says “It can’t be done!” we follow our own visions and values and the principles that we believe in to set the pace, to lead and pioneer the solutions, and to go first in exploring the pathways that allows it to be done.  If a client or a group want us to take responsibility for them getting their outcomes, as a neuro-semantic leader, we refuse.  A true leader never betrays the principles for money or approval or conformity.  The attitude and style is to live the principles even if it means embracing confusion and ambiguity, facing rejection and criticism, and persisting through the challenges.

What then is the neuro-semantic attitude, style, and approach?

• It’s recognizing and dealing with frames as the heart and center of human experience.  The person is never the problem, the frame is.
• The Matrix is self-created and must be self-re-created for change, transformation, resources, and life enhancement.
• Facilitating another’s change and excellence is what we do.  We don’t fix anyone, we don’t do anything to another person—we explore and facilitate.
• Relationship is the context for facilitating change and transformation.
• For the power of congruency and intuition we first apply to self.  We become the master of our own matrix which paradoxically gets our ego out of the way.
• Non-judgmental awareness and relation slays dragons and gives us a yellow brick road into the Matrix of others.
• Playing and having fun accelerates learning and gives us a child-like flexibility so that we stay current and relevant.
• Authenticity is fearful and fun and the human way that leads to effectiveness and success with self and others.
• It’s an exploration and always will be.  We don’t know it all and never will.

Summary
Neuro-Semantics not only refers to a model, a set of patterns, a field, a business, a community, but also to an attitude and approach.  What the neuro-semantic approach fully is and will become, we can’t yet say.  It’s still developing.  New emergent qualities are even now being given birth.  I hope in this new year to keep revising this article and updating our definitions as we discover more fully what the neuro-semantic approach and modus operandi is.  And I hope that as you experience it in various forms, you too will walk away knowing that while it is similar to coaching or training, yet it more, it is neuro-semantic in nature and style.  And may you be a part of the adventure of giving more precision to it.

Authors:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. and Michelle Duval co-created Meta-Coaching and the Axes of Change model and are key players in the field of Neuro-Semantics.

Since we began using the phrase, “Neuro-Semantics,” and trade marking that term, we have developed two different references for it. On the one hand, Neuro-Semantics refers to an idea and to a model of human functioning. On the other hand, Neuro-Semantics refers to a network of people all around the globe, to the Societies and Institutes of NS and hence, to a business. While it will take several years to fully sort these out and to fully develop both the model and the business, the time has come to at least begin that process.

If you were with us during any of the Neuro-Semantics Trainers Training in the past three months, you know that we have been doing this. In fact, the vision and plan for NS as a business, as an international association, has been coming together with the voices of the 50 Trainers that we now have.

Neuro-Semantics as a Model and Idea

First and foremost, NS is a model. It’s a model about consciousness, mental-and-emotional functioning, the structure of experience, and human nature. Emerging from Korzybski’s work at the beginning of the 20th century, Bateson’s in the middle, and Bandler and Grinder’s at the last quarter, Neuro-Semantics builds on from the Cognitive Sciences, the neuro-sciences, General Semantics, System Theory, NLP, and Cognitive Linguistics.

You can see the latest summary that I have been sticking in the front of all of the NS training manuals on the following page, “Models Used in This Training.” That summary identifies NLP and Meta-States as the immediate sources of Neuro-Semantics.

Defining the field of Neuro-Semantics

In my opinion, NLP made a major mistake when it failed to define the field as such. John Grinder and Richard Bandler never defined the heart or boundaries of NLP as a model. Robert Dilts seemed to have tried to do that. His book on Strategies and Modeling, “NLP: Volume I” (1980) came very close to setting forth some of the definitions of the field. Yet during the first 20 years of NLP, there were really no comprehensive books of the NLP model. Only in the mid to late 1990s did some works begin to appear providing an overview of NLP. The book that Bob and I write, User’s Manual of the Brain, surprisingly has come as close as anything to doing that.

As a consequence, early in NLP’s development, people began bringing all kinds of things into “NLP” and mixing it with many other things. This confused the public with regard to what NLP was. Many thought it was some facet of the New Age Movement, others thought it was a new form of hypnosis, or therapy, or manipulation, or personal development, etc. Yet though NLP can be and has been applied to all of these things, NLP is not any of these things. NLP grew out of the context of therapy (Gestalt Therapy and Family Systems Therapy) and for that reason it is often confused as a psychotherapy. Yet it is not psychotherapy. Very early, Bandler and Grinder modeled Erickson to create the hypnotic language patterns of Milton Erickson. Yet NLP is not hypnosis.

NLP is a meta-model about other models. At its heart, it is a description of the structure of experience whether that experience is therapy, hypnosis, family systems, systems, sales, business, relationships, etc. Because NLP is about modeling, it falls into the category of the Cognitive Sciences (Information Theory, Cybernetics, etc.). It therefore operates strictly as a scientific model regarding how things work. Robert Dilts devoted several pages to this theme in NLP: Volume I. (1980).

The same holds true for Neuro-Semantics and more so.

Neuro-Semantics has grown most directly from NLP and then secondarily from General Semantics and Cognitive Linguistics. I developed the foundations of Meta-States from modeling and “mining” the riches of Korzybski. Later I conducted trainings in London on “The Merging of the Models: NLP and GS” (now is called “Advanced Flexibility”).

I also took a lot from the Cognitive Sciences and Psychologies inasmuch as that was the focus of my doctrinal work. I took much from systems theory, Ericksonian models of Brief Psychotherapy, Narrative Therapy and Solution Oriented therapy. More recently I have taken much from chaos theory, fuzzy logic, mathematics, etc. as NS continues to grow and expand.

This means that Neuro-Semantics is also first and foremost a description of the structure of experience and especially the higher levels of mind or consciousness that creates contextual or framed “meaning.”

With regard to religion and spirituality, Neuro-Semantics is neutral. It’s only a tool. It’s only a description of the structure of how we organize our mind-body, brain / nervous system to experience whatever meanings we process. As a model, NS does take a stand about the ideas that we can postulate about the origin or destiny of the universe or about the existence of an intelligence in the universe. However, NS does take a moral and ethical stance in that it does value the essential ethics of the scientific model, namely, honesty, truthfulness, disclosure, respect of colleagues, openness to new and different ideas, willingness to test, experiment, and validate results, the human treatment of people and animals used in research, etc. Why? Because these are the essential attitudes necessary for searching, researching, communicating, and taking an open and explorative stance.

Philosophically, Bandler and Grinder tried to make NLP philosophically free and neutral. They did that by saying they had “no theory.” They argued that NLP is “just a model.” Of course, they then turned around and snuck the theory into NLP in terms of the presuppositions that they said were unquestionable because they only viewed them as “useful lies.” Well, that was a slick reframe, perhaps the first NLP Sleight of Mouth, but as we know, it was not true.

NLP is full of philosophical assumptions: constructionism, some empiricism, lots of pragmaticism, a touch of positivism, within the tradition of the human potential movement, etc. Yet because Bandler and Grinder set it up so that NLP presented the image of being philosophically neutral, it refused to allow its epistemology to be examined. This is what Bateson meant when he talked about NLP having a “shoddy epistemology.”

By way of contrast, I have sought to make the theoretical and philosophical foundations and frameworks of Neuro-Semantics manifest and explicit. I have done this by identifying them as located first of all in the NLP presuppositions and then secondly in the list of Meta-States principles which we have published in Meta-States, the Training Manuals, and NLP: Going Meta. Soon I will put this into the first Volume of Neuro-Semantics.

What does this mean for NS in terms of philosophical frames?

It means that NS is―

• A facet of the Cognitive Sciences and the Neuro-Sciences
• Partly Constructionism (we construct maps of the territory)
• Partly Pragmatism: we seek to identify what works, but without making the end justify the means.
• An expression of Cognitive Linguistics. We follow much of Lakoff and Johnson’s work (Metaphors we live By, Philosophy in the Flesh, etc.). Most of all we recognize the embodied nature of our metaphors by which we live and that frame our thinking.
• Democratic: we seek to find the structure of the best experiences in order to equally support and validate all people in all cultures and to encourage the democratic ideas of equality of all, fairness, justice, etc.
• Human Potential Movement: as NLP, Gestalt Therapy, Family Systems, Rogerian Counseling, etc. grew out of the Human Potential Movement, so NS is a beneficiary of that tradition and similarly seeks to promote human well-fare, empowerment, health and vitality, etc.

Generative focus: we seek to find and promote generative models rather than remedial because we believe that except for disease, genetic damage, etc., people are not broken, but work perfectly well. It’s not the lack of the ability to become resourceful, the lack of genetic possibilities that’s the problem, but the lack of top-notch maps (frames).

Figure 1:
Models Used in This Training

NLP―

A Model of Communication about human processing that empowers us to “run our own brain.” Using the “languages” of mind (our internal cinema of sights, sounds, and sensations) along with language, we “think” and frame things using these see, hear, and feel dimensions. As we represent data to ourselves on the inner screen of consciousness, that internal movie signals our bodies to go into a state-a mind-body or neuro-linguistic state and that governs the quality of our life and experiences. Developed by a linguistic and computer student about human excellence and genius, NLP provides insights and specific step-by-step techniques for running your own brain, managing your own states, communicating more effectively and elegantly with yourself and others, and replicating human expertise.

META-STATES®―

A Model of Reflexive Consciousness that extends the NLP Model, taking it to the next level. It details precisely how we reflect back on our thoughts and feelings to create higher levels of thoughts-and-feelings and layers of consciousness. In so using our thoughts-and-feelings thoughts-about-our-thoughts, feelings-about-feelings, we create mind-body states-about-states or Meta-States. Primary States involve primary emotions like fear, anger, joy, relaxed, tense, pleasure, pain, etc. and thoughts directed outward. Meta-States involve a layering of higher level concepts to involve structures like fear of fear, anger at fear, shame about being embarrassed, joy of learning, esteem of self, etc. Meta-States describe the higher frames-of-references that we set and use that create more stable structures (beliefs, values, understandings, etc.)

NEURO-SEMANTICS® ―

While it sounds like a big word, it refers to a simple fact. Namely that we create meanings in our minds (semantics) and we get those meanings incorporated into our bodies (neurology). That why, when things mean something to us-we feel it in our bodies. The meanings show up in what we call “emotions.” The meanings take the form of values, ideas, beliefs, understandings, paradigms, mental models, frames, etc.

Neuro-Semantics provides a model of how we humans make meaning as we evaluate experiences, events, words, etc. It’s a model of how we then live in the world of Meaning that we construct or inherit. Neuro-Semantics describes the frames of reference we use as we move through life and the frames of meaning that we construct. It creates the Matrix of Frames in which we live and from which we operate.

Neuro-Semantics arose from the Meta-States model which provides a way to think about the levels of states or mind that we experience all the time. That’s because we never just think. As soon as we think or feel-we then experience thoughts and feelings about that first thought, then other thoughts-and-feelings about that thought, and so on. Technically this is called self-reflective consciousness. Practically, it’s the Frames for the Games that we play in life.

Neuro-Semantics as an International Association and Business

We also use Neuro-Semantics as we refer to the associations of people who have learned the model, who are thrilled and excited about the possibilities of the model, and who plan to use the model to extend human knowledge and skill. In this, Neuro-Semantics stands for the growing community of all of those who see in Meta-States a model that extends and expands NLP. It stands for those who make up the NS movement that is spreading around the globe. It stands for all of those trainers and practitioners who use and plan to use Neuro-Semantics for creating models and training programs for education, relationships, business, health, government, leadership, etc.

Trade marking Neuro-Semantics has given us the ability to use the model for training, certification, networking, creating associations, etc. It has brought into being the first dozen or more Institutes of NS and the first Societies of NS. Structurally we have organized the networking of relationships under the trademark of Neuro-Semantics in the following way.

Figure 2: The Structure of Neuro-Semantics as a Business

Because the Institutes of Neuro-Semantics represent the local NS training centers, this is where the business of NS actually makes contact with public life. It is at the NS Institutes where NS trainers will be presenting public workshops and trainings in “Genius” and the other NS Trainings. Many NS Trainers will not establish Institutes, but will operate in corporate areas as consultants, coaches, and trainers. Rather than public trainings, they will influence businesses from within doing “in-house trainings.”

The Societies of NS will operate primarily as non-profit organizations (formally or informally) providing guidance and direction to the individual Institutes within their region. They will provide oversight and accountability. This will be our way of policing ourselves and making sure that those who are in the forefront of leading in the field of NS are walking their talk and providing an example of an ethical professional. Again, this was one of the key mistakes that NLP made from the beginning and which the NLP community in almost every country in the world is now paying the price for. We do not want to make that mistake.

I have put together the beginnings of a book on The Business of Neuro-Semantics. Currently it is a brief document, “Neuro-Semantics: the Vision-The Plan.” It is mostly about marketing at this point. But eventually, it will become a full-fledge description of NS as a business and how to make it work effectively.

Summary
While this is the beginning, this is just the beginning. There is much to do and together we will be inventing it as we go. How NS will grow and develop in the years to come will depend to a great extent upon you … upon those of you who are the first to catch the Vision and to make this a facet of your commitment.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., researcher and modeler, international trainer and entrepreneur (P.O. Box 9231; Grand Jct. CO. 81501; 970 523-7877), developer of the Meta-States Model, co-founder of Neuro-Semantics®, www.neurosemantics.com currently involved in several modeling projects: wealth building, selling/persuasion excellence, accelerated learning, etc.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

• What is it about Meta-States that makes it so creative?
• What do you attribute your own creativity to?
• Why are more new patterns, models and processes coming out of Neuro-Semantics than the rest of NLP altogether?
• How has Neuro-Semantics become the creative edge of NLP?
• What’s the secret of writing so many articles and books?

Every week I’m asked these and many other similar questions.  Sometimes these questions arise when I talk about the 120 patterns that we have in NS and compare that to the estimated 130 to 150 NLP patterns.  People then ask, “How have you developed so many patterns so quickly?”  Sometimes it arises when I say that every week I am receiving or hearing about someone in NS coming up with another new pattern.  Recently it has come up with the announcement of the first Neuro-Semantics Developers Colloquium (scheduled for Feb. 2003).

Whatever the trigger for the question, many are now talking about the fresh and prolific creativity in Neuro-Semantics.  Nor is it just about myself, it’s about many of the other key players in NS.  So, what accounts for this?  How can we explain it?

The Creativity of Reflexivity

Studies in creativity all highlight the bilateral thinking, the metaphorical thinking, and the wild, crazy, twists and turns that suddenly give birth to a new idea or insight.   Considering this, is it any wonder that a model about reflexivity itself, and of the self-reflexive consciousness that goes in circles, that spirals round and round, and that turns and twists onto itself should not generate many fresh new ideas?  With the mixing and mingling of ideas and experiences—no wonder new combinations occur.  Creativity inheres in the meta-stating process.

Meta-States as a model about reflexivity and that models how reflexivity works in our mind-body-emotion system, promotes creativity in many ways.  For one thing, it invites a non-linear kind of thinking.  In this it differs radically from the Strategy model of tracking the representational steps through a Test-Operate-Test-Exit black-box system.  In strategy work we try to hold our mind to a step-by-step process, going forward and then backwards until we get all of the representational steps.  It’s very linear.  And without question, that linear approach has and can generate lots of new creative ideas.  Look at what Robert Dilts has done with his Strategies of Genius series.  Talk about top-notch modeling using that approach!  It’s also been an approach that has led to much creativity.

Yet, that’s not how our brains work.  Our brains go in circles.  Our mind-emotion system spirals round and round ideas.  To learn this kind of non-linear processing, we have to develop such meta-states as the tolerance of ambiguity or better yet, the embracing of ambiguity, the celebration of confusion, the delight in paradox, the wonder of humor, and the willingness to explore without needing closure.  Consider these states.  As meta-states, these describe many of the facets of what we call “creativity.”

This suggests that there’s a fresh surprising facet of meta-stating itself.  The reflexivity that drives it also invites new creative mixtures of state-upon-state structures. As we give up trying to nail everything down in a strict cause-effect linear fashion, we open ourselves up to the spinning creativity of a mind in wild pursuit of an idea.  It opens us up to how a non-linear system works with system cause-effect influences.

The Creativity of Texturing Our States

What is the “creative” state?

We know that it involves seeing things in a fresh way.  It involves releasing judgment and pressure.  It involves an openness to the unknown, a welcoming of confusion, a willingness to explore without having an agenda, and a tolerance for mixing together strange and wild concoctions of the mind.  Using the Disney Strategy, we know that it involves the Dreamer state, the Realistic state, and the Testing State in a sequence that allows an initial idea to grow and develop.  It is opting for options as a modus operandi.

So what is the creative state?

What state are you in when you’re creative, when you are innovating new things?

Usually it’s a state of being curious and playful.  We’re “just thinking” about things and then suddenly, out of the blue, in a serendipitous way, something new comes to us.

Stories are told by creative people and their biographers of not trying to be creative, or not trying to invent something new, in fact, taking a bath, going for a walk, riding in a car, even dreaming while sound asleep.  Then the unexpected happens.  Sometimes they don’t even know it.  Sometimes they don’t even put the creative insight together with the problem on their mind.  They have to explore things further, test things, and play around with things before it dawns on them.

All of this has led many to map out creativity as too wild and unpredictable to be managed or controlled in any way.  Others have noted these factors and mapped creativity as having several stages.  The most typical strategy or stages of creativity involve the following:

First there is the encountering a problem stage and engaging that problem with all of one’s current resources.  This is the stage of study, research, questioning, interviewing others, finding out what others have tried, etc.

Second, there comes the putting the concern on the back-burner stage.  Here one sets aside the problem and lets it go.  Here we turn aside to other things, often things of pleasure and relaxation.  Here we let the parts of our mind outside of conscious awareness work on the idea.

Third, then there is the eureka insight stage.  Suddenly flashes of insights come to us.  Sometimes they come full blown and ready to implement.  Yet most of the time they come in little bits and pieces, flashes of this and that, fragile little curiosities and still need the conscious mind to see the connections or apply to the problem.

What have I learn form all of this?  I have learned that creativity is not a primary state.  Creativity is a meta-state.   It is a state of curiosity and playfulness textured with some rich higher frames– recognition of a problem, intelligent defining and understanding of that problem, researching the current state of the art paradigms, willingness to try the ridiculous, to be open to the preposterous, playing around with thoughts that are outside the box, etc.

Of course, this also describes the heart of Meta-States and the focus of the numerous articles and patterns we have about texturing our states and super-charging any given state with numerous higher level states.  We call this meta-state gestalting.  Why?  Because out of the mixture of the states upon states comes something that’s more than the sum of the parts, the gestalt state.

The Creativity of Time-Binding

Howard Gardner in his book, Creative Minds, explored seven key creative geniuses of the 20th century and demonstrated repeatedly the pattern that it took most of them ten years in a field before they knew the field well enough, and the problems of the current paradigms of that field before they were able to make a creative breakthrough.  This is suggestive.

What does that suggest about creativity?  It suggests that the best creativity isn’t re-inventing the computer over and over, it is rather building on the paradigms, models, and intelligence of those who have gone before.  Korzybski called this time-binding to designate the creative force of building upon the ideas and patterns of others, of standing on the shoulders of giants.  That is what allows us to see further and to invent new things.

Now to do that without giving credit is plagiarism– a problem indicating the lack of professional ethics in many fields.  It’s also a problem that indicates the lack of community, the abundance frame, the cooperation frame, etc.  Could this be one of the influences that has undermined creativity in the field of NLP?   Have the frames of competition and scarcity undermined the rich creativity that gave birth to NLP?

In Neuro-Semantics we have mindfully sought to cultivate the very opposite.  We have intentionally set forth frames that support abundance, cooperation, professional recognition and respect, etc. as our guiding principles.  We have also set forth frames that support and promote new ideas so that we don’t waste our time fussing over who created specific “intellectual property.”   Gardner noted this in his work when he said that it takes a community for the products of creativity to be recognized and honored.  Without a community, who is to honor the new things?  Without a community that’s forthright, honest, ethical, and operating from a sense of abundance, who will support the new ideas that emerge?

That’s one of the reasons we are hosting the NS Developers trainings.  We want to create the networking processes so that many others can move to the ranks of developers and be recognized for their contributions.  This is the creativity that arises when a community “drives away fear” from its midst and does not use heavy-handed tactics (demanding conformity, presenting one procedure as “the right procedure,” etc.).

The Creativity of Accessing Your Personal Genius

Finally, but not least is our emphasis upon Personal Genius.  This indeed is the heart and how we initiate trainings in Meta-States.  How or why did we decide to do things in this way?  It actually came together very early in the development of Meta-States.  When I first came upon Meta-States, I looked throughout all of the literature of NLP for other works that deal with the same subject.  There were none.

The only other book in NLP that even addressed the subject of reflexivity was the Grinder and DeLozier book, Turtles all the Way Down.   In their preliminary studies and modeling of some of Bateson’s work on meta-levels (logical levels and types), Grinder and DeLozier gathered together some of the prerequisites of genius and then noted that it could only be through the use of “logical levels” that one could manage a truly strong and power first-order attention.

Yet their model was quite convoluted.  It took them seven days just to present it.  Yet what they found was powerful.  So using the Meta-States structure, I reformulated it and over the years streamlined it to offer the Genius Pattern as a thirty-minute process.  Today we run Personal Genius Pattern in most of our trainings.  We run it for Writing and Research, for Selling Excellence, NS Trainers Training, Wealth Building, Business Experts, etc.

The Personal Genius Pattern, of course, provides yet another description and process for creativity.  It does so by enabling us to get so absolutely lost and focus in some present moment experience that we become totally engaged so that we are fully there with all of our resources available.  Further, we develop the higher meta-state frames that allows us to make “an impeccable state shift” out of that state whenever we need to without any loss of focus or power.  This supports trusting ourselves and trusting that we can turn on this laser-beam focus state whenever we want it.

These are a few of the key facets of Meta-States that explains the abundant creativity and fresh ideas in Neuro-Semantics that’s missing for the most part in NLP.  Want to be a part?  Then begin by learning about the Meta-States model and learning how to texture your basic curiosity and optimism and solution focus mind-set with other layers of thoughts and feelings that transform your everyday experience into one of creativity.

Summary

• There’s a new and fresh creativity in Neuro-Semantics that has continued unabated for more than 8 years and only seems to be growing.  Further that creativity is not limited to just one person, but seems to be spreading to many people in NS.
• The creativity that’s emerging in Neuro-Semantics as the cutting new edge of NLP is based in the original model, the Meta-States model, that involves many of the facets and features that we recognize as the ingredients of creativity.

Author:

L. Michael Hall discovered Meta-States in 1994, Frame Games in 1998, and the Matrix Model in 2002.  From these models have come over 30 published books, hundreds of articles and research papers, partnership with Dr. Bodenhamer in 11 books and the creation of Neuro-Semantics, and Institutes of NS in over 20 countries.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

I have recently been criticized as not knowing the difference between logical levels and logical types. Some in this field have taken me to task that Meta-States is inadequate and say that doesn’t work because it fails to distinguish logical types from logical levels. This raises numerous questions, questions that I will address in this article.

Is there a difference between logical levels and logical types?
Would such a distinction actually make any real difference?
How would it affect the Model of Meta-States?
Why would someone invent such a difference if it doesn’t exist?

Thesis of this Article

As an overview of this article, I have reviewed much of Bateson’s work on logical types and logical levels and I have found that Bateson did not make such a distinction but repeatedly used the terms interchangeably as I will show. Taking Russell and Whitehead’s work on logical types, Bateson spoke about the various levels at which messages, information, and communication occur.

The way we define logical types from the mathematical model of Russell and Whitehead lead to the acceptable definition of logical levels as given by Dilts, Woodsmall, myself and others. There can be no logical levels if the higher levels are not the classes and classification categories for the lower levels.

Where did this supposed distinction come from? Who created it? I do not know. My best guess at this moment is that it was a conclusion drawn based on assuming that the NLP “Neuro-Logical Levels” created by Robert Dilts is a true reflection of “Logical Levels” and since it does not fit the criteria for being a “Logical Type” system, there must be a difference between logical types and logical levels. Over the years, many trainers and theorists in NLP have showed that it is not a logical level system because it does not fit the logical type definitions that even Robert quotes from Bateson and argues for persuasively in many of his works. You will find this in NLP: Going Meta 2001) and in several articles on the Neuro-Semantics website (See References).

Definitions of Logical Types

In the index of Bateson’s book Mind and Nature (1979), he writes this under the list of “Logical Types.” A series of examines is in order:

1. The name is not the thing named but is of different logical type, higher than the thing named.
2. The class is of different logical type, higher than that of its members.
3. The injunctions issues by, or control emanating from, the bias of the house thermostat is of higher logical type than the control issued by the thermometer.
4. The word “tumbleweed” is of the same logical type as “bush” or “tree.” It is not the name of a species or genus of plants; rather, it is the name of a class of plants whose members share a particular style of growth and dissemination.
5. “Acceleration” is of a higher logical type than “velocity.”

In another place Bateson defined logical types in the following way:

Logical Type: 1) The name is not the thing named but is of different logical type, higher than the thing named. 2) The class is of different logical type, higher than that of its members. (Mary Catherine Bateson, 1987, pp. 209-210).

Robert Dilts on Levels and Types

In his writings, Robert Dilts speaks mostly about logical levels. This is the term that he most often uses just like Bateson most often uses logical types. In the following quotes, here is what Dilts says first about logical levels and then about logical types.

“In our brain structure, language, and perceptual systems there are natural hierarchies or levels of experiences. The effect of each level is to organize and control the information on the level below it. Changing something on an upper level would necessarily change things on the lower levels; changing something on a lower level could but would not necessarily affect the upper levels.” (Dilts, Epstein, Dilts, 1991, p. 26, added). italics

“Logical Levels: an internal hierarchy in which each level is progressively more psychologically encompassing and impactful” (1990: 217, italics added).

“Logical typing occurs where there is a discontinuity (as opposed to a continuity, as with the hierarchies) between levels of classification. This kind of discontinuity is exemplified:

1. in mathematic, by the restriction that a class cannot be a member of itself nor can one of the members be the class.
2. in logic, by the solution to the classic logical paradox, ‘This statement is false.’ (If the statement is true, it is false, and if it is false, then it is true, and so on.) The actual truth value of the statement is of a different logical type than the statement itself.
3. in behavior, by the fact that the reinforcement rules for exploration in animals is of a completely different nature than those for the process of testing that occurs in the act of exploration.” (1983: 24).

“The informational effects between levels and types is called feedback and is probably the major distinguishing feature of cybernetic systems.” (1983: 39)

“Differences of the same or different logical type interacting at different levels (hierarchical or logical respectively) will result in the modulation of the difference on the lower level.” (1983: 49)

Michael Hall on Meta-States and Meta-Levels

As a theoretical definition of logical levels and meta-levels used in defining meta-states, the following comes from the Meta-States Training Manual, Accessing Personal Genius.

1. Hierarchies of experience.
2. Higher levels organize and control information on lower levels.
3. The modulation effect of the system necessarily works downward.
4. The modulation effect of the system does not necessarily work upward.
5. Higher levels operate more encompassing and impactful than the lower levels.
6. There exists a discontinuity between the levelsC a break.
7. The relationship of logic between levels creates “paradox” if we don’t sort phenomena on different levels.
8. Hierarchical logical levels function as a system, the higher levels arise out of the lower and feed back information into the system to influence the lower levels. This creates recursiveness within logical levels.
9. As a cybernetic system, as information moves up logical levels new features emerge that does not exist at the lower levels. This emergence at higher levels involve, in systems language, summitivity. In other words, the emergent property does not exist only as the sum of the parts, but new properties and qualities arise over “time” within the system.
10. Reflexivity describes one of the new features that emerge in logical levels. In living organisms this results in self-reflexiveness or self-consciousness.
11. As a system with feedback properties, logical levels operates by self-reflexiveness, the whole system becomes cybernetic. It becomes a “system that feeds back onto and changes itself” (Dilts, 1990, 33). This makes it self-organizing.

Meta-States as Logical Types and Logical Levels

Operationally, the meta-stating process works as a logical type system so that each higher level classifies the previous level and thereby establishes a self-organizing system. When we go meta from one state of mind-body-emotion to another and set the first state as a frame for the second, something wild and wonderful happens. We create a meta-state and a neuro-semantic system of feedback and feed forward loops. This means that as we relate one state to other state our self-reflexive consciousness sets up a meta-relationship so that the first is about the second and classifies the second. We transcend one state and then include it inside of a higher level state. The state in a higher position is meta (above, beyond) the second and so operates and so operates as a higher Logical Level.

When we transcend from one state (anger or joy) to another state (calmness or respect) we set the second state as a frame over the first and include it inside it. This gives us “calm anger,” respectful joy, joyful learning, etc. It makes the first state a member of the class of the second.

“But that’s not logical.”

That’s right, it is not. It is psycho-logical.

“And what’s does that mean? What difference does that create?”

When we put a state like anger or fear inside another state (calmness, respect, gentleness, courage, etc.), we change the internal logic of our nervous system and way of thinking. Anger now becomes a member of the class of calmness, or the class of respect, or solution oriented thinking. This is new and different. Anger for most people would be a member of the class of threat, or insult, or “at threshold,” or something. This creates a new psycho-logic of our state and experience.

The Invisible nature of logical levels

One level becomes the higher “logical” level of another level of thinking, feeling, awareness, physiology when it operates in a meta-relationship to the lower level. This is what we mean by both “logical types” and “logical levels.” When we put one state in a “logical” relationship to another state so that one is at a higher level then the higher one is about the other. This about-relationship establishes the “logic.”

In the world, there are no such “things” as logical levels. They do not exist “out there.” You have never tripped over a “logical level” that someone left in your living room. They do not exist at the sensory-based or empirical level. If you go hunting for “logical types or levels” you have to look at how a mind is classifying, categorizing, or punctuating things. That’s where a “logical type or level” exists __in a mind that represents categories and levels or orders of abstractions.

Logical Levels as fluid processes of thinking-emoting

Logical levels are so not static, rigid, or solid. They are fluid. As processes of our thinking-feeling states, they move. So to understand meta-states we have to shift from thinking about rigid hierarchical levels to fluid levels … levels that are ever in flux, ever moving, changing, and in process. They are not things. They are mental and emotional energy expressions that result from how we represent and frame things. This means that the “logical levels” appear and vanish according to our thinking. That’s why they are so fluid and plastic.

These levels or layers of thinking-feeling-and somatizing are made out of the stuff of thoughts-and-feelings. While they are not “real” or solid, we do tend to call them by “names” and so use nominalizations to describe them. When we do then we talk about the “logical levels” as beliefs, values, identity, mission, understanding, intentions, etc. Yet we need to remember, these are nominalizations that cover up the processes inside.

We also need to remember that there are many, many logical levels, many more than the few listed in Robert Dilts’ original list. There are levels as Decisions, Understandings, Expectations, Domains of Knowledge, Pleasure, Intention, Non-Propositional Symbols, Metaphors, etc.

The simultanality of the “logical levels” C  all occurring at the same time

Each of the nominalization that we call the levels of our mind are included inside of each level. If you bring a state of confidence to your self, this operates as a belief, and because you treat this as important, you value it; you understand facets of some knowledge that area, this leads to expectations, decisions, identifications, intentions, etc. Each level is simultaneously multi-layered with all of these levels.

Bateson’s interchangeable use of “Levels” and “Types”

In Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972/2000), Bateson defines “logical types” in terms of levels of abstraction and quotes Korzybski’s map-territory distinction (p. 180). In all that follows, I have added the bold print to highlight his use of levels and types. He says that

“… a frame is meta-communicative. Any message, which either explicitly or implicitly defines a frame, ipso facto gives the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand the message included within the frame.

… Every meta-communicative or meta-linguistic message defines, either explicitly or implicitly, the set of messages about which it communicates, i.e., every meta-communicative message is or defines a psychological frame. (p. 188)

“No class can be a member of itself. The picture frame then, because it delimits a background, is here regarded as an external representation of a very special and important type of psychological frame C namely a frame whose function is to delimit a logical type.” (189)

In his chapter “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia” Bateson describes “how humans handle communication involving multiple Logical Types” (p. 203). In that section he writes the following:

“Multiple levels of learning and the Logical Typing of signals. These are two inseparable sets of phenomena C inseparable because the ability to handle the multiple types of signals is itself a learned skill and therefore a function of the multiple levels of learning.” (204)

From Mind and Nature (1979), Bateson defines “mind” as involving processes of transformation that discloses “a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena.” (p. 122).

“I shall try to drive home the importance of this criterion by exhibiting cases in which the discrimination of levels of communication has been so confused or distorted that various sorts of frustration and pathology have been the result.” (122)

He then speaks about signals that we emit and then about another class of information that tells us about the coding of messages or indications from the person. These he calls meta-messages (p. 122-123). In so explaining “logical types” he then says,

“All this is premised on the existence of levels whose nature I am here trying to make clear. We start with a potential differentiation between action in context and action or behavior which defines context or makes context intelligible. … I refer to the latter type of communication as meta-communication… A function, an effect, of the meta-message is in fact to classify the messages that occur within its contexts.” (p. 124).

“In sum, each of these disasters will be found to contain an error in logical typing. In spite of immediate gain at one logical level, the sign is reversed and benefit becomes calamity in some other, larger and longer, context.” (189)

In describing the “levels of control of house temperature” Bateson used arrows to mark the direction of control in the system. It zigzagged from Personal status to Genetics and training to personal threshold, to “too cold” or “too hot” to bias to oscillating temperature. To all of this Bateson commented:

“With each zigzag of the ladder, the sphere of relevance increases. In other words, there is a change in logical typing of the information collected by the sense organ at each level.” (215)

“To jump downward two or more steps in the hierarchy is likewise undesirable … the effect of any such jumping of levels, upward or downward, is that information appropriate as a basis for decision at one level will be used as basis for decision at some other level, a common variety of error in logical typing.” (216)

Summary

What shall we say to all of this?

• First, there is no difference between logical types, logical levels, or meta-states. These are three different models or descriptions of the same thing. Bateson used types synonymously with levels.

• Second, by definition, logical levels are an expression of logical types. The higher levels or classes are categories that provide meta-communicative information about the previous level.

• Meta-States work through the meta-function of transcending one level and including it within a larger classification. In our experience this changes the psycho-logics of our neuro-semantic system.

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“Is “strategy” elicitation the same thing as “Modeling?”
Or does Modeling go beyond Strategies?
If so, what else does Modeling include?

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Over the years there seems to have crept into NLP a particular confusion about modeling. That confusion involves assuming that working with strategies is the same thing as, and equivalent to modeling. But these are not the same. When we work with strategies, even when we unpack a strategy and re-design it for more effectiveness, we are not necessarily engaged in modeling. Of course, on the other hand, strategy work may indeed involve “modeling,” and yet it does not necessarily involve it. So while modeling human experiences does almost always involve eliciting, unpacking, re-designing, and installing new strategies, modeling also involves a lot more than just understanding and efficiency with strategies.

Undoubtedly, there are now thousands of people with high level skills in NLP Strategy elicitation and installation. And yet, there tends to be little new modeling going on in NLP. Why?

Part of the reason lies in this very distinction.

Modeling involves a lot more than just working with strategies.

I think this will become clear if you consider the beginnings of NLP itself. When John Grinder and Richard Bandler began, they did not have “the strategy model” by which to model Perls, Satir, and Erickson. In fact, the strategy model slowly came together and emerged from what they found in the three therapeutic wizards along with some of the original models that they used.

• So, how did they do it?
• How did Bandler and Grinder originally model without the strategy model?

They modeled, that is, they built a model regarding what the three magicians did by taking the raw data of their words and actions (transcripts, audio-tapes, notes, etc.) and formatted them using the tools that they had at their disposal. And what tools were those?

John brought the model of Transformational Grammar to the table.
And some of the Cognitive Behavioral tools, Constructionism as a model from Korzybski’s Map/Territory distinction.
Richard brought his model of mimicking, copying the language and tonal patterns.

And both brought the meta-level “tool” (hence a meta-state) of looking for patterns, using their great curiosity and belief in finding the structure.

Model Making

John and Richard created several explanatory “models” of their experts, models that allowed others to replicate that expertise. Compared to what we have at our disposal today for modeling, they didn’t really have much to work with–which gets my respect regarding their initial genius in achieving what they did! From those original “tools” they began to put things together and to create patterns. They created models:

1) “The meta-model of language in therapy” — the Meta-Model. 12 distinctions indicating ill-formed structure and 12 questions to elicit a more well-formed and fuller linguistic representation.

2) Representational Systems Model. They took the “model” of “the five senses” and asked the curious question– could it be that we represent information using these and that predicates indicate and sort out these five systems?

3) Eye Accessing Cue model. Listening to people use the Rep. Systems and watching people move their eyes, they asked, “Is there a pattern here?” What if there were correspondences between lateral eye accessing movements and use of the Rep. Systems?

4) The Milton Model. Using these facets, Bandler and Grinder modeled the hypnotic patterns of Erickson and affectionately labeled the model, “The Milton Model.”

5) Strategy Model: using the TOTE model and enriching it with Rep. Systems, a richer model emerged from the Miller, Gallanter, Pribram TOTE model. They didn’t create this model, they enhanced an already existing model.

And Then There was Something Else…

Achieving these first five models is impressive. Prior to their collaboration, there were already “models” about hypnosis– Erickson has his own ideas about it, so did Haley, and others who were studying Erickson. There were models about language use in therapy– in fact, Grinder had just completed a text on de-mystifying Transformational Grammar (1974) and his dissertation on Nominalizations, and Watzalawick and some associates had just completed a book detailing their model on Change Principles (1974).

I refer to this to underscore the fact that Bandler and Grinder’s original “modeling” was right in the spirit of the times and that they mostly combined and recombined current ideas and tools until they generated a workable model. This was true for four of the first five models, but not true for one of the models. And in is in that model where we can clearly see something truly unique, wonderful, magical, and intuitive about modeling.

In 1870, Galton specified and explored the sensory systems, dividing people into visual types, auditiory types, etc. Wilheim Wundt, the father of modern psychology, two decades later, did the same and was one of the “almost inventors” of NLP. Korzybski has an extensive description of the sensory systems in Science and Sanityapplyas a template of thought.

It was left for Bandler and Grinder to do that. Bateson noted in his Introduction to The Structure of Magic that this very thing was the very thing that he and his associates looked for and never found.

Applying the sensory based system of awareness to “thought” as a model for how “mind” works created the Representational System of NLP … and making this “model” gave NLP its unique impetuous and power.

Yet this model did not come from the having elicited, unpacked, and articulated the strategies of Perls, Satir, and Erickson. Bandler and Grinder did not get it from them. If they didn’t model it from the experts they studied, then where did they get it?

They invented it.

This highlights the key difference between strategy work and making both explanatory and replicatory “models.” Often times, the models that a given person creates (even using NLP tools) does not come from strict strategy elicitation. It comes rather from multiple strategies, and creative ideas from other areas, and a strange mixture of the two.

Thomas Kuhn (1962) in his classic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, talks about the models of science in terms of a field developing its paradigms. He describes paradigms as explanatory models that allow scientists to answer various questions and solve various problems. This initiates a community around the paradigm, a community that supports and validates the paradigm, and applies the model to more and more applications.

When the community does this, they find out not only all of the new things that the paradigm or model solves, but also its limits. As time passes, more and more “problems” and un-answerable facets of the paradigm emerges. Dissatisfaction grows with the paradigm. It becomes more and more inadequate. Politics typically occur in the field between the defenders of the paradigm, and those strident voices who see and articulate its inadequacies.

Then, more often than not, someone new to the field– someone not blinded by the current paradigm walks in, see what no one else sees, and offers a new paradigm. And when the new model solves problems, dilemmas, and answers questions that the current paradigm cannot, this creates the scientific revolution.

This happened with Bandler and Grinder, a college student who loved rock ‘n roll and a linguistics professor in the field of psychology and psychotherapy. They were not blinded by the current paradigm. They saw things with fresh eyes. And this freshness of perspective, this willingness to look at things apart from the blinding presuppositions of the current models is what allowed them (empowered them) to create some new models.

Modeling Our Models

After Bandler and Grinder came up with their initial models, these models became their tools for subsequent modeling. Then they began modeling their models. They looked at their models and stepped back and using the same kind of fresh, unassumptive, thinking began asking questions about the models. This is much of the power of NLP –to not get blinded by our own paradigms. To always step back and explore our assumptions. From that arose other models.

6) Meta-Programs model. Are there patterns in information processing, sorting, and attending?

7) Submodalities or Pragmagraphics (the original term) model. The distinctions and features of the Rep. Systems. Can we systematically order and structure these features and then use them for something? In revisiting this model, Bob Bodenhamer and I ended up re-modeling the so-called “submodalities” and thereafter created a new model about the features of the VAK (The Structure of Excellence, 1999). This then led to 6 new sub-models. We now know that these distinctions occur at a meta-level rather than at a supposed “sub” level, and that the model works “symbolically and semantically” rather than merely representationally. That is, a given distinction of a Rep. System works according to the meanings that a person attributes to it.

8) Time-Lines. Is there a pattern in how people sort out and make distinctions within the concept of “time?” Inheriting the Temporal Model (Past, Present, Future), and based on the work by Edward Hall (no relation), NLP did not invent or create this model, but adapted and extended it (as with the strategy model). We now know that this model works at a meta-level and as a meta-state about ideas of “time.” (Time Lining or Adventures with Time-Lines, 1998)

9) Specific models for specific outcomes. After NLP came up with this basic models– models that now define specific domains of the field, various people applied them and came up with smaller models, that is, specific models for specific outcomes. Some transpire and occur in a moment of time, others occur over a much longer period of time, from an hour to a day, to years.

Taking Criticism Positively
Naturally Thin Eating Strategy
Spelling Strategy
The Phobia Resolution Model
Motivation Strategy
Decision Strategy
Positive Parenting

10) The Meta-States model. Using the idea of logical levels found in Korzybski and Bateson, Meta-States emerged from finding the strict linear nature of the NLP enriched TOTE model ineffective and inadequate for following the strategy of complex states like resilience, proactivity, self-esteem, etc. Upon extending and enriching the Strategy model with meta-levels, Meta-States emerged as a model by bringing in system ideas from cybernetics, meta-cognition, reflexivity, etc.

11) The Frame Games Model. In an attempt to “simplify” Meta-States and to put the meta-stating processes into a more user-friendly language, we happened upon the template of thinking about our states and embedded states-upon-states as Games driven by Frames. This has lead to seeing thinking not only as “representation” but as “referencing,” and the levels of referencing as higher level frames.

Appreciating the Rich Complexity of Modeling

So while we often use the term “modeling” as if it is an equivalent for “strategy elicitation and design,” and yet because the term can also signify much richer and more complex facets, it helps to think of modeling in terms of degrees of complexity. Given this we can think about various “modeling” projects in terms of the following dimensions of complexity.

Modeling I: Getting the Strategy of a Skill

Finding someone who does something in a particularly fine way and eliciting the strategy. Basic NLP Strategy work, the skills of elicitation and unpacking using Meta-Model Questions and the ability to format using the Representational Steps to put into a flow chart format (the TOTE model).

Modeling II: Getting a Multiple Description of a Skill.

Finding the strategies of multiple persons (10 to 100 or more) with the same skill. Eliciting the multiple strategies and developing a more general model for replicating the skill. Streamlining the steps and making more elegant and refined.

Modeling III: Review of Literature Modeling.

Taking the model from the multiple modeling and with “model in mind” reading the literature of the field regarding that skill to understand more fully and integrate into the model concerns, distinctions, features, etc. for the skill set.

What is the current knowledge in the field?
Who are the leading thinkers, theoreticians, developers?
What are their models, principles, understandings?
How can they be applied and integrated into your model?
What is the language of the field?

Modeling IV: Interaction with Experts on the edge of the field modeling

Moving from a thorough understanding of a given field and skill, to interaction with the experts and people on the cutting edge of that field. Exploring and extending the model to answer the questions that the older paradigms cannot answer, designing a fuller model for extending the boundaries of that field of knowledge.

What are the questions in the field?
Who is on the leading edge?
What can the current models not do?
What hopes, dreams, imaginations are currently being explored?
What else could there be?

In Modeling IV, we also study at a meta-level “modeling” itself. We learn and try on multiple models.

The Re-Modeling Within the Meta-States Model

I’ve often been asked about how I came up with the Meta-States Model. Part of the story is told in both Meta-States (2000) and in Dragon Slaying (2000). It happened, as you may well know, while eliciting the strategies of resilient people. I was interested in the subject of resilience and having learned the Strategy Model, I wanted to find out how people “ran their brains to create that result.”

After eliciting more than two dozen strategies, I began trying to find out the elements that had to be present for a person to experience “resilience.” By that time I had elicited so much material. It was becoming overwhelming. The modeling question, “What is sufficient and necessary for the experience of resilience?” re-directed me to develop the bare-bones of the structure.

I felt confused at this stage. What was “sufficient and necessary” for a quarter of the persons was not “sufficient and necessary” for the other three-fourths.

So I headed to the literature. I began reading in the field, finding the experts, the studies, the experiments, etc. This helped clarify as it also began to provide trans-cultural information about resilience, the language of the field, etc. It enabled me to more fully understand the questions governing the researchers, the problems faced by the persons wanting to transfer it to others, etc.

During the time I was also reading broadly. I revisited two of the “grand-fathers” of NLP– founding thinkers and theorists about neuro-linguistics: Bateson and Korzybski. I was reading in Cognitive Linguistics. Then, while presenting a workshop on resilience in Denver at an NLP Conference, I heard myself say a couple things:

“It’s kind of like the person has a state about his state of having experienced a set back, a state meta to that state that allows him to believe in bouncing back.”

“Yes, there’s a higher level state of mind about the experience throughout the steps and stages in the process of bouncing back and being able to ‘go for it again,’ it’s almost like a state about the other states, a meta-state.”

That was the magic phrase. “Meta-State.” The session was video-taped and so I know that I finished it, but my mind wasn’t on it. I was doing that part by rote. Inside a thousand thought balls were energetically bouncing here and there and occupying my awareness as I was applying this new templet to states and strategies. Afterwards I talked about it with several colleagues, mainly Doug Adams and Dr. Carl Lloyd and within two weeks had written the first paper on Meta-States, the 40-page document that I submitted to the International Association of NLP Trainers.

That’s how Meta-States began. Thereafter, I have spent several years using Korzybski’s General Semantics, models from Cognitive Linguistics (that makes the old model of Transformational Grammar irrelevant), Bateson, Holland, Cybernetics, Wilbur, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphor model, Korzybski’s mathematic models of differential calculus, Game theory, Systems, etc., to continually enrich and refine the Meta-States model.

I’ve used this description of the development of the Meta-States model because I know how that modeling project pretty well. In more recently applying Meta-States to Defusing, Selling, Wealth Building, Learning, Writing, etc., I find that I often need to revisit the model as a model to add, refine, or change something.

This has happened to NLP on a much larger level as many people have refined, updated, streamlined, and offered transformations for the NLP model. This shows the dynamic nature of a good model. It keeps growing. Rather than thinking of a model as a finished product, we ought to think of it as a way to map something that continues to grow and improve.

More recently, I brought to metaphors as templates to the Meta-States/ Neuro-Semantics and NLP models. I brought “Game” and “Frame.” Frame was the easy one since so much of NLP is about frames, framing, and reframing and so much of Meta-States is about outframing with all kinds of ideas and concepts. Games framed the frames at even a higher level –adding as every meta-stating process does, more qualities, properties and features and thereby changing the very feel of the model. This has resulted in the Frame Games model. And the strange thing about it is that I did not set out to do that. In fact, I set out to do something very different. I was trying to simplify Meta-States, but extend and expand the model. Yet as I revisited Transactional Analysis, Psychoanalysis, Game Theory, Control Theory, etc., and brought these ideas, implications, models, etc. to Meta-States, yet another model emerged.

From that I again went back to Meta-States and realized that the simplest structure inside that model was “The Levels of Thought” model. This opened my eyes to a new appreciation of Korzybski’s “multiordinality.” I had been using the word “thought” without realizing that “thought” differs at every higher level.

As Frame Games has developed, and as we have been thinking about modeling larger level structures, cultural phenomena, I have revisited numerous sociological models: Freud’s tripartite id-ego-superego model, Sullivan’s self-system model, John Searle’s construction of social constructs model, Family Systems, Becker’s self-value sociological model, etc. These have expanded my awareness as I’ve applied it to Violence in America, Hitler’s Frames of Persuasion, and Racism in the world.

Where do we Go From Here?

We have just barely “touched the hem of the garment.” There is so much more to discover and invent. There are hundreds and thousands of new Patterns to create for the human technology of expertise, excellence, genius. And that’s what we’re committed to in the field of Neuro-Semantics. What is the structure of meaning at the individual, family, and cultural level? How can we replicate the highest forms of empowering and enhancing meaning for our lives and for the lives of the generations to come? That’s our vision as Neuro-Semanticists. Come and join the Revolution of Discovery.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

We first introduced the new cutting-edge field of Neuro-Semantics in our book Mind-Lines: Lines that Change Minds (1997). Since then we have also published other works in this field of Neuro-Semantics. These include Figuring Out People: Design Engineering Using Meta-Programs (1998), Time-Lining: Patterns for Adventuring in Time (1998), and The Secrets of Magic (1998).

In 1999 we first brought out pieces to highlight and distinguish Neuro-Semantics from NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and GS (General Semantics). The most radical and revolutionary of is the work regarding the so-called “submodality” model.

Since we have had many questions about this new field, this paper will utilize the following questions that we most frequently hear people ask to navigate our way through the process of setting off the distinctive features of Neuro-Semantics. I have written this with the invaluable help of my colleague, Bob Bodenhamer.

• What is Neuro-Semantics & where did it come from?

• How does Neuro-Semantics differ from Neuro-Linguistic Programming?

• How does Neuro-Semantics differ from General Semantics?

• What uniquely distinguishes this new field?

• What central principles govern this domain?

• What is The Institute of Neuro-Semantics®?

• Who are the principal players in the Institutes of Neuro-Semantics?

• What is their agenda, motivation, and intentions?

What is Neuro-Semantics & Where did it Come From?

Neuro-Semantics began in 1997 as the brain-child of Michael Hall and Bobby Bodenhamer as we engaged in various conversations about Meta-States, NLP, and General Semantics. Out of those conversations we wrote several articles regarding the current state of affairs in NLP. The first one we entitled, “The Downside of NLP.” This article, as well as some follow up articles about the state of disarray, bad P.R., the Bandler lawsuit, the over-emphasis and vague emphasis on “installing learnings unconsciously,” etc. were published in Anchor Point. Nelson Penaylillo (NLP Trainer in Australia), Peter Kean (NLP Trainer, Washington DC),  and Robert Olic (NLP Trainer, Philadelphia, PA) were the first to thereafter joined in the conversation.

In extending, expanding, and enriching both NLP and GS, we (Hall and Bodenhamer) first sought simply to unite and synthesize the best pieces from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and General Semantics. Our passion was to get more credibility and validity for the field that seemed so disorganized and torn by competition in the USA. Simultaneously, we were developing numerous new patterns using the Meta-States Model. This was beginning to revolutionize things and it was Dr. Bodenhamer who first saw this vision in the Meta-States model. Consequently we choose the term Neuro-Semantics to designate the new enriched field.

Now the term Neuro-Semantics goes back to Alfred Korzybski. The father of General Semantics introduced both phrases, “neuro-linguistic” and “neuro-semantic,” in 1936 in some of his papers. Later, they showed up in his 1941 Preface to his classic work, Science and Sanity. In Korzybski’s writings, you will find both termsused pretty much synonymously. Here, however, following the Meta-States Model®, we have arbitrary chosen to use Neuro-Linguistics to refer to the Modeling, Methodology, and Technology that has grown out of the field of NLP and Neuro-Semantics to refer to the newer and more extensive Modeling, Patterning, Methodology, and Technology that has resulted from the Meta-States Model. In the next section you will find a fuller discrimination between NLP and Neuro-Semantics.

How does Neuro-Semantics differ from Neuro-Linguistic Programming?

NLP emerged as a happen-chance from a modeling project of Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir. This happened as the young college student, Richard Bandler, discovered his genius of imitation of their language patterns. Linguistics Professor, John Grinder, began working with Richard to model the structure of the therapeutic wizards. This brought them into relationship with Dr. Robert Spitzer, who became their first publisher (Science and Behavior Books). And that, in turn, led to their association with the genius of Gregory Bateson (anthropologist, linguist, cybernetician) when Spitzer moved them onto his property. They became neighbors of Bateson. And that connection, in turn, then led them to Milton Erickson and hypnosis.

Using the new formulations of the then-emerging Cognitive Psychology Models, Bandler and Grinder tapped into the elegance of the TOTE Model of Miller, Galanter, and Pribram. This gave them a linear way to track the processes within “the black box” that Behaviorism had always avoided. Out of this came the NLP Strategy Model— a Model for Modeling Excellence. This model primarily operates like a flow chart of consciousness, tracking “mind” linearly. In Neuro-Semantics, we add the vertical dimension and so tease out the hidden meta-levels within the structure of subjectivity.

In the beginning, NLP sought to avoid all theory, explanatory models, and “the why” question by presenting itself as strictly focused on how do you do that? Accordingly, NLP arose first and foremost as a Communication Model. It explored how the body (Neuro, e.g. the nervous system, physiology, neurology, etc.) gets Programmed by the use of various Languages (linguistics).

By way of contrast, Neuro-Semantics goes beyond the linear “flow chart” analysis of the Structure of Subjective Experience by focusing more fully on the Meta-Levels that support and drive the movement of consciousness along its TOTEs. By tracking the vertical dimensions of human processing, it moves into higher level Meanings much more fully. Accordingly, it tracks and models the neuro-semantic structures of meanings at higher (and typically, unconscious) levels.

Both Neuro-Semantics and NLP operate as interdisciplinary approaches, utilizing models from many psychologies. This includes cybernetics, computer science, neuro-biology, family systems, anthropology, etc.

Neuro-Semantics highlights much more fully and extensively the existence of multiple meta-levels and logical levels than does NLP. Korzybski (1933/1994) labeled the higher level abstractions as “second order” and “third order” abstractions. He suggested that much study and exploration needs to be done in this area of reflexivity about how we evaluate and then evaluate our evaluations and by that create higher levels of “mind.”

Bateson (1972) picked up on this in how he used meta-levels and logical types in his theories of schizophrenia, play, humor, aesthetics, etc. He and the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto laid so much of the foundation for NLP (especially in the 1974 book, Change by Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch).

NLP, as a meta-discipline itself, certainly has meta-levels (the Meta-Model, Meta-Programs). And co-developer, Robert Dilts has contributed numerous meta-level models. But nowhere in NLP had a fully descriptive and comprehensive model about Meta-Levels emerged until the development of the Meta-States®(Hall 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998). This was recognized by the International NLP Trainer’s Association in 1995 in their award for Meta-States as “the most significant contribution to NLP in 1994—1995.”

In many ways, the Meta-States Model has turned NLP upside down. And it has done so in such a simple way. By merely changing the operational metaphor of “depth” inherited from Transformational Grammar, and adopting the “height” metaphor, Meta-States reformulated NLP. Dr. Graham Dawes noted this in his early reviews of Meta-States and Dragon Slaying commenting that Meta-States will be the model that “ate NLP.” Others have commented that Meta-States outframes NLP as it sets up higher frames for the processes of NLP. If this sounds like we think Neuro-Semantics will replace NLP, we would like to add that we see it in a different function, namely, as extending, continuing, and evolving the development that began with Korzybski, Bateson, Bandler, Grinder, Dilts, etc.

In the Meta-States Model, the nature of self-reflexivity has finally been given its full due. In this way, the model provides a way to track thoughts-about-thoughts, feelings-about-feelings, as our inevitable and inescapable meta-thinking, meta-feeling, and meta-responding generates layers upon layers of cognition. This flexible model provides a way to identify the ever-changing hierarchy of human consciousness, without becoming a rigid way. The levels themselves shift and change. And true enough, while this makes for seeming complexity in human “mind” and experience, the ordering of the Meta-Level Principles formats and structures that complexity. This means that the plastic and flexible nature of meta-levels whereby any thought can reflect back onto itself or onto another thought at any level does not have to create confusion or chaos. We can track it. We can model it as a system.

While the recursive nature of thought-feeling does create complexity, it does not create chaos. Systemic complexity contains structure. So even though it may at first appear as the complexity of chaos, with a meta-level model like Meta-States we can easily discover an ordering at a higher level. And as this distinguishes different levelsNeuro-Semantics. This Meta-Level Model thus provides a way of distinguishing such mental phenomena as:

• Beliefs — Validated Thoughts-about-Thoughts

• Values — Valued Thoughts-about-Thoughts

• Understandings— Extensive systems of Thoughts-about-Thoughts

• Decisions — Choiced Thoughts-about-Thoughts

• Identity — Beliefs about Thoughts-about-“Self” Concepts

• Concepts — Extensive (simple or complex) Understandings about Domains of Understandings

• Categories — conceptual sorting of Concepts

• Reasons —higher level structures used as explanatory constructs

• Etc.

As an aside, I should here mention the extreme limitation of the term “thought.” By itself, the term reflects a very limited, Aristotelian, and primitive term—an Elementalism. Using the principles of General Semantics, we know that “thought” includes “emotion,” hence the awkward yet more sane mapping of “thought-feeling.” So to use “thought” sanely we have to do so from a non-elementalistic perspective. For people in NLP, this provides a new piece straight from GS that was not in the original Meta-Model. You will find it in the expanded Meta-Model in The Secrets of Magic.

With the systemic nature of self-reflexive thought-feeling looping recursively back onto itself creating layers of consciousness and the higher level structures (the “mental” phenomena), we have states-about-states or Meta-States. This sets up systemic processing. It generates logical levels in our “thinking-emoting.” It sets up attractors in a self-organizing system. And these run by certain higher level principles— all articulated as the Meta-Stating Principles.

Now we can begin to sort out different kinds of meanings. We can sort out linkage “meaning,” previously known as Pavlovian conditioning or Associative Meanings. It goes further. It introduces Contextual Meanings— the meanings that arise from higher mental contexts. These higher level abstractions of “meanings” into which we categorize and attribute significance to things thereby generates our Semantic or Conceptual States. And with this, we introduce yet another new distinction in NLP.

I trust that by now you can recognize that in these ways, Neuro-Semantics incorporates higher level “meanings” into the structure of subjectivity. Our “states” involve the primary level neuro-linguistic thoughts-and-feelings in response to something out there in the world. That defines a Primary State. A Meta-State involves more. It involves our thoughts-feeling about our thoughts, emotions, states, memories, imaginations, concepts, etc. It involves our meta-responses to previous responses.

There is a lot more to Neuro-Semantics than this (and more being developed every week), but this does begin to offer a set of distinctions. In summary, notice the following chart.

How does Neuro-Semantics differ from General Semantics?

General Semantics began with Alfred Korzybski (1933) and continues today as a viable discipline and field in its own right. As an engineer, Korzybski sought to redesign the old Aristotelian language as our primary way of mapping the territory. He wanted to do this to increase our ability at effective adjustment to increase humanity’s sanity. The old mapping involved several unsane factors: identification, elementalism, confusion of levels, etc.

NLP brought over many of the features of General Semantics into its Meta-Model of language. More recently, we have identified many of the Korzybskian linguistic distinctions not brought over and have added them to the Meta-Model (Hall, Secrets of Magic, 1998).

Neuro-Semantics differs from General Semantics by its NLP emphasis on modeling excellence and designing patterns, technologies, and new methodologies for human design engineering (a phrase, by the way, originated by Korzybski, 1921). In Neuro-Semantics we have begun to create a Merging of the Models (NLP and GS). What we began in November 1998 in London as a three-day training program under the title, The Merging of the Models, will eventually result in a second modeling — or Engineering Training using other as-of-yet unmined treasures of Korzybski.

What Uniquely Distinguishes this new field?

Neuro-Semantics stands out as both “enriched” NLP and “enriched” General Semantics. Returning to the sources of NLP, General Semantics, Bateson’s works in anthropology, schizophrenia, Levels of Learning, and cybernetics, MRI Institute, Cognitive Psychology (Miller, Galanter, Pribram), etc., we have sought to establish Neuro-Semantics on solid, scientific, and highly researched studies.

NLP, for a variety of reasons, has seemed to have received lots of negative and harmful Public Relations and General Semantics has seemed to locate itself in a small and isolated community. For these (and other reasons), we have sought to step aside just enough from NLP and GS so that we can both continue the adventure of modeling and engineering human excellence but not tied down to the limitations of the two source disciplines.

I should mention here that we in the Institute of Neuro-Semantics are not the only ones who have been moving in this direction. Canadian Dennis Chong, M.D. and Roye Fraser of Blue Dell Systems, both NLP trainers, have in recent years written about Neuro-Semantic Programming (NSP). As noted on our web site (www.neurosemantics.com), Dr. Chong has written several books mentioned NSP, Don’t Ask Why, Language Elegance, and Knife Without Pain. While we have some differences with these gentlemen, the basic thrust and emphasis corresponds to an amazing degree.

Neuro-Semantics has also found new life and excitement in Chaos theory, Self-Organization Theory, the newer developments in Cognitive Psychology, Performance Coaching, Brief Psychotherapy, REBT, Glasser’s Reality Therapy/ Control Theory, and many other fields.

What Central Principles govern this domain?

First and foremost of the principles that govern Neuro-Semantics is the Bateson principle that “The higher levels govern (modulate, drive, organize) the lower levels.” Meta-levels serve as the frame-of-reference for the activity (thinking, feeling, responding) that occurs at the levels lower to the frame. The meta-level thus operates as an attractor in a self-organizing system. From this we have identified numerous other principles.

Someone (or something) will always set the frame of reference. The question becomes, “Who set the frame?” Count on your Meta-State becoming your unconscious frames— your “way of being in the world,” your attitude.

Whoever sets the frame will govern the experience (run the game!). Since higher frames govern—and since somebody also sets it, the person who sets the frame thereby takes charge of the subsequent experiences. The resulting thoughts, ideas, concepts, beliefs, emotions, behaviors, language, problems, solutions, and experiences derive their existence from the frame. Frames govern.

The whole determines the parts and from the parts, the whole emerges. This speaks about the systemic nature of the mind-body system. It speaks about the gestalt nature of our neuro-linguistics processes. The system that emerges from the meta-levels that govern the lower levels brings about an overall gestalt (or configuration of interactive parts) which in turn, define the character of the whole.

In outframing, we set up a higher level frame-of-reference that will take over. The power to identify a frame enables us to step aside from a frame and to set a whole new frame. Doing this transforms everything. It performs meta-level “magic” in that it installs a new self-organizing attractor at the top of the semantic system.

What we call “experience” differs radically and significantly at each level. Korzbyski described these in his “levels of abstraction” model regarding how the nervous system abstracts at different levels. We can use the same word/s at the different levels as multiordinal terms —terms that have no specific meaning until we specify at which level we refer.

Reflexivity endows consciousness with systemic processes and characteristics. Reflexivity describes the mechanism that drives these levels of abstraction and these meta-level experience. This refers to the fact that our consciousness can reflect back onto itself or its products (thoughts, emotions, beliefs, values, decisions, specific concepts, etc.). As it does, it sets up feed-back and feed-forward processes and thereby creates a circular system.

Meta-level disorientation and conflict can create living hells. Generally speaking (numerous exceptions do exist), whenever we bring negative thoughts-and-feelings (states) against ourselves or any facet of ourselves, we put ourselves at odds with ourselves. And when our self-relationships (relation to ourselves) become disturbed, we begin to loop around in vicious downward self-reinforcing cycles. And when self-disturbed (self-condemning, self-contempting, self-repressing, self-hating, etc.), this then creates a disturbance for all of our relationships with others. This creates neurosis, psychosis, personality disorders, character disorders, etc.

Paradox frequently governs meta-level solutions for health, integration, balance, and empowerment. The only way to rid ourselves of unwanted thoughts, emotions, behaviors, habits, etc. involves, paradoxically, welcoming, accepting, appreciating, and celebrating that very thought, emotion, behavior, etc. By welcoming it into consciousness we can take counsel of it, reality check it, learn from it, etc. To not reckon with it leads to unuseful suppression, repression, self-rejection, etc.

Setting a frame necessitates neuro-linguistic energy & repetition. How do we actually set a frame or establish a meta-level State? Merely “thinking” or even “feeling” will not do it. We can think, know, feel, and have awarenesses that do notestablish a higher level frame-of-reference. Here we need to utilize the natural processes of how our brains operate—we need to use drama, energy, repetition, etc.

Altering higher level frames alters Identity and Destiny. You can’t change what you do (so that it lasts in a pervasive and generative way), without also changing who you are. Does your higher frame of self-definition support the change? Your behavior is like a printout of your Operating Programs.

What are some of the New Techniques & Patterns that have already emerged from Neuro-Semantics?

At this point in time we have not made a full account of the scores of pattens and technologies that have arisen. Every month in Meta-States Journal we have published at least one new or adapted pattern. There you will find more than twenty fully described patterns. (We also have most of those in outline form in Secrets of Meta-States, the Training Manual). You can locate 16 new Time-Lining Patterns in the book by that title, and technologies in the remaking of Meta-Programs (Figuring Out People).

• Conceptual Positions (the Perceptual Positions reformatted as a Logical Level System and incorporating Semantics.

• Meta-Yesing: A Ten-Minute Belief Change Pattern.

• Inserting Resources Pattern

• Meta-Detailing: The heart of Genius (see Meta-Stating Genius)

• Modeling with Meta-Levels (see NLP: Going Meta)

What is The Institute of Neuro-Semantics®?
Who are the Principal Players in the Institutes of Neuro-Semantics?

It began when Michael Hall and Bob Bodenhamer filled for trademarks for Neuro-Semantics and Meta-States in 1997. The Registration of the Trademarks were finally obtained in 1998 (Registration numbers: 2,210,336 and 2,199,913). During this time, Dr. Bodenhamer established The First Institute of Neuro-Semantics in Gastonia NC. Later, Robert Olic (Olic Performance Seminars) began sponsoring Neuro-Semantic Trainings by Michael Hall on the east coast.

Since that time, The Institute of Neuro-Semantics has established two Web Sites, and has begun to align with other promoters and trainers (Cynthia Tuma, Houston, Evergreen Educational; Ginia Polygos, Logos Development Group, Charlotte, NC; Dr. Philip Nolan and Denis Bridoux, Post Graduate Professional Training in the UK).

We established Meta-States Journal in 1997 as a monthly publication for Neuro-Semantics. It promotes and markets much of the current research and discoveries, training schedules, responses from around the world, and much more.

E.T. Publications has become one of the facets of Neuro-Semantics as we have continue to seek to publish and promote products.

We have also created a Web Site at https://legacy.neurosemantics.com. Dr. Bodenhamer constantly updates this site monthly with articles and techniques from several authors. He does this to offer the new developments in Neuro-Semantics and to create a forum for feedback.

What is the Agenda, Motivation, and Intentions of those Associated with Neuro-Semantics?

The purpose (agenda and motivation) of The Institute of Neuro-Semantics is to continue the exciting research and modeling into the adventure of human design engineering using the tools of General Semantics, NLP, and Meta-States.

The design of this? To Engineer Human Excellence by modeling the best, by identifying the structure of Excellence, and by designing afresh new forms of human excellence in all fields.

And the meta-outcome of that? To enable people to find, discover, and actualize their best — to consciously enter into more experiences of Flow (Czikszentmihalyi), Positive Addiction (Glasser), Genius (Bandler, Grinder, Dilts, etc.), to empower people to run their own brains and to manage their meta-minds, and to achieve high performance whether it be in career, relationships, personal development, spirituality, health, or whatever.

Historical Development of the Meta-States Model
(Compiled by Denis Bridoux, NLP Trainer with Post-Graduate Professional Education, Harragate, England)

1933: Alfred Korzybski coined the phrase neuro-linguistic training, postulated his theory of the levels of abstraction, constructed his theory of second-order abstractions, third-order, etc. in his classic word Science and Sanity.

1972: Gregory Bateson’s classic work Steps to an Ecology of Mind that brought together all his revolutionary studies on double-bind theory, applications of Logical Theory of Types, going meta to meta-levels, the levels of Learning Model, etc.

1975-1983: John Grinder & Richard Bandler utilizing the idea of going meta in their NLP model beginning with the Meta-model—an explicit model about how language and VAK representations work in human experience. They distinguish sensory-based level from the evaluative level, the importance of meta-parts, and the strategy model for modeling “the structure of subjective experience.”

1994: Michael Hall specifies how meta-levels of mind-body neuro-linguistic states factor into the structure of subjective experience and bring over Korzybski and Bateson ideas into the strategy model. This arose from modeling resilience and discovering that within it people have embedded numerous layers and levels of consciousness and states. Awareness by the International Trainers Association of NLP (1995) for the most significant contribution to NLP during 1994-1995.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

With three Meta-Domains, NLP offers three avenues to its target. This means that we have three redundant systems that to describe subjectivity. It also gives us backup systems for working with subjectivity whenever we find a roadblock along one pathway.

The First Meta-Domain

NLP began with the discovery of a very powerful meta model— one which Bandler and Grinder (1975, 1976), in fact, named just that— The Meta-Model of Language in Therapy. Of course, it didn’t take them long to realize that the Meta-Model which they created from the therapeutic wizards not only applied to therapy, but also to all communications—business, family, relationships, genius, etc.

With the linguistic distinctions that Perls and Satir made as they “just talked” to people, the early co-developers of NLP discovered that they too could perform incredible word magic in the lives of people. To understand this, Grinder brought his understandings of Transformational Grammar and General Semantics to provide some of the early theoretical background for what they had stumbled upon. Shortly thereafter Gregory Bateson came into the picture bringing with him the theoretical work which he, Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch (1974) created in Principles of Change. Erickson had written the introduction to that book and so Bateson introduced Bandler and Grinder to him, which then lead to the formulation of the Milton Model.

The Meta-Model and its inverse, the Milton Model, thereafter set in motion a ferocious and passionate intensity to model excellence everywhere. Having specified the structure of magic, the Neuro-Linguists began an excited exploration into all kinds of magical experiences— hypnosis, communication expertise, getting over the past, inventing compelling futures, etc. And from this arose Classical NLP.

The Second Meta-Domain

The mythology I heard about the origin of the second meta-domain, Meta-Programs, began with Leslie Cameron-Bandler. You’ll find this story related in Figuring Out People: Design Engineering With Meta-Programs. As Leslie practiced Classic NLP in the early 1980s, she began to discover some of the limits of the model and places where the processes didn’t work. As a result, this provided “a rare and unprecedented opportunity” for her and Richard to begin to identify higher level sorting mechanisms (Meta-Programs) that got in the way and prevented the NLP technologies from working. In their exploration, they began to specify a few perceptual filters that seemed to operate at a higher logical level, meta to the primary level processing of information. And, as higher levels govern and modulate lower levels, these Meta-Programs as unconscious sorting mechanisms could validate or invalidate the lower level experiences. Thus began the search for Meta-Programs.

The Third Meta-Domain

While meta-levels, meta-parts, and meta-positions were mentioned early in NLP, and while Woodsmall even mentioned Meta-States in a list of other possible Meta-Programs workbook in 1988, it wasn’t until 1994 that a full articulation of the Meta-States Model developed. This arose as a development from both Korzybski (1933, 1994) regarding his Levels of Abstraction Model in General Semantics and Bateson (1972, 1979) regarding his numerous meta-level analysis of learning, schizophrenia (double-bind theory), aesthetics, etc.

Actually, the Meta-States Model arose from a modeling project. In preparing for a workshop at the NLP Comprehensive Conference in Denver on The Strategy of Resilience, I first conducted an extensively researched of the literature and then modeled a dozen highly resilient persons. This evoked the realization that people not only experience first-level, primary states, but also states-about-states, states-upon-states, what Korzybski called “second-order abstractions,” or Meta-States.

Three Avenues to the Same Thing

How do these three Meta-Domains relate to each other? In one word, they all speak about the structure of experience using three different lenses.

With the Meta-Model (and inverse Milton Model) we have the language route to experience. Using this Model, we can sort and separate the linguistic structures that create the person’s magical world. We can hear primary level, sensory-based language that we can immediately track over to a audio-video representation. And we can tell when a person jumps logical levels and begins speaking evaluatively using non-sensory based language. This then cues us into recognizing the person’s meta-maps about reality, the person’s meaning constructions in terms of beliefs, values, decisions, etc.

Using the language route to experience gives us several choices. We can deframemove down from the evaluative world of meaning, identity, rules, values, etc. and to provide behavioral equivalents in see-hear-feel language. This reductionistic nature of the Meta-Model shifts the person from a higher logical level to a lower, enables them to reality test their mapping, enrich their maps by observing when and where and in what circumstances that they did such mapping, and run an ecology check to see if such mapping still serves them very well.

The language route to experience, however, does more than deframes a person’s mental maps. We can just as easily use the Meta-Model to construct new generalizations, nominalizations, cause-effect relations, complex equivalences, etc. We can use the Meta-Model and our understanding of both the structure and the secrets of magic to powerfully enrich a person’s impoverished maps. I noted this in The Secrets of Magic (1998). Namely, many Meta-Model questions and processes hypnotize and move up logical levels. “And how to you feel about that feeling?”

The Perception Avenue

As the Meta-Model gives us “the yellow brick road” of language to travel to the Oz of human experience (both expertise and pathology), so the Meta-Programs Model gives us the avenue of Perception. Now we ask another question. With the Meta-Model we asked about indications of ill-formedness and well-formedness (to use John Grinder’s Transformational language). But now we ask about the indicators of perceptual filters or Meta-Programs. In some contexts we may keep this to a minimum of nine Meta-Programs as Shelly Rose Charvet did in her business applications, or to a more exhaustive list like the 51 that Dr. Bodenhamer and I put in our work, Figuring Out People. Either way, the Meta-Programs give us another “royal road” to subjective experience—the person’s way of sorting and paying attention to information.

Cognitive Behavioral psychology describes these perceptual filters as thinking patterns. In other words, the thinking patterns developed and used by Ellis and Beck relate to the NLP Model as additional Meta-Programs (see A Sourcebook of Magic, in press). This suggests that we can model and design engineer excellence by paying attention to the meta-level filters and sorting mechanisms that a person uses.

If both the Meta-Model and the Meta-Programs Model speak about the same thing, then how do they relate to each other? One focuses more on linguistic expressions, the other on perceptual viewpoint. One thinks more about the internal languaginglinguistic markers that indicate Meta-Programs. Woodsmall and James (1988) specified many of these in their work, Time Line Therapy. And conversely, within Meta-Programs we can hear and identify many Meta-Model distinctions.

The State Avenue

As distinctions that arise from the Meta-Model and Meta-Programs relate to the same thing, so does the distinctions and features within the Meta-States Model. Here, however, we do not so much focus on linguistic distinctions or perceptual filters (although they obviously play a significant role in Meta-States). Instead, we focus primarily on the person’s neuro-linguistic state, his or her mind-body state of consciousness and the logical level at which the person experiences that state.

A central and primary mechanism drives Meta-States, namely self-reflexivity. This refers to the systemic property of “mind” (thought, emotion, kinesthetic awareness) reflecting back onto itself. And when this happens, then the very products and experiences of our primary states begin to feedback, at a later time, into the experience itself to create a system—a system of interactive parts. Then out of that emerges new and unique configurations that do not exist at the lower levels. Korzybski described this as “second and third order abstractions.” Bateson described it using cybernetic terms and system language, hence his introduction of the word “meta” itself into NLP.

Reflexivity initiates our higher level skills of meta-communicating, meta-feeling, meta-thinking, etc. And while animals have some capacity for thinking-and-feeling at meta-levels (Bateson studied this in dogs and dolphins), they eventually stop reflecting back at some level (two or three levels up). But, as Korzybski noted, humans never stop. The process goes on continually and infinitely. We can always say or think something else about whatever we thought or said.

Korzybski also noted that we do this via our ability to use symbolics and so designated us a symbolic class of life. Animals, by contrast, live in a world of signals, but do not use symbols as such.

This provides us a third “royal road” to subjectivity. We can sort for logical level and neurological states. This gives us the ability to distinguish between Primary and Meta-States. They differ. And they differ pretty radically. The higher Meta-States actually speak about Conceptual and Semantic states and so operate in a more layered and complex way from primary states. In the primary states, we experience primary emotions that show up very strongly in kinesthetic experience. So when we ask, “Where do you feel …?” and supply a primary emotion (i.e. fear, anger, relaxed, calm, joy, displeasure, disgust, aversion, attraction, etc.), most people can immediately and quickly identify the corresponding somatic location.

But ask a person about a meta-feeling. “Where do you feel … dumb, like a jerk, out-of-sorts, weird, low self-esteem, resilience, forgiveness, etc.?” Typically, the person will not be able to point to a specific location kinesthetically. Such pseudo-emotions share more in the nature of a judgment of the mind, rather than a pure and direct kinesthetic state.

Thus, “I feel like a failure” bespeaks an evaluative level about some experience and the feelings of that experience (sadness, upset, tension, fear, anger, etc.). So we meta-model that language. “What did you fail at specifically?” “When?” “Where?” “Under what circumstances?” “Based upon what set of values, criteria, and standards?” “In whose eyes?”

This gets us back down to the primary sensory-based level. It enables us to deframe the old mapping of the nominalization (“failure”). The Meta-State of “Failure” arise from the person’s mapping processes and when habituated can become the person’s Meta-Program (Pessimism, Negative Self-Referencing) for looking out onto the world.

Three Meta-Domains

The three meta-domains of NLP reference the same thing through three different lenses:

Language— linguistics and the VAK sensory-based languages

Perception— thinking and sorting patterns for viewing the world

States & Levels— holistic mind-body systemic states in which we live and from which we operate

So, for example, a global or gestalt thinking style (as a Meta-Program) will show up in the over-use of generalization patterns (in the Meta-Model, nominalizations, universal quantifiers, lost performative) and in inducing one into a global frame of mind (as a Meta-State).

A Developmental Model of the 3 Meta-Domains

As we have inquired about the relationship between the Meta-Model and Meta-Programs, or between the Meta-Model and Meta-States, etc., now we can ask about the inter-relationships between all three of these Meta-Domains. If they all describe experience or subjectivity, how can we use them together?

As a theoretical model of mind, emotion, and personality, the three meta-domains of NLP provide us a way of thinking about the multi-layered and multi-leveled nature of “personality” as it emerges from simply primary states to ever more complex structures. The following developmental stages offers just a sketch of this from some forthcoming works (Personality Ordering and Disordering Using NLP and from our NLP Systemic Model III).

Stage 1. VAK representations of the world. Consciousness begins as we use our sense receptors to encounter the energy manifestations “out there.” First a child has to learn to “see” (perceive), to form and construct a perceptual map. After that comes the representational map, a construct based on our perceptions. Thus as we construct our perceptual maps of what occurs out there, we eventually use such to construct our representational maps, namely our sensory representations (the VAK). A little child around (six to twelve months) will begin the process of developing “constancy of representation.” In doing this, the child can then “hold in mind” images, sounds, and sensations not present. Prior to this development, peek-a-boo operates as a really thrilling game. Remember? After such re-presentational skill, peek-a-boo loses its excitement.

Stage 2. Meta-representation of the representational Map. The period of purelanguage to our primary state and experience. But we don’t stop there. We develop words about those words. Fruit becomes a meta-word, a word about other words. And so we go meta very early, jump logical levels, and classify our classifications.

Stage 3. Habituating thinking styles create Meta-Programs. By the habituation of our thinking-and-feeling, our sensory and linguistic maps collapse into the primary level so that our way of thinking (matching or mismatching, toward or away from, global or specific, etc.) becomes a “program” itself, a Meta-Program for paying attention to the world and people. In this way, our predispositions and training in running our attention solidifies into higher level perceptual filters, which in turn, affect our perceptions.

Stage 4. First level Meta-Stating and Meta-States. With more growth, we begin to reflect back on our thoughts-and-emotions with other thoughts-and-emotions. We go meta. And as we do, we create a state-upon-a-state structure. This initiates a new gestalt—a systemic configuration of layered consciousness, a “second-order abstraction.” In a recent training, a young father described his eighteen month infant. The child had recently suffered constipation for a few days (primary state of physical discomfort) and who then became afraid of “going potty” (a meta-state). In fact, the child had decided to refuse to go potty! Such meta-levels and meta-states then set a frame-of-reference that can become a belief.

Stage 5. Then the Meta-Levels collapse. Via continual habituation of the Meta-States, our higher frames-of-references of our thinking and feeling collapses back into our primary state. This means that the layering and embeddedness of state-upon-state merges to become indistinguishable. And the result? The qualification of the primary state. Thus we may have “joyful learning,” “compassionate anger,” “guilting fear,” “fear of fear,” etc. As we do this, it frees consciousness to create even more Meta-State structures.

Stage 6. And so the process continues. The ever-reflecting back onto itself nature of “mind” means that with every thought or feeling we then have thoughts and feelings about those. In this dynamic, systemic flow of consciousness, we develop various domains of knowledge or frames-of-reference which we use to navigate life. When we “go upward” (TDS), we go up into this meta-levels.

In the end we have a layered and complex “personality” structure that operates with various attractors to continually fulfill themselves in the world. Like the theory of Memes, these neuro-linguistic attractors set the frame for everything that occurs within this system of thoughts-emotions-and somatic states. And what makes up these “energy systems” within “personality?” Simply our higher level thoughts as beliefs, values, identifications, visions, paradigms, understandings, etc.

Of course, none of this is real. But rather, all of this, like every other model of human personality, whether Freud’s Id, ego, and superego, or Memes, or whatever, simply provides us a way of talking about things.

The 3 Meta-Domains Model Applied To “Personality”

The Meta-Model enables us to begin from the realization that “personality” (as a nominalization) is not a thing and therefore not a fixed or stable thing. We rather refer to an ever moving, changing, and reorganizing thinking-and-feeling human being. What we call “personality” therefore emerges systemically from the ongoing interplay of a great many factors in the human neuro-linguistic system. While this enables us to appreciate avoid setting a frame of determinism about persons, it also introduces a lot of complexity. How can we avoid feeling overwhelmed?

The Three Meta-Domains Model specified numerous leverage points in the system for intervening and creating generative transformations. And where do these leverage point lie? In the three meta-domains: language, perception, and state.

And because higher levels drive and modulate lower levels, the meta-domains point us in the direction of reframing and outframing. It points us to setting new frames of references at higher levels. Further, since we know that habituating thoughts-and-emotions send such constructs upward where they become Meta-Programs and Meta-States, we refuse to buy the delusion that “these things are real entities.” Rather, we recognize them as mental constructs— maps.

NLP has long recognized that people typically get caught up in content and lose awareness of meta-levels. This means that meta-level phenomena operate outside of consciousness (our higher “unconscious mind”) and as our meta frames-of-reference. And this means that we inevitably live our lives embedded in those frames and governed by those frames, without awareness.

As the three meta-domains gives us three lenses (language, perception, and state) to provide us a three-fold overlapping analysis. With such we have a way to check our work, reinforce new designs, and solidify installation.

Every state (primary or meta) involves something dynamic, moving, alive—a fully energized somatic and neurological state. The Molecules of Emotion (1996) as described by Pert and others sets up actual forces and energies in the body (the soma). This speaks about the mind-body connection, the neuro-linguistic interface that we feel when we recognize how our beliefs, values, decisions, etc. have physiological effect upon us. Cognitive linguistics speak of embodiment in the meaning-making process— as beings in the kind of bodies we have, our neurological “abstracting” from the energy manifestations “out there” become transduced into the nervous system as another kind of energy. Embodied states have real correlates in the body.

A Case Study

Not long ago Dr. Bodenhamer worked with a professional school counselor, a highly intelligent woman with two masters degrees and excellent work history who had a “personality’ problem. Having once been labeled “Dissociative Personality Disorder” she carried that label and thought that there was something “bad” about dissociation. In learning to use NLP to run her own brain and to chose when, where, and how to associate or dissociate, she found new resources for living more vibrantly.

What brought on the labeling? When a young woman, Betty (anonymous) had married an extremely abusive man, had two daughters, and then divorced him. He went on in his second marriage to murdered that wife. That lead him to federal in prison, where he has been for years. During his Meta-Model training, Bob asked Betty about her social life. She explained that she didn’t go out, but had to stay home to watch her girls.

“You have to stay home and watch your girls?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What is your purpose in staying home and watching your girls?”

“I have to protect them.”

Of course, Bob knew that she was talking about grown girls (the oldest 21 and the youngest 16) and so inquired about Betty’s beliefs about protecting the girls.

“So, you have to stay home and protect the girls?”

“Yes, I do.” she said emphatically.

“OK, I want you to get a picture of having to stay home to watch the girls.”

“OK.”

“Tell me about the girls. How old do you see them in your picture?”

At that point, she switched to the singular pronoun, “She is in my arms.”

“You have a picture of one of your girls as an infant in your arms? And you have to stay home and protect that infant?”

“Yes, that is right.”

“And how old is that child now?”

“Well she is my youngest, she is now 16.”

“Your girl is now 16 and you have to take care of her as if an infant.”

“Bob, you don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand, Betty?”

“That George [the child’s father] said that he was going to kill her. I have to protect her.”

“And when did that happen? How long ago?”

“Almost 16 years ago.”

“And where is George now?”

“He is in prison.”

Flushing out these meta-level understandings in her languaged reality (using the Meta-Model) allowed Betty to reframe her limiting beliefs, to check the ecology of her Meta-States, to update her life purposes, and to question her Meta-Program (modal operator of necessity). Having long ago decided to protect her child at all costs, that Meta-Program had become solidified as a generalized frame of reference.

In terms of the Meta-Model, we have “I always have to take care of my child.” (Universal Quantifier and Modal Operator of Necessity). This showed up also as the Meta-Program of Modal Operators and describes the language of her perceptions. She moved throught he world “seeing” that obligation. The negative Meta-State that solidified the problem state involved fear of a long past threat, a Meta-State of living in the past and forgetting to update the fear.

Reference

Bandler, Richard; and Grinder, John. (1975, 1976). The structure of magic, Volumes I & II: A book about language and therapy. Palo Alto, CA: Science & Behavior Books.

Bateson, Gregory. (1979). Mind and nature: A necessary unity. New York: Bantam.

Bateson, Gregory. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Ballatine.

Hall, Michael L. (1995). Meta-states: A new domain of logical levels, self-reflexiveness in human states of consciousness. Grand Junction, CO: ET Publications.

Hall, Michael; Bodenhamer, Bob. (1997). Figuring out people: Design engineering using meta-programs. Wales, UK: Anglo-American Books.

Hall, Michael. (1988). The secrets of magic: Communication excellence for the 21st. Century. Wales, UK: Anglo-American Books.

Hall, Michael. (1988). “Personality as a Neurologically Energized Holographic 3-D State & Meta-State.” Unpublished monograph. ET Publications.

Korzybski, Alfred. (1933/ 1994) Science and sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics, (5th. ed.). Lakeville, CN: International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co.

Candice B. Pert, Ph.D. Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel (1997), Scribner, NY.

Watzlawick, Paul; Weakland, John; Fisch, Richard. (1974). Change: Principles of problem formation and problem resolution. NY: W.W. Norton & Co.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

THE META THINKING
THAT LEADS TO NEURO-SEMANTICS

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Long before NLP came into existence, Gregory Bateson and his associates were exploring the idea and art of “going meta.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) Bateson related the “meta move” to art, beauty, communication, consciousness, dreams, grace, aesthetics, schizophrenia, and much more. There he along with Don Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland took the logical types of Russell and Whitehead and looked at the structure of meta communication.

NLP picked up on the meta move from the beginning. Robert Dilts incorporated it as one step (the meta response step) in the horizontal Strategy TOTE model. It was used as the “meta position” and “meta person” position for stepping aside in exercises to access a fuller perception. And it was built into (or assumed) in the most dynamic NLP patterns like the phobia cure, time lines, the swish pattern, etc. (See Meta-States, 2000 for details).

What early NLP did not know was that “going meta” always involved a step upward and that meant accessing a meta state. The old assumption was that any “meta” move always involved “dissociation,” and at that time, most NLP trainers and practitioners tended to treat dissociation as a thing, as an “unfeeling” state. They failed to use meta-model the term and to discover it as a relational action word. They failed to recognize that every time we dissociate from (or step out of) one state we thereby associate (or step) into another state. So given the understanding (or rather, lack of it) about meta-levels, NLP failed to take into consideration the layering effect of those higher levels, failed to recognize the presence of these higher levels and failed to recognize them as mind body states. This caused them to miss out on so many of the rich distinctions that we recognize as fundamental today in Neuro-Semantics.

So What does “Going Meta” Mean and not mean?
I will list a number of things that going meta does not mean in order to highlight what it does mean.
First, “going meta” does not mean becoming unemotional. It especially does not mean that. This was one of the criticisms that several who wrote reviews in NLP World against the Meta-States Model. They assumed that “going meta” was that same thing as “being dissociated.” Several reviewers even took potshots at me, asserting that only a very dissociated person could have come up with the idea of Meta-States.

Actually, meta moves often create much more intense emotional states. The move increases the amount of emotion and even kinesthetic engagement. Consider the meta-state of feeling joy of and about learning (the gestalt of joyful learning). This state is much more intense and emotional than just experiencing a primary state of learning. The same holds for fear of fear, fear of anger, wonder of curiosity, etc. These are much more emotionally intense states.

So what explains this? How can we go meta and end up with more kinesthetics and physiology involved?

Answer: When we go meta, we not only transcend the primary state, but we also include it inside of a new mind-body state. In this way, the second state coalesces all of its thoughts and feelings into the first state. Joy infiltrates the learning. Fear infiltrates the anger.

Conversely, what going meta does mean is that we are texturing the primary state with the thoughts and feelings of another state. When we do this, we thereby layer in a new quality of richness to the experience. This is why “respectful and considerate anger” represent so much richer an experience than just plain anger at someone or some thing. And when we texture in calmness, rationality, self control, etc. to anger, this texturing makes the primary experience of anger a very different experience. It changes the feeling tone of the primary state.

Secondly, going meta does not mean or refer to the collapsing of states. This is an easy mistake to make when first learning about Meta-States. Over the years I have heard this question hundreds of times. “When you meta-state, isn’t this the collapsing of states?”

Yet the answer is, “No, it is not.” The collapsing of states occur when we evoke two states and relate them to each other on the same level and do so at the same time. Then we are attempting to cue the nervous system and body to experience two conflicting states simultaneously. Feel “relaxed” and “tense” now! If we have anchored both states and set off both anchors at the same time, then we typically experience confusion and disorientation as our nervous system tries to go into one state and into its opposite. This disperses neurological energy. It reduces both states. It is for this reason that we have to return to the resourceful state and refresh it afterwards. In that way, we re-set a new anchor for it.

When, however, we access two opposite states and then set one over the other, the meta move sets up a new relationship between the states. Now one state (the one meta to the other) becomes a frame of reference for the lower state. Doing this constructs a new Neuro Semantic reality. Doing this allows us to create a sense of our personal worth as a given. It enables us to set the state of worth and value as a frame over all of the risks involved in making your dreams come true. This may even generate the sense of being “un-insultable.” If that happens, then the Neuro-Semantic state sets the frame that every endeavor that doesn’t succeed in just the way you had hope is not about ‘you.’ It’s about the activity.

Instead of collapsing states, going meta means creating gestalt states like “un-insultability,” resilience, proactivity, courage, etc. These states are “more than the sum of the parts” (hence the use of the word “gestalt”). It is in this way that Meta States takes NLP to the next level of becoming much more systemic in nature.
Going meta means that we are letting the levels coalesce. It is in this way that we create Meta Programs. We meta state our everyday states so often with a way of thinking, sorting, paying attention, etc. and eventually it becomes our meta program for information processing. Of course, when we know this, we also know how to change meta programs. This frees you from any confusion about you being your meta program! You are not. A meta-program is just a learned behavior.

Thirdly, going meta does not necessarily mean that we get more abstract, trancy, and fluffy. The coalescing of meta levels translates ideas and concepts into muscle patterns. That’s the marvel and magic of the Neuro-Semantics Mind to Muscle Pattern. We didn’t invent that process. We just described how it naturally happens and how you can take charge of that integration process.

Conversely, going meta actually describes a trance phenomenon and is therefore hypnotic in nature. This highlights the hypnotic nature of every meta stating process … once we send a person inward and upward to accessing or building new frames-we are engaging in a hypnotic induction. This explains why you only have to meta-state a person a few levels and it invites an inward focus and the suggestibility of hypnosis. This also explains why former meta-stating structures operate in the same way that hypnotic suggestions operate.

When we consciously choose to go meta, this means that we have learned how to recognize and effectively work inside the frames of our mind… the Matrix of Frames that makes up our current “structure” or fabric of reality. This enables us to wake up to our own matrices… and to choose the ones you want to live within.

In these and many, many more ways, Meta States has enriched the meta move (“going meta”) that Bateson initiated and that NLP employed. And it is the art of meta thinking that takes you from NLP into Neuro Semantics.

The Fluidity of Going Meta
Perhaps the hardest think to recognize about the meta-function that we refer to when we talk about going meta is the fact that the meta-levels are not actual or literal levels. This is just a way of talking about the way the mind layers thoughts, feelings, memories, imaginations, etc. upon each other. This means recovering the metaphorical nature of the so-called “hierarchy of levels” so that we learn afresh that there is no actual “hierarchy.” That’s why images of steps and ladders inadequately map the levels.

To more accurately imagine and conceptualize the psycho-logical levels, we have to think in terms of fluid levels. This invites us into a much more dynamic model of the mind. The way we layer thoughts and feelings is fluid and ever-changing. It changes as we think. That’s why we can’t say that one level or meta-state is higher than another. It all depends upon who is thinking, and about what, and when, etc.

Nor can we think about these levels as being “logical” in any rigid black-and-white way. It’s not that kind of logic. It is the “psycho-logics” that Korzybski described. It has its own internal logic. Recently a lady in a Meta-States Training in South Africa just couldn’t stand it anymore and stood up and said “It’s not logical that you can temper anger with calmness. That doesn’t make any sense.” I said, “… to you… To you, you don’t experience your anger in a calm way?”
She said, “Right. Of course.”

“What would it be like if, when something violates something of importance to you, you immediately took a deep breath and kept your muscles in your hands and forearms loose … and you noticed that which you’re angry about … Would you find your anger more manageable and under your control?”
She still fought the idea and started to argue with it.

“Just do it… don’t think about it… just do it… access calmness, relaxation, loosen your arm muscles, take a deep breath … There you go. That’s right. … Feel that relaxation … Good. Now think about something that feels upsetting and anger-producing … Something that would violate one of your values while you breathe deeply …”

She was amazed. “It can’t work that quickly.”
“So you believe that?”

Now technically she was right. It is not “logical” that anger should be a member of the class of “Calmness.” Who every categorized anger in that way? Yet, if we set calmness over anger, this becomes our psycho-logics. And of course, it is this kind of creativity with our subjectivity that takes us into the realm of Neuro-Semantics … how meaning (our psycho-logics) gets into our body and muscles.

Taking an Intentional Stance
When we go meta we move up the layering of the mind (levels of the mind) until we get to our highest intentions. Generally and typically this leads the great majority of people into a realm that we call “spiritual.” We move to very high transcendence states- oneness, love, compassion, contribution, God, etc.

But it does not always. Going meta is not a panacea. Even going to our highest intentional states does not occur apart from our belief frames about the world, about people, about morality, about origin and destiny, etc. Texturing occurs at all levels. So when we elicit the highest intentional states, still there are frames above that which will texture whether we’re dealing with a healthy or toxic frame.

Hitler had “positive intentions.” But what was the quality and property of those intentions? They were very selfish, egocentric, etc. They were governed by toxic ideas of race superiority, “blood purity,” the Fatherland, myths of the third Reich, etc. His was a world of sick neuro-semantic realities. And that’s why the Games he played politically were sick and destructive ones.

Summary
I would invite you to consider the words going meta as descriptive of neuro-semantic magic. Within these words we refer to a mechanism so special, so marvelous, so wonderful that it strains the very limits not only of our language, but also of our ability to conceptualize. In the meta-function, we step back from the workings of our own mind and emotions, from our own neuro-linguistic system and we think and feel about it. It’s still us doing it and yet a sense of transcendence emerges from the experience. As we transcend one state or level of experience and rise up to another we also include the first in our awareness, and yet we are no longer controlled by it. Now if that’s now a piece of magic, I don’t know what is.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., researcher and modeler, international trainer and entrepreneur (P.O. Box 9231; Grand Jct. CO. 81501; 970 523-7877), developer of the Meta-States Model, co-founder of Neuro-Semantics®, www.neurosemantics.com, currently involved in several modeling projects: wealth building, selling/persuasion excellence, accelerated learning, etc.

• What is it? What does it mean?
• Is it something we are born with or is it something that we can develop?
• If we can develop it, how do we do that? How long does it take?

We first introduced the idea and terminology of ego-strength into NLP when we made it one of the higher level meta-programs in Figuring Out People. Of course, the idea has a long history in the field of psychology. We can trace the development of the concept back to Freud and his three-fold division of personality in terms of id, ego, and super-ego.

If ego is the self in contact with reality, then ego-strength refers to the strength of our sense of self or person to look face in the face without caving in or being overwhelmed. The strength of ego-strength is the power, determination, road ability to engage reality for whatever we find it to be. This highlights ego-strength as the ability to accept what is as existing and to then use our cognitive-behavioral, emotional and relational skills to deal with such. Ego-strength then is our ability to play the Game of Life according to whatever curves life throws at us. Ego-strength also refers to the inner personal strength by which we tolerate stress and frustration. It is ego-strength that allows us to deal with reality without falling back to infantile defense mechanisms.

• Now, given this definition of ego-strength—
• Do you have that kind of internal strength?
• Would you like to?
• What could you do with yourself and with life if you were to develop your ego-strength so that you could just face life on its terms without fuming and fusing?
• What focus would you develop if you had the ego-strength to not be put off by stress, frustrations, or disappointments?
• How much more peaceful and focused would you feel if you had ego-strength?

Clearing out Misconceptions about “Ego”

We are all born without any ego-strength. For that matter, we are all born without an ego. Sure we are born as a self, a human self, we just don’t know it. Being born without any sense of ego means that, at first, there is no “I.” There is only enmeshment. As babies, we grow inside our mothers—fully attached. Then comes the separation. We come into this world still attached and enmeshed with our mother and without the ability to distinguish ourselves from her. As an infant, it is all one and the same. This is the process by which we become an autonomous human being. The physiological separation of birth precedes the psychological separation and birth of the self. We call this process individuation.

“Ego” is Greek for I. In the Greek New Testament or a Greek version of Plato or Aristotle any time someone says, “I…” they utter the word ego. Thousands of years later Sigmund Freud designated ego as the sense of self, the “I” that deals with and relates to reality.

Normally our ego-strength grows and develops psychologically as we grow and develop physically. It’s part of our psycho-cognitive-social development. We develop more and more of a sense of self as we face reality. As that “I” develops the ability to see and accept reality for what it is, without the magical thinking of wishing and confusing wishing with reality, we develop more strength for coping and mastering the facts and constraints that life puts before us.

Weak ego-strength describes a person’s senses of self that doesn’t easily face, take in, and cope with what is. Instead it fights reality, hates it, and wishes it otherwise. Expectations are unrealistic and based on inadequate understanding. Reality seems too big, too frightening, too overwhelming … and so we avoid the encounter. In weak ego-strength, we don’t feel up to the task but unresourceful, weak, fragile, unable to cope, etc. The weaker the ego-strength, the less we will engage reality and the more we will flee to superstition, magic thinking and wishing, and addictions.

Strong ego-strength describes the person who first accepts whatever is as existing has raised his or her frustration tolerance, then looks at it and explores it with a view of dealing with it, coping and mastering. With strong ego-strength we do not personalize things that happen in the world or what others say. We notice and we access the necessary resources to deal with it. The strong our ego-strength grows, the more of a sense of self we develop and the greater our a sense of skills and resources, and ability to handle whatever comes.

This use of “ego” differs from how we use when we say, “He has his ego involved” in this or that. Then we are speaking about a person’s self-definition, pride, and reputation. Typically this indicates a weak ego strength and the need to boaster it up by fighting, defending, and being defensive. There’s a paradox here. The stronger our ego, the less our “ego” is involved, or “on the line” with what we do. Strengthening our ego enables us to sit our “ego” aside and to engage the world as we explore what is out there and what opportunities it offers.

How to Strengthen Your Ego-Strength

How do we go about strengthening our ego?
What patterns and processes allow us to do this?
What frames, beliefs, values, expectations, etc. support this?

The following are offered as beginning guidelines—processes which we have incorporated in our basic Meta-States training, Accessing Personal Genius. If you have experienced that training, then you know these processes and can keep refreshing the meta-stating patterns until you not only strengthen your ego-strength, but actually super-charge it. This will empower you to face life on life’s terms and to develop a sense of self-efficacy in the face of changing times. It will enrich your powers of optimism, resilience, and creativity.

1st Acceptance

First and foremost, we strengthen our ego-strength by meta-stating ourselves with acceptance. Access the state of acceptance and apply that feeling to your “self.” Think of something small and simple that you simply accept. You could get yourself worked up about it, even furious and frustrated, but you have learned to just go along and accept it. It could be something like the rain, the traffic, changing the baby’s diaper, taking out the garbage, etc. Think small and simple.

What is that like when you are accepting something? Feel that and reflexively turn that feeling back onto yourself—your sense of self, life, the cards that life has dealt you, when and where you were born, your aptitudes and lack of aptitudes, etc. As you do this, you’ll experience a quiet and tender feeling, one that may not necessarily feel very positive. It’s just a feeling of welcoming something into your life but not with any particular thrill or liking. To do that is to experience appreciation. Yet acceptance also is not resignation or condoning. Acceptance is just welcoming something into your world without any negative fanfare.

In this, acceptance can be a truly magical state. In it, we simply acknowledge the world for what it is regardless of our likes or dislikes. We simply acknowledge the constraints that exist and that we have to deal with.

2nd Adjusting Expectancies

Second, look at your self-expectancies and expectancies of others, the world, work, etc. and adjust them so that you have a fairly accurate map about what is, how things work, and what you can legitimately expect. What have you mapped about yourself, people, relationships, fairness, life, etc.? Every unrealistic expectation sets us up for a cognitive and semantic jar and for a possible disappointment. If it is unrealistic, then we are trying to navigate and work in a world that is ultimately an illusion of the mind. A more effective approach is to set out to create a good and useful map that will enable us to go and experience what we desire.

This explains how learning and developing greater understandings about things increases ego-strength. Knowing what is, how things work, the rules and principles of people, relationships, careers, etc. gives us the ability to adjust our thinking-and-emoting to such and this increases our ego-strength. It takes the surprise and shock out of being caught up short. It raises our level of frustration tolerance.

3rd Stepping into Our Power Zone

Weak and strong ego-strength is related to our sense of personal power or the lack thereof. We increase ego-strength when we accept our personal powers or responses of thinking, emoting, speaking, and behaving, meta-state them with a frame of ownership and then by welcoming and practicing the use of our powers, step more and more into our power zone. This increases our self-efficacy, activity, proactivity, etc. The more resourcefulness we have, the more willing and able we are to face reality and to master our world.

4th Meta-Stating Flexibility

A fourth process for strengthening ego-strength involves replacing rigidity and closedness of mind with flexibility, willingness to accept change, and an openness to the flux and flow of life. In weak ego-strength we strongly feel a sense of insecurity. Then that we don’t want things to change we want things to stay the same. As we develop more personal security, we are more open to change and to adapting and to using our resources. Openness to change, which supports personal flexibility, enables us to face the world and our future with an optimistic attitude. Then, if things change, we feel fine because our security lies in ourselves and in our strength of ego to figure things out.

5th Optimistic Explanatory Style

A fifth thing that increases the strength of our ego to face reality is the ability and attitude of interpreting things in such a way that we put a positive spin on things. We call this attitude, optimism. It stands in contrast to pessimism.

Martin Selgiman identified both the pessimistic and optimistic explanatory styles in his research with laboratory animals and then with humans. The pessimistic style consists of three P’s: personal, pervasive, and permanent. We take a “bad” thing, an unpleasant or unfortunate event and make it about ourselves (personal), about everything in our lives (pervasive) and about forever (permanent) and that’s a formula for pessimism and clinical depression.

Conversely, when we index the specifics of an event, we contain the “evil” or “badness” because then it is about the event and not us (non-personal), it is here in this situation and context (non-pervasive), and it is today (non-permanent). This frames the negative event so that it doesn’t contaminate us with the “evil” and infiltrate our mind so that’s all we can see and feel. It enables us to then think about other things, what we truly are and what we care about, what we can do and how we can take positive action to make a difference. This begins to create the attitude of optimism as it operates from a position of strength, confidence, possibilities, and taking pleasure in what is going right.

It is in this way that we develop sufficient ego-strength to face reality and to not be overwhelmed by frustration, disappointment, hurt, etc. We do what we can with what we have and we enjoy the process everyday.

6th Consciously raising our Frustration and Stress Tolerance Level

If you look around the human situation at all the things that can and does trigger “stress” in people or that frustrates them and make a list—you will eventually make a list of everything. And the very things that frustrate the hell out of some people thrill and excite others. What one experiences as a stressor, another enjoys as excitement. In this, both stress and frustration are in the eye of the beholder.

The strength of your self develops by framing things in such a way that we endow it with empowering meanings. Positive framing and reframing then allows us to take a new view of things which then effects how we actually feel about things. In this way, framing and reframing things can enhance our ego-strength to face, cope with, and even master the challenges of life. We often do this by developing the kinds of frames of mind that allow us to develop the insights, distinctions, and skills so that what would frustrate others gives us opportunities for development.

Summary

• Ego-strength as a meta-state in the matrix of your Self is also a meta-program and so governs how you sort for things and perceive information as you move through the world. As a rich and complex set of embedded frames, your ego-strength plays a significant role in the quality of your life, in your skills for making a difference, and in your ability to effectively face reality.
• Ego-strength can also be strengthened. We can develop a strong and more robust attitude about life. We can grow out of the childish wishful thinking that’s fearful, insecure, and fragile and develop a mind-set about life on its own terms that gives us a robust motivation and an optimistic attitude that allows us to sign up for life.

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. is a psychologist turned Neuro-Semantist trainer, researcher, and modeler. He lives in the Rocky Mountains of beautiful Colorado and is author of over 30 books.

References:

Hall, L. Michael; Bodenhamer, Bob G. (1997). Figuring Out People: Design Engineering with Meta-Programs. Wales, UK: Crown House Publications.

Hall, L. Michael (1999). The Secrets of Personal Mastery. Wales, UK: Crown House Publications.

What greater integrity and congruence is there than applying one’s own principles, patterns, and models to oneself? Is there a greater integrity? Since I can’t think of one, let’s play with this idea and see where it takes us.

• Given the NLP and NS models, how do these models help us to sell, market, and influence?
• Starting from the assumptions built into the very structure of NLP and Meta-States, what does this imply for the art of persuasion?
• How does selling like a neuro-semanticist differ from any other kind of selling?

Recently, I have been thinking about how specifically Neuro-Semantics (NS) and the Meta-States model extends the modeling of “sales” that NLP began. These thoughts began one day when I received a phone call.

“You wrote that book review of Bandler’s ‘Persuasion Engineering,’ didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you have been taking NLP further with Meta-States, haven’t you?”

“Yes, Meta-States has been expanding NLP.”

“Well, I really liked the work you did in Selling Excellence, but I’ve been wondering, what’s next? And what’s new in Neuro-Semantics about selling that takes selling even further?”

At first the question caught me a bit off guard, I did suggest some of the following, but what follows is more coherent than what I said that day.

UP on Selling

If NLP leads us to understand that there’s a structure to every experience, NS points us upward to the higher levels of that structure– and particular to the higher contextual meanings. Starting with NLP, we think in terms of the question: “Where does a brain-body go in response to this or that trigger?” Using the flow chart of human responsiveness (e.g., the TOTE model), we become aware that–

• In selling, we send brains places.
• In persuading, we evoke memories and imaginations which induce states.
• In influencing, we think strategically about the best states to evoke, the states that will bring out the person’s desire, motivation, decision making strategy, etc.

NS takes us further. We not only think about responsiveness to outside triggers, we think about a given person, or typical group of people, and the internal contexts of meanings that they bring with them. So we move upward. We move up to their frames of reference and their frames of meaning.

• Now selling, as a neuro-semanticist, also becomes an exploration, awareness, and use of the person’s matrix of meaning frames.
• What cultural or environmental values and beliefs does the person use as reference points?
• What higher frames does the person rely on for meaning, feeling convinced, influenced to act, etc.?

In other words, we begin to think and analyze things in terms of the current and desired frame games.

• What frame game, or games, is the person currently playing?
• What’s the agenda, motivation, and intention of the game?
• What’s the payoff, set-up, and point system of the game?
• How useful, practical, ecological, enhancing, resourceful, etc. is the game?
• How ready is the person to play a new and different game?
• What new frame game could we offer?
• How would we go about introducing, inducing, and sitting up the new frame game?

Being Up on Selling Means we Sell Higher Meanings

Knowing that the higher frame governs and that when a higher frame is set, it will operate as an attractor in a self-organizing system, this describes one of the key leverage points for a neuro-semanticist.

1) What higher frame would this particular person need in order to step out of the old games and into the magic and power of a new frame?

2) What higher, but frustrated intention does the person already have that would offer a perfect alignment and immediately “lock right into” his or her matrix of frames?

3) How much aversion and how much attraction does the person need in order to make the transition and in what proportions?

4) What other higher frames would the person find most appealing and attractive?

5) Does the person respond best to overt (explicit) or covert (implicit) communications?

Using these questions begins the influence process. In Meta-States/ NS training we have numerous overt and explicit patterns that work with these processes. Translating them into conversational processes that you can use in everyday talk, memos, reports, etc. enable us to use them covertly.

For the first question, think “The Miracle/ Magic Pattern,” the “Pretend Frame,” and the “Presupposition Frame.” What would have to be true for the person, what would have to exist in the person’s world, orientation, way of thinking, in order for him or her to just step into the new frame and let it become a transformative frame of mind that would change everything?

For the second question, think about the Intention Elicitation Pattern, Core Transformation, Meta-States Alignment Pattern, etc. Here look for a positive intention at its highest levels, an intention that’s been frustrated by inadequate behavioral expressions. The person wants to, but doesn’t know how. Perhaps the person doesn’t have a clue about the how. This person is primed and ready for the how. Selling to this person means what?

1) Elicit the intention of intention, the outcome of outcome, the person’s highest “core” state and …

2) Point them to the strategy that articulates the “how.”

For the third and fourth questions, think “Toward” and “Away From” Meta-Programs, the Propulsion System Pattern, and the Values Elicitation pattern. Know what kind of things the person values and treats important and the proportion of attractions and aversions, gives us clue as to how to interface these facets of the benefits that we’re selling.

“And as you no longer feel controlled and dominated by the manipulations of other people, you feel yourself turning toward a future full of choice and personal power, knowing that as you own your own Power Zone of responses, you’re totally free to make up your own mind; and wouldn’t that be a relief from the hassles that you have put up with?”

For the fifth question, think about the Frame Game Analysis distinction between explicit and implicit and the Meta-Program of Strong-Will or Compliant. Speak to those who use the identification frame of “will” with indirection patterns: story, metaphor, implication, etc. Speak to the more compliant, those who “can be told things,” with explanation.

Thinking Neuro-Semantically

When we move upward into the higher levels of mind, into the way we keep layering and texturing our mind with additional references and meanings, we begin to appreciate the wondrous mystery of the mind, its richness, and how the people we speak with and seek to influence never just have “one thought” about anything. They have multiple thoughts and then multilevel thoughts about those thoughts. Recognizing this begins the process of thinking neuro-semantically.

• What meaning does the person give to this?
• What meaning does the person give to that meaning?

Next, we begin to question and explore that richness. What are the qualities of the person’s thinking and feeling? Does the person want to buy?

“Great!” says the regular salesperson and jumps right in.

But not the neuro-semanticist. It’s not enough to know that a person wants to buy. Suppose the person wants to buy and fears wanting to buy? Or, distrusts the person trying to sell him even though he wants to buy? Have you ever been in that position? Suppose a person wants to buy and yet at the same time fears being taken advantage of, feels a lack of confidence that this is the right investment, etc.?

Recognizing that mind is generally richly textured like this, the neuro-semanticist sells best by asking questions–magical questions. He or she will ask the magical questions that allows the buyer to develop more clarity, conviction, trust, awareness, choice, etc. And doing that facilitates the buyers who truly need and want the product or service to recognize it and sell him or herself. It’s a different model. It may use emotional pressure at a later point when the person needs and wants to feel more attracted to valued choices or averted from dis-valued choices, but it does not use pressure to take that responsibility away from the person. This slower, and much more respectful, approach build relationship and long term rapport.

The neuro-semanticist more fully respects the matrix of frames that govern and structure the meanings– emotions that people experience. Then, as we work with the consciousness of our customers and clients, we focus on framing in all of its forms: deframing, reframing, outframing, post-framing, pre-framing.