The role of Strategies and Meta-Programs in everyday life, an example.

NLP is an awesome tool for creating lasting change and being more effective with yourself and others. Anyone with intermediaty experience who has been to a few trainings or read a couple of books could be forgiven in assuming that all that there is to NLP can be summed up in States, Anchoring, Meta Model, Sub-modalities, and Milton model to name a few .. but the core of NLP runs much deeper. Strategies and Meta-Programs in my experience are two key areas within NLP that people often overlook but can multiply your effectiveness with any of the other of the NLP models.

Strategies and Meta-Programs in Action, an Example:

For example, I have a good friend who had a very good "worry machine" and who could at the drop of a hat start worrying about all kinds of unimportant things. He had a very good strategy for making himself feel bad, on que about almost anything. Twelve months into a new job and he would regularly worry about being fired, even though he was really very good. And his worry pattern didn't just confine itself to the job it had generalised to other areas of his life aswell.

Back then as a new person to NLP when I first realised he had this pattern I would try to allay his fears but no matter how many times I would identify a counter example, seed a new belief or context where what he said wasn't relevant he would .. within a few minutes start worrying about it again. It was almost like the were little worrying men cranking away in his mind saying "I must feel bad". That got me thinking, "I did all the slight of mouth stuff, I pattern interrupted his thought processes but why didn't it stick?" That lead me to another question which was what structures are operating that make this response the right thing to do? and how do I change it?" … which lead me to an interesting discovery for my learning of NLP.

The answer was not in doing more language patterns, or fancy change techniques.

An important realisation:

The catalyst for change was to be found in utilizing his strategy and tuning into his meta-programs. So next time I heard him beginning to worry, I did the complete opposite .. I would at first respond by giving him reasons and counter reasons for why what he was saying just wasn't so and using cause-effect language patterns and presuppositions so that I could get him to the point where he would begin to feel calm about his worry as relaxed and breathed out .. ahhhh

and then rather than wait for his program to kick in I would playfully begin to antagonise him. I would ask .. "you know what, thinking about it now .. I'm not quite so sure that X is the right thing to do. I mean what if I'm wrong?" and then pause. And suddenly he began to feel uneasy again. His brow would begin to furrow and his breathing change and as he began to worry I would really lay the worry on him .. I would go into great sensory rich detail about whatever he was worrying by saying "actually, you think this is bad, what if this or what if that happened?" (basically I ran his own worry strategy back on himself and picked up it's tempo).

But after feeling bad, then good and then much worse than before, something interesting would happen, he would begin to polarise (meta program) his responses (just like he used to me when I would give reasons why it wasn't going to happen) and he would suddenly be giving me justification and his own self evaluated reasons as to why all the things I was saying would not happen. It was comical, and I had to work hard not to burst out laughing inside.

And then in that moment I would wink and smile..

And his state would be interrupted and broken and he knew that I was playing with him. He would friendly swear at me and then I would begin again and chid him playfully, he'd polarise to my response and then after about sixty second of this .. boom. He had enough.

His worrying stopped. He began to recognise the ridiculousness of his former pattern and begin to laugh.

What before could be entire evenings, days or episodes of worry would stop in a few minutes flat. Without paying attention to his strategy and meta-programs I could of been bombarding him with every NLP language pattern and change technique and most likely nothing would of differed. The program would of continued to run.

Bedding it in:

Of course I had to run through this new strategy with him until he own consciousness got the idea that:

1. He could influence and control his worrying behaviours

and

2. It wasn't worth worring about unimportant things unless they affect the immediate safety of your life.

And soon he found himself worrying less and less and also found himself focusing on the pleasurable things in life more and more.

Strategies and meta-programs are operating for you all the time. It is worth learning how to ellict, change and leverage them. The operate outside our conscious awareness most of the time but play an important role.

A slight adjustment in just the right place can make a massive difference for your own or another persons life. Meta-programs also play a key role in how we sort and attend to things in the world and are the key to the kingdom, particulary when influencing others.

Making it Practical:

Go out and pay attention for strategies in action (by the way, in order to do this you will be running your own strategies), noticing how people have specific ways of ordering and sequencing their representations for achieving a particular outcome. Notice how effective or not effective they are and if you can codify them for use at a later time.

For example to make a phone call, may use a strategy similar to below. I have tried to use the standard NLP notation (although somewhat limited by the word press editing) as must as posisble.

Strategy for making a telephone call:

Ai, Vi(r) ->m -> Ai(r )-> m -> Ve/Vr -> Ki+ -> Ae

Which translates into:

Auditory Internal: You may hear yourself say "I need to ring John"

Visual Internal Remembered: See a picture of John's face

(Note: I have used the comma in this instance to indicate these two representations happen simultaneously)

Movement: Pick up the phone

Auditory internal remembered: Hear yourself call out the telephone number

Movement: Strike the keys on the telephone

Visual External/Internal: Compare the external visual images of the numbers you've dialed against the internal images of the telephone number

Kinesthetic internal (positive) : Get a good/congruent feeling that you have dialed correctly

Auditory External: Hear the "ring, ring" of the call

As you may see, there are at least seven distinct steps the above strategy goes through. And we didn't cover the meta programs involved in the strategy but you can see how amazing the human body is that we can handle so many processes all within a very short time frame, in part because we have habituated the pattern to be outside our conscious awareness.

So if you haven't yet done so, get out there and become curious to spot strategies and meta-programs (start off with attending to the toward/away from, sort by self vs. sort by others, internal vs. external frame of reference) in action and see what cool things you can notice and then use in applying NLP in your life.

If you spot anything good, or have a question, feel free to post it here.