[Neurons] 2024 Neurons #43 HAPPY BIRTHDAY META-STATES!

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2024 Neurons #43

September 30, 2024

              

HAPPY BIRTHDAY META-STATES

YOU ARE 30 YEARS OLD!

 

The date was September 1994.  Thirty years ago this month I traveled to
Denver, Colorado where I presented a workshop at the NLP Comprehensive
Conference.  I had been studying Resilience for nearly four years at that
point and had put together a workshop that I titled, "Go For it-Again."

 

The workshop was the result of studying as extensively as I could on the
subject although thirty years ago there was very little published on
resilience. Because of that I began interviewing people who had suffered a
significant set-back to find their strategy.  So using the basic NLP
Strategy Model, I elicited the strategy from three-dozen men and women. 

 

At the time I was excited to explore the NLP idea that every experience has
a step-by-step structure that could be made explicit.  So that's what I
worked on and what I had prepared.  I made another assumption, namely, that
experiencing a set-back was a loss, and therefore the grief stages of
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross also described the loss stages of a set-back.  And
with that I put together the stages and the strategy of resilience.

 

Then came the workshop.  It was a Sunday afternoon and I had a group of
people who signed up for the "Go for it-Again" workshop.  Then something
unexpected happened, something I had not anticipated.  The person I
interviewed for the demonstration had enough awareness of himself and his
experience to make the kind of statement which I had not heard in all of the
interviews.  Guiding him through the set-back stage, the emotional
roller-coaster stage, the acceptance stage, the coping stage, the mastering
stage, etc., he commented that he knew that he would transition from one of
those stages to the next and bounce back.

 

That was a bit of a surprise.  "You do?  You know that you will move from
that stage to the next?"  He confirmed that with a strong "yes."  So I
asked, "How?  How do you know that?"   "It is like I have something like a
state, a state meta to my current state that I know I will get through all
of this."  "A meta-state?"  "Yes, a meta-state."

 

And that did it.  The words hypnotized me into an Eureka state of awareness,
suddenly all of the studies in Korzybski and Bateson as well as studies in
the field of Meta-Cognition exploded in my mind.  And with that I suddenly
saw the hidden structure behind the step-by-step Strategy Model.  I pictured
a state-about-a-state and the layering of mental and emotional states on top
of each other and that gave birth to the Meta-States Model.  A few years ago
I updated the resilience model in the book, Resilience: Being the Phoenix
(2018) and also told the story in the book, Thinking as a Modeler (2018).

 

What's happened in the past 30 years with the Meta-States Model?

           In 1995 the Meta-States Model was recognized as "the most
significant contribution to NLP" by the International Association of NLP
Trainers.

           In 1996 Meta-States launched Neuro-Semantics, both as a model
and as a community, the International Society of Neuro-Semantics (ISNS).

           In 1996 I began The Meta-State Journal which is now the PDF
book, Meta-States Magic.

           In 1997 Bob Bodenhamer and I decided to see how Meta-States
would fit into or re-model several NLP Model, that led to four books:
Mind-Lines, Adventures in Time, Patterns for Renewing the Mind, and Figuring
Out People.

           In 1997 I put the basics of Meta-States into the book, Secrets
of Personal Mastery, which led to formatting Meta-States as a training,
Accessing Personal Genius (APG) and APG then became the Gateway training for
Neuro-Semantics which is now trained by hundreds of Neuro-Semantic Trainers
all around the world.

           In 1999 we began training Trainers for training Meta-States
which led to Neuro-Semantic Trainers' Training in 2000.

           In 2002 Meta-States gave birth to The Matrix Model.

           In 2002 we launched The Meta-Coaching System which highlighted
NLP, Meta-States and the Matrix Model.  Later we added other models: Axes of
Change, Benchmarking, Facilitation, and Self-Actualization.

           In 2004 I gathered together 144 Meta-State Patterns and put them
into the book, The Source Book of Magic, Volume II.  Volume I (1997) only
had a dozen Meta-State Patterns.

           In 2005 studying the history of the Human Potential Movement,
Meta-States became the key ingredient in the process of unleashing
potentials leading to the Construct, the Crucible, and the Zone.  That, in
turn, led to 16 books on Self-Actualization.

           In 2011 Meta-States was recognized in Innovations of NLP.

           In 2016 I delved into the kind of thinking inside of
Meta-Stating, self-reflexivity, etc. which has led to 11 books and defined
Neuro-Semantics as a Thinking Model.

           In 2020 I reviewed Meta-States and presented The Unexpected
Extensiveness of Meta-States to several NLP Conferences and ISNS Wisdoms.

 

If you ask, Is Meta-States still generating new ideas, patterns, and models?
The answer is Yes!  Just two weeks ago as I was working on the manuscript
for my next book, Strategic Thinking, I discovered something new about
Meta-States.  Namely that the driving factors for what makes any strategy
works is not the step-by-step representations, but the hidden meta-strategy.
Here's Happy Birthday Meta-States!

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

meta at acsol.net

 

 



 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist8.pair.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20240929/749d2a86/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 7843 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://pairlist8.pair.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20240929/749d2a86/attachment-0001.jpg>