Can you analyze and agree at the same time?
What do these words mean to you? The Meta Model classifies them as distortions and generalizations. But to the people who put them on these sticky notes, they represented a very specific shared experience. Part of the reputation of NLP was established by its approach to language. The Meta Model promises to help you look beneath what people are saying to discover what they really mean. It's based on understanding language as a distortion of reality. Even if it were accurate (I wouldn't argue that), it's a framing that is almost bound to get you into trouble unless you remember one cardinal rule (most people don't). The rule is this: you can only dig deeper with permission and you can only tell you have permission when you are spending most of your attention building agreement. As a coach, I sometimes work with high performers on analyzing their patterns of thought or behaviour so that we can identify leverage points for change. This is stressful, but the...