I was just doing a little bit of reflection on the use of NLP skills. Many people who complete an NLP Practitioner certification don’t use the skills beyond their current presentation. A number of them also stop using NLP. I thought about it and I think I know why.
Many NLP practitioners only do what they are shown. They don’t have the capacity to go beyond that, because there’s little continuous training for them. For instance, submodalities is deemed as too technical to use. Also, the Meta Model is taught in, often, a very structured way that prevents learning by exploration. And a lot of people still think the Meta Model is just about asking questions, but seldom know what is the purpose behind it. That’s a little sad because I can say that a lot of my learning and achievement comes from knowing the Meta Model inside out.
The Meta Model is an approach that allows for greater clarity and precision in communication. Without the ability to be precise in our communication, there is a great tendency to assume that we know what someone else is thinking. Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls were powerful users of questions such that it created incisive insight for their clients. Likewise, the Meta Model can help you to become more precise and allow you to fully understand another person’s model of the world. This basically means that I can learn what’s going on in a person’s head by asking those questions to such detail that I can replicate that experience myself.
That’s “modelling”!
Purpose of Meta Model
- Information gathering
- Identifying limits of the client’s world
- Exploring and expanding the quality of meanings in life
The Meta Model comprises several challenge questions, which come in the form of a set of questions that you will find in a typical NLP practitioner certification training.
Generally, Meta Modelling is highly misunderstood. Remember that the Meta Model is not meant to persuade. Rather, it is meant to explore. Many practitioners, upon learning the Meta Model, unintentionally, end up interrogating their clients.
Problem Meta Modeling – you want clarity of the problem to make a decision or to come up with an intervention.
- Information gathering
- Identifying limits of the client’s world
- Exploring and expanding the quality of meanings and choices in life
Resource Meta Modeling – you want to assume people already have the resources to achieve what they need to achieve, so that they can find evidence of resourcefulness and move forward on any problem they encounter.
- Information gathering
- Identifying limits of the client’s world
- Matching the external meaning/map (what you need) to the inner meaning/map (what you have)
Meta Modeling Resourceful States
Find someone who has a resourceful state and model that state by asking questions within these broader categories:-
- How does this (emotion/state)process work?
- What internal structure governs the way this experience works?
- What does a person represent first, then second, then third, etc? What is the sequence of thinking?
- What other qualities and factors play a crucial role in the formula of this piece of human excellence?
