To paraphrase Einstein, having imagination is more important than having knowledge, because knowledge boxes you into the realm of the known whereas imagination allows you to discover and create new solutions. So use your imagination for some lateral thinking to come up with novel solutions to conflicts.
Using Words to Entrance
You explore the power of language – as we share with you the very latest techniques of the world’s best communicators. You discover that the language you use doesn’t just describe your experience, but also has the power to create it. If you want to know how to use stories to good effect or send an audience into a trance (and not into a deep sleep!), you find out how to do that, too.
We also provide a chapter dedicated to the most powerful questions you can ask to help you get straight to the heart of an issue without prejudicing the result for the person you’re speaking to.
Getting to the Heart of the Matter:
The Meta Model
In This Chapter
▶ Reaching beyond the words people say
▶ Recognising how words can limit you
▶ Finding out about the Meta Model
Have you ever invited someone, even yourself, to: ‘Say what you mean and mean what you say?’ If only speech was that easy.
You use words all the time as important tools to convey your thoughts and ideas – to explain and share your experiences with others. In Chapter 7, we explain that in any face-to-face communication, people take just part of the meaning from the words that come out of your mouth. Your body language – all those movements and gestures – and the tone of your voice transmit the rest.
One of the NLP presuppositions to which you’re introduced in Chapter 2 is that ‘the map is not the territory’. This statement explains that the model that you have in your head of the world around you isn’t the actual world, but just a representation you make of it. The filters of your experience and your language influence this representation of the world.
Words offer just a model, a symbol of your experience; they can never fully describe the whole picture. Think of an iceberg – the tip above the surface is like the words you say. NLP says that this tip is the surface structure of language. Beneath the surface lies the rest of the iceberg – the home of your whole experience – which NLP calls the deep structure: the way you represent the world internally, in your mind.
This chapter takes you from the surface structure and leads you into the deep structure so that you can get beyond the vague words of everyday speech to be more specific about what you mean. You meet the incredibly useful Meta Model, one of NLP’s most important revelations, which clarifies the meaning of what people say. Remember that people never give a complete description of the entire thought process that lies beneath their words; if they did, they’d never finish speaking. The Meta Model is a tool that allows you to get closer access to people’s experience that they code through speech.
Gathering Specific Information with the Meta Model
Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the co-creators of NLP, discovered that when people speak, three key processes happen naturally, which they labelled deletion, generalisation, and distortion. These processes enable people to explain their experiences in words without going into long-winded details and boring everyone to death.
These processes happen all the time in normal everyday encounters. People delete information by not giving the whole story, make generalisations by extrapolating from one experience to another, and distort reality by letting
It’s been a hard day’s work
Supper table talk in Kate’s family often goes as follows: ‘So, has it been a hard day’s work today?’ In recounting the highlights of the day, the conversation invariably centres on what constitutes a hard day’s work. Does a 12-hour- long stint in a warm, comfortable office sur- rounded by the latest labour-saving computers and coffee-making devices qualify?
The question stemmed from watching a TV doc- umentary of motorway maintenance workers who shift traffic cones in the dead of night. The family agreed that this really was hard work in comparison with the reality of a hard day for us, as well as most of our friends and co-workers.
What’s a hard day for you? In just one sen- tence, you can conjure up a wealth of different
meanings. The qualities of the work experience when you’re running a home or an office are very different in comparison with the physical reality of, say, a fire-fighter tackling blazes or a builder constructing houses and exposed to the elements in all weathers.
A statement such as ‘a hard day’s work’ can be interpreted in numerous different ways.
To get to any one speaker’s precise meaning requires access to more information – the facts that have been left out. As you read this chap- ter, you can discover how to gain easy access to relevant information to stop you jumping to the wrong assumptions about somebody else’s experience.
Figure 15-1 illustrates the NLP model of how you experience the real world through your senses – visual (pictures), auditory (sounds), kinaesthetic (touch and feelings), olfactory (smell), and gustatory (taste). You filter or check your perception of reality against what you already know through the processes of deletion, generalisation, and distortion. In this way, you create your personal map or mental model of the real world.
By watching and analysing two different, highly experienced therapists – at work talking to their clients – Bandler and Grinder came up with the NLP Meta Model as a way to explain the link between language and experience.
Bandler and Grinder were interested in finding the rules that determine how humans use language in order to help others develop similar skills. They were influenced by their own work in the field of linguistics, especially of transformational grammar (which seeks to explain the relationship between the deep structure of experience and the surface structure of language), and set out ideas on how people describe their experiences in language. They were also strongly influenced by modelling two exceptional therapists with outstanding communication skills – Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls – and they published the results in 1975 in The Structure of Magic.
Figure 15-1:
The NLP model of experi- encing the world around you.
Map Deletion
Generalisation Distortion
Visual
Auditory
Gustatory Filters
Olfactory
Kinaesthetic
Although the early work came from the field of psychotherapy – because they wanted to enrich the skills of ‘people helpers’ – the models shed light equally well for non-professionals in ordinary situations, where they’re simply talking with friends, family, and colleagues.
The Meta Model offers a series of questions that enable you to overcome the deletions, generalisations, and distortions that people make. Most likely, you’re going to recognise some of the questions, because they’re the ones you naturally ask when you want to clarify meaning. But perhaps you haven’t thought about them consciously before. Asked in a gentle way and with rap- port, these questions let you gather more information to define a clearer picture of what’s really meant. By working with this model you can reconnect with the experiences that get lost in language.
Table 15-1 summarises some of the different ways in which you can delete, generalise, and distort an experience through the language you adopt. Don’t worry about the names of the NLP patterns just yet; the important part is that you begin to tune your ears into what people say. As you discover how to spot the main Meta Model patterns that you prefer, and that others favour too, you’re in a great position to respond appropriately. We also offer in Table 15-1 some suggestions of what to say when you respond, in order to gather the missing information that helps you to be sure of understanding what the other person really means.
Table 15-1 Meta Model Patterns
NLP Meta Model Patterns
Examples of Patterns You May Hear
Questions to Help Gather Information or Expand the Other Person’s Viewpoint Deletion
Simple deletion I’ve been out Help!
Where specifically have you been?
What do you want help with?
Unspecified verbs She annoyed me How specifically did she annoy you?
Comparisons She’s better than I am Better at what than you?
Judgements You’re wrong Who says so and what
are the facts?
Nominalisations Our relationship isn’t working
Change is easy
How do we not relate to each other?
Changing what is easy?
NLP Meta Model Patterns
Examples of Patterns You May Hear
Questions to Help Gather Information or Expand the Other Person’s Viewpoint Generalisation
Modal operators of possibility
I can’t . . . it’s not possible
What stops you? Is that true?
Modal operators of necessity
We have to do this . . . we should, ought to
What would happen if we didn’t? Who says we should?
Universal quantifiers He never thinks about my feelings
We always do it this way
Never, ever?
Every single time? What would happen if we did it differently?
Distortion
Complex equivalence With a name like that, he must be popular
How does having this name mean that he’s popular?
Mind reading You’re going to love this How do you know that?
Who says?
Cause and effect His voice makes me angry
I made her feel awful
How does his voice make you angry?
How exactly did you do that?
Deletion – you’re so vague
When you’re listening, you naturally ignore many extra sounds, saving you the effort of processing every single word. When you speak, you econo- mise on all the details that you could share. This practice is called deletion, because details have been removed. Figure 15-2 shows some everyday exam- ples of deletion.
Figure 15-2:
The language of deletion.
‘You were good.’
‘This is important.’
‘Just do it!’
‘I‘m scared.’
‘I don’t know.’
Your central nervous system is being fed millions of pieces of information every second. If you needed consciously to evaluate every bit of this informa- tion, imagine the time and energy you’d need; it would be an impossible task with full information overload!
To help you operate at peak efficiency, deletion delivers a valuable critical screening mechanism. Deletion is selective attention. Deletions in your lan- guage encourage you to fill in the gaps – to imagine information to complete what’s missing. If someone says to you ‘I bought a new car,’ you then begin to guess more information. If that person doesn’t tell you what type of car, you then create your own ideas about the make, colour, and age, based on what you’ve already decided about its use and the person’s preferences. So if you think that the person’s a lively, fun-loving character, you may decide that they bought a sports car. If you think they’re safe and cautious, you may decide that they bought a conventional and practical car.
The downside of deletion is that it can restrict and limit your thinking and understanding. For example – you can develop the habit of deleting certain information and signals from others. Compliments and criticism are the clas- sic example. Some people are experts at deleting compliments they receive and noticing only the criticism. So, too, they ignore success and notice only failure. If this habit rings a bell for you, set about breaking it now.
In a coaching session, Meera confessed to her coach that ‘I’m extremely lazy.’
This statement intrigued her coach who had heard about Meera’s exhausting workload as a partner in a City law firm. Her coach asked her to keep a diary of ‘how specifically she was lazy’ for a whole week. At the end of the week, when they evaluated the diary together, Meera spotted that the expectations she placed on herself were sky high and leading to almost certain burn-out.
What she saw as ‘laziness’ was in fact the essential recovery time that she gave herself, and she needed to reframe her limited perception to recognise its value, just as a high-performing athlete needs time off the sports track to boost energy.
To gather deleted information, you can ask these useful questions:
✓ Who? What? When? Where? How?
✓ What precisely?
✓ What exactly?
Notice that ‘why?’ doesn’t figure in this list of questions. That’s because ‘why’
forces people to question their personal judgement and purpose rather than recover lost information.
Generalisation – beware the always, musts, and shoulds
Think about when young children get on a two-wheeled bike for the first time. They pay tremendous attention to keeping their balance and steering.
Perhaps they need stabilisers until they master the skill. Yet, some weeks or months later, they’re competent and don’t have to relearn each time they cycle away – because they generalise from one experience to the next.
Your ability to generalise from past experiences is an important skill that saves huge amounts of time and energy in learning about the world. These generalised experiences are represented by words. Think of the word ‘chair’.
You know what one’s like: you’ve sat on many and seen different types. As a child, you discover that the word represents a particular chair. Then you make a generalisation. So the next time you see a chair, you’re able to name it. Now, whenever you see a chair, you understand its function.
Although vitally important to communication, the skill of generalisation can also limit your experience of options and differences in certain contexts.
When you have a bad experience, you may expect it to happen time and time again. A man who experiences a string of unhappy romantic encounters may conclude that ‘all women are a pain’ and decide that he’s never going to meet a woman with whom he can live happily.
Abstract nouns and the wheelbarrow test
The Meta Model is very useful in the way that it helps you clarify vague statements. If you say to someone ‘Love is so painful,’ that person needs more information to understand what’s going on in your life.
Abstract nouns – such as love, trust, honesty, relationship, change, fear, pain, obligation, responsibility, impression – are particularly difficult to respond to. NLP calls these words nominalisations – where a verb (for example, to love) has turned into a noun (love), which is hard to define in a way that everyone agrees on. In order to extract more meaning from your statement, another person needs to turn the noun back into a verb to help get more infor- mation and then reply. Therefore, that person’s
response to your statement above may be:
‘How specifically is the way you love someone so painful?’
Imagine a wheelbarrow. If you think of a noun and can picture it inside the wheelbarrow, it’s a concrete noun – a person, a flowerpot, an apple, a desk are all concrete examples.
Nominalisations are the nouns that don’t pass the wheelbarrow test. You can’t put love, fear, a relationship, or pain in your wheelbarrow!
Instead, when you rephrase these words as verbs, you put the action and responsibility back into the language. This helps people who speak in nominalisations to connect with their own experience, and thus find more options, rather than distancing themselves from it.
Romilla and Kate were driving from a meeting on the motorway one afternoon when Romilla ably demonstrated her natural ability to generalise and said:
‘Have you noticed how everyone’s driving my car?’ Surprised, Kate asked how that was possible. Romilla pointed out that she’d seen 15 new Minis in the last ten minutes. She’d fallen in love with this car and was deciding whether to buy one. All she was able to see were the possible colour combinations of this new car. Kate hadn’t noticed a single one of them – she wasn’t interested in a new car at all – just concentrating on getting through the traffic and out of London.
You can hear all sorts of generalisations about particular cultures or groups:
✓ ‘Americans talk loudly.’
✓ ‘British drink tea.’
✓ ‘Italians are wild drivers.’
✓ ‘Politicians can’t be trusted.’
✓ ‘Scots are prudent with money.’
✓ ‘Unmarried mothers are a drain on society.’
Such rigid, black-and-white thinking, which allows for no grey scale in between, creates unhelpful generalisations about other people and situa- tions: and it’s the breeding ground for discontent and prejudice. Stop and listen to what you say. When you hear the verbal clues about generalisations in words like ‘all’, ‘never’, ‘every’, ‘always’ (Figure 15-3 shows several exam- ples of everyday generalisations), challenge yourself. Is everyone like that? Do all clients do that? Must we always do it this way?
Figure 15-3:
The lan- guage of generali-
sation.
‘I can’t do it.’
‘You ought to
call him!’ ‘I mustn’t
say no.’
‘We never, ever go out.’
‘We always eat at 6 o’clock.’
When you hear someone (or yourself!) generalising, ask the following useful questions. They make you stop and think about whether you’re limiting your options unnecessarily and encourage you to take a broader perspective:
✓ Always? Never? Every?
✓ Just imagine you could, what then?
✓ So what happens if you do. . . ?
✓ What stops you?
Charlie was moaning to Kate that she was struggling to lose weight in spite of having a good basic diet and not liking sweet food. When Kate asked her friend Charlie about what she actually ate, she heard the following: ‘Well, I always eat porridge, I’ve had the same breakfast for 20 years; then I always have a jacket potato with cheese or beans at lunchtime; and for supper I always have soup and bread. I never eat after seven in the evening.’ Having heard the generali- sations in her language, Kate asked what would happen if she tried some dif- ferent foods, and Charlie went off to investigate fresh meal options. A month later, Charlie had lost more than three kilograms and had had fun exploring food aisles in the local supermarket.
To begin to explore your own thinking on what’s possible and impossible, here’s an easy exercise to do in just ten minutes. Beware – it may change your life forever!