[Neurons] 2023 Neurons #28 WHAT'S YOUR EXPERTISE?

Mon Jun 26 17:36:53 EDT 2023

From: L. Michael Hall

2023 Neurons #28

June 26, 2023

WHAT'S YOUR EXPERTISE?

Not long ago I had the opportunity to speak about NLP as a model of
modeling.  My subject was "Modeling with Meta-Levels" so I referred to the
book I wrote on that subject, NLP Going Meta (1997).  My theme involved
speaking about what Neuro-Semantics had added to that subject. Namely, how
can we further develop our ability to model experts because we have included
the meta dimension into our modeling?  Later in the presentation, a young
man in the group raised his hand and asked, "So what are your people experts
in?  That is, what expertise do Neuro-Semanticists have and can
demonstrate?"

For some reason that caught me off-guard.  At that moment, I did not have an
answer on the tip-of-my-tongue.  Accordingly, I thought it was a great
question because it forced me to stop and do some real thinking and that's
because in that instance, I did not have an immediate answer, I had to do
some reflecting about that question.  Later, I decided that the resident
expertise that we teach, train, coach, and mentor in Neuro-Semantics is the
expertise of modeling human experience.

Yes we train people in how to train, how to coach, how to use NLP as a
communication tool, how to parent, how to be great leaders, how to
collaborate, how to be resilient, and on and on.  Yet above and beyond all
of the specific applications, we teach something else-the structure of
subjective experience.  And when you know the structure, you know how an
experience works.  And when you know how an experience works, you are privy
to how to make it better, how to streamline it, how to replicate it in your
life and the lives of others.  If the experience is a negative one, you know
how to transform it into something positive and enhancing.

While NLP arose as a Communication Model and presented how expert therapists
like Perls, Satir, and Erickson facilitated change in their communications,
that was just the beginning.  First came the Meta-Model which explained how
"the talking cure" (e.g., psychotherapy) worked to create the "magic" of
transformation in people's lives.  That was the theme of the two volumes of
The Structure of Magic.  Then came lots of patterns and techniques.  In
Magic the founders called them Meta-Tactics-tactics of matching predicts,
challenging incongruency, etc.

Only later did they realize that what they had was actually something much
higher and much more pervasive-they had a model for modeling.  So Robert
Dilts wrote the book, "NLP, Volume I" and the subtitle was, The Study of the
Structure of Subjective Experience.  So, what is that structure?  There are
many answers to that question.  By the mid-1990s, the NLP structure of
experience involved the following:

           Language: words, phrases, labels and the syntax of language.

           Representations: the inner movie in a person's mind.

           Cinematic features or sub-modalities by which a person can edit
his movies.

           Neurological patterns: breathing, posture, muscle tension, eye
accessing, etc.

           Strategies of representational steps that provide the syntax of
an experience.

           Meta-Programs as thinking patterns that determine how one's
thinking constructs reality.

           Meta-levels as in Neuro-Logical Levels (1991) and in Meta-States
(1994) which provides the higher level structures of the mind.

It was then left almost exclusively to Neuro-Semantics to continue the study
of the structure of subjective experience.1  As I continued my study of the
structure of subjective experience, several developments occurred. 

           First, Frame Games (1999): how the meta-levels operates as
frames-of-references in the mind thereby defining the experience.

           Then Matrix Model (2002): by using the seven most common frames
by which we define and structure our experience: meaning, intention, and
self (person, powers, relationships, temporality, roles).  This offered a
systems way of thinking about how the various frames interact with each
other.

           Now The Meta Place (2023): using what we know is in "the mind"
as landmarks and sketching out a landscape of the mind.  In this way we can
picture how these landmarks work to create the specific strategies for any
given experience. 

If there is any singular expertise that characterizes Neuro-Semanticists it
is this-the ability to know, recognize, and work with the structure of
consciousness.  Now true enough, most people in this field do not engage in
formal modeling.  Yet they do engage in modeling, they engage in pragmatic
modeling as they assist a client in understanding oneself, in achieving a
desired outcome, in learning a new set of skills, in becoming the best
version of themselves.  Their "modeling" is in service of these more
practical objectives.  And while very few ever write up a description of the
model that their client started with or the model that they co-developed,
they are working with and able to facilitate the structure of their
mind-body-emotion system.  That's their expertise.

Footnote:

1: In the book I edited with Shelle Rose Charvet, Innovations in NLP (2011)
there were only two models that extended the "study of the structure of
subjective experience" in the 1990s and 2000s, Clean Language and Social
Panorama. 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

ISNS Executive Director

P.O. Box 8

Clifton Colorado 81520 USA

(970) 523-7877

drhall at acsol.net  

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