Meta Reflections 27 - 39.rtf

Meta Reflections #27 - #39

June 4, 2007 to August 27, 2007

L. Michael Hall
Meta Reflections #27
June 4, 2007

THE MYTH OF TOTAL RESPONSIBILITY

In the domain of personal development, self-actualization, modeling of excellence, creating success in living your visions and values, accepting, acknowledging, and owning your personal responses is fundamental and essential. Even the word responsibility tells the story. After all, the word contains ability at its core and so it speaks about an expression of personal power, that is capability, energy, and vitality. It speaks about the power-to-respond with our essential powers, our powers of mind, emotion, speech, and behavior.

In a way, this is core to Neuro-Semantics. On day one of almost every training, we begin with the power zone wherein we access our four core powers and meta-state them with awareness, ownership, acceptance, and appreciation. If we don’t do that explicitly (as in APG), we do that implicitly and by implication. The result is that this then enables people to build up more complex meta-states (gestalt experiences) such as proactivity, initiative, a sense of being in control of one’s life, self-efficacy, and much more. Part of that “much more” includes the abilities (powers) to learn, relate, receive feedback, flexibly adust, etc.

Given all of that, in the Neuro-Semantic approach we present responsibility as a high level metastate that creates the foundation for effectiveness and success. But, as I mentioned in the last reflection, there is a sick, toxic, dis-functional, and morbid “belief” abroad that distorts the idea of responsibility as it over-exaggerates it and ends up creating a new subtle way to induce existential guilt.

What is that toxic belief? It is this:

“Whatever comes into your life, you created. You attracted it into your life, and so you

are responsible for it.”

Now in Neuro-Semantics we talk about all of the hidden assumptions and presuppositions behind things as an FBI frame— a frame by implication. And everything we say and do contains FBIs. In fact, in the Meta-Coach training, we even provide training for Meta-Coaches to learn to listen for FBIs and to address them in their questioning. Why? Because when you do that, you can often get to the heart of mattes and find leverage points for change very quickly.

Given that, what are the FBIs of that toxic belief? Here are some:

1) The world you live in is totally and completely created by you with no influenced from

anyone or anything else.

2) You are all-powerful in how you create and attract everything.

3) There are no other influences, variables, factors in the world— just your thoughts!

4) Life is extremely simple and can be explained with a simplicity, namely, there is just

one cause for your reality—what you think.

5) There are no contexts that have any influence in your life— no social context, no

linguistic contexts, no family, racial, financial, political contexts that play any role in

your life.

6) If there’s any pain, distress, failure, problems, etc., you attracted it into your life by

your thoughts, therefore the problem is you.

7) If you had a miserable childhood and suffered various things in it, you are guilty of

inviting it into your life.

Now did I mention that this belief was sick? It is about as sick as the opposite belief that is equally as extreme and exaggerated: “I am a pawn of life, fate, genes, parents, culture, experiences, etc. I am not responsible for anything and I can do nothing to change things.”

The bottom line is that it is a myth that we are totally responsible or that we bring everything that is in our lives into it. It just ain’t so. We are just not that powerful. There are forces abroad that we have had nothing to do, forces that influence our lives and sometimes that create great problems and/or great opportunities. There are forces that operate as cultural, linguistic, political, and economic frames and realities that existed long before we came along and that will exist long after we’re gone.

I suppose that it would be nice in a way if life was so simple and if such over-simplistic explanations were true. We would not have to think so hard, search so far, or hold so many ambiguities in mind at the same time. But life isn’t so simple. And we do have to embrace multiple explanations at the same time. We have to share responsibilities as there are numerous people and events that create the responses that we have to deal with.

The total responsibility myth also ignores, downplays, or complete dismisses the factor of randomness or chance. It’s said in Ecclesiastes that “time and chance happens to them all,” that bread is not always to men of understanding, nor is the race always to the swiftest, nor is the battle always to the strongest, but time and chance happens to them all.” Of course, as meaning-makers we are so quick and so skilled at giving meaning even to random events. “It’s no mere coincidence, we were meant to meet.” “It’s not luck, I was destined to this.”

The worst thing about the total responsibility myth, of course, is the incurable guilt it induces. After all, you are responsible for everything that comes into your life. No one else has offered anything, influenced anything, created anything. In your world, they are nothing. They have no power. You have all power. This is the non-sense that the myth foster. And knowing that frees us from being seduced into it. Here’s to your healthy responsibility and empowerment!

L. Michael Hall
Meta Reflections #28 June 11, 2007

META-QUESTIONS
AND THE SKILL OF ITERATION

The Meta-States Model opened up the whole realm of questioning at meta-levels and so introduced the meta-questions. Given that this will be new to many people, I’ll offer a little description about meta-questions. For more about them, you can find a list of 26 meta-questions in Coaching Conversations, Meta-Coaching, Volume II. Or, better, in the new training manual for the Ultimate Self-Actualization workshop you can find a list of 70 meta-questions.

Actually, meta-questions have been around for centuries, even millenia. In NLP, there was one meta-question that caught the interest of Bandler and Grinder, but they didn’t know what to make of it. So they dismissed exploring what could have led to the Meta-States model much earlier. The meta-question was Virginia Satir’s question, “How do you feel about your feelings about what is happening?”

Here’s what they wrote in the first NLP book: “When you ask questions like, ‘How do you feel about that?’ (Whatever that might be) you are, in fact, asking your client for a fuller representation (than even Deep Structure) of your client’s experience of the world. And what you are doing by asking this particular question is asking for what you know is a necessary component of the client’s reference structure.” (The Structure of Magic, Vol. I, p. 160)

Actually, “How do you feel about that?” is a meta question which takes us upward to the next higher logical level inasmuch as it asks about thoughts-and-feelings at the next highest level. In terms of the Meta-States model, it elicits the person’s frame-of-reference and the conceptual or semantic state that governs the experience.

“The new question, which is characteristic of Satir’s work, is: ‘How do you feel about your feelings about what is happening?’ Consider this question in the light of the Meta-Model. This is essentially a request . . . for the client to say how he feels about his reference structure—his model of the world.” (p. 161)

But they all lost their way. First Virginia, then Richard and John. What got in their way from recognizing meta-states is that they blindly accepted the erroneous explanation that the “reference structure” elicited “was the client’s self-esteem.” (p. 161). Unquestioningly they bought into the equation “Referent structure” = “self-esteem.” So in spite of stumbling onto a meta-question in the work of Virginia Satir, Bandler and Grinder failed to see what it offered.

Now the power of meta-questions is that they allow us to enter into a person’s (including our own) matrix of frames of meaning, level upon level, and identify the full structure of a model of the world. Currently, we have identified 80 some terms and expressions that can be used as meta-questions. But the key is not how many terms or even what terms, the key to effectively using meta-questions is the iteration process.

Iteration refers to repeating a process. So with meta-questions the process is inviting a person to peak into the frames that hold an experience in place. And given that our frames are typically outside-of-conscious awareness, being unconscious of them gives them even more power to influence us. But by stepping back and holding our experience in place (or that of another) and simultaneously inquiring about it— we are able to make a meta-move to the conceptual structures that frame the experience.

If someone says that he feels upset and stressed by how another person is communicating, we ask, “So given that this seems to be the case, what do you believe about that?” Now typically the person will not answer that question but will speak about his or her feelings that derive from it or actions contemplated. “I feel putdown by him and that I never want to talk to him again!”

What we teach and model in Meta-Coaching, Self-Actualizing psychology, and Meta-States for handling this is to affirm the expression of the state and iterate again using another meta-term to find the frame that creates that state.

“Ah yes, you feel putdown and want to avoid talking. That’s what you feel and want to

do. Yet I’m wondering what that means to you? What do you think about him doing

that?”

Again, the person may go out with his or her responses instead of up to the structural frame. “I

just want to avoid him . .. Forever.”

“Great. Now we know what energies is being generated that comes out of you. Yet how

do you create that response? What is your frame that generates that? What are you

aware of about his communications? “Well, that it is disrespectful.”

“Great. So that’s what it means! Disrespect. That’s what you believe it means to you.

Good, now we’re getting somewhere. And let’s say that’s true, it means disrespect,

starting there — what does that mean to you? What do you think about that?”

Iteration —that’s the key. Keep repeating over and over meta-questions, dancing with the person round and round the experience, inviting, teasing, tempting, evoking, provoking, and exploring the frames that create and hold that experience in place. Once you can do that, you will become truly masterful in being able to enter and explore a matrix of meaning. And that, in turn, will give you the ability to tease out all of the layers as you go up the meaning ladder.

The key skills here are the following five: 1) the step back skill 2) the iteration of metaquestioning, 3) the flexibility in using multiple meta-questions, 4) the holding a previous level for yourself or another as you keep moving upward, and 5) distinguish state expressions from state frames.

L. Michael Hall
Meta Reflections #29
June 18, 2007

THE META-SECRET

The Secret of the Secret

There are secrets, and there is the Secret (as the Movie and the book), and then there is the Meta-
Secret. In several of the recent Meta-Reflections I’ve written about The Secret under the themes
of attraction and responsibility. Now it’s time to move to the secret of life, well, the secrets of
life Neuro-Semantically.
C Do you know the secret of life?
C Do you know the secrets of living life fully and humanly?

Similarly I also wrote an article for Actualise this month about this same subject (which you can
obtain by signing up for Actualise on the Neuro-Semantic website, the article is in the second
edition of Actualise June). I will not be repeating that here. Instead I’ll talk about one secret, the
highest secret of all, the Meta-Secret.

In the movie The Secret, the idea that we can and do attract things into our lives (which is
reasonable) was elevated to an absolute degree. It was pushed to an extreme and turned into an
inevitable, immutable, everlasting, absolute, without exception, “law” of the universe. Yet if
that was the case, we would be living in a nightmare universe. Anyone and everyone who
“thought” anything so it would dominate his or her mind would bring that into existence. And
that would last until someone else “thought” and “attracted” it into their lives; or someone
thought-attracted the opposite, etc.

It would be the kind of nightmare world Alice experienced in Wonderland where nothing
seemed to operate by the regular laws that we know and can count on. People and things and
animals grew and shrink and reality kept shifting and changing by mere thought. In that world
Alice couldn’t depend on things. Nothing was predictable, regular, systematic.

In the movie, The Secret, over-simplistic ideas combine with the simplistic thinking patterns
characteristic of children —either/or, black-and-white, single cause attributions, magical
thinking, ego-central perspective, over-optimistic thinking— to create a world of simple
answers. What happens in your life is totally and solely your responsibility. You attracted it.
You thought it. You believed it.

Ah, that things were so simple. But thankfully, they are not. Thankfully we live in a more complex world that calls for adult thinking. And this gives hint to the Meta-Secret. So what is the meta-secret? It is that to live and thrive and succeed in the real world (rather than the fantasy world of childish fantasy where we can attract anything into ur lives and in fact attract everything) we have to develop sufficient ego-strength to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Disappointed? Don’t be. Developing ego-strength is a tremendously exciting thing. It lies at the very heart of being human, of growing, of actualizing potentials, of developing resources, of modeling the excellence of those who are the best specimens of human kind. After all, ego-strength speaks about a very special kind of consciousness, a consciousness that can look at reality, stare at it directly, without falling apart, without caving in, and without the need for defense mechanisms, or escaping to fantasy. Ego-strength speaks of a strong sense of awareness that simply acknowledges what is so that it can then begin inventing processes and skills for coping effectively.

Ego-strength is also developed. No one is born with it. For that matter, no one is born with an ego, a sense of self, that also is developed. In fact, all of life is about developing the construct called self so that we become what we are in our deepest self in possibility. Developmentally, this is the heart of growth and development, we grow up to become the best version of ourselves, of unfolding the potentialities within, and of developing the maturity.

For the growth of ego-strength, we have to develop more and more of an awareness of ourselves, others, and our world. It is also required that we develop our coping and mastery skills so that when things happen, we have a way to figure things out, rigorously define and understand problems and invent solutions. Ego-strength is the first step in being able to be fit for life as it is, for figuring out the life you live and for shaping it so that you fulfill your highest potentials.

This is the secret of creating a life well-lived. Instead of operating with the magical-thinking and wishing of a child, we create a life well-lived by developing our inner strength and resilience. We mature our skills and competencies and we develop the ability to perceive reality as it is so that we can then take effective action.

After there is thought, meta-states that operate as attractor frames, high level intentions, then there is ego-strength. Without ego-strength we don’t face reality as it is and begin working to transform it so that we attract to us the values, visions, and dreams that we have within our minds. To think that mere thought, mere desire, mere wishing is all that’s required is to live in a fantasy world that will lead to disappointment and dis-illusionment. Mere thought is not sufficient. That’s just mind. We need the full mind-body system. We need the active ability to do something about our dreams and visions and values. Sure we need semantics —rich and exciting meanings, but we also need neurology as well. We need the full neuro-semantic system. This is where the self-actualization quadrants comes in, the meaning-performance axes.

L. Michael Hall
Meta Reflections #30
June 25, 2007

ON BEING A META-CONNOISSEUR

If a connoisseur is someone who knows and understands the details, techniques, and principles
of an art and has become competent to make critical distinctions about it, then it speaks about a
high level of expertise. At the primary level a person could be a connoisseur of wines, flowers,
literature, architecture, or ten-thousand other things.
C But what is a connoisseur at the meta-levels?
C Could a person become a meta-connoisseur?
C If so, what would that be like? What would that be about?

I began thinking about this last week in a training and then afterwards at dinner when we were
dealing with the multifaceted nature of mind and meaning within an experience. For several
years now we have used the metaphor of a diamond to speak about “logical levels.” That’s
because there are no “levels” in logical levels in the way steps up a pyramid are hierarchical
levels. In the “world of communication” or “mind” (Bateson), things are just not like that. It
just not that simple or that literal.

The metaphor of “levels” here (as a nominalization) refer to how we layer one thought or feeling
upon another. And, of course, we do not literally do this. This is just a way of talking. Just the
way we use language in an attempt to describe an experience to which we then use our self-
reflexive consciousness to think about it and to layer level upon level other thoughts and
feelings.

When we use the diamond metaphor, we can then step back and reflect upon the experience
using a wide-range of meta-terms. And each one then gives us another discriminating look at
this or that facet of the experience. It’s like turning the experience over and over in our mind
and gazing at its different facets as a connoisseur contemplates a fine painting, seeing it now in
terms of this organization and then in that.

That’s when it struck me! After you learn about the meta-levels and the meta-dimensions and
begin to use the more than 80 meta-terms, you become more like a meta-connoisseur enjoying
the multi-facetic nature of an experience, forever becoming more fascinated as you look at it
from this and then that perspective, all the while being able to make new and finer distinctions
about it.

If you consider what seems like such a simple state, the state of passionately joyful learning, what is this state in terms of “logical levels?” If you say, “Well, it’s a belief. You believe in passionately enjoying learning.” That’s one facet to that experience. But is it the only? Perhaps it is a value? Could you value learning in a passionate and joyful way? Yes, you could! But perhaps it is a decision. Could it be a decision? Again, yes, of course. What about an intention? An anticipation? A memory? An identity? A permission? An awareness? A feeling? And on and on we go covering all 80 of the meta-terms.

Yes it is all of those things— and here’s the profundity of it all, it is all of those things at the same time. So instead of one step after another step up a hierarchy of levels, it is more of a holarchy, a hologram where the slightest sliver of the image can enable us to see the whole image.

But you have to become a meta-connoisseur to recognize that and to have the expertise to work with it effectively. And this, in a manner of speaking is what you can learn from Meta-States, Meta-Coaching, and Neuro-Semantics. You learn to take an experience and whether it creates a hell or a heaven on your insides, that experience has structure, has form, has a hundred distinctive facets and you can stand in awe of it, stand in fascination of it, and then, as you turn it this way and that, witnessing and observing and appreciating its structure— you can identify its distinctive qualities. And that’s when magic happens.

That’s when you yourself enter into the diamond and are able to identify the critical leverage points for change, transformation, or enhancement. Again, language fails to do us justice in describing this. So I have to shift metaphors again. Now as with a dynamic and interactive system as we turn the experience over and over in our minds, our turning itself influences the system, changes the system. After all, we are part of the experience. If it is our experience, then the facets are facets of our inner world and of the experience is that of another, then we have entered into its inter-personal dimension and so we influence and change it.

Ah, becoming an informed and wise meta-connoisseur! Perhaps we should market Meta-States

that way. After all, it is about developing finer discriminations of taste — mental tastes.

“Fine minds developed from the richest ingredients, blended together to give you the

quality of mental and emotional states that you deserve! For those with discriminating

tastes for luxury —who have no tolerance for greasy fast food beliefs. If you want to live

in the penthouse of life with an expansive views of beauty, then choose the higher states

for the kind of interior decorating that makes your mind a place of beauty, tranquility,

and wealth.”

L. Michael Hall
Meta Reflections #31
July 2, 2007

META-HEROISM

At the primary level, a hero is the person who faces some danger or risk, who puts his own
welfare at risk in order to do something of a higher value. We consider someone a hero who
rushes into a burning building to save a child. We consider it heroism when people give their
time and energy to be a part of a rescue team, to hunt for a missing person, to lend their hands
and shoulders to rebuilding a community.

Of course, even at the primary level of response, these heroic activities involve meta-states for
courage, passion, love, commitment, etc. so that in spite of the fears, apprehensions, worries,
uncertainties, etc., the person faces the fear anyway and stands against his or her fears.
Typically it takes stronger and more emotionally intense meta-states to overcome the primary
level fear.

C If that’s the case with primary level heroism, what about meta-heroism?
C Is there such a thing as meta-heroism?
C If there is such a creature, what is an example of meta-heroism?
C What is the range of things that a person could be heroic about at a meta-level?

To move up to a level into meta-heroism this is where being heroic in attitude and spirit about
higher values and experiences of the mind and spirit. This means facing fears and dangers at
meta-levels. It refers to an attitude of being daring, audacious, and courageous regarding things
of our higher states.

What’s an example of this you ask? An example of meta-heroism is a person manifesting the
willing to engage in the struggle of self-understanding to know one self and to look directly at
weaknesses and character flaws. For a person to persist in this to gain self-knowledge, a higher
level courage is required. Meta-heroism is sometimes required to face oneself, to know that “I
am more than my problems.” In this it takes a meta-courage to refuse to let your circumstances
define you. Not infrequently I see a lot of meta-heroism when someone decides to face his or
her dragons— the shadow side of self.

More recently, as I’ve been working with the new Self-Actualization Models, I have seen people
demonstrate tremendous meta-heroism to their vision to self-actualize. Sometimes this is in the

realm of taking charge of their power to construct meaning, to resacralize life, to refuse the discounting skepticism of our age, and to take the courage to believe in goodness. Sometimes this occurs in the area of entering the Crucible of Change and letting old forms of meaning, old cultural rituals, dated emotions and impulses, etc. melt down and be de-constructed. Sometimes it is even in the zone of engagement. After all, it takes courage to let go of self, of ego, and to get lost in an engagement.

Courage is also required for gaining knowledge. It’s required in the struggle to understand things, to make sense of the world, and to overcome the challenges to solve problems. When many give up and take the easy road on the path of least resistance, those with the higher levels of courage continue the pursuit. They refuse to give in to pessimism or skepticism. As metaheros, they refuse to belief that defeat is permanent. They stubbornly refuse to stay down after a set back but instead resiliently bounce back. They pick up the pieces, learn from the experience, and give it another go.

It is meta-heroism to refuse to accept a temporary helplessness, to refuse to conform to society, to live off the opinions of others, to make a commitment and to follow through on one’s dreams and visions. In these ways, this is what Nathael Brandon calls “the heroism of consciousness.” Here it takes a higher meta-state of courage to accept our own consciousness and to be responsible for it.

After all, as semantic beings who live by our beliefs, concepts, and understandings at the higher meta-dimensions, it is a meta-heroism to choose high ones and then to translate them into reality. You engage in meta-heroic behavior when you use your determination to translate from mind into body. It’s easier to feel satisfied that you “know” something without transforming the knowledge into doing.

Other examples of meta-heroism include the courage to change your mind. Sometimes it takes a lot of courage and commitment to truth to admit to the need to change your mind and then to do it publically. We can view this also as the meta-courage to refuse to be a prisoner to yesterday’s knowledge and choices.

There is the heroism of acceptance, of just acknowledging what is, accepting the cards that life or God has dealt us, and to then ask the coping question. “Given that this is the case, what’s the best way to handle this?” A form of meta-heroism is to live in the moment. It’s easier to escape the here-and-now moment into the nostalgia of the past or the beauty of a different future. For us humans, living fully in this moment takes more focus, more awareness, more choice.

Ah, there are a great many areas within your higher state that you can rise up and demonstrate a meta-heroism. May your life this week be meta-heroic in the choices you make!

L. Michael Hall
Meta Reflections #32
July 9, 2007

THE LEASHING POWER OF EGO

One of the leashes that will limit you and that will prevent you from truly self-actualizing is the
leash of letting your ego get in the way. And what does that mean? It means letting your own
self-promotion, self-investments, and self-focus contaminate what you’re attempting to do.
Several years ago a line in The Wild Days of NLP from Terry McClintock stuck in my mind. He
was writing about Richard Bandler and John Grinder training together and said that “the stage
was not big enough for both of their egos.” It was at that time that I decided to create a “Getting
the Ego Out of the Way” pattern. And it is that same pattern that we continue to this day to run
in NSTT (Neuro-Semantic Trainers’ Training).

Why? Because if you have ever attended a training, seminar, key note speech or other
presentation by a speaker who’s “ego is in the way,” who has a massive ego then you know the
irritation, annoyance, and even the damage it can create. Suddenly instead of you as the
participant and delegate investing your time, energy, money, and mind into receiving something
of value that will enrich your life, when a trainer’s ego is in the way, the design of the training
shifts. Now you there to stand in awe of the speaker. Now it’s all about him. Now it’s all about
her. His or her success, genius, incredible life, gifts, skills, and experiences. And this, of course,
is the beginning of a guru and a cult.

A person like that, one with a big ego, however, involves a paradox. It is, in fact, paradoxical.
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