THE STRATEGY FOR RESILIENCE






There are lots of variables that play into the experience of being resilient
as noted in the last post.  And also noted in that post was the question
about the strategy?  Which variable comes first, then second, and third?
Which variables are critical and which are secondary?  These are strategy
questions and they are the questions that enable us to create a model of
resilience.  After all there is a structure to resilience and if we want to
replicate the experience of healthy resilience in our lives and in the lifes
others, we need to know how to put the structure together.  It's like a
formula or a recipe.



When I first began modeling resilience, I worked from the assumption that it
was a primary state and like the NLP "Circle of Excellence" pattern, it was
a matter of putting all of the variables into the space of the experience,
step in, and "Whollo!" the experience of resilience!  But it does not work
that way.  No long-term complex state (gestalt states) work in that manner.
If they did, then we could do the following:




.             Imagine the state of being healthy, fit, and thin.  Identify
every variable that plays a role in that state of being, see, hear, and feel
it fully, step into it.  Presto!  You are now healthy, fit, and thin!



.             Imagine the state of being wealthy, financially independent,
with passive sources of income, able to budget, save, increase income, see
and seize opportunities. Imagine it fully in all of the visual, auditory,
and kinesthetic systems, step into it.  Aha!  You are now a millionaire and
have the mind of a millionaire and financially independent!

.             Do the same with leadership, with self-discipline, with
entrepreneurship, etc.



Obviously, and perhaps sadly, reality does not work that way.  "State
induction" in that manner does not, and cannot, create the experiences you
want.  When an experience is complex in that it has multiple layers of
states-about-states, belief frames that hold multiple belief-systems in
place, and that occur over a period of time (usually weeks and months, maybe
years), you cannot just "access" it so that it enters into your neurology.
These kinds of experiences have to be developed over a period of time as you
go through the steps and stages of its creation.  That is, first you take X
and Y actions and that creates the state of A, and then you repeat that for
the next action steps so you get into state B, and so forth.



For the experience of the resilient state there are several stages that
you'll have to go through.  Using the grief stages that Elizabeth
Kubler-Ross identified, we potentially have these:

.             The Set-Back Stage: An event occurs that knocks you down that
triggers a sense of loss, disruption, upset, block, etc.

.             The Shock Stage: You inwardly are shocked, surprised, in a
state of dis-belief, amazement, disillusioned, can't believe it, etc.

.             The Bargaining Stage: You look outside yourself to a
supernatural source (God) or to some other person (boss, wife, husband,
etc.) and beg that you will do anything to get your life back the way it
was.  You placate, beg, show remorse, confess faults and sins, etc.

.             The Anger Stage: You yell and scream, you threaten, you throw
a tantrum, you are as mad as hell, you curse, you blame.

.             The Depression Stage: You give up, press down your hopes,
expectations, and energies, you resign to your situation, you feel like a
victim, you stand in the rain and let it rain all over you.

.             The Acceptance Stage: You acknowledge what happened and face
it by thinking about what you can do that will move you forward.



I say that these are potential stages because it all depends.  The greater
your ego-strength in the first place, the less you will go through
Shock-Bargaining-Anger-and- Depression stages and move straight forward to
the Acceptance stage.  That is, the stronger you are inside yourself, the
more meaning and bounce you have inside you, the less you need to go through
those emotional roller-coaster stages.  The more reality-oriented you are,
then the less you will be shocked.  You will have anticipated potential
problems and take them in stride with a more philosophical attitude.  The
more realistic your expectations and the less demanding you are that
everything go your way, the less shock and anger.



All of that depends on the meanings you give to your maps about what's real
and what could happen.  The more childish you are, the less developed, then
the more cognitive distortions will govern your way of thinking and feeling:
you will personalize, awfulize, catastrophize, emotionalize,
over-generalize, demandingness with shoulds and musts, and so on.  This will
make you more susceptible to being "throw for a fall."



The emotional roller-coaster stages of upset make perfect sense depending on
how close or how far your expectations are to reality.  The more demands you
make on reality, the more you can be knocked-down.  The more unrealistic
your shoulds and musts, the more of an upset you'll experience and therefore
the more intense the emotional roller-coaster.



What stages you will go through therefore depends upon your preparation for
facing life on its terms, rather than your.  In terms of the stages that we
all go through, then the basic

.             The Set-Back Stage: Some event occurs that interferes with
your goals, hopes, and wants.  Now there is something blocking you that you
have to deal with.

.             The Emotional Roller-coaster Stage: The amount of emotional
distress that occurs as you deal with the upset.  This depends on how mature
and accurate your expectations, your meanings, and your resources for
handling the set-back.

.             The Coping Stage: The required skills for handling your basic
needs and getting through the set-back and putting your world back together.
What you need to know, understand, believe, and do so that you can get your
feet back on the ground.

.             The Mastering Stage: The ability to not merely get through it
and survive, but to use the set-back for learning, development, and
opportunities.  In the book, The Art of the Comeback, Donald Trump says,
"Take adversity and make it an asset." (p. 68).  Mastery involves rising
above the set-back to such a degree that you make good use of it- That's
what Viktor Frankl did with his experience of Hitler's Concentration Camp.

.             The Recovery Stage: You are now in the stage predicted by
Arnold Schwarzenegger's famous line, "I'll be back!  You're back!  You are
back in the swing of life- living with passion and vitality.





L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director

               Neuro-Semantics International

RESILIENTLY LEARNING





Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, writing about how to win and about wining in
business and winning in leadership and management, calls for "heavy-duty
resilience."

"Every leader makes mistakes, every leader stumbles and falls.  The question
with a senior-level leader is, does she learn from her mistakes, regroup,
and then get going again with renewed speed, conviction, and confidence?
The name of this trait is resilience, and it is so important that a leader
must have it going into a job because if she doesn't, a crisis time is too
late to learn it." (Winning, 2005, p. 90)



The key to winning is not avoiding mistakes.  When it comes to making
mistakes, that is inevitable.  Nor is the key to not take risks, that is, to
avoid risks.  Again, that is inevitable given the human predicament of
fallibility.  The key is learning.  The key is picking yourself up and
figuring out what you need to learn, learning it, integrating that learning
into your actions, getting back on the saddle and going for it again.  If
something didn't pan out as you anticipated, then you have something to
learn, don't you?  The question is what?



Well, there's actually another question.  Are you willing to learn what you
missed?  Are you willing to take a long deep look into the mistake and
figure out what didn't go by the plan, what deviated from the plan, what is
needed to regroup and "get going again with renewed speed, conviction, and
confidence."  Are you willing to learn to become resilient?



There is a connection between learning and resilience.  Do you have those
two things linked within you?  If they are connected, then obviously, the
better your learning, the faster your learning, the more open and curious
your learning-the fast and better your resilience.  You can bounce back
quicker and cleaner, that is, carrying less of the contamination of the
past.



To argue this point I'll run with the metaphor of "getting back in the
saddle again."  You are riding a horse and you get thrown.  Now you're down
on the ground, maybe in the mud, and you may be a little sore for wear.  So
what do you do now?  Do you brush of the dirt, turn your back and walk back
to town swearing, "Never again!  I'll never trust a damn horse again?"  Do
you pull out your gun and shoot the horse?  (I'm supposing you're a complete
cowboy or cowgirl and have your gun with you!)  "That's for throwing me
down!"  Or do you brush yourself off, and go back to get into the saddle
again, "Now what caused the horse to throw me?  Did I pull on the reigns to
hard?  Did I urge the horse over terrain with briars and thorns?  Did I not
notice the snake until we were nearly on top of him?"



Here learning is the cure and resilience is the result.  The more you
accelerate your learning in an attitude of openness, responsibility, and
curiosity, the quicker your resilience and success.  Are you a fast and
thorough learner in the presence of a mistake?  Do you immediately default
to the attitude, "What can I learn here?"  "What did I miss that I need to
understand?"  "Who knows how to handle this that I can talk to?"  The
ability to "get going again," to bounce back, to get back in the saddle is
the ability to not let a set-back defeat you, but to persist until you can
ride with grace and elegance.



My first big set-back was a divorce, my second was getting fired and losing
my first career choice, and my third was a severe financial loss.  There
were others, but those were the Big Three for me.  Luckily for me, I had a
learning bias.  I had already learned that learning was an important
strategy for getting ahead in life.  The shock of finding myself on my back
contemplating the Milky Way Galaxy, alone, pennyless, and confused triggered
me to use the best coping skill that I had at the time, study.  For awhile I
think I could have made a career in the Library!  I did spend a lot of time
there tracking down the best works I could find on relationships, then
psychology, then wealth creation.



The amazing thing is that sometimes one simple principle is all you need to
turn things around, get back in the saddle and ride off to success.  I have
seen that time and time again with various people.  Sometimes the set-back
occurred because they were missing one piece to a great puzzle and when they
found it, they were off and running with conviction and confidence.  Like
everything else, it depends on the mental model that you are using to do
something-how accurate or inaccurate it is, how complete or incomplete.



Whatever it is, it is what you need to learn.  If you spend time blaming and
accusing, shouting at the horse, or worse, shooting the horse, you will
learn nothing.  You will just create more trouble for yourself.  If you give
up, change the subject, focus on something else, you also will learn
nothing.  You're not even looking to learn.  Some seem to have an aversion
to doing the post-event review because they label it "negative" and think
they will get more dirty and negative if they spent time on that.  That
hardly ever happens especially if your frame of mind is, "I want to know
what I missed so I can fill in the missing pieces."



Learning led me into doing Couple Counseling for years, from there into
focusing on Communication and doing Communication Training.  Learning sent
me through the history of psychology until I was thoroughly familiar with
every school of psychology and ended up with a Master Degree in clinical
psychology and then a Doctorate in Cognitive Psychology.  Learning turned
around my financial mess, enabled me to stabilize it and later to reach my
goal of financial freedom so that I stopped living paycheck to paycheck or
worrying about money.



It's out of the tough experiences of life, the crucible experiences, that we
seem to learn more thoroughly and integratively.  Well, you do if you have a
learning bias.  It's out the set-back experiences when you get knocked down
that can, if you let it, motivate you to learn what you need to learn to
never get knocked down in that way again.    [Want more about Resilience,
see Meta-States, or look for the Neuro-Semantic Training on Resilience.]













L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director

               Neuro-Semantics International

HOW LONG DOES RESILIENCE TAKE?





In terms of resilience, what is most problematic for most people are the
early stages of a set-back stage.  That's because most people are completely
unprepared for life's inevitable and unpredictable set-backs.  I know I was.
How about you?  And because of that lack of preparation, that is why a
set-back almost always occurs as a shock-as a surprise.  And if it totally
disrupts life, the shock is even greater.  That's why a person doesn't seem
to be able to get his head around it no matter how one tries.

"What's happening?  I can't believe this!"  "No, no way I've been fired!"
"No way would she leave me!"  "I can't believe that I lost all of my
investment."  "The doctor has to be wrong with that diagnosis- not me."



Precisely because a person is not prepared for the possibility of a
set-back, when it comes she goes into shock.  The facts about the set-back
shock her-shocks her perceptions, expectations, beliefs, style-of-life,
response patterns, and so on.  It shocks her out of her pattern of thinking
and perceiving and out of her way of living.  No wonder Elizabeth Kubler
Ross put shock as the first stage of grief.  A loss has occurred, but the
person isn't prepared for it.



So the person goes into a regressive, childish state of bargaining.   He
offers "bargains" with God, with the universe, with others, with himself.

"If this will go away, I'll go to church, I will never lie again.  I will
never cheat again."  "I will be a good husband."  "If I can get back what I
lost, I'll reform and be a new person.  I will treat others right." 



The bargaining stage is a childish promising state of desperation driven by
fear, distress, and confusion.  It is a demanding state.  It is in that
stage that spouses show up at the other's doorsteps or at work making the
most loving, romantic promises of faithfulness.  They attempt to bargain
with fate to get their life back!



Then comes anger.   When the shock fades and the bargaining fails, then the
person gets pissed.   He gets as made as hell and starts storming around.
Some people throw things, others kick things.  She curses and uses words you
have never heard her say before!  The person is now fully registering the
loss of the value and the threat that it poses to one's job, finances,
relationship, healthy, future, reputation, etc.  And with that sense of
threat, comes the emotion of anger.  Anger is the state where we feel
threaten and so we fight to get back what we have lost or to push back
whoever (whatever) we blame.  And blame we do!  We become highly activated
and maybe aggressive in pushing back whatever we think is the cause of our
problem.



Yet if for all of the pushing back, nothing changes, nothing good happens.
That's when one moves into the depression state.   We give up.   We
relinquish it and then we push down (de-press) our hopes, dreams, desires,
wants, beliefs, optimism, energy, etc.  The pain of having loss now comes
home and the cure is to not want, to not care.  So into the depression mode
we go, we let it all go.  In doing this we usually also let ourselves go- we
given up spending time with friends, exercising, reading, and everything
that makes life interesting and fascinating.  We let our appearance go.  We
don't care.  "It can all go to hell.  Who cares anyway?  I don't!" so, leave
me alone.

                                                                     

What happens after depression?  Maybe cycling back to more anger or shock or
bargaining.  In fact, while these stages do tend to be sequential, we also
cycle around them over and over.  This is the heart of the emotional
roller-coaster stage as we try to get our feet back on the ground.  Yet we
can perpetuate these stages for a long time.  How long?  It all depends.



Studying people in the US and Europe, Elizabeth Kubler Ross postulated that
it usually takes two years.  But it all depends on how prepared a person was
in the first place and how skilled a person is at coping and accepting.
That's why-in some cultures-the process hardly occurs at all.  For example,
the more a culture accepts death, celebrates death, see it as a graduation
to the great beyond-the less grief there will be.  So also, the more a
family or culture or person is well-adjusted to reality-the less shock, the
less bargaining.  The more ego-strength, the less trying to cope with
bargaining and anger.  The more coping skills and resources available, the
less time in the grief or roller-coaster stage.



In fact, the last stage in the state of acceptance.  Acknowledge of what has
happened so you can take whatever actions that you can to ameliorate the
situation as best as possible.  In this, acceptance is the cure for the
grief stages.  The sooner you get to acceptance, the sooner you begin to
deal with the set-back appropriately and effectively.  Acceptance is an
incredibly powerful state-deceptively so because it does not make one feel
powerful.    Yet in acceptance one releases the demandingness that creates
bargaining, anger, and depression.



After the set-back stage is the stage of coping-and coping effectively.
Everything before this stage essentially consists of inadequate and poor
coping skills-activities and mindsets that generally make things worse.
Acceptance is the transitional state.  With acceptance a person is able to
simply acknowledge the reality and go about doing the best one can to deal
with the set-back.  So, given the general nature of how we humans face
set-backs, it should be abundantly clear that we save ourselves a lot of
heartache and waste of emotional energy if we would just begin with
acceptance.  What's the value of shock, bargaining, anger and depression?
All of these emotions speak about how unprepared a person is for real life-
it speaks about lack of, or low, ego-strength.



So, to speed up your development of resilience, to shorten the time between
set-back and recovery, here is the strategy: skip shock, bargaining, anger,
and depression and go straight for acceptance.  It will do you good.  You
will be more reality-oriented, more attuned to how life on planet Earth
actually works, and you will be able to get to the business of living
effectively quicker.
















L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director

               Neuro-Semantics International

THE META-STRATEGIES

WITHIN RESILIENCE








Given the many, many variables within resilience (#4) and the stages of
resilience (#5), you have to have several meta-strategies to handle each of
the stages.  That is, for each stage (set back, emotional roller-coaster,
coping, mastering, and recovery) you have to have specific belief frames,
identity frames, understanding frames, decision frames, etc. in order to
navigate through that stage.   It is not sufficient to merely have the right
state or states within each stage, you have to have the right belief-system
(beliefs and beliefs-about-beliefs) which will hold those state or states in
place.  This is another one of the great contributions of the Meta-States
Model.



To start this process, elicit each of the stages and simply begin by asking
meta-questions about each of the stages.  For example, take the set-back
stage itself.  Considering that stage, now ask:

         What do you understand about the set-back?  Is this normal or
abnormal?  Is this something you can expect in life, or is it completely
unexpected?

         What do you believe about being set-back?  What does it mean to
you?

         How do you experience yourself as a person and in your identity
when you are set-back?

         What decisions do you need to make given the set-back?

         Do you have permission to experience the set-back or do you fight
and reject it?

         What do you expect when a set-back occurs?

         All of these italized words are meta-levels, also known as logical
levels, and when you ask questions about them , you are asking a
meta-question.



What then happens?  What do you achieve by doing this?  When you ask these
meta-questions, the answers take you (or another person) into the realm of
the person's internal matrix of frames which informs your experience of that
stage.  It lets you explore in depth what you think consciously and what you
are unconsciously thinking that's setting the meaning frames that you are
living by.  This enables you to do some, literally, high-level information
gathering about what a person understands, believes, expects, etc. about
that stage.  These make up the person's frame of mind.



These frames of mind not only inform you and that person regarding the
person's rich inner landscape of consciousness, it also governs it.  It
self-organizes it.  And if there's any problem for you or another person in
handling that stage, the frame is almost always the problem.  The
meta-questioning enables you to get to the frame, understand it, and then
give you an opportunity to change it- reframe it, deframe it, outframe it,
etc.



Now when you have done that with each of the stages, you have gathered
intelligence about the person's higher frames of mind about the whole
process from suffering a set-back to bouncing-back in a resilient way.  But
... but is there any connection between each of the meta-levels of beliefs,
understandings, expectations, etc.?  Are there any commonalities between one
meta-level set of beliefs and another's?



This question takes us up-and-beyond the primary level strategies wherein we
handle each of the stages.  It takes us to a higher level where we can begin
to consider meta-strategies.  A meta-strategy would be a strategy that
enables us to go from one stage to the next.  And in terms of resilience,
this is critical.  "How do you know to go from the set-back stage to the
emotional roller-coaster stage, or to the coping stage, or to the mastery
stage, or to the "I'm back!" stage?"  This is the question that I asked in
1994 that opened up the key to how to be resilient and to the presence of
Meta-States.



If a person answers, "How I know to go from this stage to the next is I have
an overall picture of all of the stages" then the person has just given you
a larger-level, a meta-level, strategy.  You can then explore more about the
person's understandings.  "How many stages are there for you?"  "What do you
believe about moving through these stages?"  "What do you believe about how
long it will take you to do the 'work' in each stage and get to the end?"
"Is there anything that could stop you from proceeding forward and getting
through it all?"  And so on.



"I believe that I will get through this!" one person says.  That's a high
level belief about the process and  about himself.  "What enables you to get
through it?"  That will call forth information about how the process of
knock-down and get-up works and factors that may play a role inside of it.
"While you may not like the initiating experience of suffering a set-back,
what do you believe or understand about such things happening?"  That will
give you much of the person's philosophy of life.  "Do you think the
set-back was fair or unfair, or do you think it has nothing to do with
fairness, it is just things that happen in the world?"



With that introduction to the meta-levels of consciousness that set the
frames for how you think about set-backs and resilience, let's now explore
more personally what meta-level frames that are operational in the back of
your mind that supports you being a resilient person or that undermines it.
Here are some questions to consider:

         What do you understand about unpleasant and disturbing events?  Do
you think of them as a personal attack or as activities that occur?  What do
you believe about what causes them, what brings them about, and what they
say about you?

         What are you expectations and assumptions when some "bad thing"
happens to you?  What meanings do you give to such an event?  What criteria
(or standards) do you use to evaluate the experience as "bad?"

         What do you permit to happen or not permit?  Are there "bad
things" that can and do happen to people and you have no permission within
yourself for them to happen?  What permissions do you need to give yourself
so that you aren't shocked or blown away if something bad happened?

         What are your understandings, beliefs, and decisions about how to
cope with disasters or hardships?  Where does your mind go in terms of what
you can do to ameliorate the hurt?









L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director

               Neuro-Semantics International

THE ART OF TURNING ?FLOW?
ON & OFF AT WILL


In Neuro-Semantics we have discovered how to turn the flow
state on and off at will.  That?s what the APG training is
about.  Turning flow on and off at will refers to the
requisite ability to step in and to step out of an optimum
state so that you can be absolutely at your best when you
need to be at your best with all of your resources
available, and to step out when that?s appropriate.
Interested?

The Flow State.  Csikszentmihalyi is the cognitive
psychologist who explored and made ?the flow state?
explicit in his doctorate dissertation on happiness.
Originally, he was searching for the structure of happiness.
 Then, in the process, he stumbled onto the fact that has
been known for centuries.  Namely, the best way to not be
happy is to pursue happiness!  Philosophers have long know
that the direct pursuit of happiness is the best way to not
experience it.  The best way to achieve happiness is to
pursue something that?s important to you, something that
makes a difference, and something requiring knowledge and
skilled which you develop along the way.  That?s what
Csikszentmihalyi discovered?to be happy you need to be
doing something that?s meaningful and challenging and
something which is based on a skill?a competence.

Yet being happy is not something will happen immediately or
automatically.  In fact, the opposite may occur.  In the
immediate moment when you have a meaningful challenge which
may be at the edge of your competence, when you step up to
it, it will not ?easy.?  Usually it is hard.  Usually
you have to begin using all of your energy, effort,
knowledge, and intelligence to be able to do it.  This is
true of running a race, playing chest, rock climbing, taking
on a challenging project, writing a book, etc.   So
where?s the happiness?  Ah, that?s the secret.  The
state of ?happiness?(joy, delight, even ecstasy) comes
later.  It comes when you look back on the experience.
That?s when you say, ?What great days those were!?
?I was the happiest when I was doing X!?  The joy of the
experience typically occurs afterwards.  Happiness is the
afterglow of a worthwhile attempt at something important.

In mapping this out Csikszentmihalyi used two
axes?challenge and competence.  That generated four
quadrants and the ?flow zone??the pathway to flow
which involved integrating a challenge with the appropriate
skills.  In Neuro-Semantics our Self-Actualization Quadrants
integrates this and extends it as we use the axes?Meaning
and Performance.

Stepping in and out.  What NLP brings to the flow experience
is the phenomenon of a mind-body state?a state that you
can access, step into, and step out of.  States are like
that.  Comprised of a dynamic combination of what?s on
your mind, the condition of your body, and the emotions that
you generate from your meanings?a mind-body-emotion state
is simultaneously a state of mind, a state of body, and a
state of emotion.  This gives us three ways into state.

Further, we can also distinguish states in terms of purity.
The great majority of our everyday states are mixed states:
a part of me is in a state of learning, a part is
preoccupied with work, another part is fearful of rejection,
etc.  Very, very seldom do we access a pure state wherein we
are of one mind about something.  A pure state refers to
being fully engaged with one referent.  Then we are ?all
there??fully present.  In that situation, we have a
laser-beam focus or concentration and that also describes
the flow state.

In early NLP literature, this was called a ?genius?
state, not because it raises IQ, but because it describes
the power of the focused, engagement state?the power of
being of one mind about something.  That same literature
identified many of ?the prerequisites of genius.?  And
that?s what we took in Neuro-Semantics to create the
Accessing Personal Genius (APG) training.  Taking the
prerequisites of personal power, self-valuing,
self-acceptance, self-appreciation, ability to choose
one?s beliefs and suspend limiting beliefs, pleasuring
oneself in higher values, making peace with troubling
emotions, closing the knowing-doing gap, using the as-if
frame for generating new possibilities, setting high
intentions and aligning attention to one?s highest
intention ?we have meta-stated these genius requirements
into a single pattern.

The result?  By custom-designing your own ?genius,? or
flow state, for a particular engagement, you can step in and
out of that state at will.  Pretty amazing wouldn?t you
say?  ?Yes, but does it really work??

I will tell you about my experience with it.  Upon learning
and designing the pattern in 1994, I ran the pattern on
myself to create two genius or flow states.  One was the
genius reading state, the other was the flow writing state.
That was 1995.  Prior to that date, I had written a book,
Emotions: Sometimes I have them/ Sometimes they have me
(1985).  That took me eight years.  By 1995 I was still
working on the book that eventually became The Spirit of NLP
(1997).  That only took five years to put together.

Then came the ability to step in and out of the flow state.
The first result: no more ?writer?s block.?  None!  I
wrote two books in 1995.  And since that time have averaged
2 to 3 books a year, three to five articles a week, two to
three training manuals a year, and numerous Prefaces,
Introductions, and Chapters in other books.  How do I
explain this sudden productivity and ease of writing?  I can
step into the writing state, write for one minute or five or
for two hours, and then cleanly step out.  Then, when I want
to step back in, I do precisely that and start again
wherever I was, even in mid-sentence, without any loss of
focus, attention, energy, vitality, etc.  Now how cool is
that?  Today (2015) I have written 54 books and counting the
serial books, 68.

The same can be said for other flow states: the coaching
state, the training state, the exercise state, etc.  The
great thing is that when you can turn the flow state on and
off at will? it is there to serve you and your
engagements.  You don?t have to wait around to ?get in
the mood.?  You don?t have to do superstitious
activities like wearing your favorite yellow shirt or making
the victory sign seven times to get into state.  You have it
well anchored in the physiologies of the state and so you
just step in.



L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director
               Neuro-Semantics International
P.O. Box 8
Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                            
               1 970-523-7877
                    Dr. Hall's email: meta@acsol.net

HOW META-STATES BEGAN





It all began with an Aha! experience in 1994.  It was that aha! experience
in the middle of a workshop at a NLP Conference which led to the discovery
of Meta-States.  Most of you know the story, but for those who don?t, here
it is again.



I was involved in my very first modeling project on resilience.  I had
decided to study how people develop the quality of ?bounce? in their
thinking-and-feeling so that when they get knocked down, they don?t stay
down.  In the process I took to interviewing numerous people who had
suffered set-backs, who had been through a living hell of one sort or
another, and who had recovered their passions about living and were back in
the game of life.  In the process I had been sketching a basic working
schema for the stages of recovery from set back to being back in the game of
life.  Using the schema of the NLP Strategy Model, I prepared a 3-hour
workshop for the Denver NLP Convention when ?the call for papers? went out.
After applying for the previous three years, Steve Andreas finally accepted
this one.  So I went and presented to some 50 or 60 people.



After presenting the stages in the process of ?Going for It ? Again,? I
invited someone to come forward ?who had been through hell and had
returned.?  When several raised their hands and briefly described the
traumatic events that they had been through and the degree to which they
were back.  I selected one gentleman and began inquiring about his strategy.
I wanted to use the interview questions to model out how he did it.  At one
point, he mentioned that he moved from one stage to another.  So I asked,
?What was on your mind as you did that?  What did you think or feel??  He
said something about knowing that it would all work out.  ?I know that
eventually I will come out of this stage.?  ?How did you know that??  Then
either he said ?I have a state about my state, a meta-state,? or I said, ?So
it is a state about the first state, a meta-state.?  I no longer remember
who said it.  And there?s a reason for that.



Suddenly the lights and bells went off inside my head!  Suddenly the phrase
?meta-state? brought together all of the studies in Korzybski and Bateson
that I had been studying for years.  Suddenly it all made sense.  And with
that, the Meta-States Model was given birth.  The Conference ended a few
hours later, and that evening I drove with three friends over the entire
Rocky Mountain range (250 miles) from Denver to Grand Junction and I
couldn?t stop talking about it.  That week, I sat down and wrote out the
model in a 40 page document.  And because the NLP Trainers Association was
running a contest for innovations in NLP, I sent my document to Wyatt
Woodsmall.  Two months later he called and said it would be given the award
for ?the most significant contribution to the field of NLP in 1995.?

Now the Aha! facet of this experience was that the term meta-state brought
together things that had been percolating in the back of my mind for several
years.  Suddenly, lots and lots of things became clear.  First and foremost
was the structure of complex states.  While it was easy to identify the
structure of the basic states, not so with the complex ones.  NLP gave me a
way to think about the primary states of fear and anger, stress and
relaxation, aversion and attraction, love and hate (or apathy), joy and
sadness, etc.  I described them by saying that there are ?two royal roads?
for accessing these states?first, mind (thinking, imagining, talking,
hearing) and second, body (physiology, acting, gestures, breathing, etc.).



But what about more complex states?  What about self-esteem, proactivity,
forgiveness, understanding, responsibility, etc.?  I knew that to model the
structure of these states there was something more, something missing.  Mere
representational images and sounds on the movie of the mind is not
sufficient for most of the people I was seeing as clients.  After all, how
do you represent ?self-esteem??  What picture induces ?proactivity??  What
sound track fully elicits ?forgiveness? or ?responsibility??  Where do you
kinesthetically sense ?self-esteem??  The primary representational data of
sights, sounds and sensations cannot fully describe these complex state.



So, what?s missing?  Within complex states, there was also typically a much
less direct and different kind of kinesthetic.  So when the gentleman that I
was interviewing started to describe a higher state, a state about the other
states in coming back from a set-back, he said it was a ?state of knowing
that he would eventually get through it all.?  I echoed back his words.

?So it?s a state of knowing that he would eventually get through it all.
Ahhhh.  So what do you call this state??  He didn?t know.  ?I?m not sure,
it?s a big picture state, like I?m above it all and know that I?ll get
through it all.?



?How do you know that you?re in this big picture state of knowing that?? I
asked again, trying to understand what he was doing in his mind, how he
represented it, and how I could replicate what he was doing.

?Well, it?s like this state is about that other state of feeling the
emotional ups-and-downs of the setback, but I?m not too concerned about my
roller-coaster emotions because I know I will get through.  It?s like a
state meta to the other.?



?You mean it is a meta-state about the first state?? I reflected back.
?Yes, a meta-state.?  My friends tell me that I finished the workshop that
day.  But I don?t remember it.  Inside my head was a whirlwind of ideas
spinning around.  I was picturing a circle of a mind-body energy state meta
to a first one and governing it and framing it as its internal reference
structure.  This dynamic picture provided a new understanding of the
meta-levels of learning in Bateson?s ?levels of learning.?  I was also
seeing Korzybski?s layers of referent experiences in action, now his
?Structural Differential? (which was his way of solving the self-reflexivity
of the human mind) was alive and dynamic.  This initiated a new search and
began my second modeling project, the structure of self-reflexive
consciousness.



Six months later I had written the first book, Meta-States (1995), and
immediately began running it as a new training which I called ?Dragon
Slaying.?  My initial focus with Meta-States was to analyze the problematic
states that arise when a person brings a negative state of
thought-and-feeling against oneself.  What I discovered is that this usually
created meta-muddles of self-conflict and self-antagonism.  It creates the
disordering of personality, self-sabotages, and wastes incredible mental,
emotional, and personal energy.  Dragon Slaying (1996) was then transcribed
and written from that training.



What are meta-states?  A meta-state is the structure of
thoughts-and-emotions about the first level thoughts-and-emotions which you
have about an experience.  If your first thoughts-and-emotions are reactions
and responses to the world, meta-states are your reactions and responses to
yourself.  This includes reactions to your thoughts, to your emotions, to
your experiences, to your concepts, to your abstractions, to all of your
meanings.



My meta-states and your meta-states are our reactions to ourselves.  So, how
do you react to yourself?  To you react to your thinking-emoting states with
kindness and grace or harshness and judgment?  Whatever you do, that sets
the frame or meta-state for the first state.  In this a meta-state is a
?logical level? jump.  We step back from ourselves as it were to then
think-and-feel a second time, then a third time, a fourth, and so on.



In fact, the process is never-ending.  Korzybski noted that it is ?an
infinite process.?  This is ?the infinite regress? which philosophers have
long noted.  In Neuro-Semantics I began calling it ?the infinite progress.?
Why?  Here the good news.  Whatever frames you have set and whatever
meta-muddles you have created with limiting beliefs and self-sabotaging
understandings and decisions, you can always make one more step forward and
set a whole new empowering frame.  Talk about opening up things so that you
are only as stuck as your frames.  This is it!



Why meta-states?  That will be the subject for the next Reflections.  There
you will discover the power, extensiveness, and nature of meta-states and
how to use them for fun and profit.




L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director

               Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                            

               1 970-523-7877

                    Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta@acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta@acsol.net

THE TRICKIEST

COACHING CONVERSATION

When you ask a client what he wants and he says, “Confidence,” you are in the presence of a situation that could be the trickiest coaching conversation of all.  So, a warning—Beware!  Your next words will be critical if you are to avoid getting trapped in a dead-end exchange that will go nowhere.  You’ve probably fallen into this trap.  Most of us have.  You may get trapped in it during your next coaching conversation.  Many who read this article will.  The distinctions that follow are subtle and therefore require careful reading and implementation.  So, if you’re ready, here we go.

It all begins with what sounds like a perfectly reasonable desired outcome.  “I want to have more confidence.”  That’s what they say.  Yet is that always helpful?  Think about it.  It all depends, doesn’t it?  Further the request for more confidence can mean so many things to different clients.  So you have to ask what your client is really asking for.  So inquire before you jump into coaching to it.  Ask the clarity check question.  Don’t assume that you know what the person means.  So what are the range of things that confidence could mean to different clients?

1) “Confidence” as assurance of being able to do something.  The person wants to be sure that she can actually do something.  In other words, “confidence” to her is equal to “being sure.”  The person is saying, “I will only feel confident when I have a guarantee that I will succeed in what I want to do.  If I don’t feel sure, if I feel any slight twinges of doubt or frustration, then I’m not ‘confident.’” Now the more risk-averse a person is, then the more that person will be questioning his ability, doubting his skills, and not sure.  Then, with being unsure, the person feels the lack of confidence.  The focus for this person is on the feeling not being sure rather than on developing the competence for being able to do the skill.

Confidence literally refers to your faith (fideo) in or with (con) yourself.  It speaks about your faith that you can do something.  That’s why confidence requires evidence that you have done it and that means it is a thing of history— you have in the past demonstrated several or many times that you can do something.  Now you can trust yourself.  That evidence convinces you that you can do it, that you are competent in that skill.  So confidence is based on competence.  No competence—no confidence.  Confidence without competence is a false and delusional trust in yourself.  We call people who are confident when they can’t demonstrate competence, fools.

Given that, do you really want to help someone who wants to feel confidence to feel it if they are incompetent?  Isn’t that undermining their skill development?  If they feel confident, then why would they devote the energy and effort to learning or practicing?

2) “Confidence” as comfortable in learning and doing.  Others will use the word “confidence” to essentially mean “comfort.”  In other words, “confidence” is equal to a feeling, to feeling comfort, at ease, no stress, no strain, no discomfort, etc.   For this person, any discomfort equates with the lack of confidence.  She can therefore loss “confidence” very quickly whenever there are any feelings of discomfort.  This will be true for almost everything new, different, and challenging.  Yet because in taking on new things, we are inevitably required to get out of our “comfort zone,” all new learning and practicing will be uncomfortable, even unpleasant, disturbing, etc.  If this automatically equates to not having confidence, then all new learnings and challenges equates with the lack of confidence.

3) “Confidence” as self-efficacy for future unknown challenges.  Yet another uses the word “confidence” as a synonym for “trust in myself to be able to handle some future challenge.”  This person is “confident” if he knows that he can trust himself to figure something out, handle any challenge that arise, and use his wits and relationship skills to create solutions.  This is what the person means by the word “confidence.”

Actually, he is using “confidence” for a different concept, for self-efficacy, which refers to a future event.  Most people develop this after numerous experiences of becoming competent in something.  They then learn something about their learning experiences — “It’s just a matter of learning, practice, and eventually I will get it.”  The more times they walk the pathway from incompetence to competence, the more likely they can jump a logical level and conclude, “I have done this many times; this is just another instance of moving from incompetence to competence.  I know I will eventually get it.”

4) “Confidence” as a sense of self-value and worth.  Others confuse self-esteem with self-confidence, so when they ask for confidence, they want to have a strong sense of personal value in some context.  Yet because they frame their personal value and worth as conditional, then whenever they engage in something new, something thewy are not all that competent and skilled at, they then question their self-esteem and feel that their sense of self is fragile or shaking in a given role or activity.  Now they want “confidence.”  They want self-assurance that they are worthwhile.

The bottom line is that you just never know how a person is using a word.   This is especially true when they say that “I want to more confidence.”  So check it out.  Find out what they are really talking about— assurance, comfort, trust in self, esteem of self.  You’ll be glad you did; and they will be even more glad.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

               Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

               1 970-523-7877 

                    Dr. Hall's email: meta@acsol.net