Now before we start this chapter, I would advise you to go and make a cup of tea and delete all memory of English class at school: we are going to be using some of the same terminology but in a very different way. We may well be talking about nouns and verbs and even lost performatives, but before you glaze over, this is going to be an eye-opening rather than eye-closing and zzz-inducing section, I promise. So if you’re ready, let’s delve into the deep sentence structure of the meta model and learn how to turn your life into HD.
Despite what you might have read elsewhere, the meta model is not a series of interrogation-type questions to force people to fill in the missing blanks in the way they describe their problems and the world around them – although it most certainly can be that if you come at it from the wrong place. We know better than that and so we are going to approach the meta model as a language tool for changing our internal map of the world. Remember we touched on this earlier, that we all have deletions, distortions and generalizations in the way we process the world around us. Well, when working with a client, I am much more interested in uncovering what they don’t say than what they do. What they do say is only really what’s left and what they have got used to including in the story every time they tell it.
What is much more interesting is all the information left out, and the analytical use of the meta model provides us with a number of problem-solving strategies.
We have problems, not because the world isn’t detailed enough, but because our internal maps aren’t detailed enough.
Remember, NLP is a hybrid, a collection of what works, the greatest hits if you like, from lots of other sources, and the meta model is firmly based in the work of Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American philosopher and scientist. He is best remembered for developing the theory of general semantics. In his work, Korzybski argued that human knowledge of the world is limited by both the human nervous system and by the structure of the language we commonly use.
Korzybski thought that people do not have access to direct knowledge of reality; rather, they have access to perceptions and to a set of beliefs that human society has confused with direct knowledge of reality. Korzybski is remembered as the original author of the phrase, ‘The map is not the territory.’
This model is one of the foundations of NLP as we know it. Our nervous system deletes and distorts whole portions of reality in order to make the world manageable and easier to process and becomes the source code for our behaviour by creating the rules and programs for how we do things – all things.
We delete information to avoid being overwhelmed. But the downside is that we don’t see all the choices we have available. We naturally attend to our priorities and overlook other things that we might perceive to be unimportant or not relevant.
We know we also generalize information in order to summarize and pigeonhole what we have experienced. Dealing with categories is much less demanding than dealing with individual bits of information, which all need to be handled separately. Think of your computer; you have folders and within those folders you have subfolders and then files so that you do not need to have every single file on your desktop. So, for example, if we were to have a conversation about cats, we can talk about cats as a category rather than each individual cat that we have ever met or everything we know about cats or every picture of a cat we have ever seen. Instead, we can generalize ‘cats’ and have a meaningful conversation, even if it does at that level lack a lot of detail.
Last, of course, we distort information as, for instance, when we plan or visualize the future to make goals or even just plan what we are going to do next. Every time we plan anything we are distorting information, we are making up a not-yet-happened reality.
So rather than trying to process all the information we are ever exposed to on our desktop, we create internal maps of the world so that we are able to form a working model of the world around us and know how to behave in that world and in different situations, even those that we have never experienced before. We know how to do that because it’s a bit like some other situation we have generalized and stored in a file somewhere. I think you get the idea.
We use these three universal modelling processes to build our maps or models of the world. The terminology used here in NLP comes from the field of linguistics and may seem quite strange, but don’t let that worry you. I’m not going to test whether you know all the terms; the important thing is that they make sense, you can spot them in action and know what to do with them. So, let’s start with finding what’s missing.
As we have said previously but is definitely worth recapping, we pay attention to some parts of our experiences but not others. The millions of sights, sounds, smells and feelings in the external environment and our internal world would overwhelm us if we didn’t delete most of them, and this is described by Bandler and Grinder as follows:
‘Deletion is a process by which we selectively pay attention to certain dimensions of our experience and exclude others. Take, for example, the ability that people have to filter out or exclude all other sound in a room full of people talking in order to listen to one particular person’s voice… Deletion reduces the world to proportions, which we feel capable of handling. The reduction may be useful in some contexts and yet be the source of pain in others.’10
For instance, deleting enables us to talk on the phone in the middle of a crowded station. We tune in to what is important and tune out what we think is not. Just like hearing our name mentioned across the room at a party, it stands out because there is nothing we are more attuned to than our own name, but just as we are also deleting information here, we are doing exactly the same when we think of ourselves as having limited choices. We often overlook problem-solving solutions because we have deleted those options from our internal map.
So let’s get straight to it and learn some patterns to help you uncover what’s gone missing, give you more choices and recover what was there all along.
Unspecified nouns are nouns (a person/being or thing) where you don’t know who or what the speaker is specifically talking about. NLP calls this a ‘lack of referential index’. Don’t you just love these terms? So don’t worry about what it’s called, unless you want to impress/bore your friends, that is, and just work with it this way.
Not knowing who or what the person is talking about can result in misunderstanding. You (or they) tend to fill in the gaps with your (or their) own ideas. In other words, we don’t know so we guess/make up and then act on that guess.
Take, for example, the following phrase, ‘They say this is easy.’ You could make up ‘who’ says and ‘what’ is easy but we don’t know. The assumption in this context might be ‘people who know about NLP say this meta model stuff is easy’, but we don’t know that for sure do we? We have just wrapped that meaning around it to make sense in the context of learning about NLP. If we took an equally relevant context, it could be my thoughts on writing this book where ‘they’ becomes my publisher or even my friends and ‘this’ is the process of writing.
We often talk about this mythical group of people called ‘they’, for example:
Can you see how this kind of thinking can vastly limit us, when we respond to them rather than to real specific people? Some more examples:
Then there’s the other part of the deletion (the unspecified verb) in, ‘They say this is easy’ – What is easy?
‘I think they have lost the plot.’ – Who?
What plot have they lost, a real one or a metaphorical one?
‘It’s delightful’ – What is delightful?
In short, to recover the deletion you want to find out specifically who or what the person is talking about. This word ‘specifically’ gives us a great little short-cut cheat. Watch…
Questions to recover the missing information
Do you notice a pattern? Good, so that was easy. Now it’s time to move from the thing to what it is doing. In English class, we call that the ‘verb’.
Unspecified verbs are the doing parts in a sentence that don’t fully describe the action taking place. They don’t give enough information to let you know what is actually and accurately going on for them. People (which people?) usually fill in the gap with their own experience, a bit like mind-reading.
A simple way to test is this is to ask yourself: are you able to picture the events in someone’s statement? If you can’t, or the process is fuzzy, there is probably an unspecified verb (or noun) lurking in there somewhere.
Try this: ‘He hurt me’ – so I am trying on different things in my mind like…
‘My boss frustrates me.’
I’m sure you’re beginning to get a feel for this now. OK, so next up, and closely related to unspecified verbs, are what we call ‘nominalizations’.
Nominalizations are just unclear verbs that we twist into nouns. Delete then distort. Saying ‘I am desperate for success’ would be an example. Success is not a ‘thing’. We can’t put it in our pocket or carry it around in a bag yet we make it into a ‘thing’ to make sense of it – just the same as we do with love, happiness and peace. Of course, to some extent, every verb is unspecified. We would be overwhelmed if we specified everything. What will you gain by having more information on a particular verb? Again, we can use our quick cheat here to quickly recover the missing information by asking,
Simple deletions are just where part of the meaning is left out or lost. You can notice them in sentences with the and that and also when referring to missing descriptions (adjectives) – as in ‘Please give me the report.’
Assuming that you know which category or thing the person means can get you into trouble. You think you know what the boss wants when she says, ‘Get me a report on it straight away.’ You make it up to fill in the deletion gaps. We waste time creating something that quite probably doesn’t suit the purpose just because it makes sense in our mind.
Here are a few more:
‘I’m so angry.’
‘I broke my promise.’
Notice how specifically one little word can get us right back to all the information we need so very quickly.
Comparative deletions are actually hypnotic words with which we make a comparison but don’t explain what we are comparing. There is some kind of standard or judgement involved, but it isn’t made specifically clear.
When you accept a judgement without understanding what’s behind it, you can get stuck. Many self-esteem issues come from deciding someone is better or more worthy at a general level rather than questioning the standard. ‘Better at what specifically?’ If you don’t know what the standard is, how can you ever measure up to it?
Vague unquantified comparisons use words like better, best, harder, faster, stronger, improved, more, less, very, bigger, smaller, brighter, louder, healthier, superior, smarter, enhanced. You’ll find that marketers love these terms. They slip in a percentage together with the comparison so it sounds more credible. (Did you spot the deliberate deletion – more credible than what?)
‘Get 20 per cent better hair with new improved Hairie-poo.’
‘Burgers are bigger and better at Sam ‘n’ Ella’s café.’
‘Buy our double-strength adhesive!’
‘He is much more intelligent.’
Questions to recover comparative deletions:
Without wishing to sound like Donald Rumsfeld and his ‘unknown knowns’ and ‘known unknowns’, it really does help to be aware of what isn’t there. Or at least isn’t said. We use language very literally, but really paying attention not just to what is said but also what is assumed and what is deleted, I hope you can see that we can very quickly start to uncover how someone is creating their map and experience of the world. Understanding the meta model and challenging (gently) some of these distinctions not only helps to enrich our understanding, but also the other person’s too. It’s a little like turning the picture into HD so that you can see what’s always been there but just wasn’t obvious. The more you are aware, the more choice you have, simple as that.
Please don’t worry whatsoever about the terminology in this section. That’s not the important part. What is important is that you get, and begin to see and hear, what’s missing, every bit as much as what is there. Very often the key is in the unspoken word, in what’s being assumed when that assumption can be very limiting indeed. Assume nothing… Go find out.