[Neurons] 2024 Neurons #47 FOR EXCELLENCE--- GO META

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2024 Neurons #47

September 21, 2024

A Deep Dive Into Expertise #2

 

FOR EXCELLENCE-GO META! 

 

You could do a really, really good job by behaviorally copying when an
expert does.  It's possible.  And that's what many people do.  They see an
expert doing something or they find a best practice-and they simply repeat
or mimic as best they can what they see.  And they could also be very
diligent about this.  They could make videos of what the expert does; they
could study it frame by frame.  They could use deliberate practice to
integrate the actions.  But there's a problem.  If they don't enter into the
expert's mind-into the person's meta place of beliefs, values,
understandings, memories, imagination, intentions, etc., they will never
truly model what that expert does.

 

How can I say that?  Why is that the case?  The answer is simple-it's
because excellence in behavior springs from the higher level mental
mapping-the expert's frames.  Excellence is not merely, or just behavior,
even though that is obviously where it shows up.  And it is the excellent
behavior which causes us to stand in awe of the expertise in the first
place.   Yet the excellence in behavior is driven from a higher place-the
expert's mind in her Meta Place.

 

This is the scandal of NLP Modeling.  In NLP, most so-called modeling
focuses on the primary state, not the meta-states.  It focuses on the
representations steps of the Strategy Model and not on the higher level
frames that makes it possible.  That's the scandal.  It offers "the study of
the structure of subjective experience" but fails to give the full
structure.   Now that model works quite sufficiently for simple,
in-the-moment type of strategies like spelling.  But if we are to identify
"the structure of experience" by an expert that involves anything more
complex,  we have to elicit the structure of the expert's meta-mind.  We
have to ask, "What's in the back of the mind?" and we have to ask that
question about each aspect of the strategy.

 

Now true enough, both Dilts and Gordon attempted to get at least a little
bit of the expert's meta-mind.  Robert Dilts did it with his four
meta-levels of his Neuro-Logical Levels Model (beliefs, values, identity,
purpose) and David Gordon did it with his Experiential Array Model which
elicits different kinds of beliefs.  But both of these attempts at making
explicit the meta-levels of the mind severely fall short of what's there.

 

This is why the Meta-States Model truly opens up the meta-levels and lets us
look in to see a much fuller richness of the mind which is the Meta Place.
In the original Meta-States Model, I collected as many meta-levels as I
could think of (i.e., meta-terms) and put them in the Diamond of
Consciousness Diagram.  As a result of that-you have 26 meta-levels to work
with. 

The purpose of the Diamond was to indicate that all of these are facets of
the same thing-the consciousness of the expert or his conscious experience.
Therefore if one of the meta-level terms did not work, simply go to the next
one.  If you ask, "What do you believe about X?" and the person says,
"Believe?  I don't believe anything about that, I just know."  Then ask,
"What do you know about X?"   Shift the meta-level from belief to knowing.

 

The 26 levels, however, is a lot and over the years I noticed that I tended
to only use about 10 of them.  So in Meta-Coaching, under Meta-Questioning,
that's what we focused on-the ten most  common meta-levels that defines the
Meta Place.

Belief - Value - Identity - Intention - Decision -  Expectation -
Imagination - Memory - Permission/ Prohibition - Metaphor.

 

What's wonderful about these 10 meta-terms and meta-levels is that by asking
about these, they will take you just about everywhere you need to go with a
person.  You won't need any more.  These are enough.  Notice that two terms
are not in the list, two terms that are very general and which actually
cover the ten because all ten of the terms are also frames and each one is a
form of meaning.

 

The modeling of "mind" (thinking) beginning in 2016 brought to my attention
that we have all of these meta-level words, but no structure.  Then I also
began identifying more, in fact, 100 terms for thinking.  And without a
structure, it is next-to-impossible to even imagine what the Meta Place
would look like.  Consequently I struggled with that for several years.
Later by examining the process itself-namely, thinking- I began to sort the
ten meta-terms out and consider a few more.  That led to the diagrams of the
Meta Place as a model of the mind.  And while the Meta Place is not an
actual, literal or real diagram of the meta-levels (there is no such thing),
it does enable us to take the major processes of consciousness (mind) into
account.  And that is its purpose-so that we can embrace all of the mind's
functioning.

 

Why do you need to go meta when modeling excellence?  It's because above and
beyond the first-level representation of the steps, you need to know the
hidden frames that actually drive and determine the behavior.  That's where
you will find the true distinctions of the expert's mind.  And it's the
expert's mind that drives the expertise.  It's her attitude, perspective,
and understandings.

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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/20241020/ab9f531b/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/20241020/ab9f531b/attachment-0001.jpg>