The Matrix Model [4 ed.] 9781890001490

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THE MATRIX MODEL Modeling A Person’s Neuro-Semantics System

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. 2002/ 2020

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The Matrix Model Modeling a Neuro-Semantic System 2020 ©2002 L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. The Matrix Model: Neuro-Semantics and the Construction of Meaning Library of Congress, Washington DC. TXu 1-059-218 Registered July 22, 2002 ISBN Number: 1-890-001-22-8 First Edition: July, 2002 Second Edition: April, 2003 Third Edition: 2016 Fourth Edition: 2020

All Rights Reserved No part of this may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, etc.) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by:

NSP: Neuro-Semantic Publications P.O. Box 8 Clifton, CO. 81520-0008 USA

Author:

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. P.O. Box 8 Clifton, CO 81520 (970) 523-7877

Neuro-Semantics® is the trademark name and brand for the International Society of Neuro-Semantics (ISNS). See the web site: www.neurosemantics.com for articles, trainings, books, DVDs, Meta-Coaches, Self-Actualization Psychology, and much more.

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THE MATRIX MODEL Foreword Preface

Bob Bodenhamer, D.Min.

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I: THE MODEL

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

15 23 39 50 58

The Matrix Mary Lived In Welcome to the Matrix The Matrix of our Neuro-Semantic Frameworks Entering the Matrix Meta-Programs and the Matrix

II: THE DIMENSIONS

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Three Process Dimensions 6. The Meaning Dimension 7. Diagnosing Meaning 8. The Intention Dimension 9. The States Dimension 10. Meta-States: Higher States Five Content Dimensions 11. The Self Dimension 12. The Power Dimension 13. The Others Dimension 14. The Time Dimension 15. The World Dimension

70 90 105 116 126 137 141 156 168 175 180

III: USING THE MATRIX

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 23. 25. 26. 27.

Modeling Stuttering Matrix Neuro-Semantics of Concepts The Matrix for Profiling Matrix for Diagnosing The Spiraling of the Matrix Matrix’s “Logical Levels” Matrix as Systemic Model Robust Conversations “Reality” and the Matrix Healing the Matrix Matrix Skills Matrix Principles

Bibliography Author

196 211 221 233 245 255 265 280 294 301 314 325 336 339

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FOREWORD “Men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the courses of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.” St. Augustine, Confessions, Book X, Chapter 8

I

n the first of three movies on The Matrix, Morpheus opened the first one with these words to Neo: Morpheus: “Let me tell you why you are here. You have come because you know something. What you know you can’t explain but you feel it. You’ve felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world. You don’t know what, but it’s there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that brought you to me. You know what I’m talking about? Neo: The Matrix? Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is? Neo: Yes. Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us ... It is the world that has been pulled down over your eyes to blind you from the truth. Neo: The truth? Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.” (Wachowski, 2000, p. 300)

This is the first conversation between Neo and Morpheus in the movie, The Matrix. Wonderful science fiction—if you love sci-fi movies. Yet it is more. After all, don’t you find that there’s something strangely familiar in it to your everyday life? Why is that? I think it reminds us so much of our everyday lives because we also live in a matrix. We also live in a matrix of frames. Frames of mind, frames of reference, and frames of meaning. These are also invisible to the empirical eye -5-

The Matrix Model

Foreword

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

and can only be seen by the eye of the mind. I noted this in the book Frame Games (1999) (now titled, Winning the Inner Game, 2007) which describes the cognitive-behavioral frames that we construct as we move through life and which become our framework for perception, behavior, feeling, skills, relating, and living. It was from Frame Games as a model and as a training that I developed the Matrix Model. Who is this Book For? This book is for anyone who works with people and wants a model that will help to simplify the complexities that we humans bring to our tasks and relationships. It’s for anyone who wants to more fully understand him or herself. It’s for those who seek to influence people—teachers, trainers, therapists, coaches, parents, managers, leaders, people in sales, marketing, writing, consultants, business change agents, and law. It is especially for those who know and use Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Neuro-Semantics as part of their tool chest of effective patterns and models. I designed the Matrix Model originally to serve as an unifying framework for tying together all of the models, insights, principles, and tools of NLP and Neuro-Semantics together. The Matrix Model is for anyone who wants better self-understanding, selfmanagement and self-leadership. The model gives you a new way for thinking about yourself, your life, how you experience life, how you know what you know, and how others do the same. The Matrix Model describes how you create the meaning structures of your mind-body system which, in turn, provide you with your sense of what’s real, at least what we call “reality.” The model describes your mind-body experience in terms of frames and of multiple levels of frames. If you’re interested in understanding yourself, another, or human functioning in general, the Matrix Model will provide that. If you’re interested in how a group mind works, the frames within frames that determine and govern a cultural framework, political framework, that of a business, or any other community, this model will provide that. The Origin of the Matrix Model The Matrix Model emerged in my awareness in the winter of 2001-2002 and represented at that time the newest model in Neuro-Semantics after the discovery of the Meta-States Model in 1994. My colleague, Dr. Bob -6-

The Matrix Model

Foreword

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Bodenhamer, elicited much of this model from me while we were doing a month-long training in Sydney Australia. For many evenings, we worked out many of the details over dinner. How did Bob elicit it from me? It’s actually a funny story. I was presenting NLP when, at some point, I commented that “I never leave home without my state. Everywhere I go I’m in a state.” Later while speaking about the structure of meaning, I said, “I never leave home without my meanings.” Then several days later while introducing Meta-States, I offhandedly said, “I never leave home without my self. Everywhere I go I find that I am there.” It was a joke. A one-liner. At that point Bob chimed in and, in his North Carolina accent, asked: “Michael, how many things do you never leave home without?” He was serious, well, okay semi-serious. But I wasn’t. I said, “Seven things I never leave home without, Bob.” He wanted to know what they were. That off-handed comment was a joke in which I made up the number on the spot. Later over fish and chips he pressed me about it. “If there were other constructs that you’ve created that you— that we — never leave home without, what would they be?” That question sent me on a year long study of the basic principles in human development. Via the research in the pioneer thinkers in the field of Developmental Psychology: Piaget, Erickson, Fowler, Keagan, and others, I constructed The Matrix Model using five categories of the Self: Self (SelfEsteem or value), Power (Self-Confidence), Others (social self), Time (temporal self), and World (our universes of meaning). Afterwards, I presented the Matrix Model in many places—Moscow, Mexico, London, and Johannesburg, South Africa, etc. then, even though my understanding was still rudimentary, I rushed the first edition to print to put it into the hands of Neuro-Semanticists and NLP practitioners. I did that primarily because there were so many colleagues who wanted to begin using and learning this structure for modeling the mind-body system. They recognized that The Matrix Model would give them an efficient and effective way to think about working with the human system for change, empowerment, and transformation. Bob created a PowerPoint presentation of it for our website and Tom Welch, Sr. made a video-audio recording of one of the early presentations. -7-

The Matrix Model

Foreword

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

The Structures and the Sources of the Matrix Model As a psychologist I stand on the shoulders of many giants who have explored and charted out the territory of human “nature” and functioning before me. I developed the three process dimensions within the Matrix Model mostly from Cognitive-Behavioral Psychology, Cognitive Linguistics, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), General Semantics, and the Meta-States Model. Within it you will also see pieces derived from Glasser’s Reality Therapy and Control Theory and Frankl’s Logotherapy. The five content dimensions came from both Developmental Psychology and Phenomenology. While this extensive theoretical background of The Matrix Model might imply that it is complex, the model actually is very simple. In presenting it around the world, I have found that even those brand new to Neuro-Semantics easily pick up on the structure with an understanding that allows them to begin using it immediately to transform themselves and others. In rushing the first edition to print I knew that there are many unfinished parts to the model. I also knew that it would be in turning it loose and giving others a chance to bring their knowledge, competence, background, and experimental use of the model that would detail out other facets of the model. That is precisely what has happened. For the second edition I was indebted to so many for the questions, suggestions, and experiences that hundreds of people offered. Yet it was not really completed with even that edition. There’s more research and development that will be made to The Matrix Model. To Best Learn this Model— Sit back and read through the entire text to get an overview of the Matrix Model without worrying about understanding every detail or facet of the model. When you have a general sense of the structure, then use that to first apply the model to one of your own experiences. This will allow you to discover and explore your own matrix of frames. Thereafter you will be ore skilled to use it in communicating, negotiating, coaching, managing, doing therapy, leading, etc. Because this is an evolving model, I am interested in your comments and experiences. May you find yourself becoming a Master of yours.

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PREFACE To the Second Edition Bob Bodenhamer, D.Min.

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he term “matrix” originally referred to, and literally means, “womb.” The etymology of the word denotes a place where things are given birth. In mathematics, Michael states, “matrix refers to a rectangular array of mathematical elements as the coefficients of simultaneous linear equations.” Now, those definitions sound really impressive and fit the Matrix Model as we use it in Neuro-Semantics. But don’t let Michael fool you. I think it was the movie The Matrix that really turned him on to the matrix as a metaphor. The movie by that title provides a metaphor that is so close to Neuro-Semantics, some thought Michael helped write the script for the movie. In NeuroSemantics, the matrix refers to our mind-body-emotion frames from which our reality and experiences originates. In May 2002, I was in Sydney Australia co-training with Michael in a MetaNLP Practitioner and Meta-Master course. After many years of working with Michael, I have become accustomed to him coming up with new theories that advance NLP and Neuro-Semantics. While eating dinner one evening at our hotel, he said, “Let me show you something,” and then proceeded to sketch out a new model he was working on, “The Matrix Model.” I immediately realized that he was on to something. When one looks at all the materials now available in NLP plus all the additional materials from NeuroSemantics, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. People are not simple. And, the outcome of NLP and Neuro-Semantics is to describe as accurately as possible how our mind-body system functions as a cognitive entity. No wonder there are so many books on the subject. The challenge is huge. In the attempt to model our subjective experience and to provide means of controlling it, NLP has more than 200 patterns for intervention. In Neuro-Semantics there are over 130 patterns and both lists are growing and will continue to grow. -9-

The Matrix Model

Preface—1

Bobby G. Bodenhamer, M.Div.

Figure 1

Figure 1 is my attempt to illustrate the daunting character of the components and patterns of the NLP model before the Matrix Model. Over the years of leading trainings and co-authoring several books on the subject, I have been asked, “How does it all tie together?” People say, “Wow, this is a lot of stuff. I didn’t realize there was so much to the model. I thought one could learn it at a weekend training.” They are surprised to find out that this is not so. There is a huge volume of material available. All of the materials attempt to explain the complexities of cognition and how to control it. We desperately needed some model that would tie it all together. The Matrix Model is the best I have seen for that. And, in assisting Michael in expanding the model, I have grown to appreciate it even more. I am typing this Preface in the lounge of Gatwick Airport in London having completed my first formal training using The Matrix Model. I introduced the model and provided some patterns for evoking change in each of the seven dimensions to the London College of Clinical Hypnosis in a two-day -10-

The Matrix Model

Preface—1

Bobby G. Bodenhamer, M.Div.

workshop. I loved it! The model is so easy to teach and is so quickly grasped by participants. Why is this? It is easily grasped because it brings the complexity of NLP and Neuro-Semantics into just seven categories as you can see in Figure 2. This number fits the number of items that we can typically hold in conscious awareness at a time as was given by cognitive psychologist, George Miller in his famous paper, “The Magic Number Seven Plus or Minus Two (7 +/- 2).” The Matrix Model allows us to fit all of NLP and Neuro-Semantics within just seven categories: meaning, intention, self, power, time, others, and world. Inside those concepts one can place all of the major components. These include all of the patterns of NLP/NS, all of the Meta-Programs, all of the Meta-Model categories and Milton Model distinctions, all linguistic structures and all Mind-Lines (Sleight-of-Mouth) patterns. This is wonderful. The model provides the diagnostic tools for understanding the problem states and, once diagnosed as to which dimensions are involved in constructing the problem state, the clinician can then use the patterns within those dimensions to bring about needed change. The book you now have in your hand is the second edition of the Matrix Model. Michael quickly produced the first edition due to the demand from our neuro-semanticists. They were excited to get it in their hands. The first edition provided a testing ground for the second edition which expanded and clarified the model. This is an advanced book. To really appreciate its value, the reader will need to have a thorough knowledge of NLP and Neuro-Semantics. I recommend both a NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner certification to really appreciate its value. However, if that is not possible, read up on all the key areas of NLP and Neuro-Semantics before reading this work. A reading of the two volumes of The User’s Manual of the Brain will provides an adequate foundation for appreciating The Matrix Model. In addition, I would recommend an extensive understanding of the patterns of NLP found in The Structure of Magic, an understanding and appreciation of Meta-Programs found in Figuring Out People, a reading of Mind-Lines: Lines that Change Minds for an in-depth look at sleight-of-mouth patterns, and Secrets of Personal Mastery and Frame Games for a thorough understanding of the Meta-States Model which is at the heart of Neuro-Semantics. -11-

That’s because Meta-States lies at the heart of the matrix as Michael wrote about the Matrix Model: “It unifies within one structure the meta-stating processes that move us from one state to another and so to all the systemic processes involved in layers of meaning-making. This is perhaps the most significant contribution of this model. It may even be the most important structural piece that truly unites the whole model as a systemic model.” Bobby G Bodenhamer February, 2003

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Recommendations for this Book "Once more, L. Michael Hall, a distinguished psychologist, author, and trainer, has expanded the knowledge base on NLP by presenting a comprehensive, dynamic model of the mind. He has put forth a theory of human psychology that far surpasses those I learned about in college and graduate school. ... In my opinion the Matrix Model is a landmark in the field of NLP and Neuro-Semantics.” Judith Pearson, Ph.D., Psychologist, NLP Trainer, Author

“WOW! I just finished reading The Matrix Model and I am blown away. Finally, someone has put together a Model that is usable for coaching, sales, counseling with applications. I particularly enjoyed how each chapter ends with many pattern to use. What is done here is amazing—this is an integrated model that combines NLP, Semantics, Neuro-Semantics, and the cognitive sciences in 7 simple logical dimensions. This book is the answer coaches and counselors and others have been waiting for.” Todd Beeler, President, Success Coaching Group, Savannah, Ga. “The Matrix Model is a great step forward to understand the spiritual laws and the power of frames. Awesome, such an easy to understand complete model which overlook or shows all the domains of communication. This Matrix Model will be the next super model for NLP and Neuro-Semantics.” Peter Kemperman, Netherlands

“To understand the stories we live and how we link the different meanings of our lives into a "world view," start with The Matrix Model. This will give you a frame and an approach if you are a coach and/or a psychologist. After reading The Matrix Model, it will be virtually impossible to consider any individual methods of intervention without this book in your hand. Armand Kruger, Clinical Psychologist; NLP, South Africa "Dr. Michael Hall is a Master Magician. He is the Morpheus who enticed me to willingly take the red pill, embarking on the endless journey of personal growth with the possibility of mastery calling me into the future." Sabrina Yuille, NLP & Neuro-Semantic Trainer, Australia

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PART I: THE MATRIX MODEL The Meaning-Making Meta-Stating Core

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6

5

4

3

2

Stimulus

Response

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Chapter 1

THE MATRIX MARY LIVED IN

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hen I first met Mary, she lived in a matrix, a neuro-semantic matrix, which was quite predictable. Her world was one where she would alternate between seductive childlike flirting and then very intense anger which was almost always inappropriate and just as surprising. The worse part was that it would seem to come out of nowhere. Most of the time you could count on her being flirtatious, sensual, and childlike. This made her charming and a delight to be around. It was her primary way of coping with the world, defining herself, and moving through relationships. Yet that childlikeness could just as quickly give way to a childishness when she didn’t get her way. In almost everything she did, she gave off an attitude of entitlement. She seemed to assume that getting her way was one of her inalienable rights. It wasn’t even that she thought she would get her way by being cute, sweet, seductive, or sexual. It was more the case that she expected, and even demanded, getting her way because she felt entitled to it. Didn’t everybody see it that way? When she didn’t get her way and in the way that she wanted it, the tantrums would start. She would blow up in rage. What made her anger surprising and shocking was that you never knew when it would occur or over what. It could be almost anything. Anything that she took as not getting her way would evoke her immediate and intense wrath. -15-

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The Matrix Mary Lived In

Then there was another thing about her that made it all the more confusing, both to herself and to others. When anyone would bring up her inappropriate way of expressing her dissatisfactions, she would deny feeling angry or that she had misbehaved. Then she would feel hurt and sad and that would last until those feelings gave way to depression. It was quite a cycle. Typically, she would do this in a way that it would leave the person who brought up the subject feeling like the perpetrator of a terrible grievance against her. Over the years of her life, this essentially taught those closest to her to not confront her directly or, for that matter, to not give her any feedback that might help her adjust her behaviors or discover her patterns. Needless to say, this made Mary a “tough client” with therapists as well, and she had been through several dozen without any significant change. Over the years when she did see a therapist the “complaint” that she offered, and that she wanted help was to “get people to treat me better and not be so demanding since I am suffering from depression.” When she explored this in therapy, she discovered (again and again) that she didn’t have a really deep nor significant relationship with her husband, children, parents, or friends. Now I said that her matrix seemed predictable to me. Yet simultaneously it did not seem predictable to her, her husband, and children. All of them felt confused, disoriented, and anxious. Each had his or her understanding about what was wrong and a solution for that wrong. Of course, all of this contributed to and added fuel to the symptomology. Actually, working with the symptoms had now become part of the problem. Mary focused on the symptoms of depression, feeling like a victim, being mistreated and misunderstood. Her husband Joseph focused on her anger and had developed a strategically skillful style of avoiding intimacy and walking on eggshells around her. The more he shifted his focus to work and his social life, the more she felt alone and abandoned. The more he did this, the more she came to believe that he was up to something, hiding something, and conspiring against her. This led her to fear him which, in turn, eventually led her to feel paranoid around him. The children, who were now teenagers and one of them in her early twenties, similarly used the defense of avoidance. They described their mother, behind her back, as “crazy.” As she picked up on this, her paranoia -16-

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spread to the children and then to the entire “world.” It all seemed strange, fearful, and dangerous. Eventually, whenever a friend or even Joseph would do something nice, she feared that it was a plot to trick her. As her fearful attitude grew, she used her seductive childlike flirting less and less and stayed more in a state of fear that was always ready to explode in anger. To create even a semblance of “control,” she became increasingly hyper-vigilant. The Matrix that Had Mary Even though Mary created this matrix from her experiences, eventually it had her. That’s the way the matrix works for all of us. If we don’t wake up to its existence, presence, and influence, it controls and governs our experience so that we don’t feel in control of our brain, emotions, or behaviors. That’s when the matrix has us. At first Mary’s matrix was grounded in several common everyday states: desire, play, fun, attraction, hope, dreams, wonder. But when she created the meaning of entitlement and applied the feeling of demand (demandingness) to that entitlement, she began to create a self which she then felt as being increasingly mistreated and misunderstood (Self dimension). This showed up in the introduction of some other everyday states: stress, disappointment, frustration, and anger. To deal with that, Mary began using her angry outbursts to get people to stop mistreating her, and to give her what she wanted. That was her intention, to get what she wanted and her rightful due (Intentional Dimension). Her emotional rages and tantrums (State Dimension) had worked well as a child and a thought lingered in the back of her mind just outside of conscious awareness that people would see her childlike seductiveness as a sweet kind of anger and respond positively to her as her parents had (Time Dimension). In this way she was using her resources to make something positive happen and to manage her anxiety (Power Dimension). But it wasn’t quite working out that way. Her intention in doing this was positively good. She wasn’t trying to be hurtful, ugly, confusing, crazy-making, demanding, or rageful. She positively intended to make her life work, to get the things important to her, to feel in control and successful. Yet in spite of that intention, it wasn’t working out that way. -17-

The Matrix Model

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As the old coping skills and resources proved less and less effective, Mary experienced more and more of the extremes—childlike seductiveness and inappropriate anger. The movie that she played in her head was from her past, a time in her life when those patterns worked. She really had not noticed that they were no longer working, so she kept doing more of what didn’t work in hope that it would. But that didn’t happen. The more this whole matrix of frames and beliefs and understandings spun round and round, the more she got into increasingly fearful and rageful states. At first she would try to make herself stop, but that only made it worse (Intention Dimension). When she later became even more convinced that it wasn’t about her, but about them, and then about “the world,” the more pathological her states became. In this way, her Others Dimension reflecting her beliefs and understandings about others became more negative and distrusting. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy organizing her entire mind-body-emotion system. The Day the Matrix Changed Since a matrix of beliefs, values, understandings, and decisions governs our lives, and operates as a self-organizing system, the first step toward transforming a matrix is always to first become aware of the matrix and how it operates in our lives. I was fortunate enough to be at the right place and the right time—for Mary —to be able to help her see and recognize her matrix. It happened when I was promoting a training. Mary saw the ads about “running her own brain” and it struck her as a potentially new approach to taking charge of her life and getting people to give her what she wanted. Later at the training, I worked with Mary in front of the group doing The Intentionality Stance pattern.1 This process starts with any task or goal that a person wants to do or achieve, whether one finds it pleasant or unpleasant. The pattern enables you to move up the levels of your mind to the intentions of your intentions. In doing this with Mary, I welcomed and accepted every intention or agenda that she presented and then invited her to yet a higher and more important objective. Doing this enabled her to hear herself for the first time and to recognize the matrix that she had created. As we moved up the levels, I commented to her:

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“So you want to experience X and Y, so that you can feel yourself accepted and valued. And when you get that fully and completely in just the way you want, what do you get that’s even more important?”

She said, “That’s it. I just want to feel acceptable for who I am.” I commented, “You don’t already feel that?” “No...” she said pausing, noticing, thinking ... and then crying. “So you have to do all of these things because you don’t just accept yourself as a worthwhile human being ... unconditionally valuing and loving yourself simply because you are a human being ... a wonderful, awesome, and mysterious being ... you have to prove yourself to be a Somebody rather than esteeming yourself as a Somebody and getting on with life?”

“Can you just do that?” she asked. “Why not? There are no Mind Police that will arrest you for starting from the position of being a valuable, lovable, and precious human being and then living your life to express your Somebody-ness. What if you just adopted that as your frame of mind ... that you get to express the magic and wonder of your mind and heart rather than trying to work your way up to being a human being?”

She laughed. “That’s what I’ve been doing, ‘Working my way up to being a human being.’ I can’t believe how stupid that is.” “Well I really don’t think it has anything to do with being stupid or even smart, it really doesn’t have anything to do with you. It was your frames. It was the matrix of frames which you had received and out of which you have been living. That’s what gave the orders for you to play the Blame Game, Anger Game, Seduction Game. You played those games because of these frames.” “Now that you know that you can simply accept and appreciate yourself for what you can do to create healthy self-confidence and can esteem yourself as valuable, worthwhile, and lovable ... because you were born a Somebody, you can create a healthy self-esteem, you can begin to live freely as a magical human being with fewer demands and more able to just enjoy the people and experiences you have.”

When a Matrix Transforms A matrix can and does change. That’s because the matrix and its dimensions are made out of the human “stuff’ of thought, emotion, and physiology. The “strange and painful worlds” that some people live in are -19-

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made out of the same stuff that make up the “wonderful and genius worlds” that others live in. What’s the difference? Frames that either allow some people to thrive and excel or frames that impoverish and imprison others. In such trainings as Frame Games2 and Matrix Games3 we have been identifying the frames which allow people to make their lives a hundred times more productive and enjoyable. Along the way we have simultaneously identified the toxic frames which impoverish a person’s internal world. This has led us to realize that there are just a few essential and foundational categories of frames which we carry with us which define, shape, and govern our lives: Self, Power, Others, Time, and the World (the five sub-dimensions of Self) along with State, Meaning, and Intentionality. Within the frames that we inherit, absorb, and invent in these categories, we have our most essential sub-dimensions and together they all make up the matrix of complete our mind-body-emotion system. These dimensions are made up of the stuff of thoughts-emotions-andphysiology (how you experience and use your body) and these give you the tools for transforming the frames. That’s because of the basic matrix principle: When frames change, so does one’s life and destiny. Your frames-of-reference, frames of mind, frames of meaning encode the “meanings” that you create and hold in mind as the maps you use to navigate the experiences of life. Changing a frame changes the map which, in turn, changes the trip. Diagnosing Mary’s Matrix The following chapters present The Matrix Model. In these chapters you will get to fully explore the matrix and see it used and demonstrated for how to use it in modeling, profiling, diagnosing, coaching, training, healing, and much more. What follows will probably make much more sense after you finish this book. Here is a summary of the matrix that Mary lived in. The Process Dimensions: State: Meaning:

Seductive childlike flirting, intense anger. Confusion about what’s happening leading to depression, feeling like a victim, feeling fearful and paranoid. Demanding (I must get my way), entitlement (I deserve to always get my way), all-or-nothing thinking (It’s my way or nothing), Denial (refusal for indepth self-awareness, fear of selfawareness), -20-

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Intentionality: I intend to get my way. I want people to treat me better, to stop being so demanding, to not hold me accountable for my responses. Trying to stop herself from being afraid or rageful.

The Content Dimensions: Self: Power: Time:

Others: World:

Self defined by getting one’s way, sense of value by not being contradicted, denied anything, or frustrated. Not understanding self. Weak ego-strength for facing the reality of Others, that others have needs and wants also. Resources used are that of a little child who wants to be taken care of. Living in the Past: why can’t I be treated as Little Miss Charming as my parents did, I just want to be spoiled, that’s all, is that asking too much? Using Past coping skills that are inadequate for the Present. Superficial relationships, lack of depth of contact with others, lack of intimacy. Not feeling understood. The world is confusing and strange. She only had a map for the world of her intimate childhood family which made her ineffective in any and every other domain.

Matrix Dynamics In Mary’s case, her matrix spiraled in a downward direction. The more she tried to stop herself from feeling afraid or angry, the more fragile, fearful, and rageful she became. Her matrix was also oscillating in a seemingly unpredictable way, moving back and forth from being a seductionist to being the incredible hulk. And that arose from her frames about herself; “I’m special and fragile so people have to walk on eggshells around me.” Matrix Learnings You live in a matrix of frames, and until you recognize it for what it is— The matrix has you. When you recognize the matrix for what it is and how it operates, you begin the adventure of becoming the master of your own matrix and a much more effective communicator with others. The problem is never you or another person, the problem is always the frame. The problem is the matrix of frames that you have inherited, absorbed from your environment and culture, or invented as you sought to figure life out. Yet it is just a set of meanings— interpretative frames, and the good news is that you can change them if they do not serve you well. -21-

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End of Chapter Notes 1. You can find the Intentionality Stance pattern in Secrets of Personal Mastery (1999). 2. Frame Games refers to a book by that title, now re-titled, Winning the Inner Game (2007). I developed a series of Frame Books as well as a series of training manuals: Games that Slim and Fit People Play, Games for Creating Inside-Out Wealth, Games for Mastering Fear, Games for Accelerating Learning, Games Great Business Expert Play, etc. 3: The Matrix Games or Matrix Training is our current training for learning the skills of the Matrix and Transforming our system of frames.

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Chapter 2

WELCOME TO THE MATRIX OF YOUR MIND The mind is the key. So, where is the key to the mind? What is the key to the mind? The key to the mind is the matrix.

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ou were born in a matrix, just as I was. You didn’t create it. You didn’t wish for it. You didn’t particularly want it, and you didn’t even recognize it ... at least not at first. Yet you were born in a matrix of frames within frames within frames—frames of reference, frames of meaning, frames of mind. We call this matrix by numerous terms: “mind,” “personality,” “self-consciousness,” “culture,” “civilization,” “the human condition,” “reality,” as well as more philosophical and psychological terms, “logical levels,” “self-reflexivity,” “the infinite regress,” etc. I’ve written this chapter to introduce you to your matrix. The matrix you were born into has been coming together for thousands upon thousands of years through the time-binding activities of the human race. This means that what others learned and encoded in symbolic form (via language, mathematics, architecture, art, play, etc.) allowed those who came later to begin where the former generation left off.1 We bind the things into ourselves learned in such times. We bind them into our mindbody systems and we do so through the use of symbols. This is the human way of being and performing. In this way, the belief frames, value frames, understanding and knowledge frames, the identity and religious frames, and -23-

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hundreds of other kinds of frames come together into a whole. As they do, they offer you s a whole set of filters, constraints, and maps about things, about self, others, and life. This gives birth to the matrix and with every generation, it continues to evolve in ever-new developments. “Wake Up, Neo! The Matrix Has You!” Like Neo in the Movie, The Matrix, you live in a matrix—a mind-body matrix comprised of multiple embedded frames. It is made up of layers of belief frames, value frames, understanding frames, meaning frames, and many, many more. Your matrix is your internal model of the world, a map you use to get around. It is made up of multiple belief frames about many things. This gives you your working model of the world. And you use it to navigate your way through life—through work and career, through relationships, through managing ourselves, and through all of the other thousands of experiences of life. The Matrix Model What is the design of any person’s matrix? Made up of multiple subdimensions and multiple sets of embedded frames about all kinds of things, as your model of the world, you can now use to navigate the busy corridors and the wild territory “out there.” That’s its design. Unlike animals who operate in the world with genetically encoded programs for what to do, how to be, and what to pay attention to, you have been born with a freedom and a responsibility that allows you to construct meanings. Meaning is not a given. You have to invent it. You have to discover it. It is precisely from constructing meanings, as you develop over your life span, that you construct the dimensions in which you then live. And with that the adventure begins. The Foundation of the Matrix— the State Dimension It all starts with your everyday states of consciousness. Yet, what are those states? A state is a simple mind-body experience. At that point, you don’t know that there’s any matrix. You hardly know anything. You only “know” in the most rudimentary way that there is inciting stimuli in the world. Later you discover that you have a pattern for responding to the external environment. Then you begin to recognize that you experience mental-emotional-and-physical states. We call them emotions, moods, feelings, attitudes, our way of being and eventually “self” and personality

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and sometimes we say, “That’s the way I am” when we identify with our emotions. Figure 2:1 A Neuro-Linguistic State The matrix begins in, and is grounded in, a mindbody-emotion state— a composite state of thoughts and emotions.

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States are the mind-body-emotion experiences which you never leave home without. There’s a reason for this. Namely, because you are always in some state of mind, state of emotion, and state of body. You cannot step out of your body or leave your body. There is no actual dissociation. Yet you can conceptually think-and-feel as if you are not in your body (although you actually are). What you can do is conceptually step back from an experience and, in a reflexive move, gain a larger perspective and mindfulness of it. To call this “dissociation” is a misuse of language as it falsely describes things. Driven by your thinking, beliefs, understandings and frames of meaning, states are your mood experiences within your neurology which in turn govern your perception, communication, behavior, memory, and learning. In this way, your states color your world. You see and perceive the world through the lens provided by your state. Grounding the Matrix All of this about state is important because the matrix is grounded in a neuro-semantic state. Without such grounding, you would lose your sense of reality and your ability to effectively adjust yourself to the world as you find it. This would reduce “sanity” and make you “unsane.” Each of the dimensions in-forms and influences the cinema playing in your mind within the primary state experience. This is the “work station,” so to speak, of your mind where you present and re-present things to yourself again and again. This is the mental movie theater that you “sense” inside as you make pictures, hear sounds and a sound track, and feel sensations as you re-present to yourself previous events and experiences.

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States are invisible when we first encounter them.

States can occur at many different levels. When states rise up to a higher level they “go meta” to become statesabout-other-states or meta-states.2 This enables them to habituate which then enables you to keep them. The state (whether of joy or sadness, love or apathy, stress or relaxation) then stays with you as a frame of mind, as a matrix in your mind, as a higher level frame that establishes contexts for your meanings. In this way you can take your state with you and hold it over time. The 7 Matrices of our Neuro-Semantics VII Purpose/Intent Matrix

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First Encounter with the Matrix When you first encounter a person, you don’t see the other person’s matrix at all. Typically you don’t even see the person’s state. All of that is invisible. By learning how to recognize the meanings and the framings that create one’s internal world you are enabled to see the invisible dimensions of the mind. They then become visible to your perception and inspection. If a person’s matrix is his or her internal world of frames which are embedded within frames within frames, this makes his internal universe layered and complex. This creates her “assumed reality”—the place that she comes from as she encounters the world. “What is the matrix made up?” It is comprised of the simplest of things: thoughts, feelings, and physiology. It is comprised of the very things which we all use to map the world that we live in. This is the “stuff” that comes together to create your states and your experiences. There’s nothing else, just the human stuff of your nervous systems operating in the world by thinking, feeling, and activating motor programs of response. The Matrix Movie3 You map the world inside of your mind as you re-present mental movies. These maps or movies, in turn, create your states. The particular content that plays out on the theater of your mind puts you into state by sending signals to your body. Knowing the movies that play in the mind-body-emotion matrix then, in turn, gives cue as to what the person is feeling and how he or she will behave. Movie Frames Above and beyond the internal cinema are frames of meaning which influence the movies. You never just “think”— you think about your thinking. You observe your thinking, direct your thinking, etc. This describes the higher levels of your mind —your operational meta-states.

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Doing this enables you to think in ways Code for the Figure beyond representation. You also think in Meta-Model distinctions in terms of editing the cinema and the camera the Meaning Funnel shots you use. You think in terms of directing Ps: Presupposition the focus of your movie-mind and the CE: Cause-Effect screenplay or script that you live out. You can MR: Mind-Reading think in terms of the cinema that you produce CEq: Complex Equivalence Id: Identification and whether it truly serves you and puts you in the direction in which you really want to go. You can step back, in your mind, and think about the content of your thinking. This self-reflexivity as a kind of thinking differs significantly from representational thinking. The Meaning Dimension — A Funnel of Meaning-Making As you map your experiences, you generate meanings that you encode into your mental movies which, in turn, create your states. This is the foundational core of each person’s neuro-semantic system. Your neurosemantic system works and is driven by meaning. So is mine. Think of it as the winds of your mind which move upward creating layer upon layer of meanings. These spirals of reflexivity #1 which go round and round create within The Meta-Stating Core of you a whirlwind of emotions. Meaning-Making With regard to your states, what counts most are your meanings. Your meanings drive and create the layered nature of your consciousness. When a stimulus occurs, you frame things, and when you do that it activates your state which in turn, evoke your feelings and behaviors. And with that, the game begins. Multi-Level Meaning Making What does meaning mean? How many kinds or levels of meanings are there? We humans make meanings at many levels in our mind-body. Although we use different words to describe these different meanings, each of these processes are involved at each level of -28-

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meaning-making. We create meanings through associating, labeling, defining, languaging, classifying, framings, and evaluating. While all of these terms sound like different processes, they are not. These terms describe different facets of the same thing—the abstracting or summarizing from one level to the other through some use of symbols. At the primary state you typically begin by making associations between things. That is, you link your emotional states to your experiences in the world. Then from there you make a meta-move to label, frame, classify, language, and evaluate the experience. These different terms each describe another facet of the structure and yet they all refer to the same meaningmaking process. In this way, your reflexivity creates your meaning-making funnel. Meta-Stating in the Meaning-Making Funnel Via by making-meaning you create all of the other dimensions. As you give meaning to things by associating states with experiences, by framing, classifying, evaluating, etc., you call the other sub-dimensions of the matrix into existence. In this way you also stabilize your highest meta-states until they become your frames-of-mind or your “attitudes.” What you hold in mind becomes your “meaning” precisely because you hold it in mind and use it as your reference structure. How do you hold your meanings in mind? Mostly through language. This explains why language in NLP was designed as “the structure of magic” in the two original NLP books by that title. Why the term “magic?” What magic does this refer to? That term was used because the workings of the internal world can sometimes seem like magic. In that internal world you can, as it were, magically make something out of nothing by simply naming it. You can call “rudeness” into existence simply by labeling some behavior as rude. By so framing it with that evaluation, so it becomes to you. In the inside world of the matrix, unlike the outside world of energy manifestations, naming and speaking make it so. It constructs your inner world of what is subjectively real to you. Prior to NLP, we called these processes “self-fulfilling prophecies,” “the placebo effect,” or simply “beliefs” which sent commands to the nervous system. Korzybski called them the human “psycho-logics” which comprise one’s internal reality. These processes work because your matrix, like -29-

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mine, seeks to actualize itself. Frames seek to self-replicate. That’s also why if you don’t take charge of your matrix, the matrix will have you. In terms of the structure of the Matrix Model, we have three process dimensions: Meaning, Intention, and State and we have five content dimensions: Self, Power, Others, Time, and World. These dimensions “we never leave home without them.” Because state serves as the grounding matrix, I did not number it. That leaves seven sub-dimensions which define and describe the entire Neuro-Semantic system. 4 The Intention Dimension Part of the meaning-making process is intentionality. Intending is an aspect of constructing meaning. Sometimes we ask, “What do you mean by doing that?” we are actually asking, “What is your intention?” Intention, as an aspect of meaning, is the kind of meaning creation wherein you set an intent, you orient yourself in the world by your choice and specific goals or purposes. By intending, you choose to attempt to do something which you consider valuable and important. This describes the second process dimension. Actually you do not have just one intention, you have many—hundreds. You have intentions within every sub-matrice, you have intentions about your intentions. Intention answers the Why is that important? question and as it thereby flushes out layers of intentions, it identifies layers of values. If intentionality is your capacity for setting yourself in a certain direction and developing a sense of purpose, then your intentions specifies particular goals, objectives, and outcomes. Then, from your intentions arises your motives and motivation, your agendas and purposes. You feel your Intention Dimension in terms of an urge to do something. Sometimes these urges conflict with each other. The design of the Intention Dimension is that you experience an urge to act because as it activates your motor programs, that urge moves you to align your attentions and actions to your higher objective. The Self-Organizing Nature of the Matrix Out of the core funnel of the meaning matrix frames upon frames are created and central is the way a person builds understandings about one’s self. In this way the process dimensions fill up the content that you mentally map about your self. These articulate your understandings, -30-

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definitions, values, beliefs, decisions, expectations, etc. about the categories of self: self-esteem (Self), self-confidence (Power), social self (Others), temporal self (Time), self in different roles in different domains (World). Producer These embedded frames work as selforganizing attractors (a term from systems dynamics). Each and every matrix attracts and organizes itself according to t he m ean i ngs incorporated in its frames. A function of the higher frames is that they attract and command the matrix to selforganize. This makes the matrix dynamic, forever active, and always seeking to make real in the external world what’s real inside.

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As such, an attractor frame dynamically stabilizes a matrix and can also put one matrix in conflict with another matrix. Every highest level frame within any matrix will provide the focus, energy, motivation, and agenda for the default choices you make. Neuro-Semantic “Thinking” or Movie-Making Your awareness and experience of things depend on the movies which you play in the cinema of your mind. To discover what’s “on your mind,” take a look at the movie that’s playing inside. These determine your “thoughts.” These movies typically are two-second movies that flash on very quickly, so you have to be quick to catch them. The systemic nature of your mind-body system also means that each movie is in-formed and framed by each of the sub-dimensions. These frames inform and edit your internal mental movies. In this way, your conceptual constructions determine how you choose camera perspectives and how you direct and produce the movie— even thought most of this isn’t conscious. Matrix belief frames, once set, work automatically.

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These cinematic features work semantically to encode the meaning in sensory-based terms. While NLP traditionally called these features “submodalities,” in Neuro-Semantics we recognize them as meta-frames that govern the movie itself. The cinematic features stand for higher semantic frames and incorporate within them those meanings.4 Psycho-Logics— Your Unique Way of Reasoning As you think and construct your maps—your frames and embedded frames all “make sense” to you. From the inside they make perfect psycho-logical sense. This holds true even when they are not useful, productive, or logical to the outside world. Every meta-move sets a higher frame as a “logical” level and so creates your internal dimensions. Every meta-state is another “logical” level as it classifies or categorizes the experience in that way. 5 When you meet someone who seems to live in a different world, you may scratch your head and wonder, “What planet did you grow up on?” In spite of this metaphor, you are actually very close to the truth. That person did not grow up in the same world as you. You do live in a different universe of perceptions and values and understandings from that person. Your psycho-logics are at the same time incredibly “right” and appropriate to the meaning-making you have accepted and done and can be incredibly ugly, painful, stupid, inhuman, dysfunctional, pathological, and irrational. How does this occur? Because you are the framer, you set the frames by which you invent your own unique 1 -M e a ning “logic” of states within states. This explains the importance of ecology checks on frames. We have to run reality checks, ecology checks, and quality control checks. That’s the only way we can test the validity, usefulness, productivity, and sanity of our matrix. We cannot do so from the inside of the psychological structure. We have to step out of that and into a different kind of thinking that created it. This is the magic of the meta-moves up the levels of the mind.

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The Self Dimension You never leave home without your self and your set of self frames. This set of frames-within-frames influence nearly every one of your experiences and is nearly always ready to be activated. These are the frames that you have set as you have meta-stated your self. Your self dimension is actually made up of the five content subdimensions. The self dimension you have created is composed of all the frames of beliefs, classifications, understandings, and concepts you have set. These are the concepts conceptual frames which you have set about Cinema the key facets of yourself as a person. Your self-worth or selfesteem is either conditional or unconditional. Your competence in an activity or self-confidence refers to your ability to perform a particular skill and your ego-strength to face the world without falling apart. Your social self or your self-image is derived from how you think you are seen in the eyes of others. Your temporal self is your sense of yourself in time and over time and as you live in the different time zones. Your life-world self refers to the roles you take on in various worlds or universes of meaning and take on different positions, status, titles, etc. There are many facets of the self concept. How this most intimate map is constructed and what it allows you to do or not do fundamentally influences all of your thoughts and feelings. The Power Dimension As you meta-state yourself about your sense of power you make meanings about your ability to act, to take action, and to access needed resources.

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This dimension governs your core mappings about what you can or cannot do as you move through the world. Can I handle the world? Do I have the skills and ability to cope with things? What things can I do with competence and confidence? Am I helpless or can I do something? Can I grow and develop more skills and become empowered?

This dimension governs whether you will approach or avoid the events of life, whether you take effective action in the world or ineffective, whether you go for making your dreams come true or seek protection and safety. It establishes your style or modus operandi (MO) for how you operate in the world. The Others Dimension As you move through life, you make meanings about people and how you relate to them. This is your social self. You create a map about who they are, whether they are a threat or not, 1 -M e a n in g whether they will be there to support you or not, and whether you can effectively relate to them. The classifications, evaluations, and associations around people create this mental matrix. When you represent people, you create a social panorama of the world of people. This dimension governs your social skills, relational skills, and your 2 - S e lf ability to work with and through other C in e m a people. It determines whether you E vent approach or avoid, whether you like S tim u lu s or dislike, whether you fear or desire or in what combination you so R e s p o n s e respond. This dimension also reflects your meanings about ethnic and cultural groups, communities, politics, and persuasion. It also reflects the degree and quality of your emotional intelligence (EQ) in relating to others—your social intelligence.

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The Time Dimension As you move through the world, you map your understanding of time—of how you think about the events that have happened, are happening, or that will happen. Cinema It is this identification and comparing of events that enable you to create the uniquely human concept of “time.” And with that you become a temporal being—a person who lives in time. You are no longer a prisoner of the present, you can time-travel to the other time zones, to the past and to the future. It enables you to relate to “time” as a friend or as an enemy, as a resource or a limitation, sequentially (throughtime) or all at once (in-time). 1-Meaning

The World Dimension As you engage in various dimensions 7-Intention of life— the life-world, you create 6-World images, understandings, beliefs, expectations, values, etc. of that 5-Other world. The world dimension refers to 4-Time how you sense your self in these diverse domains—the roles you play 3-Power and the identities that you take on. 2- Self This dimension contains all of your mappings about all of the different Cinema worlds in which you live or could Event Stimulus live. This includes the world of work and business, the cultural world, Response world of physics, mathematics, music, family, etc. Each of these worlds offers yet another universe of meaning for you, a world in which you could live and operate. In each world that you have develop mental models

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about yourself—your position in it, your roles, etc. In each world you also develop your own unique world-view. Seeing the Matrix — Making of the Invisible Visible I’ve mentioned that the matrix is invisible to the physical eye and that’s why you have to learn to see it. You learn to see it as you recognize the various frames of the sub-dimensions and know what to look for—the linguistic patterns and the non-verbal indicators. Then you can see it. Then it becomes visible to your perspective. As the dimensions are activated, you can recognize them in a person’s neurology and physiology. When a person goes into a state, you can then hear it when a person uses the language that activates a given matrix. A person’s matrix becomes visible also when his or her internal semantics are activated regarding some meaning that the person considers important. Watch for it! Think of the matrix as a hologram and imagine the various dimensions flashing on and off as they are activated by information entering the system and energy leaving the system. In the chapters that follow, we will explore each and every matrix so you can become more fully acquainted with it and how it operates. The System Loops of the Matrix There are multiple feedback and feed-forward loops in the neuro-semantic system. These describe the information being brought in and processed and the energy being created and manifested out into the world. The first feedback loop occurs at the primary state level in the input-output or the stimulus-response process. This Pavlovian response is the most obvious and overt response pattern. A situation occurs and you respond. The world “out there” impacts upon you in some inciting incident and you respond. Information comes in as feedback. To that you then expand energy which goes out as you feed-forward behavior and emotion. That is the horizontal loop. he vertical loop is the meta-state loop of meaningmaking. Here you feed information back to yourself as you “think,” and send it upward to the higher levels of your mind. From there you then feed that information forward into your body. This activates your body in terms of your neurology and physiology so that you begin to embody the information into muscle memory and response patterns. This results in -36-

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emotions, speech, and behavior which you then feed-forward into your world. Background Dimensions in the Back of the Mind The seven dimensions are always ready to be activated by current conditions and stimuli. They are always “in the back of your mind”—outside of conscious awareness as your frames (metastates) and filters (meta-programs).6

The Meaning-Making Meta-Stating Core

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Because they are outside of awareness, they make up much of Stimulus what we call your “unconscious” Response mind. If they are well-formed and robust, this empowers you to be automatically effective and intuitive about the right things to do. If they are ill-formed and fragile, then they automatically limit you creating self-sabotage and dis-ease in your whole system. In that case you will feel that reality is your enemy and “makes you wrong.” This is a sign that something is wrong with the world. Not the external world, but your matrix world. And what’s wrong is not you, but your frames. It’s always the frame, it is never the person. Matrix Analysis Matrix analysis is a process that allows you to understand the neurosemantic system as a system. This invites you into a higher understanding of how it works, what drives it, the spiraling loops within it, and the leverage points for transformation. Matrix analysis allows you to identify the driving and critical matrix within and behind every experience. Through matrix analysis you are able to profile yourself, groups, cultures, etc. and to understand the structure of an experience. In this way, you can use the matrix for modeling how any experience, emotion, or skill works. Matrix Holarchy Think of the matrix as a holarchy rather than a hierarchy. There are levels of thoughts-and-feelings in your mind, yet these levels are not like a hierarchy. That’s too linear a picture. A holarchy is comprised of holons, -37-

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which are simultaneously both parts and wholes. The whole is in the part and the part is in the whole. When you think of your states as holons you can understand your mind-body-emotion system as a system. If your mind-body system is a holarchy, you can expect to find in any every part, the whole and within the whole, the parts. You can now take a word, a belief, a cinematic feature of a movie, etc. and by playing with it, you can flush out the whole that’s within it—the higher frames that govern the neuro-semantic system. And the Point Is? This chapter has provided an overview of the matrix. The design has been to give you a sense of a person’s matrix and an idea of what the Matrix Model is about. While there is much more to it, those details will be detailed in the coming chapters. No need to worry about that now. All of your questions will be answered as we progress. Later, when you have finished the book, come back to this chapter and you will find that it continually makes more sense and seem richer and fuller. The Matrix Model gives you the frameworks for entering into a matrix—your own or that of someone else. Now the adventure can begin— the adventure of detecting and escaping a current matrix and the adventure of learning to become the master of your matrix.

End Notes 1: Time-Binding refers to how we bind the learnings that others made in previous times. We bind them inside our nervous systems via the symbols and symbolic systems that we invent. 2: Meta is a Greek word that means “above, beyond, and about.” A meta-level is above and beyond the first level. It transcends the first, and is about the first as its frame of classification or reference. 3: See the book, MovieMind for a full description of this subject. 4. If you ask, “Why did you originally say there were seven dimensions when there are actually eight?” The answer is because I thought “seven” was a sexier number than “eight.”! 4: For more on “sub-modalities” see The Structure of Excellence (1999). 5: A meta-state is a state of mind or emotion about another state. 6: See Chapter 5 for more about meta-programs as coalesced meta-states.

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Chapter 3

THE MATRIX OF OUR NEURO-SEMANTIC FRAMEWORK “ There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.” Victor Hugo

I

n Neuro-Semantics we begin from a single realization, namely, that our mind-body-and-emotion experience works as a system—it operates as a total system of frames which are embedded in yet higher frames. Further, all of these frames work as a system of interactive parts mutually influencing each other. You probably already know this. The only thing we sometimes question and debate is how all these frames and facets of our mind influence each other, in what order, and if there is a dominating influence among these variables. These are basic questions about human functioning and psychology. They govern our basic maps about people, about ourselves, and about how to move through the world effectively. As a model of human functioning, the Matrix Model with its subdimensions is the primary systemic model in Neuro-Semantics. It is a -39-

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system that unites all of the component pieces, distinctions, patterns, and models that have arisen in Neuro-Linguistics (NLP) during the past 40 years. It also provides a framework for how to use NLP and NeuroSemantics effectively as a coach, manager, leader, therapist, or communicator. It also integrates and unifies the four meta-domains of NLP, the four higher domains which govern key facets of human functioning: Language (the Meta-Model)1 Perception and Thinking Patterns (Meta-Programs)2 The Levels of States (Meta-States)3 and The Cinematic Features of our representations (“sub-modalities”).4 This model also does something else. The Matrix Model unifies within one structure the meta-stating processes which include all of the systemic processes involved in the meaning-making layers. This is perhaps the most significant contribution of this model. It may even be the most important structural piece that truly unites the whole model as a systemic model. The pages that follow outlines the basic structure and functioning of the Matrix Model. Although two-dimensional, sequential, and linear on paper, The Matrix Model itself is three-dimensional and holographic. The best way to learn it is through seeing it used and getting some hands-on experience using it yourself. The Matrix — As a Term and Metaphor There are two references used here for the term matrix. One reference is mathematical and the other is from the movie by the same name. A matrix with two axes (or three) is used to create new concepts and understandings. For example, if we relate the ideas of speed and time, then we can construct the concept of miles-per-hour. The second reference is the 1999 sci-fi movie trilogy, The Matrix, the screenplay written by Larry and Andy Wachowski. The word “matrix” itself comes from “womb” and means “something within which something else originates or develops.” The term matrix applied to human psychology and functioning refers to all of the frames of mind which we hold in mind. These frames are belief frames, value frames, reference frames, identity frames, decision frames, etc. They are also frames within embedded frames that make up systems of understandings. 5

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In the movie, The Matrix, there was a great war between the humans and artificial intelligence (AI). The machines won. So the movie opens with most humans imprisoned in egg-like structures where they are grown and harvested for their brain energy. Only the few live on the outside in “the real world,” know “the truth”—namely, that everybody else lives in a computer-generated world. And “the world” they live in has been pulled down over their eyes deceiving them from the truth. Fed with this information, they live under the delusion that they live in Sydney, Australia in 1997. Actually, they are experiencing the audio-visual signals of The Matrix, the construct of a computer program, a construct they represent and feel as real. The machines created this “1997 world” matrix to keep the humans occupied so that their brains would stay active and emit lots of energy. In that way the humans become as it were “batteries” (“copper tops”) for the machines. Electrical signals to their brain and nervous system induced them into experiencing the sights, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes, etc. of life at the end of the twentieth century, at the apex of human culture before A.I. developed. It created a hypnotic state with no exit. Well, almost no exit (and that’s the story, of course). Later in the movie we find out that the “1997 Matrix” was not the first matrix. The machines had originally set out to create the “Perfect World” matrix. But it didn’t work out. Agent Smith explained, “The humans didn’t buy it. Whole crops were lost.” After that, the A.I. machines set up the 1999 matrix to occupy the humans to keep their brains activated as they harvested their energy and turned them into “copper-top batteries” (which is why Neo is once called a “copper-top” in the movie). There were still some free humans. Some lived in Zion, “the last human city,” and the others worked from hovercrafts like the one Morpheus operated, the Nebuchadnezzar. Being free from the matrix, Morpheus and his crew hack into it. They enter and exit it at will. Yet they have to be careful. Sentinel programs, the Agents, roam the matrix seeking to kill them. And they are powerful. Later when inside one of the training programs Morpheus warns Neo that no one has ever defeated an agent. So why do they do it? They hack in to find and free other humans and to find “the one” who would master that matrix and end the war with the machines.

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What is the matrix? Morpheus said that it was “a neural-interactive simulation,” a dreamwork. “You’ve been living inside a dreamworld, Neo ... your whole life has been spent inside the map, not the territory. This is the world as it exists today.” (Wachowski, 2000, p. 310)

The Human Matrix We too live in a matrix—a matrix of frames of our own creation. Because we do not deal with the world (the territory) directly, but via the transforms of our nervous system—our maps, we relate to the world via three mapping levels: neurological representational and conceptual mapping. First, you and I relate to the world via our neurological maps. You experience things at this level as “perceptions.” Your perceptions emerge from the interaction of your sense receptors with the energy manifestations “out there.” You do not really see color “out there.” Color results from the interaction with that energy and is created mostly via your rods and cones and the interpretations that you have learned. Yet because these perceptions seem so “real,” we easily confuse what we “see” with what truly is out there. Yet even our perceptions are constructed in our body and brain in the interaction of the external energies impacting our neurology. You also relate to the world via your representational maps. On the inside you re-call and re-present to yourself the sights, sounds, sensations, and smells of your experiences in the theater of your mind. You then use various cinematic features of these sensory systems (“sub-modalities”) to code your internal cinema. You can code your movies in color or you can fade the color out. You can zoom in and zoom out. You can add various sound tracks. You can step in, you can step out. All of this creates your “movie mind”—how you represent things. Finally, you relate to the world via your conceptual maps. By drawing conclusions, generalizing, and computing what things mean you construct concepts, categories, beliefs, values, expectations, decisions, etc. You then bring these more abstract frames to your thinking and use them as your categories for understanding. All of these frames of reference combine to create your matrix—they comprise your reality strategy. They give you your sense of the fabric of reality.

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Entering and Exiting the Matrix The movie The Matrix begins with a message that flashes across Neal Anderson’s computer. The words quietly scroll across the screen: “Wake up Neo. The matrix has you.” Similarly, your matrix has you to the extent that we are not aware of the existence of your subjective world of frames. You have partly inherited these frames from the cultures you are born into and partly, you have created them. No wonder it is a high priority to wake up and detect your frames. Korzybski (1933) alerted us to the matrix when he wrote, “The map is not the territory.” Human frames are just that—frames, maps, movies, representations and not the “real world.” In the movie, a particular feeling brought Neo (or Thomas Anderson, the new man) to Morpheus (the leader of the hackers, the one who facilitates the metamorphosis or transformation). It was the feeling that “something is wrong with the world.” What created that feeling? It was created by the frames and the software of the matrix did not support and promote human vitality, aliveness, or freedom. This feeling emerged into a question in Neo’s mind. He asked, “What is the matrix?” We all know that feeling. The same happens for each of us. We also experience our frames first and foremost in terms of our feelings and emotions. For instance, those who play “The Blame Game” experience a very different set of feelings and intuitions from those who play “The Solution Game.” Each frame (and all of the frames that they are embedded within) creates a set of feelings, states, and behaviors. Frequently it is the feeling that “there’s something wrong with my world” that makes you ready for a new game. When you feel that dissatisfaction, welcome it. Use it to open yourself to leaving the old matrix of frames.6 Taking the Red Pill Taking the red pill in the movie was Neo’s way to exit the matrix and to step out of it into the real world. This is where the metaphor breaks down for us. We cannot exit the matrix structure itself. We can only choose to exit one matrix and enter another. In the movie, Morpheus first greeted Neo with this introduction: “It seems you’re feeling a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. You know that something is wrong with the world. -43-

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You can’t explain it, but you feel it, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.” Neo says, “The matrix?” “Yes, the matrix. The world has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” Morpheus said. “What truth?” “That you were born into slavery, into a prison that you cannot see or smell... A prison of the mind ... Unfortunately, no one can tell you what the matrix is; you have to see it for yourself.”

In his invitation for Neo to see the matrix for himself, Morpheus showed him two pills. He held them out—a blue one and a red one. “Take the Blue Pill,” he said, and... “... you will wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. Take the red pill and you stay in Wonder Land, and I’ll show you how deep the Rabbit Hole goes.”

Your matrix is very similar to that. Your matrix of human constructs pulls a conceptual world down over your eyes so that you stop seeing and hearing and feeling at sensory levels. To see freshly and naively you have to “lose your mind and come back to your senses” (the famous quotation from Fritz Perls). The world you see is colored through your frames. Taking the red pill opens your eyes and ears and feelings to the map/territory difference and you begin to discover the depth and length of the rabbit holes which you have created in your mind. You too have been living “inside the map” and have confused it with the territory. It is in these labyrinths that you have also created many “dragons” and toxic states. The red pill interrupts the familiar signals of the matrix—it is then that you begin to discover the depths of the rabbit hole that you live in —all of the things that lurk “in the back of your mind” outside of your awareness. Your matrix is also a fictional bio-computer generated world. You (and many, many of your ancestors) made it up. It is a human construct—a subjective experience. It has a structure we can model, and yet, in the end, it is just frames within frames within frames. It’s frames all the way up. Each of us was born inside of a matrix. A matrix of multiple frames of ideas and beliefs that have ever so subtly infiltrated our brains and which now run our programs. As “time-binders” we are culturalized to various frames of mind.7 We have no choice about that. To be human is to enter into the symbolic world of ideas, language, beliefs, etc. Yet each of us -44-

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does have a choice about which matrix to live in. We do if we know about the matrix and have developed the skills for entering and exiting the matrix. Where did you get your current frames of mind, your points of view and your mental styles for perceiving things? Did you invent them all on your own? Of course not. Most of them you simply absorbed from your family and cultural environment. You sucked them in just as you breathe in air— paying no attention at all to the frames that people, groups, culture, and language itself set for the working of your brain. And, given the specific matrix you entered, that matrix controls the games that you can now play. All of the games that you play in life spring from the higher frames that are set in your mind. You learned to play these games as you learned to play within the rules of the game. Some dimensions empower you to use your mental and emotional powers efficiently. Other dimensions sabotage your effectiveness, manipulate the hell out of you, poison your emotions, and imprison you. Only through frame awareness can you begin to develop the skills to choose your game and to play mindfully. Otherwise, the matrix is your prison. However, once you become conscious of your map making, able to jump logical levels in a single bound, then you can detect frames, challenge them, shift them, transform them, set and solidify new ones, and layer frame upon frame to build a matrix world which will be a lot of fun to live in. It’s in this way that you become a Matrix Master. Then, like Neo, you will be able to change your matrix at will. That’s when you can bend the fabric of your subjective “reality” to do you service in living a richer, fuller, and more vibrant life. You can then keep opening up a whole world of possibilities as the deceptions and illusions are exposed, and as you reclaim your powers for making the matrix as you desire. First, Matrix Awareness The first task is to become aware of the presence of your own matrix, to get a sense of your matrix and how it plays out in your own life. Matrix awareness begins as you come to understand how you re-present see-hearfeel information to yourself in your mental movies and then create mental maps of those representations as you classify, frame, and meta-state those understandings. Frame awareness, and how frames are embedded inside of yet other frames, describes how you inevitably and naturally meta-state

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yourself and use your self-reflexive consciousness to create layers of embedded frames. For all this, I cannot really tell you about the matrix. You have to experience it for yourself. That’s why you will have to practice detecting frames and layers of frames. Think of your matrix as the operating system for how you make or create meaning which then generates your model of the world. This highlights the most important aspect of the matrix—how it is our way of constructing meaning. In chapter eight we will explore the meaning matrix in detail. There you will see how the four meta-domains of NLP come together in the meaning-making funnel. The Meta-Model describes the linguistic structuring of meaning. Meta-States describe the framing of levels and states of meaning which you layer level upon level. Meta-Programs, as solidified meta-states, describe the frames that become perceptual filters and thinking patterns and coalesced into your muscle memory. Meta-Modalities (“sub-modalities”) describe representational meanings that show up as the cinematic features in your internal movies. The center of the human matrix is the meaning-making core—here represented as the meta-stating funnel. That core arises due to the metacognitive steps of your recursive thinking. This is the source of power for all of your framing and reframing. You cannot frame without “going meta.” When you do move to a meta-position you are then able to step aside from your first thinking and feeling to think-and-feel about it which thereby creates the next level. In this way you are able to set new frames, categories, classifications, and feelings. Via this meta-function you are able to create all sorts of new meanings— classification meaning, frame meaning, association of state-upon-state meaning, etc. Meta-stating refers to the reflexive process of bringing one state of mind-emotion-body to another so that you can operate in a metaposition to your previous constructs. Then the meta-position state becomes the frame, or “logical” level, of the first state.

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Think about reflexivity as the spinning or spiraling tornado. Sometimes the spinning eddies of your whirling thoughts will take you up in more constructive frames. Sometimes those spiraling states of thoughts-andemotions will take you down to the center of gravity in the middle and down to the deepest levels of your neurology. This happens because the matrix is experienced in states. Understanding states and developing your skills for managing states is essential for matrix awareness. A matrix system constructed for genius or pathology may be intact and ready to be activated, yet it cannot be accessed if you are not in the right state. What Happens When You Meta-State? What happens to a meta-state after you have meta-stated yourself or someone else? What happens when you are playful about your learning? Or calm about your anger? Or curious and explorative about your grief? Or focused and excited about your curiosity? What happens oftentimes is nothing. Frequently, you simply have a momentary experience of multiple thoughts-and-feelings. They come and they go. States typically operate in this fashion. You go through many, many states in a day’s time. This fluidity of states is typical, especially primary states. Your mind-body (or neuro-linguistic) states simply operate in this way. You experience a state of mind-and-body-and-emotion, then you shift and experience another state. All day and all night long, you alternate from one state to another state. Yet not always. Sometimes you will experience a state that stays. It can happen, and does happen, with any strong state. Increase the intensity of a state and it begins to affect not only your surface thinking and feeling, it also pervades more deeply (or highly since this is the predominant metaphor in this book) so that it affects your deepest or highest state of mind-andemotion. We call this “state dependency.” An intense state can so recruit all of your neuro-circuits in all of your nervous systems (central, peripheral, autonomic, immune, etc.) that you cannot easily shake off that state. The general arousal states of fight/flight (fear/anger) to perceived threat, danger, and over-load are like that. So too with any chronic stress type of state. Sometimes these kinds of states can keep reverberating throughout your nervous systems not only for hours, but for days.

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There’s another way that states stay. Sometimes when you meta-state, you set one state so solidly in your mind-body-emotion system that it becomes your frame of mind. When this happens, the state itself becomes the way you think-and-feel about something. You then set that state as your frame of mind and meaning— something that may stay with you for the rest of your life. We call these states “attitudes” because they seem so solid and stable. They can last years, even decades. When this happens, the meta-state becomes the internal structure for the network of embedded frames within frames—your neuro-semantic framework. They become the internal structure for what’s called “logical levels” which make up one or more of the dimensions of your mind. What happens after you meta-state yourself or another? The matrix emerges. You create layer upon layer of concepts which become the labyrinth of your mind. When you meta-state frames of mind and meanings that stay, you create your essential matrix. In the matrix there are seven dimensions. These seven are so fundamental to being human that you tend to carry them with you everywhere you go. You never leave home without them. These seven are based upon, and centered around, your primary states. Points from the Matrix You were born in a matrix. It is a matrix of frame within frame within embedded frame of beliefs, values, understandings, decisions, etc. It is your inner world—your sense of reality and your womb of meaning, emotion, perception, passion, and performance. To become aware of the matrix is to wake up to its presence. Then you can begin to see that which is typically invisible. True freedom and mastery from the matrix means being able to choose your frames and to manage them from within the matrix. End Notes 1. The Meta-Model is a set of linguistic distinctions that allows us to recognize the linguistic mapping that a person has engaged in to create his or her matrix. These distinctions also enable us to engage in a dialogue and explore the person’s matrix. 2. Meta-Programs refer to a set of thinking, emoting, choosing, and responding distinctions that describes what a person sorts for, pays attention to, and values. These perceptual filters provide the basic coloring of our internal world and result from meta-stating. 3. Meta-States refer to mind-body states that have become layered with one state about another state as thought, emotion, and physiology is reflexively applied back to self, i.e., -48-

joy about learning, playful about being serious. Meta-stating, as a verb, describes the process. 4. “Sub-Modalities” is the old term for the Cinematic Features that we use in how we code the Cinemas that play in our mind. More accurately, they are actually Meta-Modalities. Modes or modalities of awareness include the visual mode, auditory mode, kinesthetic mode, etc. 5. The term frame is short for frame-of-reference and refers to how we format and structure an understanding. It is similar to how we focus a camera to frame the picture that we want. 6. In Neuro-Semantics we have developed the use of these terms, Frames and Games as a way to model any behavior or experience. See Frame Games and the books in that series. 7. Time-Binding is the term that describes how we can take learnings that people made in earlier times and through the use of symbols (language, math, music, etc.) incorporate or bind those learnings inside our nervous-system of mind-and-body. See Korzybski’s Science and Sanity. 8. “Mind” as a single term in this work always refers to the entire mind-body-emotion system that we call a “state” or a neuro-semantic state. I never use the single term “mind” to refer to an imagined “mind” that exists apart from “the body.”

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Chapter 4

ENTERING THE MATRIX “The first act of courage is simply to see things as they are. No excuses, no explanations, no illusions of wishful progress.” Peter Block

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here’s an art to entering the matrix. Whether your own or that of another, entering the matrix involves the skill set of being able to create rapport, a sense of safety, and respect. No one’s matrix will open simply because you want it to open and it will definitely not open if you command it to open! Typically it will only open when the person you’re interacting with feels respected. Even your own matrix will protect itself against intrusion from your own thinking-and-feeling if you treat yourself disrespectfully. That’s why the ancient dictum, “Know Thyself” encourages the required emotional intelligence of self-awareness. This does not come to the unprepared nor to those who are judgmental. Judgment locks the doors of the matrix. Judge yourself and you won’t be able to get into your own matrix of frames. Judge another, and kiss entering that matrix goodbye. If you want to enter the matrix, it will be through nonjudgmental awareness. It is acceptance that invites you in. Entering the matrix of another’s mind-body-emotion system has to start on a kinder, gentler premise. It may begin as simply as meeting someone and exchanging friendly greetings. At that first point of contact, the person’s -50-

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dimensions will be invisible. When you then say “Hello” and the other person returns the greeting, this activates the other’s matrix, and with that, the adventure begins. The response you get tells you the first little bit about the frames and the matrix of frames that the other person lives in, and operates from. Responses come from frames and always make sense relative to their source frames. This allows you to conclude several things about this area of entering a matrix as we work with another’s frames. Until it is activated, The matrix is invisible, then it comes alive. It is information and activity that activates the matrix we live within, and information and activity also transforms our matrix. The further you go into a matrix (whether your own or another’s), the more information you receive, and the more frames you activate. This allows you to see the world inside and the universe of meaning that creates a person’s felt life. As you do, you can expect several things. The process and content dimensions operate holographically so that you can see “the whole in the part and the part in the whole.” You can see it, that is, if you look, listen, and feel. You will be able to see if you focus on the primary process matrix—the meta-stating, meaning-making matrix of reflexivity. The dimensions spin and spiral as a person goes round and round his neurosemantic system to make sense of his experiences. When an event, situation, idea, feeling, or experience occurs a person “processes” it mentally-and-emotionally. She goes around it. He tours it. If she can’t “get a hold of it” in her mind, she will loop around it one more time, trying to understand it from another point of view or perspective. And if that doesn’t do it, he may spin around it again and again until he does. You know that experience, don’t you? You may become aware of it when you’re trying to go to sleep at night, but your mind-body-emotion system is still going round and round something, trying to come to terms with it. You can get into a spin. The spin can keep you up for hours. The worst thing to do at that point is use a command-and-order approach. “Don’t think about it!” Do that and you are more likely to go into an even more intense spin. Dimensions can spiral out of control. In systems language, we create a negative downward spiraling of thoughts and feelings so that our state gets -51-

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worse and worse. The neuro-semantic system then becomes a run-away system, a vicious downward spiral, a “dragon” state. This doesn’t just happen with negative thoughts. You can just as easily get into a positive spin creating a virtuous positive spiraling of thoughts-andemotions around something that delights and excites you. Most of the time the dimensions will spiral as a balancing system which constantly brings you back to homeostasis, to an equilibrium. This is the self-organizing or self-prophecy nature of our dimensions of frames. 1 How do you Enter into the Matrix? If you seek to enter into the matrix of frames rather than fight it, respect it. Honor the person and bring no contempt or judgment with you. Fighting the matrix means that you do not under-stand it, that is, you literally do not “stand under” the person and support him. Non-judgmental under-standing supports the person’s matrix. Judgment elicits a defensiveness that will prevent the matrix from showing itself. And that will result in becoming self-blind and unaware or misunderstanding another. You can enter into the matrix of another person by matching and mirroring what she says or does—the output of that neuro-semantic system. Doing this paces that person’s reality and validates it so that the person feels heard, therefore understood and safe in your presence. It is the sense of safety, rather than being attacked or judged, that allows you entrance into another’s matrix. Offer anything that remotely sounds like attack, judgment, criticism, or rejection and the matrix will close. Entrance will be forbidden. That’s why non-judgmental awareness plays such a critical role if you would seek entrance into the matrix.2 With your own matrix, enter through acceptance and even appreciation as you respectfully welcome your frames as frames (not reality) and seek first to understand. This means seeing and hearing your reality for whatever it is, rather than what you wish it to be. Do this by respectfully recognizing that everybody’s matrix is special and totally unique. Acknowledge that no one else lives in the same internal universe of frames as you do. No two dimensions are alike. They all differ. Paradoxically it is through welcoming and embracing the mystery of your matrix that you will be able to transform it. How can you tell when you are -52-

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in the presence of a very different matrix? Listen for the language of uniqueness: “I just can’t get inside his head.” “I don’t know where she’s coming from.” “I wish I knew what makes him tick. It’s a mystery to me.” “I can’t relate to her. Was she born on a different planet?” Difference here is not the problem. If there’s a problem, it is caused by one’s attitude toward difference. If you acknowledge it as “difference” and then seek to understand how it differs, why it differs, what a particular matrix of frames seeks to do that’s of value, and how it came to be constructed as a solution to a perceived problem, that non-judgmental curiosity and acknowledgment will allow you entrance. If you move in recognizing the magic and wonder of the human spirit that creates such meaning, you honor the person. Acknowledge also that the person isn’t broken, bad or wrong. The person is simply doing what all humans do, namely, seeking to make things better for oneself. You can even apply this to the most obnoxious and disgusting of ideas and responses that a person creates. What that really reveals is the extent of human flexibility and how far it can be distorted. Understanding the Dimensions What are you to understand about the set of process and content dimensions? How do you go about this learning process? The following offers some insights about the matrix that will help and suggest some ways to interact with the dimensions to increase your effectiveness and skill. The Matrix — A Set of Maps for Navigating Life Your matrix operates as your overall “model of the world.” Every time you make a map about something, you create more frames. Every matrix grows from how you take the experiences of life and map your understandings and beliefs. You map your ideas and concepts which stay with you as your internal reference structures for the basic categories of your Self— Intention, Self, Resources (Powers), Others, Time, and the World. In this way you create your dimensions. Each content dimension is a place of belief frames about a given domain of experience and concept: self, power, others, time, and world. Your belief frames, embedded in yet higher frames, coded linguistically, comprise your linguistic models of the world. Taken as a whole, this is the matrix. -53-

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Every Matrix Makes Internal Sense The matrix, and each sub-dimension, is literally psycho-logical. Your logics or the reasoning that you do to “make sense” of things is your psycho-logics. Often something that makes no sense at all from the outside, does have structure, form, and order on a person’s inside as it was created by that person’s unique way and kind of thinking. In this way, you create your psychology. The matrix results from mapping strategies about how to do things. These may or may not be sufficient in terms of providing accurate or productive how-to knowledge. Yet each person’s matrix contains the best knowledge and understanding that the person has at that moment. Each person will also be using the sub-dimensions to develop the resources for dealing with and coming to terms with the world. Knowing this gives you a way to enter a matrix. How? Start by assuming that it makes sense. It might not make sense to you, but it does to the person who mapped things that way. Once you assume that it makes sense, then explore how it makes sense to that person. Use a know-nothing frame as you do this. Release all judgment and biases as you do focusing singularly on one single line of questioning: How does this make sense to you? What does this mean to you? How does this contribute positively to your life?

This is the modeling attitude of NLP and Neuro-Semantics. It is this attitude which allows you to discover and describe the structure of experience, emotion, or skill. Focus Primarily on the Meaning Dimension Of all these dimensions, the most important dimension is the Meaning dimension. That’s because it involves the person’s meaning-making skills (i.e., classifying, defining, languaging, framing, associating, and evaluating) by which the person creates all of the other dimensions. The Meaning dimension drives and organizes the rest and it results from the meta-stating spiral or funnel of meaning-making. You build your matrix as you create meaning and hold those meanings in your mind-body-emotion system. This is what meaning means. From an old German word, “meaning” refers to that which you “hold in mind.” The -54-

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term “meaning” refers to the ideas that you hold in mind and from which you build other ideas. You create meaning by mapping things in a certain way and using that map as your meta-cognitive frame. This allows you to hold constant some idea or experience and to treat it as a reference. In this way it becomes your frame-of-reference, your mental context— metaphorically as a canopy of consciousness. In this way you can keep an idea or experience with you as a classification, association, and evaluation. All embedded frames within frames are actually meta-states. That’s why we call the meaning dimension a meta-stating funnel. As you move up the levels, these so-called “logical levels” of the mind contain multidimensional perspectives that we call by a number of terms: values, beliefs, understandings, expectations, feelings, decisions, knowledge, intentions, etc. Through language and repetition they become stable. They then stay with you as higher states or frames. The different terms do not refer to different things, just different ways of looking at the same thing as we’ll see again in the chapter on “logical levels.” Grounding the Matrix Now regarding the matrix, it can be ground or ungrounded. If grounded, it is connected to your everyday reality and life. Is your matrix ground? How grounded is your matrix? How skilled and effective are you at translating ideas in your head into effective behavior in the real world?

To ground a matrix, connect it to sensory-based referents. If you don’t, the matrix can spin away from external reality and end up having little or no connection to the real world. People who “lose touch with everyday reality” have maps that take them nowhere except to the inner heavens and hells of the person’s imaginations. Their maps don’t work to navigate them practically in the world of business, relationship, health, or sanity. Since we do not deal with “the real world” directly, but only as mediated by our maps, it’s possible to become ungrounded. When that happens you generally will feel that you are not centered, not able to get on with things, not able to make things happen. Being rooted and grounded in everyday reality, social reality, work and career reality means that you have maps that work sufficiently well so that you can get on in the world, have friends, make a living, and distinguish between the dreams in your mind and what’s on the outside. -55-

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How do you test your maps to make sure they are grounded? The test is what they allow you to actually do and where they enable you to go. Do you have a map for handling and experiencing the things that are important to you? Are the frames of your matrix grounded in actual behaviors and performances? To be healthy and effective, your matrix needs to be grounded.

Detect and Follow a Matrix’s Activation Not only can a person’s matrix be activated, you also can see and hear the activation of the matrix of others. From this comes the dictum giving guidance for detecting and working a matrix: Follow the person’s energy as it moves through the matrix. This refers to recognizing how information enters into and flows through a person’s mind-body system as it energizes and activates the system. This is an advanced skill for a coach, therapist, leader, parent, manager, or communicator. When you learn this skill, you can then track the flow of information into a person’s mind-body-emotion and the energy that moves out. You will even be able to track how it moves through the system, stepby-step, reflecting on itself, and activating the system in its responses. This tracking is essential for modeling human experiences. You can then track the representational steps as they flow through the system. We’ll pick this up again in the chapter on Neuro-Semantic Profiling. Matrix activation enables you to see the sub-dimensions turn on and off as information travels through the neuro-semantic system. What is invisible becomes visible as you activate it through information and symbolic input. As a symbolic class of life, it is ideas that mostly move and touch people. I personally like to imagine the different dimensions as flickering on and off like lights and energy fields as different energies move through it. You can also learn to listen for the heart of the matrix. What does the matrix care about most? What is it built around? This can be either positive or negative, empowering or limiting, enriching or toxic. You can also think about the heart of the matrix as made up of the attractions and aversions that create your drive and energy. Explore with these questions: What is the heart of this matrix? What are you attracted to? What does the person most of all think, care about, want, and intend? If there’s a heart to this mind-body-emotion system, where is it? What is its pulse-beat? To what does it beat? -56-

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Is there a conflict so that the neuro-semantic system has two hearts and is torn in alliances? What are the valued meanings and/or the anti-valued meanings of the matrix? What ideas operate like attractors in your self-organizing neuro-semantic system?

Summary Enter a matrix through under-standing, pacing, non-judgmental acceptance, and by making things safe for the person. By way of contrast, judgment evokes defensiveness and excludes entrance. Your matrix is activated by information and activity and if you have eyes to see, you can observe a matrix being activated by the system flow of information in and energy out. At the heart of the matrix is the meaning-making funnel by which a person meta-states meaning, understanding, beliefs, values, etc. and doing so with one’s unique psycho-logics.

End Notes: 1. See John Burton’s States of Equilibrium. 2: Creating rapport through matching and mirroring another person’s inner and outer responses are called “pacing” and “calibrating” in NLP and are the most basic skills for creating rapport. See The User’s Manual of the Brain for detailed information.

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Chapter 5

META-PROGRAMS AND THE MATRIX Your focus governs your experiences. and your focus, as your way of perceiving things, is what we call a meta-program.

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f the matrix as a whole, and every sub-dimension or dimension within it, is comprised of frames—the meaning frames that you build up from your experiences, then each frame colors your world. Nor only that, but each frame also filters and selects both what and how you see the world. You perceive what you perceive as if you view things through a lense colored according to the nature of the frames you use. This description of meta-frames defines what has come to be known as the NLP Model of Meta-Programs. With this in mind, the following questions set the orientation of this chapter: What’s the relationship between the matrix and Meta-Programs? How do the meta-programs as individual perceptual filters fit into the Matrix Model? Where do we put them? Which meta-programs fit into which of the seven sub-dimensions? If these models are the same, what’s the advantage of creating yet another model? -58-

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How does the Matrix Model pull the meta-programs together and unite them in an even higher frame? Meta-Programs — Meta-Level Processing in the Matrix Meta-Programs refer to those programs that operate at a higher (or meta) level to the content of thoughts. What you talk about is “content,” structure refers to how you are talking and the frames of reference you use in your talking. So, suppose you hear me speaking about my career. “I know I can succeed as the manager of a new project, it’s so exciting to finally get a chance to demonstrate what I can do. I’m really excited about because I see so much potential to make a difference.”

What is the content? It is career, personal success, managing a new project and the corresponding details. What are the higher programs governing the structure of that content? That’s a more challenging question because you have to rise above the content. In this instance it is: Towards what one wants (rather than Away From) Visual in representation (rather than auditory or kinesthetic) Active in response (rather than inactive, reflective, or reactive) Options in organizing oneself (rather than Procedures) Future orientation (rather than Past)

These meta-programs are the mental filters behind the scene as it were by which the speaker is seeing, perceiving, sorting information, and processing his thoughts. Another person might feel the same thing and respond very differently. The different response can be understood as governed by different meta-programs. “I know that I won’t mess up the chance at managing this new project, not like John did. I won’t be putting off the budget to the end, but create it from the start, and then get everybody aligned with it so that we can come through on time and under budget, probably 5 to 10 percent under budget, because we don’t want to let down Mr. Sean.”

Here the meta-programs that stand out are: Away From, Kinesthetic, Active, Procedure, and Past oriented. Meta-programs, as the perceptual sorting patterns which you use as you perceive, pay attention to things, input and process stimuli around you, reflect your frames of mind. As the second meta-domain of NLP, MetaPrograms offer an additional tool for modeling the structure of experience. As meta-level processes, meta-programs function as an operating system for -59-

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processing information and thinking. And precisely because of this, they reflect a person’s thinking patterns and styles. Given that, then we can conclude the following about meta-programs: A person’s mental focus as his perceptual lenses describes the way he conceptually sees the world. By now recognizing this as an important aspect of his matrix, what we call meta-programs are structural aspects of the matrix. Are these the same thing? Yes in one sense they are the same thing. Your matrix of frames, from the point of view of looking at your point of view —is your perceptual lenses. Yet at the same time; No they are not the same. Each model serves a different purpose and has a different structure. It is the Matrix Model as made up of your meta-programs. Pascal Gambardella, Ph.D. has researched and written extensively on the relationship between Meta-Programs and the Matrix Model. In his initial paper, he offers this working definition that provides us a criterion for discerning what a meta-program is:1 X is a meta-program if X filters what we perceive or what we attend to.

Because the meta-programs refer to processes that occur at a level above the primary level of everyday life of content thinking and responding, they concern the structure of perceiving itself rather than the content of what we perceive. Meta-programs operate as meta-level functions. Categorizing the Meta-Programs In the book, Figuring Out People I began sorting out and classifying, with Bob Bodenhamer, the following categories of meta-programs. These categories suggest the wide range of ways we have for patterning or structuring our experiences. As a learned way of patterning regarding how you pay attention to things develops, your meta-programs become your meta-level "reality." When that happens you repetitively apply the same pattern to all of your representing and experiencing. This results in creating your habitual style of perceiving.

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Figure 5:1 Meta-Programs as a Logical Levels System [In the following the @ sign stands for “about”]

The Genesis of Meta-Programs Where do meta-programs come from? In a word, they arise as integrated meta-states. They emerge from your meta-states which have coalesced to become part of your neurology and encoded in muscle memory. In this, meta-states “get into your eyes” as your meta-programs and so become your way of looking at the world, your intuitively feel of the world. If metaprograms operate at a meta-level to your primary level thinking-and-feeling about things, then it’s really no surprise that they are related to meta-states. What is the relationship between meta-states and meta-programs? Meta-States create the foundation of meta-programs. MetaPrograms result from having meta-stated one thought or emotion with another. This makes meta-programs integrated and solidified meta-states. The higher state has become habituated and coalesced into muscle so that we see the world through it. What does this mean? It means that each and every meta-program started out as a meta-state. These perceiving patterns began as a mind-body state made up of particular thoughts, emotions, and physiologies. Eventually, you default to them so often or so intensely, they became habitual. Perhaps you “had to” use a particular meta-program filter because you were ordered -61-

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to. Or perhaps you were forbidden to go the opposite way. In this way the meta-program got into your muscles as a neurological pattern. It does not take a lot to imagine how this takes place. Imagine, for example, that you grew up in a home where you were told to “get the big picture.” Or what if that was the style of thinking most often demonstrated by your parents. Or, what if you experienced pain in the form of humiliation or insult if you got too involved in details. Given those contexts, it would be easy and natural to learn to think and process information in terms of the big picture, globally, by getting a sense of the overall gestalt rather than specific details. Or the opposite could occur. You may have been repeatedly instructed, “Pay attention to the details!” If so, you would have learned and practiced zooming in on the most minute specifications. And, if you did that month after month, year after year, such thinking would inevitably induce you into either a detailed state of mind. If it worked, if it succeeded in helping you get on in life, then you would inevitably value that way of thinking. After all, it is valuable to you. And after awhile, you might draw the conclusion, “I’m that kind of a person; I naturally sort for details.” As a prototype, this describes how a way of thinking, and the holistic mindbody state, can transform what we call a meta-state into a meta-program. All you have to do is use a way of thinking and default to it often enough so that it becomes your personal and regular way of thinking-and-feeling. Eventually you would use it reflectively in all of your thinking. It would have become your perceptual pattern or meta-program. Meta-programs are transformed meta-states now integrated embodied in our eyes. The Coalescing Process Understanding this development of meta-programs gives us a model for thinking about what happens to a meta-state in the process. As you activate the reflexivity mechanism of mind so that you continually reflect back onto your thinking with a certain thinking pattern, you construct state-about-state structures, which gives birth to the matrix. Reflective thinking operates at the core of your ability to make meta-moves to higher “logical levels” with your thoughts-and-emotions. As you reflexively think about your thoughts, this moves you up to ever higher levels (conceptually). You keep layering meta-level of thoughts-and-feelings onto thoughts-and-feelings. -62-

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Yet it doesn’t stay layered in the way this metaphor suggests. Unlike an onion with stable layers or a set of Russian Dolls embedded in each other, mind-emotion states are dynamic. They are fluid and always in flux. As you run your neuro-pathways in a particular way (Matching/ Mismatching; Options/ Procedures; Global/ Specific, etc.) these ways of processing information use your nervous system and brain habituate so that the higher levels coalesce into the lower levels. They merge into them. Eventually, all you have left is a perceptual frame-of-reference richer and fuller than just a perception. Your representational frame on the first level is textured and qualified by the higher states. As this richer perception becomes your stabilized state, you see the world from that state. In this way your meta-states solidify and transform into your meta-programs. The Perception of our States Every state involves a way of perceiving. In anger, you see the world in terms of threat and danger and feel aggressive. It is a different perception from when you are in states of joy and love. In every perception, you are in some mind-body-emotion state. An optimistic view initiates certain feelings that correspond to it just as does a pessimistic view. Suppose a person over-uses the meta-state of global thinking while at the same time de-emphasizing detailed, specific thinking. This perceiving pattern (a meta-program) is at the very same time a state of consciousness (a meta-state). One way of describing this is to say that the person is in a global state. The person is accessing thoughts-and-emotions of that state. She has stepped into a state (or position) of being a visionary, seeing the big picture, operating from a philosophical stance, etc. Yet we could just as easily describe her as operating from the meta-program of Global. If she does this regularly, we say that the Global meta-program governs her way of operating. And if it is dependable, regular, and consistent—we would want to use it to pace her way of thinking and perceiving. Let’s now take a time out and reflect on what we have discovered. We have found that our focus, and use of various NLP meta-models, gives us a fourfold choice for how to describe things: Focusing on state and level of mind—we call it a meta-state. Focusing on perception and way of seeing things—we call it a metaprogram.

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Focusing on language and way of talking—we call it a meta-model or linguistic distinction. Focusing on the representation which are edited or coded in a person’s mental movie—we call them the cinematic features (“sub-modalities”).

Now isn’t that amazing! This means that in the NLP Communication Model we have four redundant systems (or models) for describing the same thing—the structure of subjective experience. Each model, providing a different facet of the same thing, enriches our understanding. Meta-Programs arise and stabilize also as a person brings value to a state. When you believe in the importance of the global perspective, you outframe the first state (global) with value and significance. You could also construct this meta-program by bringing it upon itself (global about global), joyful about global thinking, fearful to get too specific, dislike or disgust about details, etc. There are actually a great many ways that you could construct the meta-program out with various meta-state structures. Repeating any meta-state structure leads to creating a habituated pattern that we can call either a meta-state or a meta-program. Sometimes these metastructures become a new category—a gestalt state. In the early Meta-State books, I described these as a “canopy of consciousness.” I used the phrase canopy of consciousness to talk about how specific meta-states become so completely engulf our other states that it creates (so to speak) an entire mental atmosphere (or context). The meta-state becomes so pervasive, that like living within an atmosphere; it filters everything from all incoming information and all outgoing perceptions to all of one’s understandings, experiences, memories, anticipations, etc. When a person’s canopies of consciousness become the very fabric of her mental and emotional life, it becomes what we are calling the matrix. Driver Meta-Programs What happens when you over-use a meta-state structure so that you only perceive things in one way? You create a driver meta-program. Now because meta-programs arise from meta-states, meta-programs are coalesced, integrated, solidified, and transformed meta-states. The more you value, believe in, appreciate, find benefits in, and identify with the meta-state, the more you create a driver meta-program.

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A driver meta-program means that the state and its “program” (set of operational frames) for how to perceive, sort, and process information is now your default operational style. It is your “way of being” in the world. Operationally it is your particular way of doing “personality.”2 In a driver meta-program your primary states are embedded inside of a larger context made up of the meta-states that form the meta-program. Consider when the meta-program of mismatching becomes a driver metaprogram. Here we have the cognitive style of perceiving, sorting for what’s different, embedded inside of various higher states. The person undoubtedly believes that doing this is important and valuable. Perhaps it is a way to “be oneself,” to “think one’s own thoughts,” to “not be controlled,” to “not be told what to do or think,” etc. It’s probably embedded in other higher level frames or states: This is who I am! (Self) I have to do this. (Power) I remember and hate how parents and teachers forced me to do things their way. (Time) When you just give in and compromise, you wimp out. (Meaning) I will never wimp out in that way! (Intention) Others will try to take this way from me, but I won’t let them. (Others and Intention) It’s a jungle out there, you have to be prepared. (World) I don’t know why I’m so stressed, guess that’s just the way life is. (State)

Modeling the Matrix Modeling any particular person who is highly driven for mismatching will reveal different structures for that meta-program. Yet the basic principle is the same: within every meta-program there are layered meta-states within even higher meta-states which support, validate, and give the meaning structure. There are always frames by implication. That is, whatever state a person applies to another state and so layers the mind, level upon level, there are multiple implied frames that the person has not made explicit. Those frames are simply assumed. Put all of this together and you have meta-state structures that grow into meta-programs and into canopies or dimensions of consciousness. Together as a synergistic force, they work as a pervasive psychological force that pervades all facets of our lives. They define and construct meta-level structures of "reality" for us.

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Meta-Programs in the Dimensions In the following chapters you will find a list of key meta-programs at the end of each chapter. Some were easy to sort out. Those which deal with the concept of self obviously apply to the Self dimension, those that deal with the concept of time into the Time dimension, etc. Most NLP MetaPrograms fit into the Meaning dimension because they relate to how we think and how we create meaning in the first place. The meta-programs that govern or relate to each dimension provides you a way to recognize the perceptual frames that influence the person’s state and generates the behaviors, perceptions, and/or emotions which one feedforward into the world. The meta-programs also enable you to identify the matrix of frames upward into a person’s labyrinth of frames. And since each meta-program and meta-state structure is languaged, you will also find meta-model linguistic distinctions within each. All of this provides a redundancy to the structure of an experience as you model, profile, diagnose, and intervene for transformation. Summary The NLP Meta-Programs model gives you another way to look at perception and perceptual patterns. In the matrix, meta-programs revealed the coalesced meta-states and give you an avenue into an experience when modeling or “reading” a person. Meta-Programs are made up of thinking-and-feeling patterns that have become so habitual and regular that it gets into the eyes and is simply part of a larger process, the grounding of states and higher frames into your body. When you hone in on a person’s mental focus or perception, and you know the Meta-Programs Model, you will be able to see the matrix in terms of the operational meta-programs. End Notes 1. Pascal J. Gambardella, Ph.D., “Working Notes: Meta-Programs and the 7 Matrix Model.” Unpublished paper, Feb. 2003. Pascal has also created the diagram that follows. 2. See The Structure of Personality: Ordering and Disordering Personality Using NLP and Neuro-Semantics. Crown House Publication, 1999. By the way, because “personality” is not a “thing,” but a set of processes, we speak about it as what we do. This keeps the action and process within the concept front and center making it more fluid and easy to transform.

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Gambardella’s Representation of the Matrix Model This diagram shows the embracing frame of the Meaning dimension, which surrounds everything and calls the matrix into being. It also positions the Intention dimension over the central content dimensions and how everything then is grounded in the State dimension.

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Meta-Programs and the Matrix (The numbers below are from the book, Figuring Out People, 2005)

The Process Dimensions: Meaning Intention

State

Convincer/ Believability (17) Chunk Size (1) Representation Systems (3) Value Buying (26) Matching/ Mismatching (2) Information Gathering (4) Quantity/ Quality (35) Scenarios: Best/ Worst (7) Epistemology (5) Knowledge (36) Philosophical Direction (10) Perceptual Categories (6) Closure (37) (20) Screeners and Not (9) Valuing (40) (21) Aristotelian & Not (11) Causation (51) (37) Verbal & Not (12) (27) Associated & Not (15) (50) Congruent & Not (32)

The Content Dimensions: Self Power

Time

Other

Permeable Emotional Direction (20) Trusting & - (28) Modal & Not (8) Coping (13) Tenses: Past, Rejuvenating Operators Self / Other Somatic Res. Present, Future Battery (29) (28) (14) (16) (46) Affiliation (30) Preference Emotional Options/ Random / Satir Stances (24) Direction (18) Procedures (21) Sequence (47) (31) Work (34) Surgency & - (19) Judging/ Access (48) Cooperative/ Preference Responsibility (27) Perceiving (22) Polarity/ Meta (20) Social Pres. (38) Goal Striving (25) (32) (25) Temper to Polarity/ Meta (32) Hierarchical (39) Instruction (41) Somatic Response Dominance Self-Esteem (42) (33) (39) Self-Confidence (43) (12) Self-Experience (44) (27) Self-Integrity (45) (38) Ego Strength (49) Morality (50) (29)

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THE MEANING DIMENSION The Construct “We had the experience, but missed the meaning.” (T.S. Elliot, 1943) “Language is the most accessible part of the mind.” (Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct) Tell me your meanings—what something means to you, and I will tell you about your inner world.

W

hat can we say about the matrix that people live in? First, it is of the person’s own construction. You build yours, I build mine, she builds hers. Each of us build our personal matrix slowly over the years via our experiences. We do so as we map various ideas, understandings, beliefs, emotions, decisions, etc. about things. Yet it seldom seems this way to us. More often than not, it seems that experiences create the matrix. It seems that way, but that’s not the way it is. There is, however, a reason for it appearing this way, a reason that we will shortly explore. Yet experience itself does not create the matrix, your mapping as your meaning-making, conceptualizing, learning, etc. about those experiences is the genesis of the matrix. -70-

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This point is not trivial. This is the point which will give you access to the secrets of the matrix: Your experiences do not comprise the center or core of the matrix, your meanings do. What you “hold in your mind” about your experiences—that creates the matrix which you live in. It is the meanings that you invent and how you interpret and explain things that call your dimensions into existence. In this, your ideas are much more important than your experiences. They are more important in defining yourself and setting the course for your future. Central to your matrix is your meanings. Meaning comes first. That’s why I put the Meaning dimension as the central core one. When you look at the schema of the dimensions diagram, you will see that the Meaning dimension appears within and above the other dimensions. In the diagrams it is the funnel matrix out of which the other dimensions spin. It is not only the first dimension, it is also the most important and critical of the dimensions. The Meaning dimension begins at the level of state (the State dimension) and spirals all the way up the levels of our Neuro-semantic states of mind. We meta-state our way up these levels. We make meaning in different ways at different levels of the mind and at different times in our development, and yet the meaning-making process is a singular process even though it develops and becomes more complex over time. In the Meaning dimension, you create classification meanings. By your categories and definitions, you speak the other dimensions into existence as you construct them and make them real to yourself. The very words you use and the definitions you invent determine to a great extent the realities that you experience. Your definitions are not neutral. They are semantically loaded. This is why you can take words or terms of a person and use them (for the most part) as a pathway into the matrix. Words set frames. Words evoke emotions. Words associate you into experiences. And the words that you inherit in your language come loaded with assumptive and implied frames—inviting matrix constructions which is why we have shared meanings in every group and culture. From there you meta-state more and more meaning into those dimensions. It is in the Meaning dimension that you associate things, things that may or may not be connected normally. So whether it’s fitting or not, productive or not, when you so link things, this associating creates associative meaning -71-

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(or stimulus-response meaning). Now you can answer the feeling question, “What does X feel like?” because you have associated it with an emotion. Above and beyond this primary level of Your ideas are much meaning, you create frame meanings (context more important than meanings). These are the meanings which arise your experiences. as you set frames-of-reference that define the significance of things. In this way you create layer upon layer of embedded frames of meanings within frames. You layer mind-body-emotion states upon previous mental and emotional states and so meta-state yourself into more and more of your matrix. You meta-state classifications, frames, and evaluations. The meta-stating funnel makes all of this happen. As the driver and generator of all of your dimensions the Meaning dimension is first and foremost among the dimensions. Even after it calls the other dimensions into existence, it continues to operate as you set frames, attach emotions, and create evaluations that influence the whole matrix. In this way “thinking makes it so.” At first you use your Meaning dimension to relate an external event to your emotional state. After that you use it to classify and categorize things. Then, with every layer of meaning that you add, you can spiral around in your mind about that meaning, layering even more meanings. You create meanings about the five content dimensions about your “self,” and hold them in mind. Entering and exploring these shows “how deep the rabbit hole goes.” The significance and value of the meanings you invent creates your internal universe. Ultimately you live in and by meaning because it is through the creation of meaning that you know what to call things, how to interpret events, and how to perceive the significance of anything. As a semantic class of life, you do not have innate programs for how to live, relate, or even be human. You have to learn to attribute meaning to things and there is tremendous freedom in the range of meanings that you can attribute. You can now use the Meta-Model as a description for understanding how you use language to encode those meanings at the linguistic level and how to effectively question those constructs.

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We are all born inside of meaning dimensions that we call family systems, cultures, societies, religious and political worlds, etc. In the process of growing up each of us absorb the style and content from these meaning systems. These systems actually indicate the meaning-making results of those who came before us and who left behind symbol systems which encode their meanings. This time-binding mechanism of meaning explains why meanings seem to exist outside of us. The meanings constructed in other “times” by people have been passed on. The most obvious time-binding symbol is that of language. And when we externalize language, it encodes the definitions, classifications, and categories of others. Then come books and magazines and other written media. On a cultural level, meaning can be encoded, transmitted, and externalized in other ways. It can be made external in rituals, ceremony, plays, movies, art, music, way of organizing groups, architecture, rules, status symbols, and so on. In this multitude of cultural forms, meaning seems to be “out there.” It appears to be external. But that’s the trick. It seems so, while it is not. The meaning is only transmitted by such things, events, and experiences. They are the symbols of meaning and it still takes a meaning-maker to “make sense” of such. If the meaning isn’t passed on, the symbol becomes empty. Even the words of a language system, as when archeologists find lost scrolls, are meaningless in and of themselves. We can only give meaning to them and understand the original author’s meanings when we find the symbolic system that it operates from. Here is one of the ways that meaning hides. It’s not until you step out of your cultural matrix that you can begin to see the meanings which you give to such simple things as greeting each other, eating a meal, the instruments you use to eat, what you consider legitimate “food,” what counts as respect and insult, and ten thousand other meanings encoded in ritual, events, architecture, etc. Exploring the Meaning Dimension The following questions enable you to begin to explore the Meaning Dimension. These questions allow you to begin a robust dialogue in the Meaning conversation: How do you interpret this? What does this mean to you? -73-

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Is that interpretation accurate, useful, productive, healthy, or empowering? Does that meaning induce you into a positive or negative mental world? Does it encourage love, compassion, joy, courage, confidence, development, etc.? Where did you get that meaning? Who else thinks like that? Do you want that to be the meaning you give to it? If you had the choice of giving it a new meaning, one that would enhance your mind-and-emotions, what would you invent?

In creating meaning, you create, search for, and explore those things that you consider significant—important and valuable. In this, meaning slides into “value”—what you consider as having significance. So, of all the dimensions, this central one is the most crucial one because it determines how and what you invest with value and significance. It creates the others and textures them to enrich or impoverish them. What does X mean? What is the significance of this behavior or this event? How do you classify it? What do you call it? How do you define it? How do you reason and think to associate it with your internal states? How do you frame it and use it as your frame of reference?’ What do you think-and-feel about your states and experiences? How much importance do you attribute to X?

In and from this dimension your attribution style arises. This is the style you use in interpreting what things mean. This speaks about the quality and properties within your meaning-making. What is your style? Do you treat things as if they count or do you discount things? Do you reject and contempt or appreciate and validate? Do you create positive or negative meanings? How rich or impoverished are your meaning structures? How rigid or flexible? Do you view life as a problem and headache or as something precious and beautiful, an adventure? Do you view suffering as your inevitable fate or as an exception to being absorbed in learning and growing? Do you think of people as depraved and unworthy, evil and out to do harm, or as sacred beings with a magical consciousness that allows them to be conscious of being conscious? -74-

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There is yet another way by which you create meaning. You also invent representational meaning by your style of editing and coding your mental movies. This editorial dimension inside the Meaning dimension has been given the unfortunate name of “sub-modalities.”1 “Unfortunate” because there’s nothing “sub” (at a lower logical level) about these modalities of awareness. They are simply the finer cinematic features of a person’s internal movies. The cinematic features of your movies simply describe how you represent things in your cinema in terms of sights (visual), sounds (auditory) and sensations (kinesthetic). As #1 The Meta-Stating sensory information, the features of Core of Meaning-Making your movies operate in a similar way to the control knobs of a television set. You can turn the brightness of the picture up or down, you can fade out the color or Framing (Ps.) make it more vivid and intense, you can edit in a sound track with Evaluation (CE, MR, CEq, Id) various features (circus music, a Association (Linking Emotions) fearful narrator’s voice, a child’s tone, etc.). Classification (Labeling) Cinematic

Cinema Representation The cinematic features of your Event Stimulus movies determine how compellingly real you feel your Response representations and constructs, or how vague and non-compelling. For example, if you encode the cinema with all the features of being present, big, close, 3-D, and you are inside the movie—you will typically install whatever ideas you are viewing or whatever belief you are inventing very quickly. Yet if you observe your movie as if you were a spectator to it, then you will experience it as only informational and not necessarily emotional or motivational. In NeuroSemantics we refer to this level as the cinematic features of our movies, or as the meta-modalities.2

[Code for the meta-stating funnel in which we create meaning: Meta-Model distinctions, cause-effect (CE), complex equivalence (Ceq), mind-reading (MR), presuppositions (Ps), and identifications (Id).]

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The Meaning of the Meaning Dimension What is meaning? What is the meaning of meaning? Have you ever seen meaning? Have you ever heard, tasted, smelled, or felt meaning? How do you work with neuro-semantic meaning in your life and mind? How well do you understand the meaning-making process?

You use your mind-body-emotion system to map your understandings of the things that make up the world or the territory. Korzybski (1933) in Science and Sanity detailed how our sense receptors (e.g., eyes, ears, skin, etc.) abstract or summarize from the energy manifestations out there in the world to create within us neurological maps of the territory. From there we abstract to the next level, neurological mappings of neurological mappings, the cognitive unconscious. Eventually we create a linguistic mapping, and then higher linguistic mappings. It is in this way that the nervous system–brain system comes to “know” and “understand” things. Obviously this meaning-making process is not simple. Meaning first emerges from “sense impressions,” then the activation of our “senses,” then levels of neurological abstracting, etc. This continues until our “mental” sense of representation arises in our MovieMind.2 From there we can use linkage, classification, naming, defining, evaluating, framing, over and over again as we map things linguistically. This allows us to do multiple layers of reflexive layering of frames. This is what creates the matrix that we live in. From these rudimentary thoughts, ideas, and information you see-hear-andfeel, you transform them into beliefs which are higher level frames. From there, you create even higher levels as you layer frame upon frame to create a whole series of embedded frames. You almost never entertain an idea in its simple representational form. Typically, your thoughts are embedded in various contexts, and those contexts are within contexts. This is what we call a matrix of frames within which you give birth to your meanings. The Construct of Meaning Originally, in old high German and middle English language, the word “meaning” referred to the thoughts that you “hold in mind.” Yet, how do we do that? How do you “hold” a thought in mind?

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Imagine a fluid mind that sees, hears, and feels and that immediately releases so that nothing endures, nothing coheres in mind after the sensory stimulus. This is how the mind typically works. The great majority of the impressions and things that pass through your mind never stays. We humans are experts at deleting and “leaving characteristics out,” that is, not making a map about many things. We all have also held a book, looked at the words on the page, perhaps even said the words to ourselves or out loud, and the thoughts went into our mind, yet nothing stayed. That’s why it “meant nothing to you” and you had to read it again. Without taking the words in, thinking about them, you comprehended nothing and you remembered nothing. You and me, and all of us, have to hold our ideas, representations, beliefs, memories, understandings, etc. in mind if they are to become our meanings. When you explore meaning in yourself or another, you are exploring what the person holds in mind about something. You want to know what the person understands, believes, or values, etc. When you ask the meaning question, “What do you mean by that?” you want to know both what is on the person’s mind (the movie playing in the mind) and also what is in the back of the mind (all the context frames which holds the interpretative guide for understanding and comprehending). What is the person holding in the back of his or her mind about that subject? This asks for the person’s frame of meaning and frame of reference. These “behind the scene” awarenesses are the very thoughts that you hold as your reference. These mental frames govern your actions. You carry these thoughts with you and the thoughts that make up your matrix, the sum of your embedded frames. The higher these thoughts, the more outside of consciousness they will be. You live in those frames as in a canopy of consciousness. This speaks about the close relationship between the higher levels of meanings and meta-states. It makes clear that beyond what’s playing on the screen of your mental cinema, the thoughts in the back of your mind, your higher level intentions and understandings by which you interpret things—this is what determines your meanings. At the first level of meaning is your sensory-based movie. The languages of the mind are the internal representations of sights, sounds, sensations, smells, and tastes. Within and above this are the words which you use, are

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the meta-representational symbols. Above that are even higher levels of abstract language.

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Meaning—Your Inner Neuro-Semantic Reality Given that meaning does not exist “out there,” meaning is an inside job. Meaning arises within the mind. It originates from within as an integral part of your internal world. It emerges as a neuro-linguistic product that you construct from your interactions with the outside world of people, events, ideas, etc. This internal construct is an interaction of event and thought. You interact with things, events, and even ideas and then you create representations which you hold in mind. There’s good news about this—your meanings are under your control. You are the meaning-maker. It is your brain creating your meanings. Can you imagine how much of a paradigm shift this is for someone brought up to think that language or meaning “is” a real empirical object? External events only have meaning as you make them meaningful. Now, how fantastic is that? Meaning —Ideas and Representations in Process As a living process, meaning is not static. Meaning is a moving and shifting process of thinking, feeling, and framing. This explains the plasticity of meaning—how it is always bending, stretching, moving, slipping, and sliding. It is dynamically alive. Now the more you incorporate this realization, the less likely you will treat it as solid or permanent. Meaning is always in flux. If meaning arises by mind and in mind, then you can expect it to come and go according to the functioning of your consciousness. It doesn’t stay put. Now you have it; now you don’t. We see this most vividly in the ever-shifting nature of meanings. This paragraph comes from what I wrote in Mind-Lines (1997): As a customer we go out to buy a new car. But the meaning of “purchasing a new car” may change multiple times in a given day. It all depends. It depends upon the ideas, memories, referents, values, and thoughts that flow through our consciousness. At first it may mean, “getting a more reliable source of transportation.” But as you shop, other meanings may flow into your stream of consciousness. Now it means, “enjoying looking good in a sharp machine!” A little later, “a really smart buy—economical, affordable, solid.” And then the next minute, “an expression of my power,” “an expression of my sexuality,” “the envy of my friends,” etc.

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What in the world is going on here? What’s going on is the fluidity of interpretation that causes one’s point of view to bend this way and then that way. This reveals the ever-shifting nature of meaning. And this occurs because— meaning does not (and cannot) exist apart from a meaningmaker. It takes a human mind to create, communicate, and experience meaning. Meaning does not exist “in” the car, it arises in how a meaning-maker thinks and feels about a car and relates it to different aspects of life. This represents an entirely new way to think about meaning for most people. Even for those who have thought this way about meaning for a long, long time—it can still feel strange. Why? Why should this plasticity of meaning continue to feel strange even if you know this well and have thought this way for a long time? There are two reasons. First, because we are forever projecting our meanings onto the world. As one of the most basic psychological mechanisms that we know about, projection deceives us into thinking and feeling that meaning is “out there.” Then there is also the habituation of our thoughts and ideas. This also seduces us into assuming a false permanence and stability about meaning. Are there any “old” thoughts about something, something that may have happened decades ago, that you still “hold” in your mind, which do not serve to enhance your life? Have you considered simply changing the meaning of that event? Do you have permission to do that?

Of course, you are actually changing meanings about past events all the time. It’s how your mind and memory works as we have been learning in the Neuro-Sciences. Yet sometimes we get in a “rut” with some old meanings, forget that they are just constructions, and hold on to them even though they make us semantically reactive or ineffective. If you find this strange and scary, welcome to the club. Most people do. This explains why people typically have to spend some time with this concept to get used to it. In this way you can get over any insecurity or fear about the fluid and unstable nature of meaning. The plasticity of meaning does not make it so relative that you can make anything mean anything. A dog is not a tree. A tree is not food. Yet it does suggest that you should expect to discover fluidity in meanings because it will keep shifting and -80-

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changing. This also explains why you have to keep refreshing your meanings (ideas, beliefs, understandings, decisions, etc.) if you want to keep them activated. Meaning — Your Invented Reality Because it takes a meaning-maker to create meaning, meaning is entirely a human construct.3 To what extent do you realize this? How much does it empower you as you think about and work with meaning? You construct all of your internal realities. An old biblical proverb expressed this succinctly, “As a man thinks in his heart, so he is.” What you are in terms of how you think, feel, and act in relationship to the world and to others operates as a function of your maps (i.e., your perceptions and constructions). Ultimately you are responsible for constructing useful maps. You invent meaning first via the linking process. You link things up. You associate a stimulus with some response so that the stimulus means, equals, or leads to that response. Animals create this level of meaning. The dog sees a piece of meat and moves close to it, smells it, and has a response. His autonomic nervous system reacts with a response of salivating, which prepares his stomach and organism for eating the meat. All the while, an experimenter rings a bell. The first time, the dog doesn’t respond to the bell except perhaps to cock his ear. This is Zero Learning (Bateson). Yet if the meat and bell ringing occurs together at the same time or in close approximation, the dog will connect the sound of the bell with the meat. He will respond to the bell by salivating. He has now moved to Learning I. We call the relationship between the external stuff and the internal stuff “meaning.” This is what we put together as a conceptual equation. In Mind-Lines we formulate it in the following way:

E.B. —>/ = I.S. External Behavior —>/ = Internal State

This External Stuff or External Behavior E.B.

leads to —> This Internal Stuff or equals = Internal State —> and = I.S.

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As you move through life, you cannot help but link things with things. Yet some linking does not create an accurate mapping of things. I met a young man who ran into the bathroom at five years of age to pee and had to step across his drunken dad in the floor and when he began to pee, he woke his dad, who then gave him a beating for waking him. The young boy created a linkage between peeing and being beaten. As a result he developed a “shy bladder.” He couldn’t pee in the presence of others, not even his wife. Once an idea or experience is linked with something else, the idea will get embodied in the muscles. In one of the larger earthquakes that shook southern California in the 1980s, just moments prior to the quaking of the earth, a mother got upset with her little five year old for slamming a door in the house. At that moment, she had had enough of his rebellious stubbornness. So in her frustration she turned loose to give him a good rebuke, telling him in no uncertain terms that “something really bad will happen if you keep contradicting me.” Just as she was saying those words, at that very moment, the boy angrily slammed the door again and the whole house simultaneously shook and trembled as an earthquake occurred. Dishes crashed to the floor. Lamps came tumbling down. It absolutely terrified the little boy. Seeing the world all around him falling apart, he felt that he had caused the earthquake because he was being bad and sassy and stubborn and willful. In his nervous system he linked up “slamming the door” as an external behavior which stood for all actions of defiance and selfassertiveness with the internal states of being -82-

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“bad,” showing angry disobedience, sassing mom. The terror of the earthquake became his neurologically felt confirmation that being “bad” (assertive in the face of an authority figure) would destroy the world. Was this rational? No, of course not. Did it make psycho-logical sense? Yes, definitely. He now absolutely “knew” in the depths of his being that being a bad, disobedient boy and slamming the door caused the devastation. His mindbody-emotion system connected these things so that any form of standing up for himself, being defiant, individualizing felt dangerous and threatening. These stories powerfully illustrate the logic inside the human nervous system. It is not “logical” in a formal way that would please Aristotle or a professor of critical thinking. Nor does it reflect the best of mature human thinking. Yet the psycho-logics inside your nervous system can and does connect all kinds of things. To an outsider who doesn’t know the whole story, the associations will seem irrational. Yet once you link one thing with another thing—then your brain, nervous system, and all connecting human tissue (which means all of your somatic, physical, and body stuff) “knows” at a neurological level the “truth” that “sassing is dangerous.” This creates “intuitive” knowledge which can be so wrong and disempowering. By using the formal language of causation, all of us create a formula that captures the semantic magic that we invent through linkage, association, and framing. This formula offers a structural way to think about how we connect things. It describes the meaning-making process. Formally: NLP Mind-Lines:

X —>/ = Y E.B. —>/ = I.S.

This formula summarizes how you can take an external behavior and link it up within a Cause—> Effect neuro-linguistic structure. Then, from inside your matrix, you not only think but feel that the one thing does and will lead to another. It’s useless to argue against such. In fact, arguing against typically strengthens it. From the inside, the person knows and feels “the reality” of the connection. The powerful emotionally significant event gave the boy a strong reference experience and the mental maps that he made were so quick, so outside-of-conscious awareness, and so emotionally impactful that he may never question it. Why should he? He has a convincer —his own body and emotions. -83-

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You also link things together so that you construct various ideas about reality. I met another young man who at four years of age figured out why traffic lights are red and green. His four-year-old mind made the linkage one day and from then until he was in his mid-twenties he never thought about it, but just “knew.” What was this fabulous insight? Well, obviously, “green is a good color because it is the color of grass and red is a bad color because it is the color of blood when you get hurt.” It wasn’t until he was in his twenties that he discovered that most people do not think that way(!). This linkage of things which creates meaning explains why most adults associate stressed vocal chords to feeling bad, threatened, and attacked. When they were kids, and their parents were feeling stressed, upset, angry, afraid for them, they would yell at them and then administer a spanking. Stressed tone of voice leads to being in trouble and physical pain (causeeffect, C–E). Repeat that often enough and then the linkage becomes an equation. Eventually the harsh tone is the trouble and pain. When you equate one thing with another, then you create another linguistic structure, a complex equivalence (CEq). Now the external stimulus equals an internal state or the computation of some significance (i.e., a disaster, terrifying fear, pain, horror, etc.). In this way you linguistically punctuate your experience and then encode it with this structure. Whatever you say leads to or is equal to or is the same as something else, so it is to you—inside your neurology. Gregory Bateson, and then the developers of NLP, said this is like “magic” in that one thing seems to magically become something else. To model this “magic” I have used three key linguistic distinctions from the expanded Meta-Model: 4 Cause —> Effect statements (C-E) This X leads to this Y. “Defying anyone causes devastating disasters in life.” “Play things safe. Don’t do anything that rocks the boat.” Complex Equivalences (CEq) This X means this Y. “A harsh tone is an attack and hurtful.” Identification (Id) This X means this Y about me. “I am a bad boy who causes bad things to happen.”

Meaning — Embedded Frames-of-Reference The human construct of meaning always occurs in frames. Because you think and feel reflexively, you can think-and-feel about your own thinking-84-

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and-feeling and do so level upon level. You can do so without it ever coming to an end. This factor enables you to construct layers upon layers of meaning. It enables you to create your Meaning dimension. No wonder we search for frames. What are you referring to? (Primary level) How are you representing that reference? (Representative or movie level) What is your frame of reference for this idea? (First meta level) What frames are you using to say or perceive this? What frame of mind are you coming from? What frames have to be there in order for this statement to make sense?

Frame-less meanings do not occur. To have higher level meanings, you have frames of reference. In other words, meaning is context sensitive both externally and internally. Ideas, thoughts, emotions, experiences, etc. mean different things in different contexts and contexts can be internal as well as external. Internal contexts are your frames. When you realize that your frames govern, modulate, organize, drive, and control your experiences, you can appreciate the power of frames as well as their pervasiveness. Your thoughts, feelings, language, behavior, and responses are expressions of your frames. When you set a frame, that frame becomes the governor of your internal reality. It sets in motion certain consequences and conclusions, what Alfred Korzybski called “logical fate.” This sets up “frame games”—games that occur due to your frames. 5 The logical fate of your frames shows up in your actions and interactions—your games. The games that you play in life, from your actions, relationships, talk, to your mental and emotional games, are functions and expressions of your frames. That’s because where there is a frame, there’s a game. Conversely, where there is a game in play, there is a frame. There are frames that govern the games that you play with eating and exercising (Games that Slim People Play, 2001). There are frames that govern the games you play with the things you deem dangerous (Games for Mastering Fear, 2001). There are frames that govern the games you play at work, in your career, and with money (Games Business Experts Play, 2002; Games Wealthy People Play, Inside-Out Wealth). There are frames that govern loving relationships (Games Great Lovers Play).

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All human experiences occur within frames—cultural frames-of-reference, personal frames, family frames, business and economic frames, etc. Even your native language constitutes multiple frames. In fact, the language frame is one of the largest frames that you unconsciously live in and which governs your experiences. If you grew up hearing and speaking English, then the multiple hidden assumptions built into the language will govern how you think, how you perceive, what experiences stand out and count, which do not, etc. Similarly, your cultural frames typically operate outside of your awareness so that you hardly ever notice it. To notice it, you have to step out of the frame, as when you visit a different culture. Then you suddenly become aware of your assumptions about life, relationships, values, etc. Driving frames in the American culture that are seldom ever questioned include such frames as “bigger is better,” “money is the measure of success,” “a person’s value is measured by achievements,” “entertainment doesn’t contribute to violence, it’s just entertainment,” etc. The pervasiveness and inevitability of frames shows in the fact that you have no choice about living with frames, framing, and reframing. It’s how you think. If we think by framing, then whoever sets the frame controls the experience. This describes what happens in relationships and cultures. Someone always sets the frame. Actually, we all live in the midst of many frames—frames embedded within frames. Do you know the frame out of which you operate? Do the frames serve you well? Who set the frame? Would you prefer a different frame?

It works as simple and as profoundly as this. If I start talking about researching human resourcefulness, I set a frame for our conversation. Setting the frame refers to setting either the content of the subject matter or the context for the subject matter. If I ask, “How resourceful do you feel when you get up in the morning?” I set resourcefulness as the context of the conversation. Simultaneously, I have set the content of the discussion as exploring your evaluation of your own situation. This is very subtle. While the language of the question gets you to focus on the content of your life, at a higher logical level, I have actually set a frame whereby I can elicit your higher values, beliefs, understandings, meta-states, -86-

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etc. I haven’t done so explicitly, only implicitly. This is a frame by implication. Life in the Matrix Given that in your mind-body-emotion system of brain, nervous system, mind, consciousness, etc. when you think and say that one thing equals another thing, you make it so. It creates your subjective sense of reality. “When she looks at me with that expression, I feel discounted.” “When he talks to me in that tone of voice, I know he is angry with me.”

In this way you literally speak your subjective reality into being. You box up that meaning and buy the package. As you live in that box, it runs your emotions, behaviors, and responses. Behaviorists called this the “black box” and because they could not see into it. This phrase suggests that most of the time we don’t have the slightest idea of how we have constructed our meanings, or what meanings operate within us as our “programs.” Yet you live mostly unconscious of your meanings and their structure. You assume them and then live, breathe, and move inside them as your mental atmosphere. As meta-frames of references they function like a conceptual canopy that governs the weather of your mind-and-emotions. These languaged equations are central to your experiences, skills, abilities, emotions, etc. because they are your meanings. To change you have to change these equations. When you do change the neuro-linguistic equations—“magic” happens. Suddenly everything becomes transformed and new realities pop into existence. Figure 8:1 ————— EB—>/=IS ————— / \ ——— EB—>/=IS ———— / \ EB—>/ = IS Formula

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Meaning—Simultaneously Activated in Multiple Frames We are now getting to the heart of the problem that creates the mind-body meaning complexity. We not only have primary level “meaning” —this action, experience, event, set of words linked to and connected to this idea, thought, feeling, state, etc., we have embedded layers of meaning equations. To a salesperson a “customer” may “mean” “a source of income,” if the person has linked the person looking to buy a product as having that significance to him or her. Of course, a “customer” may also mean other things: “someone who may reject me,” “someone who I may enjoy getting to know,” “an opportunity to practice my skills,” etc. These are the primary level connections. “This X means this Y.” Wouldn’t you know that your mind, like mine, won’t stay put. Just as soon as you create a meaning formula, you then entertain another thought about that first one. You think about your thinking. You have feelings about your feelings. This initiates multiple-levels of meanings. Suppose you begin with a primary level thought: “This person may reject me.”

How do you think or feel about that? Do you like it? No? Now you have yet another embedded thought: “I hate my thoughts-and-feelings of feeling vulnerable about being rejected by people.”

How do you feel about your hatred of your sensitivity-to-rejection feelings? You feel guilty about that? “Guilty for feeling hate/contempt for sensitivity to rejection.”

How do you feel about that? And so on it goes. To understand the structure of this word magic regarding how it works inside your head, you have to understand the effect of your own reflexivity, how you entertain thoughts about thoughts, and then more thoughts about those thoughts. The processing feeds-back into itself so that, as a cybernetic system, your brain processes its own previous products. These meta-level meanings refer to meaning above other meanings that reference previous meanings. Self-reflexivity enables you to move into higher levels of computation as you punctuate your experiences with various understandings. -88-

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Self-reflexive thinking creates the complexity and layeredness of thought upon thought, emotion upon emotion. You experience layers of thoughts upon thoughts and these build up upon each other to create even more complicated conceptual systems. To add a little bit more complexity to all of this, consciousness operates simultaneously at many different levels. You not only have thoughts about something. You have thoughts about those previous thoughts. Meaning—Mapping Accuracy and Usefulness In the mind-and-body system, your meanings mostly feel real to you neurologically because they put you into state. Meanings govern your states of consciousness and even modulate both your central and autonomic nervous systems. Though “real” in this sense—the meaning frames may not enhance your life. A meaning may be sick and toxic and undermine your ability to effectively live up to your values and visions. To deal with this—run an ecology check on meanings to quality control them. Does this thought, emotion, state, belief, etc. serve you well? Will it enhance your life, bring out your best, put you in a resourceful state, and empower you in reaching your goals? Will it enable you to act in a way true to your values? Or will it limit you, reduce your effectiveness, and put you at odds with your own highest values and beliefs?

In exploring the meanings that you have created, you can inquire about these categories of meaning. 1) What is this? How have you labeled or classified this? 2) How does it work? What do you believe about its cause, its origin, or its functioning? 3) What else contributes to this? What other influential system plays a role in this? 4) What is this equal to or identical with? What do you equate this with? 5) How can or should you evaluate it? What does it mean in terms of value, criteria, or standard? What is its significance? 6) What are the rules that govern this? What are its limits or constraints? What consequences will occur if we violate this?

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Summary Meaning is made and created as you construct it according to the way you process information and hold it in your mind. The meaning-making process is both simple and powerful. It can have seemingly “magical” effects since it is restrained very little from the outside. Ultimately it is transcendently human and a process to stand in awe of. Meaning is an inside job and does not exist “out there” in the external world although you can encode your meanings, create symbolic systems, and externalize your meanings. Yet meaning itself is an internal experience. Meaning is an inside-out job.

End Notes: 1. For more about “sub-modalities” and how they are actually meta-modalities or Cinematic Features, see Sub-Modalities Going Meta (2005) and User’s Manual of the Brain (2002 in press). 2. Sub-Modalities Going Meta (2005). The original title was The Structure of Excellence: Unmasking the Meta-Levels of “Sub-Modalities” (1999) and MovieMind (2003). 3. That we construct our internal world of thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, etc. is, in philosophy, called Constructionism. 4. These three distinctions come from the Meta-Model of Language, see The Structure of Magic, Volumes I & II or the updated version Communication Magic. This is also the basis and foundation of conversational reframing as detailed in Mind-Lines (2007). 5. The original title was Frame Games (1999) it is now retitled, Winning the Inner Game (2007).

Patterns for Coaching / Therapy: The Meta-Stating Pleasure Belief Change Patterns Exploration of Meaning SCORE Model & Dance Seeing / Seizing Opportunities Meta-Stating Concepts Problem Defining Pattern Expanding Meta-Programs Sub-Modality Detection Pattern

As If Frame Reframing Patterns Meta-Stating Optimism Outframing and Texturing of States Meta-Stating Resilience Neuro-Semantics of Concepts: Meta-Modeling Questions Identifying Meta-Programs New Behavior Generator Pattern Drop Down Through Pattern

Meta-Programs (numbers from Figuring Out People): #37 Completion / Closure Sort #40 Value Sort #51 Causational #27 Responsibility #50 Morality: Super-ego

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DIAGNOSIS AND THE MEANING DIMENSION The Meaning Dimension – Part II “Categorization: Start with the universe. Any sub-categorization under that level is purely arbitrary.” Buckminster Fuller

M

eaning is what you and I make. We construct and invent it in several ways—by finding it in the thoughts and writings of others, by discovering it through our own search and exploration, by arbitrary declaring it, by co-creating it with others, by learning formal interpretation models, and so on. What you cannot do is not create meaning. You are constantly interpreting everything you hear others say and everything you experience and feel. You do so by the frames or internal contexts that you carry with you. Yet just because you can invent or construct meaning doesn’t mean the meaning will enhance your life. It doesn’t mean the meaning will be accurate, useful, healthy, or desirable. You, like the rest of us, have the ability to create stupid meanings, toxic meanings, dysfunctional and crazy -91-

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meanings. You also create meanings that sabotage and limit you, and meanings that can make your life a living hell. Have you ever done that? Have you ever created a meaning that you held in your mind as a belief, an understanding, an expectation, a fantasy, a dream, etc. and then you found out later that it was irrational and non-sense?

Of course, you have. We all have. We have for the simple fact that we do not have an omniscient and infallible nervous system–brain, we always and only create fallible meanings. It comes with the territory of being human. How does that settle for you? Have you developed the ego-strength to face this head-on? System Checks No wonder it is important that, to have a healthy and robust matrix, you have to constantly run system checks. Some of the most basic systems checks are these: Reality checks: Does this fit with what you know about reality? Accuracy checks: How accurate or precise is the formulation of this map? Correspondence checks: How well does this map correspond to the territory? Productivity checks: Will this help me to be more effective and productive? Ecology checks: Does this have a good fit into all of the other facets in my life? My health, relationships, work, recreation, etc.? Empowerment checks: Does this empower me as a person and endow me with a greater sense of vitality and focus? Congruency checks: Does this fit with all of my central values and goals? Do I feel congruent with this in all of the facets of my being?

The brain processes information, it doesn’t have an internal check for ecology or quality. Feed the mind junk thoughts, sloppy ideas, stupid beliefs, and irrational hopes and it will simply process the information and send signals to put you in state. “Garbage in, garbage out.” In this, the brain isn’t as smart as the stomach. At least the stomach knows how to vomit. The brain just goes right ahead and processes mental garbage and -92-

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doesn’t have a clue! That’s why you have to run Quality Control checks for your brain. To run a diagnosis of your skills in meaning-making and your cognitive styles, take a good look at your cognitive styles and cognitive distortions. It’s your responsibility and power to step back from your meaning frames and check them out, to be clear about what they do inside you, the worlds they call into being, and to examine these mental contexts in which you experience your conversations, relationships, emotions, skills, and the whole model of your world. Identifying Cognitive Styles and Distortions Cognition refers to “thought” and your cognitive styles describe how you go about using your thoughts to create meaning. Piaget’s original work in human cognitive development from childhood through adulthood identified many of the processes of the maturing mind. In States of Equilibrium (2003), John Burton identified these developmental psychology mechanisms and placed them in the context of using meta-states for maturing and creating mental-emotional balance. Your cognitive style and development is crucial because it is through “thought” that you create meanings and develop your own attribution style. Here are some basic questions in exploring this area: What is your style and mode of thinking? How many thinking or sorting styles are there? How can you learn to discern the thinking styles that you and others use? How can you detect toxic and dis-empowering thinking patterns? What can you do once you find a way of thinking that does not enhance your life?

Some “styles of thinking” are meta-programs. You do this thinking at a level above (meta) your content thinking. No meta-program is “bad” or “wrong,” they are just processing styles. Yet they can be unhelpful, unuseful, non-productive, etc. in a given context. (See chapters 18 & 19) As meta-programs relate to the processing you do about the content, this processing occurs at a meta-level as various states, and frame your thinking and feeling. As you develop these habitual thinking styles from the states of mind-and-emotion that you learn to use (matching / mis-matching states;

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option / procedure states, etc.), they eventually transform into your metaprograms [as noted in a previous chapter]. The NLP model of Meta-Programs certainly does not include all possible thinking styles or cognitive distortions. Ellis and Harper (1975) in Rational-Emotive Behavioral Therapy (formerly RET), along with Beck (1983) in Cognitive Therapy identify a list of thinking errors or cognitive distortions. These ways of reasoning are as unproductive as they are irrational and lead to personal misery. As cognitive distortions they create mapping blindness and dysfunction. You will note that many of these relate to the linguistic distinctions of the Meta-Model for detecting ill-formed mapping. You can now use these distinctions as a systems checklist for diagnosing your thinking patterns and identifying cognitive distortions. Cognitive Distortions Thinking Patterns 1) Over-Generalizing or Jumping-to-Conclusions Jumping to conclusions on little evidence or without facts. 2) All-or-Nothing Thinking A kind of thinking that polarizes at the extreme poles, black-and-white thinking that posits options as two-valued choices. 3) Labeling or Name-Calling Name-calling that uses over-generalizations. 4) Blaming Accusatory thinking that transfers blame and responsibility. 5) Mind-reading other people’s motives and intentions Projecting thoughts, feelings, intuitions onto others without checking your guesses with the person, over-trusting your "intuitions." 6) Prophesying the future Projecting negative outcomes into the future without seeing alternatives or possible ways to proactively intervene. 7) Emotionalizing Concluding that what you feel is what you are, is what you should do, it is taking counsel of your emotions as an information source for what is real. 8) Personalizing Perceiving circumstances and actions of others as about oneself, perceiving world through ego-centric filters. 9) Awfulizing or Terriblizing Imagining the worst possible scenario and then amplifying it with the emotion-laden word, "Awful” or “Terrible.” 10) Should-ing or Inner Demandingness

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Pressuring self and others to conform to your rules using the words "should" and "must" in your statements. 11) Filtering out the Positive or the Negative Over-focusing on one facet of something to the exclusive of everything else, a tunnel vision perspective, filtering out the positive, solutions, etc. 12) Can't-ing or Impossibility thinking Imposing semantic limits on oneself and others using the word "can't." Not a physiological can’t, but a psychological one. 13) Discounting or Minimizing Dis-qualifying possible solutions or values by minimizing yourself, others, and not letting things “count.”

Productive Thinking Patterns The Meta-Model enables you to question linguistic terms and phrases that indicate ill-formed mapping. The inquiring invites and challenges the person to re-map in a more well-formed way. Similarly, the Cognitive psychology model suggests that you identify and replace the distortion with a more productive thinking pattern. The systems check enables you to do a Step Back and identify thinking patterns which you use in reasoning, drawing conclusions, and attributing meanings. Once you do that, you can switch the ineffective way with a more empowering thinking style. The following list provides another checklist for straightening out cognitive disordering. 1) Contextual thinking: Inquire about the context of information and index the specific distinctions—what, when, where, which, how, who, and why. Meta-model unspecified nouns, verbs, relational terms, etc. 2) Both-and-thinking: Ask if a situation truly functions in an Either/Or way. If not, think in terms of a continuum. Inquire whether the two seemingly contradictory options are different ways, times, circumstances, etc. 3) Reality-testing: Test the reality of the experience: to what extent, in what way, etc. someone deems something as "bad, undesirable, and unwanted?" Meta-model the value words. De-nominalize terms words to recover the hidden verbs. 4) Denominalizing thinking: Ask how a label functions: accurately, usefully, productively, too generally. De-nominalize pseudo-nouns that make thinking and language fuzzy. 5) Systemic thinking: Check the pattern of causation. Distinguish linear causation from the multi-faceted nature of systemic causation.

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26) Information Gathering thinking: Gather information to find the facts and then to check the conclusions. 7) Tentative predictive thinking: Gather high quality information about the factors, causes, forces, trends, etc. that come together to create an event. Keep an open mind about ways of intervening and altering that destiny. Look at consequences of certain, actions, etc. 9) Critical thinking/ Meta thinking: Analyze the multi-causational nature of human emotions, back-track to the originating thoughts, think above and beyond the immediate content to the patterns and structures. 10) Reality-testing, Challenging the "shoulds." Explore the word "should" to discover the rule behind it. If there’s no such law, shift to desire thinking, "I would prefer that..." "I would like.” 11) Depersonalizing thinking; Responsibility To/For Thinking: Reality test to see if the content or context references you personally. If not, code information in a third-person perspective. 12) Possibility thinking: Check the term "can't" to distinguish physical or psychological can’ts, then shift to possibility thinking. Ask, "What stops you?" "What would it feel like, look like, or sound like if you could?" 13) Appreciative thinking: What does count? In what way? How could it be valued? Pattern for Updating Cognitive Distortions 1) Identify a referent experience. Is there any situation that seems impossible or limiting to you? Is there a situation in which you would like to have a more robust attitude in how you think about it? Describe it. 2) Identify the cognitive distortions that create difficulties or limitations. Use a check list of the cognitive distortions to examine your thinking. Which ones create problems and difficulties for you? Which ones do you need to change? Which one does the most damage and would make the most difference if you altered it? 3) Validate and confirm the cognitive distortion. When you think about the way you have been thinking, and you check the ecology of that thinking pattern, does it seem useful anymore? Do you need it? What is it like living life with this pattern of thought? 4) Do a Step Up: Step back to a meta-position. Does this pattern of thinking reflect one that you typically use? How long have you used this cognitive distortion? Has it served you well? In what way has it been beneficial? In what ways has it undermined your well-being? -96-

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What more useful way of processing this information would you like to use? 5) Challenge and dispute with the distortion. What is the strongest argument against the thinking pattern? For what reasons is it unproductive and inaccurate? What are other arguments against this thinking pattern? 6) Replace each distortion with an empowering thinking pattern. Check the list of the more enhancing ways of thinking. Which thinking pattern would be more empowering for you? Are you willing to practice thinking with that thinking pattern?

Diagnosing the Meaning at Higher levels. The meanings that have the most impact are those meanings which operate at the highest levels. Diagnosing those requires that you mentally rise up to identify them. Then you can catch the frames that you put around things and recognize the contextual meanings you’ve created. Patterns that facilitate a person to move up to the higher levels of the mind in Neuro-Semantics include the Opening Up pattern, the Intentionality pattern, the Pleasure pattern, and a host of other patterns.1 While it may sound complex, the process is actually deceptively simple. Deceptively because it would seem that you could easily run it on yourself. Yet you cannot. That’s because it is so easy to trick yourself. To rise up the levels, apply awareness to awareness. The challenge in this lies in being able to track your progress, and know where you are in the process without getting caught in loops. Typically words will fail you as you move up. You move to the edge of your maps to places where you lack the language to even describe your experience. For these reasons, reflexive consciousness can easily get into a spin and you get “lost in the ozone.” For these reasons, it’s best to have someone stay on the outside and mark and measure the experience for you. Then you don’t have to both experience and notice simultaneously. You can just experience the upward spiral as you move into the higher frames. Simply having a coach external to yourself who can ask the meta-questions, hold the intentional frame, and mark your progress allows you to give yourself more fully to the journey of discovery. If your mental constructs serve as your internal lenses through which you view reality, then flushing out these higher frames enables you to detect -97-

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your matrix and how you have created it. Yet because all words carry with them implications (frames by implication), it’s important to be able to recognize words as complicated streamlined maps (maps of intricate philosophies condensed into a single word). Now you can see the matrix in a new way. There’s a definition to every word in your mind-body system and every definition creates a mental context and encodes multiple cultural assumptions. Normally we don’t think of words in this way. It’s more typical for us to think of words as real, as “true,” as accurate maps of reality, and as “the given meaning of things.” Yet this assumption about words blinds you from actually realizing that you have a choice about the definitions you operate from. Yet your definition meanings create a background conversation in your matrix. The truth is that any definition is just the assignment of meaning given by a group of people and culturally accepted. Change the meaning of that word and your world changes. No wonder it seems, on the surface, so easy to just ask questions and find out what a person means. The problem is that we use words to do so and as we get used to using our words, we forget that we subtly load them with layers of implied meanings ... meanings inherent in our use of the words. And because the lenses they create are so close to our eyes, we typically can’t see them. Again, this is why it’s valuable to have a trained coach in Neuro-Semantics. If you don’t have a coach to work with you, you can externalize by using a Neuro-Semantic Word or Concept Analysis. To set this up, set up a blank sheet of paper using the template in Figure 7:1. Diagnosing Your Conversations While you use both representations and frames to create your matrix frames, you do so mostly by language. As the meta-representation system, language gives you the power to speak the matrix into existence. To a great extent, naming or labeling something and defining it makes it real to you, makes it neuro-semantically real. Yet there are also times when you will have experiences that are beyond words. You feel or sense something, but have no words that can “do justice” to the experience. At such times you may rely upon other kinds of words—poetry, drama, story, myth, etc. or you may move to pure symbols -98-

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and images. You may translate to music, art, or dance. At such times you enter the matrix of your awareness about something at a higher level, but you are speechless. You are at a place that’s beyond words. You “know,” yet you cannot say. So you feel your way in and only later you might find some words to express the experience. Figure 7:1 Word or Concept

Wealth Money Finances

Events & Experiences with the Term

Evaluations Conclusions Generalizations Beliefs

Re-Evaluation Assessment Ecology Check

Dad always said, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”

Money is hard to get. Money doesn’t come easy. You have to take advantage of people to be wealthy.

If you don’t know how money works or what creates wealth, it is hard and a mystery.

Stresses in paying bills; creditors.

Making and managing money stressful.

Church saying “Money is the root of all evil.”

It’s dangerous to be wealthy or want to be.

It’s only stressful if you don’t plan and handle finances intelligently. It is the love of money, not money itself, that’s the root of evil.

In conversation with loved ones, close friends, a confidant, therapist, or a personal coach, we often feel our way into the matrix ... sensing, feeling, experiencing ... moving into the shadows, beyond the borders and edges of our maps, into the darkness, confusion, ambiguity, or paradox ... and then later find or invent the words. You first experience, then language the experience. Finding new expressive ways of speaking, you return again and again to the experience. Eventually the new language sheds light on the way, extending the map.

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This happened in a workshop in Sydney, Australia a few years ago. I began speaking about a pattern that I had developed and named “Un-insultability.” For several days I primed the upcoming pattern by planting seeds about it. When the day came to explain it and demonstrate it with a participant, several participants said that the very terminology of uninsultability had been teasing their minds for days, alluring them to a new place. The term “un-insult-ability” had worked in them as a one-word map about a possible new experience and they had used the term to create their own mapping about what that would be like and how to get there. Language can do this. Sometimes the magic of language is that it provides a light that facilitates a search. You begin a new journey using only a word or phrase or line to guide you. The power is not in the word, but in the journeying and searching that it initiates in you. Conversely, listening to the words and language of people gives you a way to identify and diagnose much of the internal mind-scape in their matrix. Ask: “Where does that language take you?” “When you use that metaphor, what do you feel? Where do you go? How does that work inside you?” You can use metaphors as doorways into the person’s inner world and model symbolically what it suggests and implies. This is what James Lawley and Penny Tomkins did in their work on Symbolic Modeling. “Intelligence” and the Matrix Since “mind” is so intimately involved in creating meaning, is the quality of your matrix dependent upon your “intelligence?” What is the relationship between your intelligence and the matrix that you live in?

In the process of recognizing and detecting the process and content dimensions, you inevitably move around the system touching on various domains of intelligence. Today we have several models that help us diagnose the different kinds of “intelligence” in addition to the original Intelligent Quotient (IQ) model. Here I will mention two: Zophar’s triangle and Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Model. The Multiple Intelligences (MI) Model Gardner’s MI model makes distinctions between the kinds of “smarts” or intelligences needed for different domains of life. Harvard psychologist, -100-

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Howard Gardner, has used this model to map out a new way to think about intelligence. His books detail the seven intelligences and in the revised editions, an eighth intelligence: Frames of Mind (1983), The Unschooled Mind (1991), Multiple Intelligences (1993), etc. By expanding the old understandings and definitions of “intelligence” Gardner has initiated a movement in education. Viewing the mind as modular—each intelligence comes from a distinct portion of the brain and operates somewhat independently of the others. His discovery is that we do not just have one intelligence, we have multiple intelligences. “Intelligence” (a nominalization) does not refer to a single and general capacity. It refers to the ability to solve problems, and create products and responses that are valued and useful in a given context. “Intelligence” relates in a relative way to various domains or contexts as problem solving skills. The MI model recognizes that human intellectual competence entails a set of skills in problem solving that covers a great range of application. Because it takes a special “intelligence” to handle music, sound, melody, space, pictorial symbols, linguistic symbols, kinesthetic activities, interpersonal, intra-psychic (sense of self), metaphors, etc. In the Multiple Intelligences model, Gardner utilizes much of the research and discoveries of Piaget regarding cognitive development. He speaks about levels and dimensions of “knowing” and sorts out two kinds. Know That: Propositional knowledge about the actual set of procedures involved in execution. Know How: Tacit knowledge of how to execute something.

1) Linguistic Intelligence: The intelligence needed to read a book, write a paper, novel, or poem; and understand spoken words. 2) Logical-Mathematical Intelligence: The intelligence needed to solve mathematical problems, balance a checkbook, solve a mathematical proof, and engage in logical reasoning. 3) Spatial Intelligence: The intelligence needed to get from one place to another, to read a map, and to pack suitcases in the trunk of a car. 4) Musical Intelligence: The intelligence needed to sing a song, compose a sonata, play a trumpet, or even appreciate the structural patterning in a piece of music. 5) Bodily Kinesthetic Intelligence: The intelligence needed to dance, play basketball, run a mile, or throw a javelin.

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6) Inter-personal Intelligence: The intelligence needed to relate to other people, such as when we try to understand another person’s behavior, motives, or emotions. 7) Intra-personal Intelligence: The intelligence needed to understand ourselves—the basis for understanding who you are, what makes you tick, and how you can change, given the existing constraints on your abilities and interests. 8) Natural Intelligence: The intelligence for understanding the natural world, the world of nature, animals, plants, surviving off the land, preserving the world, etc. The Intelligence Triangle SQ In her intelligence triangle, Donna Zophar combines three kinds of intelligences. How does this triangle of intelligences correlate with the neuro-semantic mind-bodyemotion system? How do you integrate these three dimensions of intelligence for personal congruence? IQ fits best into the dimensions of State, Power, and World. IQ EQ Here you use your know-how knowledge to figure out how to deal with reality and develop the strategies for handling various domains of life. By your IQ you learn and adjust in a given World dimension. Intelligent Quotient: IQ refers to logical and rational intelligence. This is the kind of intelligence typically developed and tested in school. It is the know-how practical knowledge. IQ is your logical and sequential intelligence that you use in problem solving, reasoning, scientific thinking (inductive and deductive), to solution orientation, handling language, concepts, propositional statements, logic, mathematics, statistics, etc. IQ as intelligence is typically goal oriented and is strategic intelligence. Emotional Quotient: EQ refers to the intelligence involved in handling emotions. It involves relationship, rapport, connection, as well as selfawareness, self-control, acceptance of emotional states, etc. It involves the wisdom of empathy and compassion for operating in the people dimension. EQ is your social and relational intelligence; how you relate to your emotions, get along well with others, and manager your state. It determines your resilience, self-control, and optimism. -102-

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Spiritual Quotient: SQ refers to the sense of inspiration and passion, to meaningfulness, contribution to the whole, systemic thinking, and awareness of the health of the entire system, to ecology, beauty, balance, wisdom, and quality. This picks up on the higher purposes, intentions, attitudes, and spirit. SQ is your relationship to meaning and purpose, to your sense of the meaning of life, to your attitude and spirit of contributing and becoming all that you can become (self-actualization). This is the intelligence of wisdom and living meaningfully. EQ fits mostly in the Self and Other dimensions as well as the grounding of the State dimension. Here emotional intelligence enables you to become self-aware, self-accepting, and self-managing of your emotions and how you relate and communicate the others as you create richer relationships. SQ primarily fits into the Meaning and the Intentionality dimensions as you construct your maps about what is, what excites you, what stirs your passions, why you care, what else you could care about, and your sense of transcendence. It also relates to the Time dimension for it is time awareness that makes us mortal. Mastering Your Matrix — It is You who Bends Inside your inner matrix you live in a world of your own invention. In that world you have conceptual structures that you take totally for grant. Yet these concepts as inner “entities” only exist there. Outside of the matrix, they do not exist. In the outside world there is no “manipulation” or “rudeness,” nor is there any such thing as “time” or “kindness,” or a hundred thousand other concepts. If you see these as if on the outside, it is because you are projecting them onto the outside world. It is your projective power which tricks you into thinking that they exist out there. This explains why most people experience reframing as if it performs magic. Take away one frame, put in another frame and it’s like the switching of colored glasses—the world seems different and you change in response to it. In the movie, The Matrix, when Neo went to visit the Oracle he met a little boy with a shaven head who was holding a spoon which swayed like a blade of grass. Neo stared in astonishment. When the boy handed the spoon to him, it was perfectly straight. The boy said:

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“Do not try to bend the spoon. That is impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.” “The truth?” Neo responded. “That there is no spoon.” Neo nodded and stared at the spoon. “There is no spoon.” “Then you will see that it is not the spoon that bends. It is only yourself.”

It is your bending—your thinking, your processing, your constructing, attributing, defining, labeling, evaluating, and framing that creates and alters the inner world. When you reframe, the outside world doesn’t change. You change. And as you change, you influence others to change. Perhaps once when someone spoke with a harsh tonality, you immediately took offense and felt bad. Perhaps you felt defensive, attacked, or insulted. Perhaps you felt like a five-year-old again. Perhaps you were seeing a parent or teacher. Once you interpret the tension of the vocal chord as being anger or threat, you spin around the old memories of some hurtful experience and to build a matrix of frames around it. Later you bend in a new way. You view whatever occurs outside of you as not mine. You regard it as something interesting about others. Suddenly, there is no insult. There is curiosity about the other’s tension and stress. Yet while the world doesn’t change, the stressed vocal chords are still there, the “harshness” vanishes as it gives way to “fascination.” Then because your buttons are not pushed and you don’t become defensive, it is as if you live in a different world. Knowing that, in the conceptual dimensions, it is you who bend. You are empowered to bend and move with a new kind of flexibility. The world as you experience it is ultimately a matter of your constructs. Learning to frame and reframe gives you the flexibility and freedom to choose. Then, like Neo, you don’t have to dodge bullets or be faster than speeding bullets. Morpheus told Neo. “When you’re ready, you won’t have to.” Nor do you. You can simply make them irrelevant, you can call others into existence. Summary The skill of detecting and flushing out frames gives you the ability, first, to detect the structure of meaning and then to diagnose it from the standpoint of being realistic, ecological, healthy, etc. for you.

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The skill of doing a Step Back from the matrix and running a Systems Check is the foundation for learning to master your matrix. Because your style and patterns for “thinking” govern and predict the quality and nature of your experiences, it’s critical to make sure that cognitive distortions are not interfering with your best mapping and meaning-making. Since your brain doesn’t have a quality control feature built in, it is up to you to do system checks to check for quality. End Notes: 1. You can find these patterns in Meta-States, Secrets of Personal Mastery, and MetaStates Magic.

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Chapter 8

THE INTENTION DIMENSION Getting On Purpose “The knowledge that he is to swing from a scaffold within a week wonderfully concentrates a man’s mind.” Samuel Johnson “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” Kierkegaard

T

he Intention dimension reveals yet another dimension of meaningmaking. In this dimension you construct the reasons why you want something or see something in a particular way. Here you invent the meanings that make up your sense of direction and purpose. Intention speaks about your higher purpose or objective behind something and intentionality speaks about the capacity for creating a purpose and a sense of direction. In this dimension of meaning you map purpose, agenda, motives, and all of that leads to dreams, passions, and motivations. As you develop intentions, you are able to do things on purpose. Intentionality refers to being able to have something in the back of your mind as to why you do what you do. Nor do you only do this once. You map numerous and various purposes within each of the content dimensions. That’s why you can feel so torn in your purposes, in what you want. “A part of me wants fame and fortune. Another part of me wants modesty and contribution. Another part wants sex and fun. Another part wants...” And so it goes. All of us are full of wants and desires and intentions. Some intentions arise momentarily and vanish, others stay with us a lifetime. -106-

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When you move up the levels of your mind to intentionality, you move into the blue atmosphere of your mental sky. Here your capacity to build hopes and dreams, goals and reasons sets a direction for your life. As this Dimension endows you with a sense of meaning beyond the present moment, it establishes how you orient yourself into your future. From Intentionality you invent intentions and then experience the mental states of will, purpose, conation, decision, and choice. The codes and frames within your Intention dimension shows up in life as your motives and motivation. Where there is motivation, there are underlying motives. With weak intentions, your motivation will be weak and inconsistent. With an off-and-on agenda, your ability to be persistent, to sustain passion, and to bounce back from set backs (resilience) will be fragile and undependable. The capacity of intentionality enables you to move up the levels of intentions as you construct your highest intentions. Intentionality moves you into other facets of consciousness that often transcend your everyday states. It moves you into more exquisite areas: Ontology: Your awareness and mental frames about existence itself and being-ness. Teleology: Your awareness about where life and existence is going, and by presupposition, where it came from. Theology: Your thoughts about whether there a higher intelligence and about your ultimate concerns. Epistemology: Your awareness and frames about how you know what you know, your theory of knowledge.

How robust is your Intention dimension? Weakness here leads to low motivation and off-and-on commitment. It leads to being easily distracted, procrastinating, indecision, experiencing inner conflict, feeling insecure, unsure of your standards, the inability to focus. When your intentionality is undeveloped or under-developed, your ability to intend the objects of life will feel weak resulting in a sense of being determined by the environment and the forces around you. To elicit the Intentional dimension, ask: What do you want? What are you seeking to accomplish? What’s your purpose or agenda? What are you living for? Why is that important to you? Why do you want that? -107-

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Why do you give yourself to that? What do you hope to obtain by getting that?

Intention relates to and involves what you value, to valuing, to what you consider important, and meaningful as well as what you intend to do about the things you notice, feel, and experience. While this dimension uniquely arises from the Meaning dimension, it is also a part of it. How and what you construct will form your intentions. So all of the ways you make meanings and the cognitive patterns that you use apply equally to your intentions. As a human being you create and express intentions in everything you do. You want something to happen or to stop happening. You seek to achieve things. You seek to accomplish things of value for yourself. You develop agendas that make up your motives and motivation. Because this is a process dimension, it is not about any specific content, but about the process of wanting, intending, valuing. This dimension answers the why question. The why of intention drives you to think consequentially, to think in terms of where you are going in your future, to think what outcomes you want to achieve. From your intentionality also comes all of the specific intentions which you construct about each dimension—Self, Power, Others, Time, and World. In each dimension you have specific intentions and agendas. Why do you want that? Why is that important to you? Sometimes these conflict with each other. At other times they combine to create a larger gestalt so that you feel fully aligned and congruent. This makes your actions and sense of self harmonious and congruent. Rollo May (1969) in Love and Will writes about intentionality. “Intentionality is based upon a meaning-dimension which patient and therapist share. Every person, sane or insane, lives in a meaningdimension which he, to some extent, makes— i.e., it is individual— but he makes it within the shared situation of human history and language. This is why language is so important: it is the milieu within we find and form our meaning-dimension, a milieu which we share with our fellow human beings. ‘Language is every man’s spiritual root,’ says Binswanger. By the same token, we state that history is every man’s cultural body. The meaning-dimension comes before any discussion, scientific or other, since it is what makes discussion. ... friendship and love requires that we participate in the meaning-dimension of the other but without -108-

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surrendering our own. This is the way human consciousness understandings, grows, changes, becomes clarified and meaningful.” (p. 260)

“Stretching Out” to What You Want You typically experience your sense of purpose or intention as the thoughts in the back of the mind. Intent, from Latin intentus, at its most basic definition simply means to stretch out. In an intention you stretch out to what you want, to what’s before you, to the direction you want to move in. What’s in the back of your mind about what you are thinking and feeling right now as you are involved in your present engagement? What do you want to happen? And when that happens, why is that important to you? What do you get from that happening?

Intentions organize and direct your attentions on the primary level. The thoughts in the front of your mind, what’s on your mind, make up what you are attending to. Generally, if you have developed your intentionality, your attentions are in service of them. So when you combine your intentions and attentions in this way, the phenomenon of will arises. This refers to your freedom to choose your responses. Moving up into this dimension allows you to understand and explore what you (or another person) truly want, what you think you are going after, and to check whether you are actually getting your highest intentions or not. Intentionality describes yet another meta-cognitive awareness. Failing to recognize or embrace your higher intentions or just getting lost in the present moment attentions creates what is mis-labeled “attention deficit disorder” (ADD). That means being overwhelmed with too much stimuli and unable to control or manage all of the things that grab your attention, that distract you as you run around trying to put out fires or feel incapable of holding your attention on anything for long. When you live in the attentional world, you experience your mind and emotions similar to that of how a small child or animal experiences the world. Attentions come and go and you are at their disposal. You are therefore shifted here and then there. You have no sense of control with your attentions. Living in the intentional world gives you a sense that you are in control of what you pay attention to, when, where, and for how long. You have a big enough “why” to govern and organize the everyday attentions and to screen out what isn’t important to you. -109-

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The kind of ADD whose genesis is not in biology, actually comes from Intentional Deficit Disorder (IDD). In this case, a person does not have a strong enough intention, or he may be experiencing the conflict of intentions, wanting two or more things that contradict each other. When you have a big enough why for something, you experience a strong motivation in your hopes and dreams, in your visions and values, in your passions and expectations. You may even develop a fully-fledged propulsion system.1 With the Intention dimension, you move up to not only outframe your immediate goals and objectives, but to also organize your beliefs and understandings of your ultimate purpose and perhaps even the ultimate purposes of the universe. Here you construct ideas about whether you think the Universe is friendly or unfriendly, chaotic or ordered, intelligent or nonintelligent, determined or open for choice, etc. In this dimension, you create your meanings that make up your concepts about all sorts of things— spirituality, philosophy, religion, ontology, etc. Seldom will you have just a single intention. More typically you, as all of us, experience multiple intentions and layers of objectives. Whenever you classify anything in your Meaning dimension, you do so to “make sense” of the world. This creates your inner “logic” which will be your first intention—to understand what is there. And what’s the intention behind that? To be able to manage it, first in your mind and then to decide what to do about what’s there. As with every other meaning that you create, and every dimension which arises, you do so for yet other reasons. Supplementing the Intention dimension requires a well-developed Power dimension. The reason is to enable and empower you to become intentional and to take an intentional stance in life.2 Without sufficient resources from your Power dimension, you will not feel that you have enough capacity or energy to translate your intentions into reality. Then you can only be wishing and hoping, but not being intentional. This will undermine your intentionality and discourage you from setting bold and courageous goals. On the other hand, it is possible to over-emphasize intention. When that happens a person can become too goal-oriented and driven that she forgets to live today and enjoy her current experiences. Bateson warned about an over-purposeful approach to life and warned how it can lead to unecological consequences. This is where we need wisdom or spirit (beauty, -110-

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appreciation, being). Wisdom makes an entrance to create ecological balance. It is from the Meaning and Intention dimensions that we move to higher states and experience a transcending sense of inspiration, passion, hope, love, joy, and even a sense of transcendence. These are the qualities which we typically call “spirit” or “spiritual.” Detecting the Intention Dimension Because intention involves the thoughts “in the back mind” about something, to detect intention inquire about the why of yours or another person’s intention. “Why is that important?” “What are the higher values” (what you think and feel as significant and important) that drive your intentions? So when you find a value, you are detecting this dimension. These are the motives that create motivation. Your agenda is what you want. In this way values indicate what a person is going toward or away from. At the neurological level, intention is the part of the mind which activates the motor cortex. Accordingly, your intentions put you in action. When you think in this way, you feel an urge to act. This dimension of thinking is always present. Think about anything and you will almost always feel an urge to do something. This urge arises from your intentions, which, in turn, stimulates an inner sense of the need to take action about your thoughts. If someone is criticizing you, your intention may activate a motor program to leave, get out of there, avoid the situation. Or it could activate a need to argue for your point, fight, persuade, straighten someone out. Living on purpose endows you a sense of direction. In turn, this affects your sense of Self, Power, Others, Time, and the World. Because you have intentions, agendas, and motivations in each these dimensions, to be selfaware, you will want to detect your intentionality in each. When Intention Becomes the Problem Given this description you would think that you can always rely upon intention to empower you. Yet this is not the case. Intention itself can become problematic. Common sayings reflect this: “The pathway to hell is paved with good intentions.” “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” “I really meant well, but I just didn’t get around to doing it.”

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and/or not well formed. When this happens you experience your intentions as wimpy—a wish but not a will, a complaint, but not a determination. Of course, having little energy, the intention will not take you very far. It will run out of gas before you get out of the driveway. “I want to exercise, but it is cold outside.” “I want to contact her, but I am not in the mood.” “I would have finished the project, but there was a great movie on TV.”

What Do You Really Want? Richard Bolstad tells the story in his book, Resolve: A New Model of Therapy about Lucy, a lady who said she wanted to stop smoking. She had tried to give up smoking using several NLP processes, but to no avail. Richard was pressed for time so he used a linguistic reframing pattern. “So you have tried several things and it still hasn’t worked, that means there’s a part of you that hasn’t thought, ‘It’s OK to change—right?’” She nodded. “And if you were to know what is the part’s intention in having you smoke—what is it trying to do for you by having you continue smoking?” “To help me relax,” she replied after thinking about it for a moment. “OK, so I’d like you to consider the next statement very carefully. Anything less than completely stopping smoking and having healthy lungs is not totally enabling you to relax the way you deserve to.” At this Lucy looked bewildered. “I know you said some words, and I followed each word, but I couldn’t ‘hear’ the sentence.” Richard then explained, “That’s right, because your brain would need to change in order to fully process that statement. It starts out speaking to the neural network where smoking is generated and expands out to contact your higher intention. It’s a kind of linguistic parts integration.” After that Richard had to repeat the sentence four times carefully and still Lucy “had a feeling that the meaning was important and almost there.” So he wrote it down and asked her to read it until she understood it. Soon the understanding emerged and she reported a few months later that she had been “unable” to smoke after that discussion. Here he used her big why—her highest intention—and connected it to her more immediate goal and attention.

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Intending Impossible Intentions Two things undermine your effectiveness—intending at the wrong level and intending impossible things. These also occur frequently. It usually occurs when you experience something unpleasant and you immediately create an intention to stop having an emotion, thought, or awareness. Yet emotions and thoughts are just emotions and thoughts. Trying to stop them is an impossible intention because it deals with a symptom while ignoring the cause. This explains why the command negation creates seemly paradoxical effects. Issuing a command like the following inevitably force you to represent and focus on the very object you wish to negate. While there are ways to negate, this is not the way to do it. 3 “Don’t think of blue.” “Don’t feel embarrassed.” “Don’t worry about what could happen if this project fails.”

When intention is misdirected and misused in this way, intention becomes a problem. The problem in the above sentences is that they represent a confusion of “logical levels.” This leads to what we call “paradox.” When that happens, the solution will always seem counter-intuitive.4 What is the paradox phenomenon? For something to be a paradox or paradoxical, we have to confuse “logical levels,” that is, we have to make a logical typing error. For example, experiencing an emotion and commenting about it—these are thoughts-emotions which exist on different levels. If we fail to distinguish the experience and the meta-comment, this creates “paradox.” Aren’t you angry enough at you’re inability to get angry in a healthy and legitimate way? Haven’t you had enough of that? Aren’t you as mad as hell that someone deceived you into fearing anger as dangerous? I think you should be really angry at that. If you want to get over that fearfulness, just fear what that fearfulness is going to do to you in the long run! Now that’s something to really fear. Fear that only until you feel the courage arise that empowers you to do something bold about it.

Does these sentences feel counter-intuitive? Good. Expect it when you set out to undo the original confusion. The very response that will make things better will typically feel counter-intuitive, strange, and contradictory. You will probably think it’s going to make matters worse. The solution seems, on first appearance, to violate your typical way of thinking and framing things. It violates what you consider “common sense.” -113-

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Yet the art of welcoming the counter-intuitive is a matrix skill that allows you to handle the false-to-fact framings that you have inherited from your culture, absorbed from others, or created for yourself. To say that it feels counter-intuitive is to acknowledge that your current program, what’s on the inside (in-) as your knowing (tuit to know) is wrong. Welcoming the counter-intuitive trains you for new intuitions and develops your uncommon sense. This means that every higher level ideas, principle, belief, and understanding that operates at the higher levels of your mind and which are toxic, erroneous, false, mis-information, and distorted will seem and feel real and intuitively right. What’s wrong and unhealthy for you will feel right. What’s good for you will feel wrong. If it is well installed, then your feeling of rightness is the result of having validated those thoughts. Yet the feeling of rightness does not make such ideas right, only familiar. An idea can feel right, and be totally wrong. After all, your feelings are derived from your thinking. Think anything long enough and it will feel right. Stutterers, for example, have a long history (usually from early childhood) where they now feel that accepting and welcoming non-fluency is just wrong. It is bad, it makes it worse, and it will only reinforce it. In Logotherapy Viktor Frankl called the invitation to practice stuttering or to practice panicking—paradoxical intervention. He didn’t offer an explanation as to why it worked, he only knew that it did. Many times when you first welcome what’s real in human functioning and experience, like feeling sad when you’ve experienced a loss, or angry when your values feel violated, or fearful when threatened, it feels “paradoxical.” It seems counter-intuitive that doing such could make things better. We can now describe the confusion of levels in the matrix in the following way. At the primary level you experience a state of “feeling bad.” Feeling upset through a sense of loss, anger, fear, embarrassment, etc. These “bad” feelings, however, occur at a different “logical level” than when you step back and label these feelings as “bad.” To set that frame of judging them, of prohibiting them, of forbidding them as “bad” is a higher “logical level.” It is also a false-to-fact response because it sets a taboo on what is useful and valid when such emotions accurately reflect a loss or hurt or embarrassment.

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This explains why we have to ask: At what level do you feel bad? Do you feel bad about something that you encounter in the world? Or do you feel bad about your ideas about this feeling? The bad feelings may be very right and informative or wrong and deceptive. Yet if you feel bad for feeling bad, you are attacking yourself. Doing this also creates a double-bind which locks you into a prison without an escape. The skill of welcoming the counter-intuitive occurs when you accept your anger, welcome your fear, just with your embarrassment, acknowledge your non-fluency, etc. While all of this seems “paradoxical,” it is actually how to correct the logical typing error. You are resetting the matrix so that you recognize that your emotions are “just emotions”and can therefore more easily acknowledge them as emotions, welcome them, and manage them. Summary Behind your conscious contact with reality are intentions. Your intentionality enables you to stretch out to intend— to contact the world with your purposes. This is why that behind everything you think and feel, there are intentions. You experience motives and motivation to do something even if that doing is just waiting. The Intention dimension involved intentionality (the capacity) and intentions (content meanings of purpose) which drives and organizes all of your experiences. We humans can live so much at the attentional level, that we do not fully develop our intentionality. When that happens, your Intention Dimension isn’t robust enough to truly supports you with the result that you may suffer from intention deficit and attention deficit. End Notes: 1. A propulsion system refers to a complete motivation mind-body-emotion system where we not only know and feel what we are moving away from (the pushes), but also what we are moving toward (the pulls). This combination of attractions and aversions creates a push-pull structure that puts a turbo-charge in our motivation. 2. See The Secrets of Personal Mastery for the Intentional pattern and discussion about ADD. 3. For how to effectively negate something, see Sub-Modalities Going Meta. 4. For more about paradox, see the chapter on The Paradoxical Conversation in Executive Coaching. Patterns for Coaching/ Therapy: Taking an Intentional Stance

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SCORE Model and Dance Spinning Icons Pattern Values Elicitation Pattern Drop Down Through to Rise Up Pattern

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Meta-Alignment Pattern Core Transformation Pattern Value Hierarchy Pattern

Meta-Programs (numbers from Figuring Out People): #1 Chunk Size #2 Sameness/ Difference #7 Scenario Thinking #10 Philosophical Direction #20 Motivation: Toward/ Away from #21 Conation: Options/ Procedures #37 Closure/ Non-Closure sort

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THE FOUNDATIONAL DIMENSION OF STATES “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Henry David Thoreau

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hat is the matrix? The matrix is your neuro-semantic system of frames which is embedded within frames which is embedded within yet more nested frames. This is what makes up what we call the matrix of a person’s mind-body system. All of this also is inside stuff. That means that it is generally invisible until you know how to enter the matrix and learn how to see it for what it is. Yet this does not mean that the matrix doesn’t have an everyday experience in the real world. It does. The matrix shows up in your state. The matrix is grounded and experienced in everyday states of mind, body, and emotion. No wonder the matrix does not seem like anything special or anything other than our everyday mind-body awareness. When you have things on your mind and sensations and feelings in the body—that seems like all there is. Now in a way, that is all there is. What we call a state is simply made out of the “stuff” of mind and body and when we make a meta-move to apply one state to another and to create the “logical levels” of our mind (or metastates), it is all made out of the same “stuff.”

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And yet—and this is where the wonder and adventure begins—as a system of interactive parts, when the system begins working, new emergent properties arise. These are the higher, more complex, and transcendental states and experiences that seem much more than the sum of the parts. It is for this reason that we call them gestalt states. Movie

While there is much more than states, all of the meta-phenomena which arise at the higher levels of mind not only emerge from the primary states, they are also expressed in them. In this, we begin with and we end with a state.

Stimulus Physiology Response

Mind Body

Further, because sub-dimensions A Neuro-Linguistic State operate from states, they are to that extent state dependent. If you change your state sufficiently, your dimensions will change. Sometimes, your entire matrix will change. Typically, when you do this, you find that you are not able to activate your regular matrix no matter how familiar it is. Why not? What’s going on in these instances? What’s occurring is an important aspect of the matrix, namely, the grounding of the matrix. And because the grounding of the sub-dimensions in a person’s state/s is fundamental to understanding the matrix, it enables us to more fully understand how the system works. To get to that, we first have to understand states from a neuro-semantic standpoint. The Magic and Wonder of Everyday States What are neuro-linguistic states? Your states are mind-body experiences reflecting your awareness at a given point in time. These states are the composite of all you do in your mind-and-body system which make up your everyday sense of consciousness. Sometimes we call them “mental states,” sometimes “physical states,” and sometimes “emotional states.” These different phrases reveal the three key facets of a “state”—what’s on your mind, the condition of your body (your physiology) and what you feel (your emotions). With these facets you can now do a “state” check by registering and noticing: What’s on my mind right now? How am I feeling in my body? -118-

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What emotions am I currently experiencing?

Now in English, there’s a problem with the term “state” because it sounds like something “static.” But this is just a language problem. States are anything but static. They are dynamic, fluid, always moving and changing, always altering and transforming. You never stay in the same state for very long, usually just a few minutes. In a day’s time you are in scores if not hundreds of states. Isn’t that true of you? Further, you are always in some state. It’s only a matter of what state you are in at any given time. This enables you now to begin to question and explore your states and to develop state awareness. What state are you in right now? What do you call it? What is the strength of that state? On a 0-to-10 scale how would you rate its intensity? How resourceful or limiting is that state? How much control do you have over your state? Do you like it or not? What are your regular and consistent states? Make a list of them. How much do they support your visions and values? What other states have you experienced today? What states would be resourceful that you are missing?

States are made up of the “stuff” of mind, emotion, and body. More specifically, they are made out of the representations and ideas in your mind. You begin by creating sensory-based representations. On the screen of your mind, you present to yourself again (re-present) the sights, sounds, sensations, smells, and touches that you have experienced. You do this by creating a movie in your mind of events, people, places, etc. It seems like you are internally seeing, hearing, feeling, etc. again. Yet you are not. Inside your head there are no movies, screens, theaters, sights, images, sounds, etc. Not literally. All of this is just a metaphor. 1 Yet this metaphorical way of thinking about and experiencing your representations gives you a sense of how you code your “thoughts.” Yet it doesn’t stop here. You also use words as you define and describe things. Words or linguistics give you yet another “sense”—a higher way to “make sense” of things. Language, as your sixth sense, operates as a metarepresentational system to the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sensory representation systems. Words describe more of the “stuff” of mind.

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States are also made up of the stuff of “body.” How you use your neurology and physiology affects your states as you undoubtedly know all so well. If you don’t take care of yourself in terms of sleeping, eating, and exercising right, you will quickly discover just how much your body affects your everyday states. Even the way you move, breathe, gesture, etc. can induce you into particular states or interrupt a state. Slumping shoulders, breathing in a constrained and shallow way, and dragging your movements and speech will not induce an intense motivation state to take on a new challenge. The Neuro-Semantics of an Emotion Emotions emerge as the body (soma) registers the values and meanings of the mind. We call the result—psycho-somatic. Think about grand ideas and wonder-filled dreams and the emotion of excitement emerges to somatize what your mind is conceiving. That’s why you can create psychosomatic expressions of your thoughts for healing and disease. It is essential to remember that every mind-body state is also an emotional state. The emotion may be very weak, even faint, but “emotion” simply refers to the body’s registering of an evaluation. That’s what the body does—it registers somatically how you feel an idea. An emotion is mostly a derivative from your thinking and cognition, even though emotions can feed back into your system so that they elicit and invite certain ways of thinking. The dynamic nature of states reveals that they are essentially energy fields. As already noted, the term “state” is problematic to the extent that leaves the impression of something static, unchanging, or worse, a thing. The reality is that your states and mine are dynamic processes—fluid ongoing experiences. Here we have to be careful with our linguistics. States are not “things” at all, but activities and processes of the mind-body-emotion system as an interaction with the world. You can count on this—your states will never stay the same for long. As processes they come and go depending on how you have mapped things in relation to how you are experiencing things. The fluidity of states explains how you can “fly into a rage” or “fly into a calm.” Quickly shifting states sometimes occurs when you are on the receiving end of lots of life changing events. They can also occur as you choose to alter your life.

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The dynamic nature of thought and emotion comes and goes and so creates the sense of the ebb and flow in your states. Typically you experience consciousness as a “stream of consciousness” responding in a passive way to the events, people, and circumstances around you. Thoughts, awarenesses, memories, imaginations, and emotions flow in and out as various sights, sounds, sensations, smells, and tastes stimulate you. State at this first level seems to happen to you. When a strong trigger occurs, it jars your awareness and gets your attention in a dramatic way. It may “push your buttons” so that you become much more intense and your thoughts-and-emotions may change from floating along in an easy stream of consciousness to rushing like a torrent in the white-waters of your mind. When that happens, your thoughts-andemotions seem to cascade and even become swirling whirlpools so that you go round and round the same referent point never resolving anything, but feeling even more and more frantic and negative. This cascading of thoughts and emotions is like thought-balls popping into the court of the mind whenever something stressful, new, jarring, upsetting, and intense occurs. Enjoy it. It’s just the way the brain works. Welcome it rather than fight it, dance with it. Fighting it only makes it worse, it intensifies the pressure and, worse, blinds you from recognizing the Matrix’s communication within you. For where do these thoughts come from? From the higher levels of the many dimensions of your matrix. States have different degrees of intensity. Typically, you only have awareness of your state when the state become sufficiently strong. Prior to that, the intensity of your state will hover below the radar of your awareness barrier. So even though you are always in a state, you are not always aware that you are. “What state are you in?” “State? I’m not in any state.” “What are you feeling?” “Nothing in particular.” Ahhh, the Comfort Zone!

What is it like when you’re in your comfort zone? Thoughts and emotions can so habituate that everything normalizes. Everything will seem so normal and so regular that you will no longer be able to make any differentiation.

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Even your strongest of states will not stay that way. The level of their intensity will habituate to become your “comfort zone.” This bespeaks of the danger of getting used to states which are toxic. It’s possible to get so used to a sick, morbid, toxic, and pathological state that you actually think it is “normal.” You can even come to long for it when you are deprived of it! That’s the matrix at work. The intensity of an emotional state speaks about how much you have that state and about how much you could get caught up into it so that the state could “have” you. In Neuro-Semantics we gauge states for intensity in order to set a higher meta-state as a frame of mind. This is typically needed in order to have sufficient neurological intensity when we bring one state to another and create a meta-state. Gauging a state is easy, simply ask: How much do you have that fear or joy or love? From 0 to 10, where are you on the scale with your calmness? What do you need to do to nudge the focus from a 6 to an 8? How much would you like to have this state?

With intensity, the more emotionally intense a state, the more you experience state dependency. When this phenomenon occurs, the state itself will have, as it were, “a life of its own.” Then it will determine and govern your memory, perception, learning, behavior, and thinking. State dependency induces you to feel that the state is in control of you. It seems as if it has taken over to control what you see and how you see. It modulates what and how you remember, what and how you talk and behave. The intensity or strength of the state turns things around so that you become dependent on the state rather than the state dependent on you —your choices, your focus, your thoughts, beliefs, etc. States are Amoral States are just experiences that you are having at any given moment in time and are therefore neither good nor bad. They just are. Whatever state you are in and experiencing—that’s what you are experiencing at that moment. There is no morality to a state. Morality and ethics arise from what you do and how you behave while in a state. Instead of evaluating states in terms of morality, they are evaluated in terms of usefulness, practicality, and resourcefulness. To that end we ask quality control questions: Is this state enhancing or impoverishing? Does this state empower me as a person or create limitations? Does this state bring out my best? Is this state ecological? -122-

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The only morality about a state involves what you do with your thoughts and emotions once in a given state. States are the result of hundreds of thousands of bits of information, thinking, feeling, and neurology, so because of that, they are neutral. The Levels of States Primary states are infiltrated, penetrated, and textured by the higher or meta-states of the matrix. It is here that you can actually learn to see and recognize the higher states and even the whole matrix in the parts (the holons) of the primary state. The levels that you tease out in the process of understanding how the matrix came together and what state-upon-state syntactical structures make it work as it does is only a way of talking about it. How do you actually experience the meta-states and the meta or logical levels? You experience those layers and levels as part of your primary consciousness or mind. How does this happen? This arises from the fact that the meta-state structures penetrate into the primary state. They percolate down into the primary state inside the very cinema playing in the theater of your mind. They re-enter and texture the primary awareness through all of the frames that color it. What you have in the primary state is in your mental theater. There you experience the sensory representation systems of sights, sounds, and sensations along with the sound track of words, and voices is the framing of the movie—the cinematic features which stand for and represent higher level concepts. States and Movies—The Matrix’s Center of Gravity You cannot get away from your states, and especially the primary states that ground you to a certain time, place, situation, and context. These are the states that ground you in the moment and in your current experience and which set the foundation for all of your other thoughts and self-reflexivity about things. What you experience at the higher levels of the matrix collects and accumulates in your everyday primary states. You experience what occurs at the higher levels and the system as a whole, in your present state of mind and body as feelings. This influences your mental movie in such a way that it frames what you are seeing, hearing, and feeling. It affects how you adjust the lenses of your mental camera. In this way the whole is in the part, and the part is in the whole. -123-

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Every matrix starts from a particular state. But what state? That’s the million dollar question, is it not? This is the first and one of the most important questions that you can ask yourself and others. The present state gives you your fundamental reference point for understanding any given m. Ask state questions: What state are you in and what triggers it? What is the quality and nature and intensity of your state? What are you in reference to? How are you experiencing this state? What is the context or environment of this state? What is the physiology and the physiological factors of this state? What does this state mean to you?

Along with the importance of state, and just as important, is the coding and quality of the internal movie—the cinema. What makes the cinema so important? The very fact that it is through re-presentation systems that you “make sense” of the outside world. This creates the “inside world” of your inner reality. What is real to you or to any other person? It depends on the movie playing in your mind.1 This, in turn, leads to asking many more questions. In exploring the structure of any experience, ask about the cinema playing in the theater of someone’s consciousness. Use that as your entry point into the matrix. What are you representing in the theater of your mind? How are you representing it in audio-visual terms? Are you inside the movie and experiencing it directly as an actor or are you outside of it watching it like an observer or editor? If I were to peek into the theater of your mind, what would I see-hear-andfeel and what state would it induce me into? What perspective are you taking in reference to this movie? What is the sound-track like? How loud, close, panoramic, etc.? What is the plot or story-line? What is the theme of the narrative? What movie do you play about that movie?

Many experiences occur, and can only occur, when you are in a particular state or environment. In a different state, a particular matrix will not be accessible and will not work. Now it is unavailable. This provides a powerful principle and secret for using and working with Neuro-Semantics. We can even state this principle as an instructional statement: Induce the person into a very different state. Amplify that state and then suddenly invite that person to try to experience that problematic matrix. -124-

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Then when the person cannot engage it and access those frames, begin to question the problematic matrix. Undermine it by deframing and reframing. “Are you sure you had a problem with this?” “Maybe you have forgotten how to panic, or fly into a rage.”

This also leads to many of the so-called “paradoxical interventions” which partake of the nature of the “Be spontaneous” paradox. Show me your panic (or anger, paranoia, etc.). Freak out all over the floor right here. Show me how bad it is. What? You can’t do it? Well, turn it on just a tiny bit. Get even the tiniest bit of it. Good. That’s great. Now, how did you do that? What induction did you use? It’s your brain doing it.

The “Drives” that Drive States One last thing about states—states are driven. I have mostly been describing all of the frames that drive your states and yet there are also those facets of neurology and biology that drive your states that are more innate, more the facets of “nature,” the predispositions and tendencies within. William Glasser, M.D. speaks about the five basic needs that drive us: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun. In Reality Therapy and Control Theory he designates these as the built-in drives, urges, or needs that move us. The history of psychology has seen numerous other lists of such biologically determined needs as well. The survival needs include the need or requirement of oxygen, sleep, water, food, sex, etc. Safety and security needs include the need for stability, protection, control, power, etc. Social needs include the need for love and affection, connection, bonding, being a part, included, etc. Self needs include the need for recognition, acknowledge, validation, esteem, a sense of importance, etc. Then beyond all of these lower-deficiency needs (the animal needs) there are the truly human needs for knowledge, meaning, creativity, contribution, beauty, justice, making a wisdom, humor, difference, etc. These and any other innate drive in human nature are part of our primary states. 2

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Summary The matrix begins and ends in State—in your Neuro-linguistic states that you never leave home without. State, in fact, is precisely what you are undoubtedly mostly conscious of—what you feel, what’s on your mind, and what you feel an urge to do. When we speak about state management, we speak about what has more recently been labeled, Emotional Intelligence. This refers to emotional awareness, emotional monitoring, emotional regulation (self-control), and emotional connecting to others (relating, bonding, etc.). These higher meta-states allow you to choose your states and direct them which is a central focus of NLP and Neuro-Semantics. Yet there’s more to say about states ... there’s the whole realm of states-about-states or meta-states—the subject of the next chapter. End Notes: 1. MovieMind (2003) is the title of a new book on this subject. We have also reworked the NLP model with this terminology in User’s Manual of the Brain—Volume II (in press, due for publication, March of 2003). 2. See Unleashed (2007), Self-Actualization Psychology (2009), Motivation and Personality (1954/ 1970, Abraham Maslow). For Working with the Grounding State of the Matrix: You can find these Patterns in numerous NLP books. As a beginning place, start with The Sourcebook of Magic (1997), and then The User’s Manual of the Brain (1999).

Patterns for Coaching / Therapy: State Accessing and Amplifying State Elicitation Accessing Positive Intentions Calibration to State Chaining States Pattern

Anchoring State Interrupting Pacing for Rapport Collapsing Anchors Circles of Excellence

Meta-Programs (numbers from Figuring Out People): #3 Representation System #4 Information Gathering #5 Epistemology #6 Perceptual Categories #9 Screeners/ Non-Screeners #11 Aristotelian/ Non-Aristotelian #12 Verbal/ Non-Verbal Balance #15 Associated/ Dissociated #32 Congruent/ Incongruent

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META-STATES The Meta-Levels of the Matrix Part II

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hile the grounding of the matrix begins in a mind-body state, and while states are often mixed so that there are numerous facets and dimension of any state, there are also different kinds of states. There are primary states and there are meta-states, then when you apply numerous states to a state, gestalt states emerge. These complex meta-states which elicit new emergent properties are “more than the sum of the parts” and different from the parts. By meta-stating you can texture and qualify any primary or grounding state in numerous ways. When you do, you make that first state richer and fuller. This can either enhance or limit a person. Negatively, you can outframe a primary state with thoughts and feelings which are toxic. This creates “dragon” states that can sabotage one’s success or makes one sick in mind and body. Positively, you can outframe with resources that empower you as a person so you become more skilled, competent, passionate, focused, loving, or any other quality you choose. This can also lead into the specific gestalt state—the genius state of “flow.”

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From State to Meta-State Except for childhood, states almost never occur alone. That’s because just as soon as you experience a primary state, you immediately entertain other thoughts and feelings about that state, and with that you make a metamove to create layer upon layer of meta-states. In this you use your higher states to texture your primary states and thereby you create your matrix. Then the higher state coalesces and cascades down into the primary state. No wonder then that most of the higher level processes ultimately end up in the primary state. Yet for the sake of modeling and understanding the structure of experience, we speak about the meta-levels and layers to tease out the cascading structure. Reflexivity brings all of this about. You reflect upon yourself, upon your states, thoughts, emotions, experiences, memories, imaginations, etc. This self-reflexive awareness of your awareness initiates a new gestalt in consciousness which we call self-awareness. While this may sound simple, it is not trivial. Your very awareness-of-your-awareness brings with it a certain complexity and an interfering influence. The complexity arises from the layering, awareness-of-awareness. And that’s only one layer, awareness-of-awareness-of-awareness. One gestalt that results from this is mindfulness —a higher level perceptive that has healing and empowering qualities.1 This consciousness of abstracting, according to Korzybski, is also the foundational mechanism for sanity. This higher level awareness allows you to check and re-check your own abstracting (thinking, representing, computing, reasoning, etc.). To not be conscious of your evaluating or abstracting means that you jump logical levels and set meta-frames without knowing what or how you are doing so. Interference refers to the fact that when you enter, or re-enter, your own system of thoughts-and-feelings by way of reflexive awareness, you interfere with your own thoughts-and-feelings. You interfere in that your second thoughts and third thoughts and so on will either conflict with or support your first awareness. In one case they create “dragon” states, in the next instance they create resourceful meta-states like optimism, courage, resilience, etc.

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Along with self-reflexivity is another powerful influence in human awareness, symbolism. By symbols and symbolic systems such as language you are able to effectively reflect upon yourself and layer level upon level of additional frames and states. Symbol systems of language has another marvelous quality which reflexivity shares. It is an infinite process. That is, whatever you say or think about anything, you can always add yet another thought or feeling about that level. Philosophers call this phenomenon “an infinite regress.” You can always say or think or feel something else in response to whatever you are thinking, saying, or feeling. It never ends. This is what you do, what we all do. It’s a function of the mind. We don’t have to postulate a “ghost within” to understand how we can, and do, operate at multiple levels. What’s happening? It is simple. We are operating at different levels of awareness and abstracting. Think of reflexivity as an infinite progress. You can always take “one more step” regarding whatever you are thinking, feeling, or experiencing. What this means is that you will never get to the final step. Whatever you know or think you know, whatever you feel, or imagine that you feel or fear that you might feel, you can always take one more step. To change the metaphor, you can always step back one more time. Ultimately this means that you are never permanently stuck. By accessing the step back process, you can always step forward in creating another level to out-frame your experience and open up new possibilities. Because you can operate at different levels of thinking, feeling, abstracting, and evaluating, language symbols also can, and do, operate at different levels. A word that means different things at different levels is called a “multi-ordinal” term. Korzybski’s “theory of multiordinality” was his Theory of Science and Sanity, hence the title, Science and Sanity (1933/ 1994). Multi-ordinality is the central mechanism in his model that leads to sanity and science.2 Meta-Stating and Meaning-Making As a semantic class of life, we give meaning to things in numerous ways as we saw in the chapter on the Meaning dimension. You associate your states

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with events “out there” in the world. This stimulus—>response structure is the foundation of your meaning-making powers. What does “fire” mean? In itself, nothing. It is just an event in the world, the combustion of chemicals. But living-breathing-moving and meaningmaking human beings give it meaning. You associate some thought or feeling with that event. It can mean pleasantness, fun, sociality, play, etc. if you associate “fire” with camping out in the woods. It can mean danger, threat, poverty, terror, shame, etc. if you associate “fire” with the destruction of your home and possessions. It can mean romance if you associate it with a candlelight dinner with a loved one. Meaning-making begins with association or linkage of events with your thinking, yet it does not stop there. You also classify and categorize. Language especially allows you to do this and to keep record of your classifications. As you name things, you put things into categories which the language allows. After that you move through the world seeing, hearing, and feeling things in terms of those classifications. What exists? What’s possible? Who am I? Who are others? What are we about? It depends on what classifications you have inherited from your culture and family, and what classifications you have invented along the way. From culture and learning and associations you create classifications. In this way you create meaning by the definitions you create in your mind with your words. What do you call X? Do you call it criticism or communication? Do you call it stupidity or curiosity? Do you call it stuttering or searching for words? Then you create additional layers of meanings through framing, evaluating, applying standards, and meta-stating. All of these meaning-making processes take bits and pieces of thoughts, emotions, memories, imaginations, physiology, etc. and apply them to a previous state. In this way, you meta-state3 your way up the levels of meanings, abstractions, and classifications. You meta-state the essential dimensions in your mind about yourself, what you can and cannot do (power), time, others, the world, and your intentions. Combine all of this and you have the structural form to your meanings. This explains how words—inside of the nervous system of a human being —become so semantically loaded. You can load a word up with so much -130-

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significance that it can have incredible power inside us to affect your neurology. This also creates your unique and idiosyncratic model of the world of your personal psycho-logics. From the inside, it all makes sense. This is true even when it is toxic, painful, hurtful, unproductive, and severely impoverishing. It makes sense because you build it up layer by layer doing the best thinking and feeling you could at the time. It becomes your psychological world. What we call “logical types” or “logical levels” are not actual entities, but your way of punctuating the world, a way of formatting and layering your states with other thoughts and emotions. 4 What happens after you meta-state yourself with a thought or feeling? If you deem it important, valuable, significant, and/or if you experience it in an emotionally intense way, it will stay within you as one of your frames of reference. It will stay as your matrix about a given area. You meta-state your individual dimensions and your overall matrix into existence. Then you confirm, validate, and “make them so.” In terms of meaning-making then, you have a primary state function —association. You then have numerous terms for describing the metastating functions—framing, classifying, categorizing, evaluating, etc. With these processes you create layer upon layer of meaning as you set higher contexts as frames about things—your contextual meanings. State as Holons A systems principle is summarized in the term holon. Like holography and holograms, a whole picture contains the parts and inside of each part is the whole. So with even a sliver of the hologram recovered, you can recover the whole. This “whole in the part and the part in the whole” nature is not only true for holograms, it is also true for your states and matrix. How do you experience your mind or awareness? Mostly you experience your consciousness as a state. Typically, you experience your mind in terms of what is playing on the screen of your mind. Only on occasion do you hear and see the things in the back of your mind. These are usually outside of consciousness (unconscious). Yet within your awareness are these operational levels. All of us have multiple meta-state structures of frames embedded in frames which influence things. All of these influences then show up in your states. In this multi-dimensional process, the bits and -131-

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pieces that you internally represent show up as the content of what’s playing on the theater of your mind and in your physiology. These carry the whole. To tease out the step-by-step horizontal structure of an experience as well as the higher levels of states upon states, first send your awareness out to what you sense in the sequence—the strategy. This means never treat a state as if it were just a simple thing. There’s always more to it. When someone says that they are in a state of joy or anger, confidence or doubt, fear or courage, etc.—count on there being a whole lot more within that experience. To flush out the meta-levels encoded and embedded inside that state, ask meta-level questions: What is the quality of your joy? (Or anger, confidence, doubt, etc.) What do you believe about joy? How is joy important and significant to you? What’s your intention in experiencing this state? What does it do for you that you value? What is joy like for you? What decisions have you made about joy? Is joy part of your self-definition or identity? How do you know to call this state “joy?”

Matrix Emotions The fact that you can experience emotions at different levels of mind means that primary and meta-states influence the kind and quality of your emotions. Primary state emotions are much more direct, immediate, and kinesthetically active. When you experience an emotion at the primary level, you can more easily identify the external trigger that sets it off and the internal body part wherein you register the emotion. As an illustration, consider the emotion of fear. Primary fear is in real time and is in reference to something that is right now and has a reference to which you can point. “What are you afraid of?” “I’m afraid of that elevator, the lookout point on the cliff, that barking dog, that staring audience.” This event-stimulated emotion is about something “out there.” “Where do you feel the fear?” “In my heart, it’s pounding like crazy!” “I feel it in my stomach, it’s churning and turning summersaults and is full of butterflies.” The awareness of an event-triggered emotion occurs in this moment in time and space and so triggers the body to respond to the danger or threat. This emotion reflects your engagement with the world. If you were not paying -132-

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attention to the event, you would not have experienced the emotion. The registering of the emotion in your body (soma) brings you into the moment and into an emotional awareness of that event in terms of your values, beliefs, hopes, dreams, etc. That’s why it is psycho-somatic. How different is a meta-state emotion. Such emotions are still emotions, but they are triggered by concepts rather than events. That’s why you can experience them just as fully, if not more so, after the event. When you recall and rehearse the event, you can do so while intensifying and amplifying the concept. Meta-emotions are concept-stimulated emotions. As such, they are imagined and as imaginary as your concepts. Often you will feel the meta-emotion much more in your head than in your body, but not always. Sometimes you will embody it and feel it much more intensely in your body. And with repetition meta-emotions move from mind to muscle and become incorporated in the body. Meta-emotions start in the head. Take the meta-state of anticipation of fear, or fear of being threatened by the loss of self-esteem or what others might think of you. Anticipating fear, feeling afraid of what it might or could mean if you did look foolish in the eyes of your peers, or feeling ashamed at having fear, these all involve a meta-state structure. Where do you feel this anticipation of fear? Where do you feel this shame of feeling afraid? Usually it is harder to identify a corresponding body part. That’s because these are evaluations or judgments. “Well, what triggers these feelings?” “What is the triggering event?” That’s also harder to pinpoint. It’s usually your thoughts. “I was just thinking about what I would do if... “ You imagine these meta-feelings into existence. “It just popped into my mind that I could become the laughing stock at my company.” Primary Emotions

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Event Stimulated Experience Driven About what is Kinesthetically Registered

Meta-Emotions Concept Stimulated Imagination Driven About what could be Registered in the mind

Fear 1 is an awareness-based emotion triggered by a real event in real time in a particular place. Fear 2 is a concept-based emotion triggered by other thoughts (memories, imaginations, associations) that arise from how you -133-

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think about the first state. Fear 3 would be yet another higher level of thought-and-emotion about Fear 2. And this applies to anger just as well, joy, love, pleasure, learning, curiosity, etc. In discerning the level at which you experience any emotion, ask: What sensory trigger is stimulating the emotion? Is your emotion driving, managing, exaggerating, or influencing your experience? For example, is your fear exaggerating your sense of danger? Is your emotion a function of some belief, idea, concept?

Perfectionism “What would you like to explore or transform in your matrix of frames?” I asked this of a young woman at a training. “I have anorexia and have been told that I’m perfectionistic. I don’t think that’s so, but I know that I do have a lot of unpleasant emotions and am tired of feeling negative so much.”

What emotions do you feel which you wish you didn’t—the emotions that you dislike? “I get angry a lot.”

Good. And is your anger appropriate? “Well ... I don’t know ... well, yes. People upset me. And I feel upset about myself as well.”

Okay, so what’s wrong? What is violating your sense of how things should be? If “anger” registers a sense that something is wrong and violates something important to you— what is wrong? “I just wish things were easier and not so messy.”

Messy? “Yeah, you know, so out-of-control.”

So what’s out-of-control that feels messy for you which arouses your anger? “Well ... that is hard to say. I wish I was prettier. I don’t like my looks.”

If you could make changes in your looks, what would you change? “I’m too fat. I’m not fit enough either, and I wish I had a more symmetrical face.”

Let’s say you could get all of that —let’s say that we had a magic wand and you had your perfect body. What would that do for you? “Do for me? ... I don’t know what you mean.”

Sure you do. You want that, don’t you? (Yeah.) ... so, why? Why do you want that? What will you get when you have that, what will you feel? “I’ll feel in control.”

Of what? “Of what? Well, of myself.”

Of your emotions? -134-

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“Yes.”

Of your thoughts? “Yes.”

What will you feel and think then when you are in control in that way? “That I’m acceptable... That guys will like me. That I’ll be loved. I can’t believe I’m saying all of this to you.”

Well, I appreciate your honesty. It’s refreshing in a world of people who are not authentic. And it’s what you’re really thinking and feeling, isn’t it? “Yes (crying). I just want to be accepted.”

And perfectly controlling your looks and your body and your emotions is how you think you will get the feeling of acceptance? “I ... I don’t know. It sounds kind of funny, even ridiculous, when you say it out loud like that.”

Yet that’s what you’ve been thinking, right? “Yes.”

So now that you hear these frames—just stop ... in your mind ... and step back from them. Take a deep breath. That’s right. And as you step back—it’s just your thoughts and feelings that you’ve repeated and habituated for years. They are not necessarily true, they are just old and familiar. ... [Pause] Now what? What do you think about those ways of thinking and feeling? How well do those frames work to create a sense of acceptance? “Not very well. Actually, not at all.” (Sniffing)

How much acceptance do you feel from 0 to 10? “A zero.”

None at all? “No, none.” From yourself? (“Yeah”) What about from others? “Zero there.” I want you to open your eyes right now. [Actually, her eyes were open physically.] Yes, open them. Look at me. Look ... for the first time. How much acceptance of you as a human being do you think I’m extending to you right now? (Crying) ... “I’m sorry.” Your tears are wonderful. They cleanse the windshield of your mind. Let them flow. Cleansing ... hmmmm. So you can really see. How much acceptance do you now see coming from me? “I’m sure you are giving lots of acceptance.” Hmmm. That’s an idea. What do you see? ... Look at me—yes, through the tears, see me as a person and notice how I give acceptance right now with my eyes, my words, my questions, my gestures, and touches. Just notice ... -135-

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you don’t have to do anything. Because when you have been inside feeling bad, you haven’t been seeing, have you? “No.”

How much acceptance do you see and hear in me right now? “A lot.... an 8 or a 9.”

And look out there at those who you came with to this training ... how much do they accept you? (Crying) “A 10.”

Welcome those feelings in. Experience this acceptance. Doesn’t that feel good? And do you know what? “What?”

You are the one accepting their acceptance ... and that means you know how to accept ... and that means you can accept yourself ...so feel this about yourself... (Long pause.) What frame of mind would support this feeling of self-acceptance? What belief? “That people are valuable human beings.”

Do you believe that? “Yes.”

Really? (“Yes”) Do you feel it? “I’m beginning to.”

Well continue that ... and would that be important to you? “Yeah.”

What if that acceptance grew and filled you up on the inside. Imagine that ... do you think I have self-acceptance of myself (Yeah.), what if you had as much self-acceptance for yourself ... hmmmm. Good, and just be with that feeling. And suppose this feeling filled your body, informed your face, your eyes, your breathing ... when you feel this, how does it transform your old need to be perfect, to control things? “I don’t ... I don’t need to control things. I can release that.”

Summary The matrix begins and ends in state—in a neuro-linguistic state. This is what we are mostly conscious of—what we feel, what’s on our mind, and what we feel an urge to do. The content of a primary state. Yet above and beyond state, we have multiple layers of meta-states that make up the matrix. These meta-states can be enhancing or impoverishing. They determine the quality of our lives. State management is the art of awareness that enables you to begin to exercise control over your states. This is the focus of NLP and Neuro-Semantics. -136-

End Notes: 1. See the work of Ellen Langer, Mindfulness. 2. I added multiordinality to the extended Meta-Model which you can find in the book, Communication Magic (2001, an updated version of The Secrets of Magic, 1997). Korzybski wrote, “This self-reflexiveness of language introduces serious complexities, which can only be solved by the theory of multiordinality.” (p. 58). 3. Meta-stating as a verb refers to the process of bringing one state and putting it in a meta-relationship to another. Joy about accelerating our learning. The process involves applying one state to another, embedding one inside of another, transferring one state to another, or bringing one to bear upon another. 4. For more on “logical levels,” see NLP: Going Meta —Advanced Modeling Using MetaLevels (2001), numerous articles on the website of www.neurosemantics.com under the heading of “Logical Types.” 5. For additional information about states in NLP and Neuro-Semantics, see The Sourcebook of Magic (1997). Chapter 6 is devoted to patterns for State Management and Resourcefulness. Meta-States and Dragon Slaying addresses states, as do the books by Tony Robbins, Unlimited Power and Awaken the Giant. For Working with the Grounding State of the Matrix: After the Patterns at the end of the previous chapter about Neuro-Linguistic States, a good beginning place for finding Meta-State patterns is in The Secrets of Personal Mastery (1998) and then Meta-States Magic (2001). The Sourcebook of Magic, Volume II will also have a full presentation of Neuro-Semantic patterns.

Patterns for Coaching / Therapy: Meta-Programs: All meta-programs are solidified meta-states. See Figuring Out People for a full presentation of all of the NLP Meta-Programs. Meta-Model / Linguistic Markers: The Meta-Model linguistic distinctions are comprised of words and language which is a meta-representational system itself. This means that in using the MetaModel every linguistic distinction implies or elicits some state—some state that we then use to set a frame on whatever subject we are in reference to.

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THE CONTENT DIMENSIONS

The Matrix Model is a systemic model about human framing and meaning making. It’s about how you use the languages of the mind to make your inner movies and how you develop concepts and classes of ideas that create your matrix. It’s a systemic model about your style of thinking and information processing and how you turn information into energy—into the energy of emotions, into neurological patterns in your body, and into behaviors. It’s a system model that unites all of the component pieces of NLP and Neuro-Semantics about human functioning. It thereby provides an over-arching frame for the four meta-domains of so that you can understand, enter, profile, and model any experience, emotion, or skill. As already noted, the word matrix (“womb”) refers to the womb where meaning is a given birth and embedded frames which define your thoughts, emotions, experiences, and skills. It is your womb of consciousness from which your sense of “reality” is given birth. What is the matrix? It is a framework of frames made up of seven process and content dimensions and grounded or embodied in your everyday mind-138-

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body states. The matrix is your mind-body-emotion system comprised of frames of meaning for your references and for your semantic understandings. In the matrix you absorbed the cultural frames around you for what people say is real. There are three kinds of dimensions: Process dimensions: State, Meaning, and Intention. Grounding dimension: State. Content dimensions: Self, Power, Others, Time, World.

This mixture of process and content gives the Matrix Model a uniqueness unlike other models of NLP that are strictly process or structural. The process dimensions describes the form and structure of personality regardless of the person or the content. The content dimensions describes the Self in five dimensions. It describes the beliefs and meanings which inform your sense of self: your values, resources, relationships, time, and domains of knowledge and skills. The process dimensions create, form, and determine the content dimensions. For this reason the process dimensions are more critical and determinative in terms of getting leverage for change, and facilitating the unleashing of potentials. The content dimensions reflect the meaning-making (or meta-stating) you do about yourself. These dimensions determine the nature and quality of your experiences. Your health or ill-health are mostly governed by the content dimensions. This interface between process and content gives you the ability to start wherever a person is, to work with both content and process, and to move back and forth between what a person thinks and how he or she thinks.

Distinguishing the Process Dimensions The Meaning dimension spins upward layering ever-new levels of consciousness, creating multiple layers of meanings about things and spinning down in the center of gravity inside of the whirlwind of thought to embody the meanings into perception, expectation, and emotion. This is the meta-level loop of communication known as the inner game. The Intention dimension operates as a hidden aspect of the Meaning dimension. It covers the capacity to determine your own life experience via intentions, choices, values, etc. as the thoughts in the back of the mind about the reasons why you make your choices. Intentionality infuses state with energy, motivation, and a selforganizing force. -139-

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Informed by Meaning With your Meaning dimension you are able to make meaning and to create ideas which you will then hold in mind. This sets you out on the adventure of life. The Meaning dimension is so pervasive and unavoidable that you can’t turn it off, yet it is also so subtle that you hardly notice it in operation. This subtlety is part and parcel of what can prevent you from recognizing its power. It doesn’t seem like you are doing it at all. It seems like meaning happens to you. It seems like meaning exists “out there” in the world and you are only recognizing it. You look at anything and presto—suddenly you classify it, you link thoughts and feelings to it, and you evaluate it. Just a look at something —anything, and presto, it seems like you are finding and discovering meaning. It seems like meaning has an external existence to you. Yet it does not. It is rather that you are not recognizing the role that you play in meaning-making. Meaning seems given and external. True enough, there is the meaning that others give to things which you receive and inherit from them as they communicate their meanings. Yet even in that you are the one who have to recognize and receive their meaning and accept or reject it. When you look at a process, typically you name that process. In doing this, you create a noun for the activity. You can now conceptually handle that set of activities. When you use a verb, you encode it as a process—fluid, active, dynamic, and transformative. But when you name it—the naming with a noun, nounifies or nominalizes it. You encode a set of activities in a way that makes it seem staid, solid, rigid, and unchanging. We call the result a “nominalization.” What do we nominalize? We name ideas. We name concepts. We label self, identity, justice, relationships, emotions, mind, fear, joy, love, resources, etc. In doing this, we solidify our ideas in order to hold them in mind. Then through repetition and habituation, these conceptual understandings come to seem and feel like “things”—entities. By this process you endow them with “reality,” at least inside of your mind and neurology. The technical term for this is reification. When you reify ideas and emotions and experiences, you “make them real.” You turn them into “things”—at least in your nervous system—brain. You take certain central ideas, emotions, and experiences of life that you consider significant and important and then turn them into conceptual -140-

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states. In this way conceptual and semantic states come into being. In the Matrix Model the seven most common semantic states that govern experience are Meaning and Intention, and then Self, Power, Others, Time, and World. These semantic states are so essential to who you are and how you experience the world that they are always present, hence you “never leave home without them.” The Structure of Concepts Turning to the Content dimensions lets us examine a different kind and level of “thought” from sensory representations. Representations inform and govern the movies in the mind, made up of see-hear-feel representations. By these sensory systems we re-present what our sense receptors of eyes, ears, and skin pick up. These first level representations make up the primary state of “thoughts.” Above and beyond that first level is the meta-representational systems. These are made up of words, language, symbols, graphs, diagrams, cartoons, flow charts, and so on. They are comprised of any kind of symbolic system (like mathematics, music notation, etc.) that you can use to stand for and represent what you see and hear in your movies. Here higher level thinking, reasoning, abstracting, and generalizing dominates. Here frames govern. A concept is not just a sensory thought that you can video-tape and play in the theater of your mind. Concepts cannot be represented solely by representations. As more abstract ideas, they are constructed from generalizations, classifications, categories, and other framing structures. This explains why mere cinematography of the mind (“sub-modality” analysis, shifts, and mapping across) are usually inadequate for dealing with concepts. In constructing the Matrix Model I selected the concepts which seemed absolutely critical in understanding and profiling human experience. The concept of meaning and intention describe the construction of information processing. The self concepts deal with one’s sense of value as a person, sense of power, capacity, ability, or resources, one’s social sense of self and how one relates, one’s temporal sense of self as a person who lives in time, and one’s sense of roles in various domains. We not only take these concepts everywhere we go, we also see our world and experience ourselves in terms of these. And now on to the Content dimensions. -141-

Chapter 11

THE SELF DIMENSION “I never leave home without my Self” L. Michael Hall “Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personal, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world...” Don Miguel Ruiz The self is not a thing or entity—the self is a process. We are ever-becoming more than we are. The self is a narrative construction that’s open to flux and change.

T

he central conceptual dimension that we all live in, and operate from, and that we take with us everywhere we go is our Self dimension. “I never go anywhere without my concepts of my self.” It’s the first thing that we all construct as we grow up. It’s our first classification and it is therefore the first frame that we call into existence. Self, as a concept, is that important, that critical. It is also one of the more challenging concepts to comprehend. The Self dimension is your first dimension and it is called into existence as your parents name you. They name you and then they begin to relate to you via that name using it as a summary term for you. They do so through the multitude of explicit and implicit frames that they bring to you regarding -142-

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that name, about the meanings that they give to you as their baby, and all that means. They relate to you as a person—as a little person with a name. Yet you don’t know that. You only feel it. Conscious awareness of this will come later. When it does, then you begin to explore and question: Who am I? What am I? What is my nature, purpose, destiny, value, etc.? Am I loved? Am I loveable? Am I valued and treated with dignity? Do I count?

As the “Self” Develops In the development of your conceptual frame of self, you first punctuate yourself as a self, as you recognize that you are an “I” or a “me” (“ego” is Greek for “I,” hence, sense of self). You first experience yourself as a living and breathing organism and don’t know yourself as “a self.” That’s a higher level concept which comes later. At first you only experience whatever you encounter in your immediate environment. You play with a teddy-bear. You see, hear, feel, smell, and even taste(!) teddy-bear. Later mother says, “Do you want the teddy-bear?” And you have a representation of teddy-bear. Then something magical happens. Father asks, “Whose teddy-bear is this?” And in answering, you make a meta-cognitive move, “It’s my teddy-bear.” “And who are you?” “I am me ... I am Michael.” And so by being named we start the process of defining self. With the magic of naming, we begin developing thoughts and feelings (states) about ourselves. “Self” itself becomes an object of our awareness. We start associating various emotional states to self: pleasure, love, support, pain, stress, etc. As this occurs, our first meta-state, self-awareness grows into an awareness of Self with certain qualities (i.e., good, loving, excited, energetic, quiet, etc.). Then, as we receive multiple messages from our parents and other adults, they offer us more information about how they see us and the meanings they appraise. Our sense of self in their eyes creates our first concept of self. Later we conceptualize the kind of a being we are. As we become selfaware, and meta-state ourselves about awareness, we also receive thoughtfeeling states from others about ourselves. In this way, we consciously -143-

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begin to construct our Self dimension, layering in thoughts and feelings about these ideas. “Ego” first refers to “I” or “me” as a conscious being. After that ego refers to your reality orientation—facing what exists. We call this ego-strength, the ability to face reality without caving in. Our Multiple Selves From self-awareness, you then create multiple other maps about yourself. Your “self” dimension involves many facets of your thoughts-and-feelings. It includes your sense of self in self-esteem, self-confidence, social self, sense of self in presence of others, self definition, and your identifications. This is just the beginning. With almost any other facet of self, you create yet another “self.” Each of us have so many selves. You can discern and distinguish yourself in many roles and you can set so many different emotions as meta-states about yourself. Regarding the skills that you have developed, you feel selfconfidence. Regarding the things that violate you, you might feel anger or pain or self-contempt. The possibilities are as extensive as your experiences. It is in this way that you identify yourself with feelings, roles, words, ideas, definitions, etc. Significance How you map your self determines everything. If you feel and think of yourself as someone valuable and worthwhile, you will experience a healthy and vital Self dimension. If you contempt and despise yourself, you will experience an impoverished dimension. When this dimension is not welldeveloped, a person easily and automatically personalizes. He then puts his ego “on the line” when anything undesirable happens. A person may even become so other-referent that he will seek to become okay or to feel safe by getting others to validate him. In this dimension you map and give meaning to your “sense of self” in all of its multiple dimensions. Yet, whether that mapping and framing works for you, or against you, determines whether it is well-formed or ill-formed. You also have multiple concepts about people and about human nature that can also undermine your resourcefulness. In working with the Self dimension we seek to empower it so that you map a Self that you can live with. This means finding and updating any ill-formed concepts. It means -144-

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developing a better relationship to the ideas of value, worth, dignity, loveability, responsibility, acceptance, etc. A Matrix Conversation about Self In trainings on Matrix Games, I typically invite participants to let me work with them in front of the group as we introduce the various facets of the matrix. In one training, a young lady came forward because she was not pleased with her sense of herself at work. I began by asking a general question, “How do you think of yourself?” “Well, I’m kind and considerate, I’m a good person, responsible, but when I need to be firm, I can’t.” When do you need to be firm with people? “At work. I’m in charge of three people and I need to be firm with them and as long as things are smooth, things are fine, but when I need to confront them, I just can’t.” You say “confront” them, what is it that you need to be firm about when you confront them? “Well, I need to set down the law that they need to do this or that and to stop being lazy.” What’s the situation that you are encountering with these workers? “They get stubborn or lazy, it’s more laziness than anything, they just don’t want to work. Then they refuse and if I say anything, they get angry at me.” And then you ...? “I shrink up inside myself and feel tense and that I can’t be firm.” It is fascinating that so much goes on inside you with these interactions. So what do all of these responses mean to you? “I just want things to go well, that’s all. To get the job done. I usually end up doing it for them because I can’t be firm with them and get them to do it.” That’s what you do, but I’m wondering what it means to you? “That they are controlling me.” How is that happening? “By their stubbornness and their anger.” So help me understand this. When they go into those states and whatever actions that they express while stubborn and/or angry—how does that “control” you? “It controls me because I hate it.” Hmmm. So what do you believe about the stubbornness and anger in your employees? -145-

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“That it’s bad.” Okay, let’s say that’s true, let’s say that it’s bad for them to become stubborn, lazy, and angry ... what then? “Then we’re not a team, and then I can’t succeed.” So they are in control of your success. “Yes, definitely. That’s why it bothers me so much.” How do you feel about that? “I don’t like it.” Does it enhance your life? “No, not at all!” Does it empower you as a person? “No.” If you could have any frame of mind so that you can be firm in just the way that you would like to be firm, and still maintain the other qualities of value, what would you want? What frame of mind would you like to have so that you can be firm? What qualities would it have? “Well, it would be a kind of matter-of-fact frame of mind, and I would be thinking that my success is not dependent upon them.” Good. That sounds very good. So go ahead and step into that state of mind ... and how does that feel to you? How’s that? “Great.” So you already know how to think with a matter-of-fact perspective and to think in terms that your success depends on what you do, and not what others do? Yes? Good. So be with that. Let it grow ... let it feel stronger and stronger ... after all, it is your frame of mind, your attitude and you created it. So you would like this as your frame of mind at work with those employees? “Yes.” And it would help you? “Definitely.” It would help you to be firm? “Yes.” Show me how you would hold yourself ... your posture, and your eyes. Hmmmm. That looks firm. And your voice ... give me the sound and tone of matter-of-fact firmness when you tell them what you want from them. Good. How is all of that in your body? “Very good.” So imagine operating from this space, from this matrix during this next week when you are back at work. Notice how it would transform your responses to them and their responses. Would that make things better? -146-

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“Yes.” Maybe I should take this away from you? What do you think? Can I take this away from you? “Yeah! Right!” No, I think I better. You’d be too much—too successful, too powerful, too dangerous. “No, it’s mine.” Well, what if you forget this—how to think this way, how to feel this way? What if that happens? “It won’t, I can tell you that!” Great. Mapping Self-Esteem A healthy Self dimension is the difference between feeling worthy, valuable, respectable, and loveable in contrast to seeking to experience things in the world to obtain these experiences. With a healthy Self dimension you can celebrate yourself and value yourself without any need to put your “self” on the line. Whether you achieve or don’t achieve a goal—does not determine your human worth. A healthy Self dimension separates person from behavior, self-esteem from self-confidence. The meanings you map about your concepts of self make all the difference in the world, whether you move through the world trying to become a Somebody, or whether you live your life in the world as an expression of your Somebody-ness. In the first case, you put your ego or self-esteem “on the line” with your outcomes. You identify and personalize almost everything that happens, especially the negative and unpleasant. This is sure to make you reactive, defensive, and thin-skinned. What is the problem here? Not the person, but the frames that map the self as inadequate, conditionally valuable, and unworthy. When you map your Self as inherently and innately valuable, worthwhile, lovable, and having dignity, as a member of the human race, as a Somebody, and with nothing to prove, but everything to experience, you are freed to be and become, to explore and enjoy and to choose to only identify with the things that enable you to become more than you presently are. This mapping allows you to explore your potentials, be open and responsive, caring and loving in relationships, non-defensive about mistakes, fallibility, and vulnerability, and creative with your skills and passions. When the ego is not on the line, there’s nothing to prove. This mapping allows you to get -147-

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ego out of the way. That, in turn, then frees up lots of mental-andemotional energy which you can invest in others, develop your talents, and contribute creatively. A healthy mapping of Self allows you to feel free and secure enough to open your ego boundaries to others. This is the structure of intimacy. It takes a lot of independence and self-esteem to become inter-dependent in an adult way. Mapping Self-Confidence Self-confidence differs from self-esteem. Self-confidence is not about you as a person, but what you can do—your abilities, skills, and achievements. Unlike self-esteem which is unconditional and a given; self-confidence is completely conditional. As you develop a skill, you earn your right to be confident. You earn it through using your talents to become competent in what you do. When you attach the feeling of self-confidence to an activity in which you are unskilled and incompetent, you fool yourself. It may feel good, but your confidence is mistaken. Accurate self-confidence is based upon your trust and faith in (“con” and “fideo” faith) yourself to pull something off. All of us have strengths and weaknesses. We have aptitudes and predispositions in which we can more easily excel and those in which we do not. Playing to your strengths enables you to find those areas and tasks at which you have a natural disposition and can become highly skilled and contribute the most. This is true for your multiple intelligences and will be the secret of succeeding in the world. Mapping Ego-Strength and Super-Ego If ego simply refers to self (“I”), then in the Self dimension we also map several other concepts that involve this term, namely ego-strength and super-ego. The latter refers to the sense of conscience and relates to the sense of right and wrong, of being and doing what’s proper, ethical, honorable, and moral. It generates a conscientiousness in relation to Others. This sense of self relates to how you think and feel about yourself in how you relate to others and to the ethical rules and principles that guide your interactions. Someone with a strong and appropriate level of super-ego knows how to act appropriately in a way that honors self and others. Too much conscientiousness can lead to an over-sensitivity to right-and-wrong -148-

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and a tendency to interpret the smallest slights as crimes and sins. Too little and a person develops a socio-pathic personality. Each of us can become ego-involved in our ideas, emotions, beliefs, experiences, possessions, etc. This happens by over-identifying and/or by the lack of healthy ego-development. Ego as a sense of self develops over time. We do not have it at birth. So at first our ego (sense of self) is very fragile. As a child our ego develops by becoming involved in things. We invest in others and in our toys and in our parents. “My teddy bear,” “my mother,” etc. As we continue to grow we expand our sense of self (ego) by investing in more and more. This ego-investment at first is childish and ego-centric because it is informed by childish thinking. At that time everything revolves entirely around us. It takes further cognitive development for egostrength to grow, for us to be able to face reality without a stress response, and to accept such radical ideas as the world doesn’t revolve around us. Mapping Boundaries Growing up also involves mapping the distinctions between “me” and “not me.” How can you tell what is you and what is not you? At first you have no ego and no boundaries. There’s no differentiation. Slowly you begin to distinguish. “No” is your power which allows you to establish your own space. Saying “No” develops your power to dis-identify with things that do not fit for you and to protect yourself from them entering your world. Conversely, saying “Yes” develops your power to bring ideas, experiences, people, and feelings into yourself and welcome them as part of your inner world. “Yes” is the language of confirmation and integration whereby you affirm and validate things. Over-Emphasizing “Self” Any dimension can become too strong if you over-emphasize it or overvalue it. You can so specialize or focus in one dimension that you loose focus, emphasis, and development in another. When you over-focus on the Self dimension, this can weaken your ability to extend yourself to others, to connect and bond, and to experience full and rich relationships. Overfocusing on the Self dimension weakens the Other/Relationship dimension. This is the meta-program of self-referencing in an exclusive way.

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Conversely, weakness in the Self dimension means the lack of sufficient and healthy independence, which is a prerequisite for healthy interdependence with others. Such weakness may lead to co-dependency, neediness, the inability to stand up for oneself, to say no, to know one’s own mind, etc. Detecting the Self Dimension To detect the matrix, or any of the content dimensions such as the Self dimension, learn to recognize the signs which indicate it is active and operational. Signs indicating a dimension are linguistic markers and behavioral indicators. Use the NLP models to identify when the Self dimension has been activated. What are the linguistic distinctions that cue the Self dimension? What are the meta-programs of the Self dimension? How do they interface with each other? What are the processes for bringing about generative transformation and constructing a map of self that facilitates people becoming all that they can become?

You can hear the Self dimension whenever there is a lot of speech about self and one’s sense of value, confidence, identification, self-definition, etc. How much of a person’s talk is always about one self? To activate this or any other dimension, inquire about one’s self: What do you think about yourself? How much do you feel self-confidence in your abilities and self-worth for yourself as a person? Do you like yourself? Do you believe in yourself? Can you highly esteem yourself? Is your sense of self-esteem conditional or unconditional?

These and many other questions elicit the sense of self and activate the thoughts-and-feelings that a person has about these concepts. Events and experiences can do the same. Think about speaking to an audience of several hundred people. Think about being criticized unfairly. Think about making a mistake and being laughed at. Think about taking a risk in business.

Events elicit people to respond from their sense of self—from both one’s sense of being a human being of value (self-esteem) and from one’s sense -150-

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of skills and response-capacity (self-confidence). Frequently a person cannot respond effectively because she has not mapped a sufficient and adequate sense of self in these two dimensions. The “Self” Beyond “Self” “Self” is a fascinating word. Bateson said that the biggest nominalization of all is the word “I.” So also are the synonyms of “ego” and “self.” Yet these noun-like words do not point to things, but to processes—to living, breathing, thinking, emoting processes, to a person as an ever-changing process. When a nominalization is reflexive, when it can refer to itself, we have another kind of linguistic term, we have a multi-ordinal term. Multiordinality, as a linguistic distinction from Korzybski, refers to phenomena at multiple levels of mind.2 Because you can use the same word and then think and speak at different levels, it is common to not notice this. Yet when this happens, you can so easily confuse levels thereby leading to confusion and category errors. This is the problem with multi-ordinal terms. You can be thinking and talking at a different level than the other person and yet using the same term. The level you are referencing will involve a different concept than what the other person is thinking. Any nominalization that is reflexive creates this misunderstanding: love, fear, anger, self, democracy, fairness, justice, etc. Because we lack sufficient terms for describing mental phenomena, we can use the same word at different levels and mean different things. This is multi-ordinality. A truly multiordinal term will mean nothing specifically apart from its level of abstraction. To understand what it means you first have to specify the level one is referring to. The solution is to recognize multi-ordinal words and inquire about the level which you or someone else is using the term. And because the term self is multi-ordinal there are layers of “self” in a self-reflexive system. Not recognizing this causes lots of philosophical problems. For example, if we ask, Who does the observing of that self who performs on the stage at the primary level? This can create multi-ordinal confusion. “My own self?” What self? Which is my real self, the actor or the observer? And who now observes my observer self?

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It is not uncommon for us humans to ask pseudo-questions as these. Or perhaps you notice that you’re not performing up to the standard that you have set. Then, if you listened to your own internal dialogue, you would hear yourself command yourself: “What’s what with you? Stop being so anxious about it and just do it!” Yet, if you step back for a moment, “Who’s ushering these commands?” “Who is ordering who?” Now, if you’re not careful, you might even jump to the conclusion that there’s a false me inside of myself and that I need to get rid of that self, “He’s the problem! If I could just get that self to stop being so bossy everything would be fine.” This meta-muddle madness is the result of a philosophical confusion. There is no other “self.” There is no “me” in contrast to “I” (as some theorists have tried to postulate). The problem is not that there are different selves vying for control, the problem here lies entirely with our language. We have taken a multi-ordinal word (“self”) and we have used it at different levels without recognizing what we have done. We have assumed that because the word self sounds like a noun, it must refer to some entity. Not so. The term is just a way of talking about things. There is only one self. And we have simply caught ourselves using the term self without distinguishing at what level we’re using it or what we mean at each level. To distinguish levels and to bring some sanity into the conversation, identify the different levels where you are using the term “self.” At the primary level, we speak about ourselves as a sentient being, Self1. Here you speak about yourself operating as the actor, the doer, the experiencer. Here you are grounded in your everyday state and operating in reference to the real world “out there.” When you move to a first meta-state, you can speak of yourself as observing your first-self, Self2. Now you experience your self in an observer role to your first self. This generates self-awareness, reflexive self-consciousness, and the state of mind (or metaprogram) of witnessing self rather than judging or evaluating. If you move to the meta-state of taking charge of things which is the meta-program of judger, then you can speak about your self as the director of your experience, Self3. Here you are operating as the director of your experiencing self (Self1) or even your observer self (Self2). This is me running my own brain, choosing to take charge of how I inform my ideas, goals, plans, self-definition, etc. -152-

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You can move to a meta-state above those levels and experience yourself, Self4, you can theorize about your previous selves. This more executive level enables you to philosophize and to think about the meaning of self and what you can become. And so it goes. You can create many higher level “selves”—multiple frames of awareness about yourself. Yet in doing so, it is still the one and same self doing it. It is me thinking and feeling at various levels of mind, not different entities. Why is this important? Because if I think (set a frame) that these are all different entities, I can then set frames of dislike about some, favor others, hate some, shame myself about others, etc. Then I’m back to turning my thinking-feeling energies against myself and inviting various “dragons” to arise from within. Let’s now re-phrase all of this so that we speak more accurately about our self at various levels. At the primary state, I have thoughts-and-feelings about various objects, events, people, and ideas in the world. From that primary experience I speak and behave in a way so that I know myself as self the actor (self1). As I do, I develop thoughts-and-feelings about myself in that experience which indicates that I have moved to a meta-level state of consciousness. In doing so I create another facet of self—self as an observer of self. I (as self2) now have consciousness of self1. Who then thinks-and-feels and observes the observer self? This “infinite regress” (or progress) arises because we can always entertain thoughts-and-feelings about our previous thoughts-andfeelings states about states. What do we have in all of this? We simply have our self, our being self, creating various conceptual selves. Yet in the end, it is just me. It is me operating at various levels of my awareness, that’s all. While philosophers call this “the infinite regress” in Neuro-Semantics we call it “the infinite progress” since with every jump we progress to yet another level of awareness, or point of view, about our concept of self. Such reflexivity allows you to create and experience a new self (“self” at various levels) every time you step back from your previous conception. Self3 directs self2,

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and so on, as selfn theorizes about the director self about the observer self about the experiencer self. What all of this means is that Self1, Self2, Self3, etc. is a shorthand version of, "I operating at level one," "I operating at level two," etc. These selves, functioning as your "personality" in all of its holistic and layered complexity, simply explain how you experience multi-levels and dimensions of abstractions simultaneously. Figure 11:2 You inevitably look at yourself through various concepts. Your concepts about you become the lens through which you see and feel. And every self is invented. Every self is constructed by your thinking, feeling, remembering, imagining, defining, evaluating, etc. There is no “real” self in the sense of some natural untouched self. That ended a few days after you were born. As human beings, you operate at all of these levels of mind and awareness and all play a part in your “sense of self” and concept of self. The initial dispositions and traits that you were given, and those that unfolded in the natural development of moving through the human lifespan stages mentally, emotionally, socially, sexually, and so on were the raw materials that you then formed and in-formed via your concepts. The “Self” Dimension as Applied to Business What happens when we apply the Matrix Model to business or to any organization? The group could be a family, a small business, a community, or an international corporation. The “self” of a business is the corporate identity. It is who we are as a company, as an organization, and/or as a team. Asked the identity question of any business or company: “What is the identify of this company?” “Who is X company?” -154-

“What does the public think of this company’s corporate identity?”

The answers to these questions will give you one of the many identities that the company has in the minds and hearts of its employees and customers. “Who do you want to be?” “Who do you want to become?” “Do you like your corporate identity?” “Does it serve and enhance your marketing and sales?”

Summary With your meaning-making powers, you create meaning upon meaning about the idea and concept of “self” until you generate a Self dimension that you carry with you everywhere you go. Your Self dimension either maps things so that you can get your ego out of the way or it becomes a painful problem in and of itself, a problem that generates “dragons” in the labyrinths of your mind. End Notes: 1. References for additional information: In The Sourcebook of Magic (1997), we have devoted an entire chapter, Chapter 5, to the NLP patterns that deal with self. In MetaStates (2000), and Dragon States (2000), we have an entire chapter devoted to SelfEsteeming. 2. Multi-ordinality is a linguistic distinction that Korzybski introduced in General Semantics and which I later incorporated into the Expanded Meta-Model (Communication Magic, 2001). Patterns for Coaching/ Therapy: The Swish Pattern Dis-identification Pattern Gloriously Fallible Pattern Un-Insultability Pattern Re-Imprinting Past Imprints Belief Change Patterns Change Personal History Pattern Decision Destroyer Perceptual Positions Pattern Aligning Perceptual Positions Establishing Boundaries Pattern Circles of Excellence Pattern Decision Destroyer Pattern Loving Yourself Pattern Receiving Wisdom from Inner Sage Spinning Icons Pattern Self-Sufficiency Pattern Shifting from Other-Referent to Self-Referent Meta-state Acceptance, Appreciation and Awe for Self-Esteem Drop Down Through to Rise Up Pattern Meta-Programs (numbers from Figuring Out People): #8 Permeable/ Impermeable #14 Self/ Others #18 Emotional Direction #19 Surgency/ Desurgency #27 Responsibility -155-

#38 Social Presentation #41 Temper to Instruction #42 Self-Esteem #43 Self-Confidence #44 Self-Experience #45 Self-Integrity #49 Ego Strength #50 Morality #29 Battery Rejuvenation

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THE POWER DIMENSION The Resource Dimension Take your finger and touch your nose. What’s on the other side is — your “Power Zone.” Own it as your own—and your life becomes your own. Deny it or refuse it, and welcome to the hell of powerlessness.

A

re you wondering why does the Power dimension immediately follow the Self dimension in the Matrix Model? Why have I separated it from “Self” and why have I put it second? The reason is that the sense and feel of “power,” the confidence to take action, the feeling of being resourceful, is an intimate part of your sense of self. You experience it in the states of self-confidence and self-efficacy. It shows up in states of initiative, proactivity, courage, and aliveness. It also comes second in terms of your development, first you develop a sense of self, then you develop a sense of what you can do. Soon you will discover how it is one of the most important content dimensions. Several things came together to put the Power dimension in this sequence. First, in developmental psychology, the baby’s first mapping is about his or her self. Yet as soon as you experience your first sense of self, who you are, you begin your search for what you can do. You create maps regarding -157-

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whether you have the resources, the capability, or the power, to handle the world as you find it. Some of the first felt questions of life involve the question of power. Can I handle myself in this situation? Can I manage my own mind and emotions? Can I take effective action in the world? What can I do, what talents do I have, what capacities? Am I helpless, a victim, or am I able to do something and influence the forces around me?

This second dimension highlights how your sense of power and resourcefulness plays into, and is part of, your sense of self and your mappings about your self. In fact, as you create your frames about power and capability, these frames involve the sense of self called self-efficacy and self-confidence. These phrases refer to the sense that you have within the ability to become efficacious to handling the challenges of life, in trusting your mind-emotion system to recognize reality, to think effectively in defining and solving problems, and the confidence which you can place in yourself regarding your abilities and aptitudes. Pretty important, right? The Meaning of Power For just a moment, consider the meanings that you have formulated about power and the concept of power. What do you think and feel about your ability to take effective action in the world? How much influence do you feel in yourself to make a difference? How resourceful are you in coping effectively with life’s challenges, what about mastering these challenges? Do you have the right to feel powerful? Is power a positive or negative term for you? What about the terms—control, influence, and persuasion? How comfortable to you feel around people who are very resourceful and creative? What plans or goals do you have for increasing your personal resources?

However you conceptualize these concerns, they play a part in your overall self-definitions regarding your abilities, capabilities, and potentials. They comprise the key frames within your Power dimension. Because this dimension encodes your sense of confidence in yourself to take action and to do, it describes you as a doer. It is about you as a human doing. This dimension answers fundamental questions about you and your life: -158-

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What can I do? What skills and resources can I develop? What are my aptitudes and capacities? How can I develop my potentials? Can I cope with things? Can I master myself, run my own brain, regulate my own states, and plan my own future? Can I develop mastery in an area where I have a real passion?

The sense of power speaks of your sense of being resourceful which makes all the difference in dealing with the world. It is the difference in “personality” styles, between operating from what is called a weak response style versus a strong response style. It can also reveal the difference between learned helplessness and learned optimism, between reactivity and passivity and assertive proactivity. A healthy Power dimension enables you to feel self-efficacy as you take ownership of your thoughts, emotions, speech, and behavior. This enables your ability to be response-able as a proactive person and who takes the initiative. This is foundational for so many of the most desirable mind-body states: persistence, determination, resiliency, passion, strength, persistence, energy, vitality, courage, and proactivity. This is the dimension in which you develop that very special quality known as self-efficacy—your sense of being capable of dealing with the challenges that life throws you. After all, you have a inborn need to want to feel effective and to rely upon yourself. You also have a developed desire to be as efficient as possible and to be able to figure things out. When you both feel effective and efficient, you feel self-confidence, self-assurance, and self-trust. Now you are able to approach life wholeheartedly and to sign up, as it were, for life. No more cowering away in fear. What can you do, what are you able to influence, what effects can you produce, how much skill or knowledge can you express in coping or mastering the challenges which life throws at you? What is your frame of mind about your abilities, skills, potentials, capabilities, etc.? Do your mental frames give you a rich sense of capacity and power? Do you have a sense of control in life, power over your own life, your own mind and body and emotions? Do you feel like the driver of your own bus or a passenger in the back going for a ride? -159-

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Now if you grew up in a safe and secure environment, one in which you were gradually allowed to take more and more control over your life, then you probably learned to be independent and now have a good relationship to the idea of power. You probably are able to welcome your power in a way so that you enjoy it and are able to use it appropriately. Being able to delight in it, you can handle it effectively as a means to an end. Damage in the Power Dimension Now in terms of power, all of us were born immobile and helpless—totally without power. At that time we could not even turn over, let alone exercise enough self-control of wiping our own bottoms. We were helpless. Literally. We had to be fed, nursed, rocked, held, and nurtured. Our power to respond to our mother and father and to the world evolve slowly. At first our powers are very fragile and easily damaged. Ideally, we were raised by people who not only took Parenting 101, but who also graduated with honors. If so, we got a good healthy start in life. Ideally you got parents who supported and nurtured your powers, who encouraged you to experiment, and who made it safe to explore using your new powers as they emerge. If you grew up in a world that seemed safe to you, you would have learned bit by bit to try out your ever-evolving mental, emotional, verbal, and behavioral powers. Yet if that didn’t happen, if you grew up in a chaotic family or culture, in a war zone, or a place that was erratic and unpredictable, you would have more likely framed the world and people as dangerous. You would have concluded that the world is not a safe place. You would probably undermine your sense of personal power by setting frames about your response powers as “weak, fragile, impossible, not available at all, or the most important thing in the world.” In the end, whatever ideas or concepts you constructed from all of that will be the governing frames today for your Power dimension. People overwhelmed with too much (whether in childhood or in adult life), often abdicate control to others and opt for living in weak, indecisive, and deferential states. They may have “learned helplessness” and so give up in resignation. They may have mapped themselves as a “victim” and helpless. Or conversely, they may have mapped the world as a “dog eat dog” world where only the ruthless survive. They may have decided to “do unto others before they do unto you.” -160-

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Whatever frames you constructed today serve as the content in this dimension and will operate as self-fulfilling prophecies. Your frames about power will operate as self-organizing attractors. Then you not only think in those terms, you feel that “this is the way it is.” Then, feeling powerless, unresourceful, taken advantaged of, victimized, helpless, and unable to do anything—such feelings become your way of life. Is the person in that situation the problem? No! The problem is not the person. Nor is the problem the events that happened. No matter how painful and unpleasant, the event is just that, an event. The key is the frames that a person builds from those events. The frames are always the problems, never the person. Now, of course, when you have some illformed or non-robust maps in your Power dimension, transformative change becomes more challenging. That’s because you first have to recover your response powers, own them, and then use them. The Power of Choice The Power dimension relates also to your sense of options and choices. For this reason, this dimension encodes your frames about “will” and your power to choose. If you mentally map that you lack this power or that you are helpless, you will experience little sense of choice. You will feel controlled, limited, fated, and that life is deterministic.1 Seligman (1975) summarized his research regarding learned helplessness in terms of three Ps: Personal, Pervasive, and Permanent. This describes how a person constructs “learned helplessness” when something unpleasant, painful, or traumatic happens. First the person personalizes, “This bad thing is about me; I’m bad, flawed, unclean, worthless, the problem.” Second, the person makes it pervasive regarding all of life, “This bad things means everything sucks, nothing is going right, nobody likes me, I can’t do anything.” Third, the person frames it as permanent, “This bad things ruins all of life forever. I will never amount to anything. Nothing will ever change.” If those thinking patterns seem familiar, they are. These are the thinking patterns we all experienced when we were little children. They are an intimate part of the cognitive development stages we all go through and, hopefully, we grow out of. But when these are used to process something

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traumatic in life, they create the structure of clinical depression. No wonder they induce hopelessness! Seligman (1990) later revisited his research and formatted the foundations for the opposite of learned helplessness. He found the structure for “learned optimism.” And not surprisingly, learned optimism involves doing the opposite of the three Ps. So he reversed the three Ps. Not Personal: “It’s not about me; it’s about whatever bad that thing that happened.” Not Pervasive: “It’s not about everything, it’s about this one thing. There are many, many things that this is not about.” Not Permanent: “It is not forever, it is now. It is here in this place.” Let’s recast these with three Ts: That, There, Then. Not personal, just that; not pervasive but there not everywhere; and not permanent as in forever, but just then. Doing this radically shifts everything in the Power dimension. Now instead of bringing the “evil” thing inside of your inner world, you keep it out. You contain it in the that, there, then frame. Do this with the simplest of maneuvers, simply index the when, where, and who: Who? Not me, but whatever brings the unpleasant and painful experience into my presence, some that. Where? Not everywhere, just here, in this space and place, a there. When? Not forever, but just now or then.

Amazing, isn’t it? By simply indexing the specifics you completely change the dimension. You re-map person, place, and time so that you experience a much more resourceful state of mind. Now isn’t that crucial? When you are born, you are not only born powerless and without a self, but also without any boundaries. As your sense of self emerges, you become an I, an ego. Yet at first your ego is without any discriminations. Then in the first years you begin to differentiate yourself from mother and discover yourself in terms of “me” and “not-me.” This individuating is what allows you to create boundaries. What is me? What is not me? Where do I begin and end? Where are the boundaries? What else is outside of me? How big is that world?

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protection and safety. You then have the safety to observe what’s out there without caving in, without personalizing. During your “terrible twos” you individualize as you differentiate yourself. Every “No!” that you utter enables you to push things out which don’t fit your space. This thereby gives yourself the mental-emotional space to say, “Yes!” to what you want. In this way you become more your self, more of who you are, and endowed with more of a sense of power. Your Power Zone and Bubble The human “powers” arise from, and are expressed in, the four basic responses which you can make to the things that happen in the world. Two of these are private and occur inside and two are public responses which you make. Your thinking and feeling responses make up your two private and internal powers. You have mental powers—powers of thought to represent, frame, imagine, remember, anticipate, etc. You also have emotional powers—powers to feel and to register your values and meanings in your soma (body). Your speaking and acting responses make up your two public powers. These are your powers for expressing your thoughts-andfeelings and translating them into action. You have verbal powers, powers of speech, linguistic powers and you have behavioral powers, powers of action, gesture, and movement. This gives you a wide-range of things that you can always do in response to people, events, and situations. You can always think and feel, and you can usually speak and act. As you recognize these powers as skills, you can develop your mental, emotional, verbal, and behavioral competencies in responding. You can become more skillful, resourceful, and effective in the ways which you can influence. In discovering these powers, you will thereby develop a much greater personal self-confidence. An easy way to own your space and your power is to imagine the space around you as your special space, your territory— the place that protects your uniqueness, and the space from which you live and breathe and have your being. Now imagine it as a bubble ... a sphere of your response powers. As you feel your powers of thought, of feeling, of speech, of behavior—feel them as energy forces flowing from you. Your thinking energy can entertain an idea, wonder about things, represent, frame, evaluate, label ... Your emotive energy enables you to care, rejoice, laugh -163-

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and play, fear, get angry, connect and bond ... Your speaking energy can use language, sing, write poetry, frame things in your unique way ... and your behavioral energy can step up to take effective action, initiate a new and bold plan, and close the knowing–doing gap. Next imagine this Power Bubble growing and expanding ... feel the energy expand as you claim it as your own, recognize it as yours and rejoice in it as how you can feel centered in yourself ... and your response-powers in your enlarged and robust sense of responsibilities. Use this to “power up” as you own and celebrate the responses that you have the ability to produce. Intentional Power Wanting sufficient power so that you can be resourceful is a common and valid human response. You want to be more able to affect yourself, others, and the world. And you try. But what happens when you try to feel more of your power in responding and yet do not or cannot access the state of empowerment? Given this intention and the inability to fully access the needed power resources must be some block or interferences. What is the relation between your Power dimension and your Intentionality? The weaker your sense of your personal power, the weaker your intentionality. And if you then “try” really hard without a measurable effect, your trying will actually undermine your sense of power. This pattern can then spiral into a vicious downward spin. This shows up in “trying to not X” whether X is embarrass yourself, feel foolish, stutter, experience fear, etc. The more you intend to not respond in a particular way, the more you use “the command negation” (“Don’t think of ...”), the more it happens. How is your IQ related to your Power dimension? Your IQ is developed by using your thinking-feeling powers. With these powers you develop the basic skills of understanding and then finding, developing, and using effective strategies as you live, work, and love. Of course your EQ also plays a role because you have to deal with your emotions as you learn. You have to develop awareness of what you feel, accept those feelings, and manage them well. Activating the Power Dimension How activated is your Power Dimension? How often do you think or ask,

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“Given this knowledge or understanding, what can I do to shape my future? How can I translate this into practical value?”

The process of translating knowledge into action is the power to take a great idea or principle and translate it so that it becomes incorporated into your body and actions. This power enables you to take complete ownership of your responses. It doesn’t take much to activate this dimension—anything that challenges you will do it, anything that calls upon you to respond. This includes family and cultural pressures, personal hopes and dreams, desires, etc. Sometimes any and every stimulus in your life can elicit this dimension and invite you to do something in response to the trigger. In this, most people are reactive rather than proactive. When things happen, we react. We react rather than mindfully respond. It is the mindfulness of “running your own brain” which allows you to take charge of your these powers. As you map more detailed plans and strategies for when and where to be active, how to act, the right reasons to act, etc., you build up a strategy for being proactive and taking appropriate responsibility. This introduces you into a very new and different way of life. Now, how can you create that? Begin by creating the meaning frames to validate the idea of accessing your personal powers, taking effective action, investing your time and trouble and effort into something that you care about, resisting the path of least resistance, etc. These meaning frames will allow you to operate with a healthy respect about power. Start by accepting your fallibility. Recognize that you cannot, and will not, become all-powerful or skilled in everything. Nor do you need to. All of us are incompetent about a great many things. Those who focus on what they can’t do only make themselves needlessly miserable—they are creating maps of their own impoverishment which will lead them to states of regret, remorse, emptiness, etc. Not a happy way to live. To create a more enhancing map—decide to focus on what you care about, to play to your strengths, to find and cultivate your aptitudes and talents. By so specializing in what you can do and what you can develop even more skill in, you develop confidence in yourself around an area of competency. This gives the basis for feeling good and enjoying something. It provides -165-

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the basis for becoming passionate about something that you can then use to make a living and even become financially independent. Do childhood maps about certain incompetencies still bother you? Then as you realize that children are supposed to be incompetent and unskilled, you can let those old feelings go as you also let go any frames that you have used that personalized such childish incompetence or made it permanent. Those frames can and will just fade from your mind as you turn your focus to what you can do. Strengths— Weaknesses Every strength that you develop poses a danger. It is the problem of overidentifying yourself with that strength and then over-trusting that it will carry you through in other domains of life. When you do that, that very strength can become a challenge and could even undermine your effectiveness. Those with tremendous skills at getting things done, being efficient, active, focused, disciplined, etc. can become task-masters to others they apply that to personal relationships. Those who are highly skilled as a “people person” in caring, empathizing, supporting, nurturing, etc. can become tortured if they don’t know how to establish good boundaries, say No, and turn it off when they are getting away to recharge their own batteries. Strengths become weaknesses when over-done. They become weaknesses when over-trusted to handle activities for which they are not designed or when over-identified with and made part of “who you are.” Your strengths, talents, aptitudes, etc. do not make you a worthwhile, lovable, and valuable human being. You are already a valued human being. You were born a human being. What you do in terms of achievements, accomplishments, skills, gifts, contributions, etc. describes another facet of your life, your experience as a human doing—an important distinction. Detecting the Power Dimension The language of this dimension is that of action, possibility (can, may), impossibility (can’t, must not), movement, response, etc. When you talk about what to do, how to do, and when to do something—you are speaking from the Power dimension. You can detect the Power dimension by calibrating to a person’s state. Watch for when a person seems out of it, unresourceful, and unable to take effective action. Watch for when a person is “on,” in the zone, and ready and able to respond effectively. -166-

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Frequently a person will have to put his motor programs of the Power dimension on hold during the time he builds up his resources. Reacting as when a person jumps to conclusions or doesn’t feel at her best usually creates more problems. That is the way of children who lack both maturity and resources. Detect this dimension also when a person is in the zone and achieving top-notch results. Detect this dimension also by listening to a person describe negative ideas about power, resources, productivity, effectiveness, efficiency, etc. The Power Dimension as Applied to Business At the group level the Power dimension correspond to a business’ resources and assets. Anything and everything that enables a business to take effective action is a resource—one of its “powers.” This includes external and financial assets, brain power of employees, connections, networking relationships, and how-to knowledge that increases those in the business to respond. The power of human capital—intelligence, creativity, connection —is one of the group’s powers. In the twenty-first century the Power dimension of a business is increasingly involving the information assets of its people, customer-service skills, relationship skills, team building skills, and self-management skills for taking personal responsibility, being accountable, and managing one’s own states. Summary You carry your sense of your ability to handle things with you everywhere you go. This arises from how you have framed your sense of power and resources. Without a solid sense of power, you will feel powerless, insecure, and will use all kinds of defense mechanisms to protect yourself. With a solid sense of power, your ego-strength develops so that you can look at problems as simply challenges to deal with.

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End Notes: 1. See the Neuro-Semantics of “will”and “will-power” on the neuro-semantic website. 2. References for additional information: In The Sourcebook of Magic (1997), Chapter 3 is devoted to the basic NLP patterns for greater resourcefulness. Patterns for Coaching/ Therapy: Circle of Excellence Pattern Reclaim Past Resources Pattern State Accessing and Anchoring Six-Step Reframing Meta-Stating your Power Zone Intentionality Pattern Meta-Yes-ing and Meta-No-ing Meta-Stating Emotions Representational System Enrichment Well-formed Outcomes Time-Line Empowerment The Godiva Chocolate Pattern New Behavior Generator Pattern Responding to Criticism Pattern Disney Creativity Pattern Establishing Boundaries Pattern Assertive Speaking Pattern Pleasure and Meta-Pleasuring Core Transformation Pattern Threshold or Compulsion Blowout Transforming Mistakes into Learnings Pattern Meta-Stating Strength, Confidence, Courage, etc. Drop Down Through to Rise Up Pattern Meta-Programs (numbers from Figuring Out People): #13 Emotional Coping #16 Somatic Response #21 Options/ Procedures #22 Judging/ Perceiving #25 Goal Sort: Adapting to Expectations #32 Polarity/ Meta #33 Somatic Response Style

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THE OTHERS DIMENSION Your Social and Relational Self "A human being is a part of the whole which we call the universe ... a part limited in time and space. He experiences his thoughts and feelings as separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison ... restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." Albert Einstein

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he next dimension that addresses another sense of self is the Others dimension. This one encodes all of the specific content you and I have about others, about human nature in general, about sociology, politics, and anthropology. This dimension concerns you as a social self— who you are in relationship with other people. And because you are a social being, and because you identify yourself in terms of your relationships, real and imaginary, your social self plays a key role in your sense of self. In this dimension you construct mental maps which either enable or dis-able you regarding how you get along with and relate to other people. It reflects and influences how you feel loved and esteemed or not, create alliances, fall in love, support others, experience the relational emotions, and much more. -169-

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This dimension, and all that it represents, answers the numerous questions that which you have regarding how you think about Others in your world. Who are others? What kind of a map do you have about people or human kind in general and specifically? What do you think and feel about specific groups of people? Does your map allow you to comfortably approach others, deal with them in a forthright manner that’s respectful, considerate, and winsome? Does your map give you a way to do that with people in authority, people who are homeless, people with different racial backgrounds and cultures, people of different groups, “the public,” etc.? How have you mapped social classes, racial groups, national groups, religious groups, etc.?

Given these questions, you will find that your Others dimension reflects how you have mapped and developed meanings about what you understand, believe, and expect of people. It refers to what you think and feel about others. It governs your frames about all of your ideas of how you connect with others, whether this is a good and valued thing or a dangerous and fearful thing. What do you think or feel about human nature being good or evil? What meanings have you constructed about those you like and connect with and those you do not like and disconnect with? About those you invest ourselves in and bond with? Are you a “people person” or do you prefer things, information, activity, etc.? What is your sense of self in relationship to others? To a loved one, to friends, to associates, in my community, in my profession, etc.?

Here is another set of embedded frames that you never leave home without —your maps, frames, and concepts about others. In this dimension you develop views and concepts about relating to people, communicating, getting along, negotiating, conflicting, working through conflicts to resolution, dealing with troubled people, and dealing with difficult people. Here you mentally map ideas about relationships, love, associations, roles, authority, teams, races, cultures, arguments, conflicts, forgiveness, politics, and all of the other relational emotions. The Others dimension also includes those who are fictitious people: Captain Kirk of the Spaceship Enterprise, movie stars, and characters in fiction. It includes people who are long dead: Aristotle, Plato, Jesus, etc. It includes imaginary people, pets, cartoons, etc. It includes people you have learned from and modeled. -170-

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Whether you coach, do therapy, manage, parent, sell, etc. this dimension governs how you deal with the frame and patterns you have about people, how to understand and communicate, how to resolve conflicts, how to work with and through people, etc. Within this dimension you experience the results of your beliefs and attitudes regarding your philosophies about “human nature.” How do you view people who crave power and authority? What is it like relating to those kind of people? How do you view conflicts over differences? What are your ideas about people from different “races?” What do you expect of people when you are in a lower status to them, socially or educationally? What skills do you have for creating rapport, understanding, and supporting those who are very different from you?

All of the social-emotional skills and concepts are included in the Others dimension. Depending upon early experiences with parents, care-givers, friends, mates, authority figures, teachers, etc. as well as the ideas you were taught, you developed meanings about all these things as you developed your understandings and values about the importance or fearfulness of connecting, relating, loving, being open, being vulnerable, etc. 1 Development of the Others Dimension In the beginning of your life, Others had to totally take care of you. You could not have made it on your own; you are here today only because someone took care of you. You were born needy, totally dependent, and unable to do anything for yourself. Your survival depended entirely upon Others, upon parents, caretakers, and the larger community. You were also born without an individuated sense of self. When you were born, you were merged with mother, without boundaries, without an ego, and without the know-how for being human. All of that came later. It developed over time as it was nurtured through experiences. Psychological birth takes years to complete as you separate from others to become independent and autonomous. No wonder approval, nurturing, bonding, and love are so critical first to your survival and then to your psychological well-being. You were a social creature from the beginning. At first you could not even hold an image of your mother and father in your mind. That’s because you were not born with a certain ability—“constancy of representation.” That came later—usually about nine months. At first, your infant mind operated by the principle, “Out of sight, out of mind.” -171-

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As you become separate and independent, you could take more and more responsibility for yourself. However, this was not a prelude for becoming a hermit, but a prelude for entering adult-to-adult relationships for true inter-dependency—for working with and through others. The paradox is that to be inter-dependent with another in a love relationship, in friendship, or in a business partnership you first have to achieve independence. The stage of independence involves individualizing so that you know yourself and can operate as an autonomous person in your own right. This is an important stage of development. In the stage of becoming independent you discover your strengths and weaknesses, take full ownership for your own responses, and identify your personal visions and values in life. If you skip the independence stage when you move from dependency, you move into co-dependency. Then you “need” the friend, the lover, or the business partner in a desperate and clinging way. In co-dependency, you are still dependent. The classic form of co-dependency is when a helper needs to fix, save, or rescue someone dependent on an addictive substance and who needs to be saved from their own irresponsible actions (being late at work, getting drunk, yelling at the kids, etc.). Yet there are other forms of co-dependency. It is the need that defines it because the need identifies what a person is dependent upon. When a person is independent, and does not need approval, then he or she can want it and want it passionately, without feeling threatened without it. The skills for becoming effective in relating to others are the social skills of empathy, consideration, listening, being friendly, drawing the line between response-ability to others and for self, and much more. Today we call these emotional intelligence skills. When you have not successfully negotiated the early relationships with parents and family, you may suffer from lacking various programs: how to assert your own needs, how to validate and affirm the needs of another, how to build effective boundaries without turning them into barriers, how to congruently say No, how to resolve conflicts and differences effectively, how to love and nurture another, etc. Detection How can you detect the Others dimension? What are signs and cues that this dimension has been activated in a person’s mind-body-emotion system? -172-

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Begin by observing how a person gets along with others. Inquire about how a person deals with interpersonal behaviors and emotions such as love, support, affection, friendship, affiliation, connection, involvement, being included, trust, trustworthiness, betrayal, etc. Look for the social metaprograms, they govern this dimension. So do the patterns for rapport, communication, persuasion, leadership, groups, politics, etc. Because from this dimension we mostly define and describe emotional intelligence (EI), any of the cues or signals of emotional intelligence or its lack, are signs of this dimension. The meanings you give to people determine if you will turn to others when you feel down and low and need to recharge your batteries. This is the Extroversion meta-program. If, however, you turn inward to yourself, you have the Introversion meta-program. If you have mapped both as valuable and significant, that both count, you have the Ambivert meta-program style. Significance The beginning of your Others dimension plays a formative role in nearly all of your social skills and experiences. That’s because this dimension arises from how you experienced and understood the first people and how they treated you. They tend to function as prototypes of numerous conceptual categories for you. Dad and mom (or your caregivers) offer your most fundamental prototype of the male-female relationship. They were also the first persons you encounter who played an authority figure role with you. They offer you a prototype for how human beings handle emotions, handle relationships, conflict, negotiation, forgiveness, love, trust, etc. Now because we are social animals and form groups to develop our special form of consciousness, we inevitably define ourselves by the reflection we see of ourselves in the eyes of those around us. These social relationships also enter into your conceptual understanding of many things: groups, competition and cooperation, power and submission, influence and persuasion, leadership and followership, risk taking and playing it safe, etc. From your experiences with others, you create a social panorama in your mind—representations of good and bad people, close ones and strangers, friendly and unfriendly, people of your culture and race and those of others, etc. You internalize others and carry those internalized others around inside of you as representations which you embed in multiple layered frames. These make up your Others dimension. -173-

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How open or closed is your Others dimension? Are you able to easily open your ego-boundaries to another person and welcome him or her into your reality?

In a way similar to how we humans represent “time” (i.e., using a concrete image of a line or path or circle), we also create inside the mind a social panorama to represent the world of people. It is your mental map of the world of people—those who are immediately in your lives and those who are more distant to you.1 Your Internal Social Panorama Close your eyes and imagine yourself at the center of your universe and then notice who is closest to you. It could be a parent or friend or lover or child. Are they to your right or left? Take a moment to notice how you represent them. Do you see them in color or black-and-white? Is the image flat 2dimensional or is it full and 3-dimensional? Where are your mother and father? And if you had siblings, where are your brothers and sisters? Do you hear any sounds from them? Words? Music? What about the friends that you had as you grew up, or associates, acquaintances, teachers, previous lovers, extended family, etc.? Where do you put these people and how do you represent them? How close or far from you? What else is in your mental cinema of people? Is there light, darkness, shadows? Is there color, sound, music? Where are criminals, people who have hurt you, where do you put dictators like Hitler? Where do you put saints, angels, prophets, Jesus, and other spiritual characters? Where are cartoon characters and other imaginary persons? Were do you put those who lived in past ages or close people who have died and passed on? How do you represent that they are gone? Where are authority figures, the homeless, those of other nationalities? How is your inner world configured? Are you in a great plain, in a football stadium, on top of a mountain, in a cathedral, on a giant chess board? Where do you find yourself? What else is there? Any sounds, music, voices? How do you represent your past and your future in this social panorama? Matrix Interface The Others dimension obviously is directly related to, and influenced by, your Self dimension. Originally you experienced them as one—you were -174-

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“one” with others, then you individuated. Then in the developmental nature of growing up, you individualized and became dependent and then eventually independent. Today independence allows you to stand on your own, and to feel sufficient in yourself as you become inter-dependent with others in healthy relationships. If all goes well, you return in full circle to be the other who nurtures and loves others. The Others Dimension as Applied to Business The Others dimension plays a significant role in groups, businesses, and organizations. Here the others are co-workers, bosses, managers, employers, etc. Others may be your competitors, antagonists, and enemies. The subject of Others also becomes important when you think about your relational style with people. Do you compete or cooperate and to what degree? With whom do you compete and with whom do you cooperate? Which is most dominant? Do you naturally trust or distrust? Do you play manipulative games or are you open and forthright, believing in the best in people? Can you be open and even vulnerable or is it too dangerous to do that? Do you prefer to lead, coach, cooperate, support a team, or work independently?

Summary Everywhere you go, you relate to people—you communicate with people, and you work with and through people. As a social animal, you think of yourself, define your purposes, and achieve the things you do because of the frames and beliefs which you have developed about people and the relationships you have with them. You also carry people with you in your mind as the internalized others which you relate to. Living or dead, real or imaginary, these are the people in your internal world and the audience to whom you play your life and tell your stories. The Others dimension enables you to become mindful of this and to map things so that you have the appropriate social skills and states that makes things work well. End Notes: 1. Lucas Dirks has developed an NLP model and published a book using sociology and the sociogram, The Social Panorama. See our Neuro-Semantic adaptation of his work in Cultural Modeling training manual. -175-

2. There are numerous works in the field of NLP on relationships, from Influencing with Integrity, NLP and Relationships, and Solutions. Games Great Lovers Play.

Patterns for Coaching / Therapy: NLP Communication model Centering Pattern Meta-Model Questions Interpersonal Meta-Stating Matching and Pacing for Rapport The Power Zone Pattern Responsibility To / For Developing Healthy Boundaries Agreement Frame Pattern Making Peace with Parents Pattern Grief Resolution Pattern Establishing Boundaries Pattern Taking Second Position (Empathy Pattern) Resolving Co-Dependency Pattern Matching Predicates, Meta-Programs, and Values

Meta-Programs (numbers from Figuring Out People): #27 Responsibility #29 Rejuvenation of Battery #31 Communication Stance Sort #12 Verbal/ Non-Verbal

#28 Distrusting/ Trusting #30 Affiliation/ Management #32 Cooperative/ Polarity/ Meta #38 Social Presentation

#39 Hierarchical Dominance 1-M e an in g

7-In te ntio n

6-W o rld

5-O th er

4 -T im e

3-P o w er

2 - Se lf

C in em a E ve nt S tim ulus

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THE TIME DIMENSION “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” Richard Bandler “What is time? As long as nobody asks me, I know. The moment I want to explain to someone who has asked me, I don’t know.” Augustine, Confessions The best way to control the future is to create it. “What exists today are only messages about the past which we call memories, and these messages can always be framed and modulated from moment to moment.” Gregory Bateson (1972, p. 233)

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he next content dimension is the Time dimension. This dimension arises from how you map your ideas and concepts of “time.” Of course, because it is a concept, “time” is not real. How shocking is that to you? Yet that’s right. “Time” is not real in any external sense. On the outside, it does not exist. None of us have never seen, heard, felt, smelled, or tasted “time.” It doesn’t exist at that level of experience. “Time,” as we know it, and what we refer to by that term, is a concept. It is a concept that your mind creates, accepts, and uses to navigate the world of events. When Immanuel Kant tried to figure it out, he postulated that “time” was one of those a priori concepts that we were born with. He said it comes with the owner’s manual. Personally, I don’t think we have to postulate the concept as innate. I believe we construct it. The a priori idea -177-

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of Kant speaks about how thoroughly integrated this concept is within us. It certainly feels so real that we can’t image things apart from the “time” filter. The Creation of “Time” If “time” is not real, and does not exist “out there,” then what does? The answer may surprise you, or not. The answer is that you construct your understanding of time from the events that you experience in life. Events exist out there. Then from those events you create “time,” and call the concept into being. You do this by mentally comparing one event with another event. You compare events that have happened (the past), those that are now occurring (the present), and those that will occur (the future). This ability to compare what happened in one instance with anther arises from another ability—the capacity to hold events in your mind as you represent them on the screen of your mind. The “constancy of representation” provides you the mental space, as it were, for comparing and then thinking about the relationship between the two. When you compare the two you are then able to distinguish “times” (i.e., events) which thereby constructs a series of events to which you relate. The events occur at the primary level, when you step back to compare and contrast, you create time at a meta-level. In this way we give birth to “time” in our minds. You present specific times or events when you play a particular movie in your mind. Are you playing an event that has happened, is happening, or will happen? You construct various concepts of time at a meta-level when you conceptualize the time zones of past, present, future as well as other temporal concepts. This lets you develop an awareness of “time” as a conceptual understanding that you can stand aside from and consider. All conceptual “time” is actually meta-time. This semantic construction of “time” empowers you to live in various time zones (past, present, future, or atemporal) and to direct your attention in these different directions.1 The time zones also relate to what level of mind you use as you experience events. You can do so in a primary state and lose any awareness of “time.” When you do this, you become totally caught up in the present. This describes the magic and wonder of the genius-focus state.2 When you step into that experience, you experience the “flow” state. You can also -178-

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experience an event in a meta-state—aware of the event in relationship to other events. As this dimension refers to your ideas and concepts of “time,” it creates the structures for your sense of “time.” you can live in time (a primary state) or at a meta-level to “time” and therefore out of time or through-time.3 Do I primarily live in the past, the present, or the future? Do I experience time as a primary state (“in time”) or as a meta-state (“through time” or “out of time”)? Where do I live my life? How easily do I move in and out of the various time zones? Do I have time or does time have me? Do I have a positive or negative relationship to “time?” Do I have enough time or am I under a lot of time pressure? Do I feel rushed and limited by the lack of time? How well can I slow “time” down or speed it up? (Fast and slow time)

Living In Time When you live in and experience “times” (as events) at the primary state level, you can get lost in time. Then “time,” as a concept, goes away. All you are aware of is your engagement in this moment. Only the now exists. You are present and in the present. You experience things happening one after the other, each flowing into the other. And when you are fully present you are in a “flow state” or a highly focused genius state. In getting there you may experience “slow time” (psychologically) until it all stops in the “perfect moment.” You may also experience in time as a torrent of events ... as this and that and yet another event all occurring. When you experience In Time in this way, you experience life’s events as occurring randomly, or even all at once. This can be overwhelming. Prior to the ability to sort and separate events, children frequently experience “time” in this way. In this way it is prior to when they sort for time, what we call the “scheduling” events. For the intime person, the concept of “time” is not very important. What’s important for them is moving from one event to another event and being present in each to the person or the experience. However, if there is too much of this, too many events, it can be overwhelming and therefore the structure of stress for in-time people. Then being lost in time, they also have to manage time, schedule events, they can feel that this as a conflict or fight between “time” on two levels. Primary level time (in-time) can seem to be at odds with meta-time, that is, being -179-

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aware of time as “time.” The conflict involves feeling that you “should” arrive on time, get other things done in a timely manner, and “pay more attention to time,” when you just want to be lost in time. Meta-Time: The “Through Time” Position With the awareness of “time” as a concept, as a way of comparing and contrasting events over time, you operate more sequentially. You can, in a step-by-step fashion, recognize what “time” it is, gauge it by a clock, care about it, and live as you were “outside” of time, and an observer of it. This describes the Out of Time state although somehow this was labeled the “Through Time” meta-program in NLP and unfortunately that name stuck. These distinctions in the Time dimension as the meta-program distinctions of In Time and Through Time generate two experiences of time— Sequential Time and Random Time. In sequential time, you use the temporal concept of “time” to filter temporal information so that you can sequence when, and for how long, to do something. This enables you to get to meetings on time, work from a time schedule, plan, meet dead-lines, etc. Sequential time then becomes a way of thinking as well as a state and a way of being (how you experience yourself). Conversely, in random time you let go of your awareness of time. You may even not-know what time it is, and even more important, in that instant, you don’t care! This is a way of thinking in some experiences, a state, and your way of paying attention to things. Both are valuable in certain circumstances; both are problems in others. With each of these temporal concepts, there’s a corresponding intelligence or lack thereof in how to relate to time in each way. Both healthy IQ and EQ relates to time in several ways. If you are able to live in the now with an eye on the future while using your past experiences for learning, you have a great strategy for your overall management of time (i.e., the events of your life). If you are able to sequence activities and to plan for your tomorrows, as well as to get lost in time when you are with loved ones, clients, your children, etc., then you also have an excellent relationship to time. If you are able to step into a highly focused state where you can get lost in the moment so that “time” goes away, then you have a way of giving your creativity a chance to create. A well-formed time-line allows you to experience an overall sense of perspective about your entire life, which, in turn, supports you in maintaining emotional well-being and balance.

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Significance The meanings you map about the concept of “time” powerfully influence a great many of your emotions and influences your skills and performances. For instance, if you map time as a friend, you will come to think and experience it as something to simply recognize and embrace. If you frame it as an enemy, then it becomes something to fight against and fend off. This will generate a great many of your emotions—emotions which are primarily oriented to specific time zones: Past time emotions: Nostalgia, regret, depression, remorse, unforgiveness, bitterness, resentment (feeling a sentiment over and over), confidence, trust. Present time emotions: Being present, engaged, connected, impulsive, impatient, love, fear, joy, anger, appreciation, humor, playfulness, wonder, curiosity, etc. Future time emotions: Hope, desire, expectation, anticipation, worry, anxiety, wonder, curiosity, etc.

“Time,” as your accounting and comparing of events, is a meta-cognitive awareness. When you are not aware of it, you are simply inside an event and to that extent unaware of other events. As you are then in-time, you can so easily get lost in time, caught up in the eternal now. This powerfully enriches a great many experiences—love making, being fully present with a friend, or engaged in a project. This allows you to show up for life and to have all of your resources fully available. It is a very powerful state. Of course, it can frustrate those outside of that event who might be waiting on you to get to the next event. When you are comfortably and pleasurably aware of time, you can plan, sequence events, and operate efficiently in the modern world. This induces states of motivation, commitment, hope, and a sense of direction. Of course, this can drive loved ones and friends crazy if you are on holiday or needing to be present with someone. By now, you can probably tell that how you frame Time, represent it, and the meanings you give it significantly impact your experiences, emotions, skills, etc. Some people and cultures put almost all value and meaning on the Past, others on the Present, and yet others on the Future. Beliefs such as, “If I haven’t been able to do something, I never will be” frame the Past as governing the Future. “I can’t do this because I have never done it before.” What you believe about “time” affects what and how you make maps about the other dimensions of Self, Power, Others, and the World. -182-

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In the West, we frame “time” in terms of events that start and end, that go and stop, and so we create discontinuity between and in the Past, Present, and Future. This allows us to map the Past as “over and done with” rather than continuous and ongoing. Then doing that, it is easier for us to put tragedies and failures behind us, to stop referencing them, and to move forward to creating the kind of future that we desire. Your framing about the present enables you to have time for direct sensory experience and for action. How much time do you have in this present moment? Much or little? Do you have time for pleasure, for being fully present in and to an event? Making love, eating, dancing, enjoying a sunset, playing with children, engaging in sports, etc.—these are the kinds of experiences that you do best in the present moment. The power to enjoy is an aspect of the Power dimension and the ability to take time for others in building rapport occurs in the Others dimension. Actually, because everything you do, you do in the present, the present moment is the only actual “time” you have and the only time to do anything. Your framing of the future enables you to have possibilities and an openendedness to your future. This gives you the power to change and develop. You can use the future to imagine new and different things, develop new skills, and plan. When you conjure up an imagined future to which you then respond, you use the future in a bold and creative way. How much time in each time zone do you live each day? Use the circle as a diagram for past, present, and future and at the end of each day estimate what percentage of your day you lived in each zone? Was it 40% in the past, 40% in the future and 20% in today? Were your numbers 30, 30 and 40? What numbers would you like to have? Development You typically develop your orientation to time as you grow up: in-time or through-time. This enables you to operate sequentially or to be able to be totally in the moment with an experience. You can also create two timelines, one for each of these ways of relating to events. As you do you can

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set up appropriate contextual markers that cue you for when and where to use each appropriately. Unless you work as an historian, geologist, archeologist, or some profession that involves a lot of focus on the past, the best map for moving through the world involves a present day focus with an eye on the future. The best use of the past is for learning and for grounding resources. Other than that, you don’t need it. After all, it doesn’t exist anyway. The past is done and over. You do not have “unfinished” business in the past. What “business” you have with something past? After all, it is done. You may not have liked how it finished, that’s one thing. Yet it is finished. If it is not finished in your mind, then it is going on now in your mind which means it is something which you can finish today. The only actual “time” that you or any of us actually have is today. Failing to live in this day in a wise and resourceful way (using previous experiences for learning and resources), anticipating even better things in the days to come (“the future”) causes you to miss your life. Over-valuing “the past” as having determinative power over your mind-and-emotional states today creates disempowerment. Pining for the “good old days” which are gone orients you to live with a backward direction. It’s like driving backwards using our rear-view mirror. Similarly, over-valuing the future as where and when life will really begin, when all of the current problems will be over, directs you to focus on what does not exist. Planning, hoping, dreaming, anticipating, leaving a legacy, cuing your brain-body system with compelling images of a bright future, etc. are all practical uses of the future. It’s Never Too Late If what you call “the past” does not exist, and only has as much “reality” in your nervous system given how you represent and frame, then here is some good news. “It’s truly never too late to have a happy childhood.” It’s never too late to get all the love you wanted, to be mentored, and to “finish” the “unfinished business.” You are always changing the past anyway. The past as you now remember it wasn’t that way anyway. We now know from the Neuro-Sciences have that what you remember from your past has been and continues to change.

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In NLP, we have numerous patterns to assist you in changing the past— Phobia Cure, Decision Destroyer, and various Time-Lining processes. All of these enable you to change the events from previous times that you carry with you. Intra-Dimension Influence “Time” as a concept and feeling state powerfully influences all of the other dimensions. It affects your sense of self. You may even think of yourself as an “in-time” or a “through-time” or sequential person who plans well. The examples of referent experiences that you use to represent your self will affect the continuity of your sense of self. Does it carry over time? Does it endure through time? Steve Andreas (2002) suggests that the way you use examples in the different time frames of past, present, and future highly influences the degree to which your sense of self will continue over time. To find out, how big is your present? If it is just a tiny point where the past and future meet, then it may be hard to fully experience your self in the now. How well does a personal quality (i.e., being kind, being courageous, being curious) spread across time? Do you take a good or bad moment or experience and turn it into a “bad week” or “bad year?” Or can you color “good” and exciting a week based on one great experience? You carry the stability of your self definitions and self-concept with you over time, counting and discounting various experiences so that some count and others do not. Obviously, continuity of a self-concept over time gives you a strong sense of self. Further, you will probably want to dis-identify yourself with certain experiences to refuse to let some experiences spread. Notice if your self-definition enables you to think of yourself as continually learning and improving over time, if you are open to feedback and continuously refining your skills and qualities. Do you have future examples in the theater of your mind about the person you are becoming? Future examples allow you to “swish” your brain in that direction so it sets an attractor frame that will self-organize the rest of your mind-body-emotion system. It’s one of the best ways to control or predict the future, create the person you are becoming, the experiences you will be having. This integrates your Intentional dimension with your Time dimension.

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“Time” inevitably influences your sense of your resources. Do you have representations and references of past, present, and future resources encoded in ways that fill you up and spread across time? Would you like to do that? If so, then “future pace” the qualities and skills you want and put them into your future time-line. Then increase them until they pull you into that bright future. When you future-pace qualities and skills that you will become able to do, you are forecasting more choices and options for yourself. When Andreas (2002) speaks about the chunk size of time, he speaks about using some time frames that will endure for a split-second of time. “Qualities like spontaneity or excitement might need only a short time span to represent adequately. On the other hand, qualities like persistence or loyalty are only meaningful over much longer periods of time, so in order to represent that kind of quality well, a much larger time chunk is required. This could be either a continuous movie, or a movie or film strip that is made up of lots of smaller pieces...” (p. 77)

When a state “has” you due to its intensity, repetitiveness, or persistence, (as in state-dependency), your state activates your memory to search for similar previous experiences. This may occur entirely outside of your conscious awareness. It is in this way that the state can get you to harvest from previous experiences “evidence” and “proof” to support your current state. When state-dependency activates a past search for reinforcement in this manner, it sets up a closed-loop system—a “self-fulfilling prophesy.” The Time Dimension as Applied to Business In the context of a group, organization, business, or corporation, “time” plays numerous roles. There is time as schedules, planning, paying employees for their time, the “hourly employees,” the time of your sense of history and tradition in the business or group, and time as a sense of your future. Companies encode time via the company’s vision statements. People in organizations process time in terms of how long they have been with a company, the time-binding influences that have become incorporated in the company. Because we can think of a group, business, or corporation as an entity, you can recognize the organization itself in terms of the time zones. Some companies are past oriented, present oriented, future oriented and/or a combination of these. Companies develop histories that can facilitate

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creativity, innovation, and success as well as limitations, sabotages, and deadness. In any group or company, you can recognize the role of psychological time in terms of stress—the feeling that there’s not enough time, the pressure feelings to hurry up and achieve more. Companies can experience time as a resource so that the leaders sense that they have plenty of time for the most important priorities. Summary You move through the world carrying all kinds of ideas, feelings, and beliefs about time. The Time dimension governs how you relate to events—those that have occurred, those that are occurring, and those which will occur. As a dimension of the mind, Time influences your sense of direction, self-definition, sense of power and confidence, and a thousand other things. You cannot get away from it and that’s why you take “time” (your concepts and experiences and representations and states) everywhere you go. End Notes: 1. For more on “Time” and Time-Lines, see Time Line Therapy (1987, James and Woodsmall) and Time-Lining: Adventures in Time (1997, Hall and Bodenhamer). 2. See The Secrets of Personal Mastery which presents the “genius” state and the prerequisites of genius. 3. We devoted several chapters to understanding “time” as a concept and to this dimension in the book, Time-Lining (1997). In that work, we also have many new patterns for dealing with “time.” Patterns for Coaching/ Therapy: Changing Your Time-Line Decision Destroyer Slow and Fast Time Changing Time-Lines More Patience Now! Forgiveness Pattern

Adding New Time-Lines Change Personal History Creating a Bright Future Adding New Time-Lines Getting More Time Making Peace with Parents

Meta-Programs (numbers from Figuring Out People): #20 Direction: Toward/ Away From #46 “Time” Tenses #47 “Time” Experience #48 “Time” Access

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THE WORLD DIMENSION Your Sense of Self in Various Domains “Man carries the world in his head.” Ralph Waldo Emerson “It is the world that has been pulled down over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” Morpheus, The Matrix

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he final content dimension that defines and governs your sense of self is the World dimension. This dimension contains all of the content information which you have about all of the different worlds you know about, navigate through, and care about. In this dimension of your mind you store your understandings about the world in general and the many worlds within the World. It is this dimension that makes up what you know about the territory “out there” as you have mapped it so far. The World dimension represents everything outside of yourself in all of the contexts or worlds in which you act and relate. Overall, it refers to your general mappings about “the territory” of the world as you know it and of your specialized knowledge of specific worlds that you seek to navigate. This creates the “logical level” of your background knowledge in your mind. It can refer to your immediate world of family and home, to the larger world of community and village, to the world of work and career, professional organizations, physics, economics, politics, etc. The word -188-

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“world” refers to all of the environments and contexts in which you live and which are available to you—all of the universes of meaning that are possible.1 This dimension concerns all of your ideas and concepts about what’s “out there,” and so makes up your world-view, your general philosophies about politics, economics, and the like and your general theological views about God, the universe, what life is, where it came from, what it’s all about. This dimension is made up of all your maps and frames about science, culture, the origins of things, destiny, religion, spirituality, etc. It answers the following kind of questions: What is the world like? Is it friendly or unfriendly? Is it a place full of scarcity or abundance? Is it fearful or exciting, dangerous or wonderful? How does X (world) work, what’s in it, what skills are required?

There are lots of specific worlds out there that you can interact with, explore, and navigate. The worlds of work, business, culture, politics, religion, economics, medicine, law, law-enforcement, emergency services, etc. are among the most common ones that you all deal with. Yet there are many, many more. It is in this dimension that you store so much of your background knowledge which informs and governs how you act and interact in a given context. This is importance since it is in a specific world where your performance translates your understandings and experience to make it externally real for you. Life-World In Phenomenology, the world in which you life is your Lebenswelt— your life-world. When you develop a self, you have a self in a particular context or world. Obviously, the way you frame your sense of the world affects your sense of self, others, and your power to interact a world. We call the ability (or power) to adjust effectively and to face the challenges in the worlds as you find them “ego-strength.” Ego-strength is the ability to look at what is, at what actually exists, without blinking and turning your eyes away, without becoming superstitious and falling into magical thinking, without being overwhelmed, and without feeling threatened by it or responding with a fight/flight stress reaction. Magical thinking involves the childish reasoning, “If I want it, I should have

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it.” “If I imagine it, it’s real.” “If I’m good, go to church, say some special words seven times, etc., then I will get what I want.” With ego-strength you are able to handle frustrations and the unpleasant facets of the world, or of life in general, with your internal and external resources. Freud used “ego” to refer to the reality-facing principle. The strength of ego is therefore the ability that emerges from accepting the givens of life, inquiring about what you can do to address it, and developing the required skills for coping with it. One definition of “sanity” is the ability to adjust well to reality as it is. Korzybski introduced the term “unsanity” to refer to the lack of a good and healthy adjustment to reality. Insanity (as a psychological term) then refers to a total break with the ability to understand and deal with the facts and constraints of reality. It is IQ intelligence which enables you to adjust well to the changing times culturally and economically. EQ intelligence facilitates your adjustment to the world of relationships and SQ intelligence to the world of meaning—inspiration and spirituality. Significance of the World Why is this dimension important? The World dimension governs all of your social, political, economic, business, career, and racial worlds. When you have a strong sense of self and of self-efficiency, you naturally care about and want to experience competence in relating to the domains that are important to you— that make up your life-world. You may want to experience and express your competence in career and business, in wealth creating, in groups, clubs, associations, politics, economics, etc. Empowering meanings in the World dimension opens you to the whole of multiple opportunities for expression, mastery, achievement, and success. However, when you map fearful, limiting, and impoverished meanings in the World Dimension, any given world can then become a frightful and dangerous place. You may still want to engage in it, but if you have infused it with fear, you may feel overwhelmed by it, incapable of dealing with it, and/or unsure about how to cope. This usually leads to avoidance, paranoia, procrastination, excuses, hesitations, etc. What is your world-view? How current and up-to-date is your understanding of a given world? How positive or negative is your perspective of that domain? How functional or dysfunctional are your actions in X domain? -190-

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What does it allow you to do, what does it forbid?

In growing up and moving through life you have multiple opportunities to engage and experience new facets of reality. This allows your world-view and World dimension to keep growing and expanding. And so it should. One thing about any and every world which you live in is its fluidity. It will not stay the same. The world keeps changing. In a process universe there is only a “mad dance of electrons” where everything is continually changing. The world of business and career, family and relationships, of health and activities—all of these are in a constant state of flux and flow. To deal with this, your maps (and frames within frames) must continually adjust to the ever-changing territory. This world of change has become especially true of business, economics, politics, technology, information, relationships, etc. Nor can you even say that this change is constant. It is continually changing. The acceleration of changing now challenges people in every field just to keep up. When you first arrive in life, the only world you know is the world of mom and dad. That world may eventually expand to include siblings and an extended family and then to friends. In school you learn about worlds that have been (history, past worlds) and worlds beyond the scope of your immediate experience (now), and emerging worlds (future). Some of these worlds excite you with new possibilities and invite you to make your career in them (computers, engineering, archeology, dance, therapy, etc.). Others seem mysterious and strange. Yet they all begin expanding your mapping of the world, what is out there, what exists, what else is possible. Whenever you over-identify with a particular world and the role you play in that life-world, your life gets out-of-balance and will ultimately disempower you. Success in the World dimension involves a goal-oriented approach that depends on skills of persuasiveness, confidence, and even competitiveness. On the Creating of Your Worlds The first exploration questions that you seek to answer as you grow up are, “What is the world like? What’s out there?” In answer to these questions you create mental maps to figure out the world. These models of the world provide you a general sense of the territory as well as an idea of the knowledge requirements and skills needed to navigate the world. When you -191-

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create these maps, you have your home-spun strategy for navigating that part of reality. Of course, the problem with home-spun strategies is that they are always fallible and always liable to be grossly erroneous. Plus there is the problem that you make them with a child’s mind and with first impressions (first conclusions) which often set an erroneous frame that influences later thinking. You are the one who create the world that you know. You do not directly deal with the real world “out there.” That’s impossible. So you create your inside World, one that you map from the outside as given by your senses. That then becomes the world as you know it. Actually, that’s all you can know. You always—inevitably and inescapably—deal with the world through your senses and through your maps. This is the human existential situation. Therefore if you find the world limiting, dark, foreboding, threatening, inadequate—the problem isn’t the world, it is with your maps of the world. The problem lies in how you have constructed your World Dimension. Therapy, education, coaching, mentoring, and training are domains of transformation that enable you to expand and enrich your maps so that your experience of the world can become richer, more resource-loaded, and more rewarding. These domains of transformation operate from the premise that “the map is not the territory.” To confuse your map with the territory prevents you from continually learning and growing, from adjusting your maps to the everchanging territory, and from developing an empowering ego-strength for making a good adjustment. You keep refining your strategy maps so you can understand and cope with the territory. In olden times, when map-makers got to the edge of their known worlds, they would scribble in the words, “Beyond here, there be Dragons.” They populated the edge of their maps with frightful creatures which kept most people focused on staying safely within the known boundaries of their world. Only the bold and brave ones would dare to push past those barriers to find out what was there. The same happens psychologically and personally for you when it comes to reaching the edge of one of your maps. It will almost inevitably seem scary and frightening. But that’s because it is unknown territory.

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Now about your mapping of the world, here are some vital questions to ask which can play a significant role in how you deal with this dimension that you take with you everywhere you go: Do you have permission to move beyond the edges of your maps or do dragons lie beyond those boundaries? Do you have effective learning strategies for discovering new worlds and for updating your maps? What do you think and feel when you get to the edge of one of your maps? Do you have a strategy for creating rich meanings about the worlds you discover? How’s your strategy for effective conflict resolution? Do you have a top-notch strategy for loving and being loved? Do you have a great strategy for being fit, slim, and healthy? What about a strategy for business acumen and excellence?

There are thousands of strategies that apply within the World dimension. There are strategies for motivation, understanding, learning, developing, handling various things, leading, managing, etc. Everything you do in any field involves a map about that field.2 Typically, you have to develop much more abstract maps when it comes to these frames. The background knowledge that guides you in the world of piloting an airplane, for example, will invoke some facets that you can play as a movie in your mind. Yet there will be things that you need to know and map which are unseeable—abstract ideas and concepts about aerodynamics, engine construction and operation, principles that govern air traffic controllers and their specialized codes for communicating, how to read and comprehend the navigational equipment, etc. The way you map most of these abstract areas will be through flow charts, diagrams, axes, quadrants, words, lists, etc. Detection The meanings you map about the world lead to, and create, various styles for dealing with it. You may adopt an orientation style, a modus operandi, of trying to make the world adapt to you (the Judger meta-program) and so move through the world seeking to organize it, structure it, and make it serve your purposes. Or you may adopt a style of adapting to the world, just perceiving it, flowing with it (the Perceiver meta-program).

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The meanings you map about how to learn leads to one of two learning orientation styles: Sensing by attending to facts, data, the sensory-based “givens” and so you use the scientific method for figuring things out (the Sensory meta-program). Or you may use the Intuiting style by attending to patterns, possibilities, ideas, meanings, etc. (the Intuitor meta-program). This is the philosophical method of reasoning from ideas and patterns and previous knowledge (in-tuit-ion, in-knowing). To detect any particular World dimension, begin asking about a person’s world or worlds:

What worlds do you live in? What are the worlds that you are seeking to deal with? What skills and aptitudes do you bring to the world? Do you identify yourself with any given world? Is the world a dangerous place to avoid or a friendly place to explore? Do you seek mostly to make the world adapt to you or do you seek mostly to adapt to the world? Do you seek first the sensory-based facts of the world or do you seek first to intuit patterns and meanings in the world?

The worlds of your life comprise the contexts in which you seek to succeed. If you are able to effectively cope with the world and even master it, you feel successful and self-confident. If you over-emphasize it and overdepend upon it for your own validity (Self), you may become overly oriented to success, competition, winning, and external status symbols of such success. You may de-emphasize personal relationships, intra-personal knowledge and mastery, and become shallow, even hollow as the external world becomes more important. Many people put far too much emphasis on external signs of success: status, image, performance, money, style, etc. Others engage in a workaholic lifestyle and really don’t know how to just be, to relax, to nurture another, or to cooperate. Everywhere you go you take your maps and internal cinemas of your life world with you. This makes up your background knowledge, it makes up your internal panorama of space, environment. and context. No wonder each one of us lives in, and lives from, our own unique and specialized worlds. When you met someone from a very different world, you can oftentimes feel that difference. For example, you may feel out-of-sync with that person. Though you may have a common language, it feels as if you are both speaking a foreign language to each other. The person who comes from the world of science and math will seem so foreign to the person who comes from the world of art and theater. What counts for each will differ; what each values, and even how each holds and conducts self. -194-

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The World Dimension Applied to Business Every group, business, and corporate operate within several worlds. It operates in the world of politics, economics, ideas, education, automobiles, transportation, education, government, banking, etc. Every discipline provides a new and different world to live within. Every religious philosophy describes yet another universe of meaning. Every racial and national group does the same, as does every professional field. The World dimension comprises all of this and much more. In business, it’s important to know the world/s that your customers, clients, employers, and suppliers come from. It’s important to know the worlds that you live in and relate to as well as the worlds embedded within worlds that make up all of the contexts in which you do business. It’s critical in order to know who is your market, what other markets there are that you might move into, and what contexts do these operate within? Peter Drucker revolutionized business in the twentieth century by asking business leaders, “What business are you really in?” It’s critically important to know the layers or levels of embedded worlds that you operate in. If you think you’re in the food business, but you are really in the entertainment or service business, it makes a big difference. It could make the difference between success or failure. Summary There is indeed a literal physical world out there. There are also many worlds out there—worlds that you interact with, relate to, and must deal with. How you map such worlds determines what sets of embedded frames you have in your mind governing your interactions. Your World dimension easily becomes activated whenever you encounter or engage in one of those worlds: school, work and career, relationship, family, community, etc. End Notes: 1. For more about the World Dimension, see Korzybski’s Science and Sanity (1933), this is the source for neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic mapping and the map/territory distinction. Also see our works in Modeling and especially in Cultural Modeling. 2. For more about understanding strategies and developing strategies of excellence in any field, see NLP: The Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience, Volume I (1980) by Robert Dilts, and NLP: Going Meta– Advanced Modeling Using Meta-Levels (2001) by Hall. -195-

Patterns for Coaching/ Therapy: New Behavior Generator Cultural Modeling Strategies for Specific Behaviors Social Panorama Patterns Strategies for Exercising, Wealth Building, Business, etc. Mind-to-Muscle Pattern of NLP Presuppositions (i.e., “We live in a friendly Universe” and “The map is not the territory.”) Meta-Programs (numbers from Figuring Out People): #20 Motivation: Toward/ Away From #23 Reason Sort of Modal Operator #24 Preference Sort /Primary Interest #25 Goal Striving Adaptation #34 Work Preference #39 Hierarchical Dominance sort

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PART III: USING THE MATRIX

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Chapter 16

MODELING STUTTERING WITH THE MATRIX MODEL

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he test of any model lies in what you can do with it and how far it will assist you in understanding, diagnosing, and intervening in situations of real life. During the early months of 2002, I tested the Matrix Model by applying it to a dozen problems and challenges. The first one that I applied it to, along with my business partner, Dr. Bob Bodenhamer, was the experience of “stuttering.” This arose, in part, from the fact that I had written an article on the application of Meta-States to Stuttering more than two years earlier. Then as an experiment in 2002 we began to engage with several clients who stuttered using the Matrix Model. Early in the year we used several of the Neuro-Semantic patterns with them and found that we could facilitate their transformation from a person who stutters to a person who speaks fluently. In that context we first began exploring the meaning-making patterning of these individuals. Then, with the Matrix Model, we discovered that we were able to operate much more systematically and systemically using many more processes. The following diagram is a summary of the Stuttering Matrix. The content of this chapter comes from the article that Bob and I wrote, How to Create a Good Dose of Stuttering.1

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The Stuttering/ Blocking Matrix

VII Intention

Evaluation

Stop Stuttering Fear Stuttering

I Meaning

T-F State

Association

T-F State

Fear Shame

Classification

“Stuttering”

Cinema

VI W orld

II Self

V Others

III Power

IV Time

State

W on’t Succeed

“Less than” Look foolish Judged

Foolish Inadequate Flawed

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The Neuro-Semantics of Stuttering Neuro-Semantics begins with the cognitive-behavioral principle of NLP that every experience has a structure. Then, assuming that the facets of a person’s mind-body-emotion system work together as variables in a system, we identified how the variables work together to create the experience of stuttering. These premises have many ramifications. For one, they suggest that it’s possible for us to model the structure of an experience. After all, if we can identify the component elements, arrange those variables in a sequence, identify the feedback and feed-forward loops within the system, we can then figure out its operational dynamics and then replicate that experience. This

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is the kind of modeling which lies at the heart of Neuro-Semantics and what we mean by modeling.2 These premises also explain how it is that we can replicate excellence in communication, relating, managing, leading, inventing, creativity, and thousands of other experiences. Using this modeling focus we view every behavior and experience as a skill. Though the experience may be painful, harmful, and destructive (like manic-depression, schizophrenia, etc.), every experience has a structure that explains what makes it work and how it operates. This suggests something else. Namely, by curiously wondering how something works we can enter the matrix of frames of that experience. And see how it operates on the inside. We can then develop more choices about changing and transforming an experience. This allows us to watch how the mind-body-emotion system works. We begin with state and note the variables which create the experience of “stuttering.” In the field of working with people who stutter and the theoretical frameworks for stuttering, John Harrison (2002) provided a basic systems model for six of the key variables or factors. The six factors of his Stuttering Hexagon are: physiological responses, physical behaviors, emotions, perceptions, beliefs, and intentions. As a system, every element is influenced by every other element positively or negatively. This creates numerous systemic factors for the Stuttering Hexagon: As a system, stuttering involves the entire person and is not just a speech problem. Once operating as a system, it has a life of its own (p. 3). As a system, the stuttering system will have default settings. “A permanent change in your speech will happen only when you alter the various default settings around the Stuttering Hexagon.” (p. 106) Change a critical factor in the system and the entire system changes. “Stutter on purpose, openly, consciously.... deliberately. Instead of escaping from each block as quickly as possible, you want to give yourself the luxury of extending the block as long as you can make it interesting to do so. When you block on purpose, you are in control. Find out how good it feels to be holding the strings. Sure, your heart may be pounding away. You may get all flushed. You may feel silly and stupid.” (p. 34)

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If there’s a structure to experiences, then it’s possible to create a good batch of “stuttering.” We will have to have the right ingredients and we will have to mix them in the right order. After all, not everybody can stutter effectively. Not anyone can access a state of feeling out-of-control and stressed-out so that the more they hunt for the right words, the more they stumble over various sounds. It’s a skill that necessitates a certain way of thinking and believing, a certain way of looking at and perceiving speech, self, others, etc. It involves a specific use of fear and apprehension, a certain attitude about how to cope and respond and it involves coaching and training the muscles and breathing to embody these ideas. For Harrison the key is the stuttering mentality as a frame of mind. “You have to change to another mentality, the fight should be against the stuttering mentality that creates it, not the symptoms.

As there is a stuttering mentality there is also a non-stuttering mentality. This mentality is comprised of certain critical variables which we have modeled using the Matrix Model. While we use the matrix for many other experiences, the focus here is to make explicit the stuttering system. Our design is to provide a systemic understanding of the semantics (meanings) which get into the body and nervous system (neurology) which embodies “stuttering” so that it becomes part of a person’s physiology. In that way it becomes so incorporated into a person’s mind-body system and becomes his or her style of moving through the world. Here’s how to create a good dose of stuttering. Step 1: Call Stuttering Into Existence To experience stuttering, first punctuate the non-fluency of speech as “stuttering.” Classify dysfluency as “stuttering.” What others think of as “searching for a word” or “repeating a phrase or sound,” classify it as “stuttering.” You have to take a stammer, hesitation, and/or halting response and define it as making you “a stutterer”—(Self dimension). Next, access a very strong and intense state of fear of mis-speaking. Scare yourself about it by warning yourself, “People will laugh at me.” “People will reject me.” “They will mock or criticize me and make me embarrassed.” “If I stutter that proves that I am inadequate and inferior as a human being.” “If I stutter I’ll never get a job or a lover.”

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Once the fear is intense and you are in the state of terror about it, then try really hard to stop yourself from hesitating. When you do that, there will be a high probability that it bring forth the halting or blocking. When this happens, call the first part of this response “stuttering” and do so with a disdain and contempt in your tone and attitude. Simultaneously activate your Others dimension and intensify the fear, really fearing that others will reject you. Turn up the fear so it is an absolute horror: “They will think I’m stupid, flawed, inferior.” Stuttering usually then results as you attempt to “break through the blocking.” Bob Bodenhamer originally put the sequence in this order: 1) The naming and labeling of the blocking and stuttering experience sets up an anticipatory anxiety about your speech productions and all that it means. 2) Then some internal or external trigger sets off a panic in the Meaning dimension. 3) You then feel and ground this sense of panic and fear in your State dimension so it grows stronger to create a state-dependency in that panic. 4) In panicking, you will feel a blocking and when you attempt to break through it—this creates the stuttering.

This strategy enables you to call “stuttering” into being. As you classify certain verbalizations in the category of “stuttering,” then “stuttering” becomes a part of your world. All you have to do then is attach negative thoughts, feelings, and attitudes to it. Punctuating “stuttering” in this way empowers it to become real in your speech. Harrison (1989/ 2002) notes this very thing: “When I stopped observing my problem through the narrow perspective of ‘stuttering,’ the stuttering per se was gone—that is, I stopped seeing behavior as something called ‘stuttering’—and in its place was a handful of other problems in a unique relationship that needed to be addressed. By individually addressing these issues, the actual physical blocking behaviors slowly diminished and disappeared over time.” (220)

Wendell Johnson (1946), a General Semanticist, noted the same thing in his chapter, “The Indians Have No Word For It.” For there to be an experience of stuttering, a person has to have stuttering as a category. You also have to frame the experience as negative and painful. Add massive psychological pain to it by encoding it as meaning that you are inadequate, flawed, helpless, disliked, etc.

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To create a good dose of stuttering, use your Meaning dimension to create multiple layers of meanings. First, classify the repeating of sounds as “stuttering.” Without a name which identifies and classifies the verbal expression in this way, it doesn’t exist. Then there is only non-fluency— an absence of fluency. It is not speaking fluently, yet what is it? Without a word, it is nothing to you. There’s no word as a code to define what that experience is. Next, create another kind of meaning—associate certain very strong negative feelings to the classification. This will frame the class of stuttering as meaning that you are flawed and inferior, others dislike you, will reject you, will laugh at you, will mock you, will reject you, and so on. Intensify the fear to load the behavior semantically. Then by just thinking about it, it will carry a tremendous distress. Step 2: Contemptfully Fear Stuttering What does it take to create a strong and lasting case of “stuttering” or blocking in a child? Typically, you need a strong personality of a parent or teacher, someone who can raise the voice, yell, insult, punish, embarrass, or give hypnotic suggestions to set the meaning frame that “stuttering” is a bad thing. It doesn’t matter what semantic frame is set as long it creates intense fear and shame. In this way you can develop a sense that to say words in a halting way is a negative and threatening thing. Stuttering becomes the Pavlovian bell for inner terror, dread, and self-contempt. As the feeling of fear grows, then you can attach that fear to additional ideas thereby creating layers of negative meanings. This will amplify anticipatory fear (Time dimension) about any sounds over which you might stutter. What will you hear if you ask somebody who stutters any of the following questions: Do you like stuttering? Do you enjoy it? Do you practice it? Do you feel skillful, masterful, or powerful when stuttering? If they stay around to answer you, they will tell you that they do not like, enjoy, or want it. They will tell you that they hate it, reject it, feel embarrassed by it, and that they try their best to stop it. In other words, their mental attitude about stuttering is that it is bad, ugly, dis-empowering, and hateful. No wonder it is completely counter-intuitive to welcome it, embrace it, accept it, and practice it. Why make friends with “the enemy?” Why kiss the dragon? Yet, this is precisely the “paradoxical intervention” of Logotherapy and Brief Psychotherapy. It is precisely what we do in Neuro-203-

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Semantics to straighten out the meta-muddle of setting the negative semantic frames in the first place. Harrison recommends intentional stuttering: “Here’s the irony, the harder you try to solve your stuttering problem, the more you’re establishing its presence.” (2002: p. 30) “Just like fighting the gang reinforces its presence, focusing on the speech block—resisting it, fighting it—only further entrenches it within your psyche.” (2002: p. 31)

Step 3: Fear what Stuttering Means In creating a good dose of stuttering, as you buy into the negative meanings, next move to a higher level to fear what the stuttering will mean. Expressing it in this way may seem a bit weird since the fear isn’t about a present or actual danger. It is a fear of what something means or could mean. In everyday life, we actually see this all the time. To expose it in yourself or another, ask, “What’s your relationship to the idea of criticism? Or rejection, discipline, authority, approval, etc?” We can even fear what something could mean. Isn’t it absolutely amazing the things we humans can fear? We can fear concepts and ideas. With stuttering, a person first gives it very negative meanings and then feels threatened within the dimensions of Self, Power (resources), Others (relationship), and World (career). Then, because it creates a basic existential threat to something highly valued, it puts the person in a fear state. What works best to create stuttering is to feel fear about what it could, might, or does mean in one of the dimensions. Self dimension: Power dimension:

Others dimension: World dimension:

I am inferior, flawed, inadequate, bad. I am out of control, dis-empowered, I am unable to control my speech. I won’t be able to handle speaking contexts, phone calls, interviews, and much more. No one will like me. I’ll be rejected, disdained, alone, mocked, embarrassed. I won’t be able to succeed: my future success in business and relationships are endangered.

The system then begins to oscillate back and forth between meaning given to some facet of life and the state of fear. The meaning, then the fear— back and forth, over and over. Using his Meaning dimension to create more -204-

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and more threatening meanings about Self, Power, Others, and World the person endows many situations with fear of speaking. Each seems increasingly dangerous. As each seems more and more dangerous, the more fearful he becomes. It’s a vicious circle. Step 4: Get the Fear Looping Once your mind-body-emotion system classifies an event as dangerous, and you fear it, you start to become afraid of yourself and your experience. This moves you to the level where you now fear your fear. Eventually you fear your entire neuro-semantic system, labeling it as sick, crazy, weird, etc. Fearing what the stuttering might or could mean to you leads you to go round and round as you fear your fear. You fear that your state of fear means that you are personally inadequate and that you are doomed to being ineffective in every aspect of life. After looping back and forth between awareness of personal inadequacy and the state of fear, first one, then the other, then the first again, your mind-body-emotion system oscillates in a closed-loop. As a result, that every time you go around the loop the fear becomes stronger and more intense and spreads to more and more aspects of life. Driven by the energy of fear, the system quickly spirals downward. The fear now moves to a meta-level as it becomes about meanings. In this way, the fear becomes a frame of mind—a way of thinking. The meanings become fearful, dreadful, terrifying. The fear permeates into one’s mindset so that the very idea of speaking set off “semantic reactions.” Primary state “reactions” are those built-in reactive patterns to sensory triggers. Semantic reactions are higher level triggers—ideas and beliefs which “rattle your nervous system” and “pushes your buttons.” No wonder fear in a person’s stuttering mind-body-emotion system can so easily spin out of control. It seems so real and powerful on the inside because it is real inside the body-mind system. Then with the looping of fear when you attempt to stop the stuttering and the fearing, this very intention paradoxically adds fuel to the fear. Because when you try to stop a natural process like speaking, you make matters worse. Step 5: Outframe with even more Fearful and Dreadful Frames The fear of stuttering isn’t a fear of stumbling over words, it is a fear of what it means or could mean. The fear of judgment, shaming, angering, guilting, etc. loops and spins, it activates a yet another higher level frame— -205-

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the fear that as you have judged yourself, so will others. So will the world and so will your future. As fear spreads through the whole matrix, it sets a frame of fear over all of life. This solidifies the system. It closes the feedback loops from the outside world where new information and data could enter. This outframes the entire matrix. “This is the way it is.” “This is all genetic and physiological; nothing can solve it.” “Once a stutterer, always a stutterer.” “It’s no use going against the grain, one might as well settle for being mediocre.”

Step 6: Set Up a Closed Looped Contemptful Self-Consciousness With all of the above in place, now access your Self dimension and bring a sense of painful self-awareness to it. Now attach dread and terror to your person. You will experience the painful self-awareness as selfconsciousness to confirm that you indeed are inadequate and flawed. Repeat this until it sends the entire system into a spin of self-contempt. Step 7: Access the Time Dimension to Amplify the Painful Fear Finally, recall any and every historical reference that confirms and validates this internal experience of shameful contemplation about stuttering ... bring it to this present moment as you anticipate that it could happen at any moment. Then project this into the future so that you anticipate it repeatedly over and over throughout all of the coming years. This will construct anticipatory fear of this whole matrix of fearful meanings in this moment and every step of every moment into the future. The Finale: A Fully Developed Stutterer As you have now set that whole system into motion, you create yourself as a human being who has semantically over-loaded speaking, verbalizing, and mis-speaking. Now “speaking up” isn’t just saying words and transferring ideas via symbols. Now it is the litmus test for being adequate and nonflawed as a human being. Now you have put your self-esteem “on the line” with every word you utter. Now you have turned an everyday feature of life into a major event that determines your worth, your success, your happiness, and everything else! Yet in all of this, you are not the problem. The problem lies entirely in your frames. While you have been inducted into the Hall of Fears, it is what you have learned, not what you are. You have come to believe that “fluency is -206-

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everything.” You may believe that “Fluency will solve all of my problems.” You probably think that mis-speaking is a big deal and that the only thing worse is looking foolish in front of others. You may believe that “Making mistakes is terrible” and that “Being criticized is horrible.” Yet the problem is these beliefs as frames of reference. How to Create a Good Dose of Non-Stuttering What follows is a paradox. It is therefore counter-intuitive. It will seem counter-intuitive because if you stutter and hate it, if you identify yourself as a “stutterer,” what follows is the mentality or set of frames which will lead to the non-stuttering. It will lead to fluency and non-fluency and not noticing either. Non-stutterers pay more attention to what they say than how they say it. When I stutter (that’s when, not if), I normally just do not pay much attention to it. My attitude is, “It doesn’t matter much. So what?” This enables me to not over-load it with semantic meanings. Stammering, halting, or stuttering only means “I’m searching for my words” and nothing more. I do not psycho-speak. Psycho-speaking is similar to psycho-eating. A person who eats for psychological purposes and reasons—to feel loved, rewarded, fulfilled, valued, given the good life, to de-stress, to be social, etc.—eats for the wrong reasons. That’s why he will seldom taste the food or enjoy it. He does not eat food for food, for fuel, for energy, or for vitality. He psychoeats to the extent that he eats for psychological reasons. (See Games Slim People Play, 2001). Psycho-speaking involves the same structure. You are speaking to prove that you are adequate, that you are not a fool, to avoid feeling embarrassed, to avoid feeling powerless, to avoid feeling angry, to avoid feeling. These intentions are the psychological reasons above and beyond transmitting your ideas to another by means of your speech. When you so load “speaking”—you give it meanings that it cannot bear. Consider one psychological meaning that over-loads speaking fluently. Harrison notes that when people over-value “fluency” as if it were some magical cure, they make fluency the golden key to all of the goodies of life. That’s a deception. He drives home his point:

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“Ask your friends if their lives are terrific simply because they talk fluently. You might even ask them how comfortable they are when they speak in front of others. You’ll discover that fluency is no magic pill for anything except being fluent.” (2002: p. v)

The Fluency Pattern How then can you create a good dose of normal speaking? How can you frame speaking so it is just that—saying words? Step 1: Undo the Classification. Stop punctuating speech in terms of “stuttering” or “fluency.” Let speech be speech and talk be just that, talk. “It’s just talk.” Then some of your talk will be more effective than others, and some less. Some is more to the point, more succinct, and some is searching for words. Keep framing it as “No big deal.” By all means avoid framing it as “stuttering.” This is what Johnson learned from his studies of the native American tribes, as long as they had no word for stuttering in their language, stuttering did not exist in their communities. Step 2: Welcome and Play with Non-Fluency. The homework I give stutterers is— Spend five minutes every morning stuttering on purpose. Practice it! After all, if you can turn it on, guess who’s in charge of your tongue? Practice with a friend and try to outdo each other. Turn it into a game. Attach fun, joy, play, and social feelings to it. Harrison recommends doing this with an entire audience to break fear of public speaking. And every stutterer that I have worked with over the years, who took me up on this challenge and followed through, eventually stopped stuttering. It became irrelevant. Step 3: Distinguish your Self from What You Do. You are not your tongue! You are not your speech. Speaking is what you do, it is not what you are. By distinguishing person and behavior you create a solid semantic basis for your sense of self. Then in terms of your resourcefulness, your relationship skills, and your ability to take effective action in the world, you will be more free to do. All of this speaks to, and can undo, much of the damage previously described. Unconditionally esteem your self as a human being whose worth and dignity is a given. Declare to yourself over and over that you are a Somebody. “I don’t have to prove anything.” Now focus on living your life -208-

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to express your Somebody-ness. Do that by developing new skills, new powerful resources, new response patterns—all which will increase your sense of personal vitality. Recognize that connection with others is based more on thoughtfulness, consideration, sharing of values and visions, love, compassion, and a thousand other things—things other than fluency. The same can be said about your career, finances, etc. Step 4: Welcome Your Negative Emotions. If you are not okay with your emotions, you will create a secondary problem. You will turn negative emotions against yourself. You will hate yourself for feeling bad. You will fear your anger. You will shame yourself for feeling vulnerable. Now you have a second problem. Whatever problem the first negative emotion was signaling you about (whatever you were afraid of, angry about, feeling bad about), now you have a second problem—the way you are treating yourself! Responding to your “negative” emotions in this way actually misses the whole point of having a “negative” emotions in the first place. A so-called “negative” emotion is your body’s signaling system that something is wrong in your system. Something in your world is dangerous (fear), something is threatening you or your values (anger), something violates a social norm (shame), etc. So when you do not listen to it, embrace it, explore it, you will not learn from it and you will create a “dragon” state by turning your energy against yourself which is actually a form of self-abuse (See Dragon Slaying, 2000). The solution? Get comfortable with the discomfort of your “negative” emotions. Decide that you will learn from them and so now get out of your comfort zone by embracing them, welcome them, make friends of them and begin to use your negative emotions as just a signal about how things are going in your system. An Application of the Matrix This description of the structure and process of the experience of stuttering offers one application of the Matrix Model. It was the first of many when we first created this model and put it to the test by using it to model an experience.2

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The structure given above is the most common one that we found in people who stutter. For example, we have found several individuals who similarly punctuated mis-speaking as “stuttering” thereby making it real, and then framed it in some different ways. This created some different patterning for their experience of stuttering. One person hated mis-speaking and developed strong antagonistic feelings of intolerance for any flaw in his speaking. As he did, his created similar meanings and feelings as described above, but with a different feel. He was not so much afraid of the experience as he felt contempt for himself for doing it. Similarly, anger, shame, guilt, and numerous other negative feelings could drive the mindbody-emotion matrix system and create other affects. There is a range of structures that can be created neuro-semantically, to figure this out, use the Matrix Model to explore the frames. Then, when you know how an experience works, and how a person keeps it alive today by his thinking, representing, and framing—you also know how to change it. This is a central value of modeling. Model those who are most skilled and excellent at a given behavior and transfer the structure as a step-by-step set of instructions. Or, identify the leverage points of change and make smaller adjustments so the dysfunctional system can no longer operate. Summary If you stutter with a self-consciousness that you find painful, fearful, shameful, or intolerant, there is abundant hope for change. You can gain a fluent way of talking. There is hope because your experience has a structure and because you have created that structure in your neuro-semantic system. This means you also have the power to change it. Structure gives you the chance to intervene at numerous places in the system, sometimes reversing the structure and sometimes messing it up. The mere fact that you have incorporated certain ideas into your very neurology and physiology does not mean it is not physiological. Certainly it has become physiological Your body may now be running the program from muscle memory. Yet that doesn’t discount that you had to learn how to train your muscles.

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This reveals the “habit strength” of the experience, that it now operates apart from patternings outside of your conscious awareness. In Neuro-Semantics today we use various meta-stating processes for resolving the stuttering matrix. Central to these are the following patterns: Drop-Down Through to Rise Up, Phobia Cure, SelfCelebrating, Ownership of one’s Power Bubble, Dragon Slaying, Intentional Stance, Glorious Fallibility, etc.

The 7 Matrices of our Neuro-Semantics VII Purpose/Intent Matrix

I Meaning/Value Matrix

Framing Evaluating

Meta-Stating

Meaning of Meta-Levels

M Classification

IV Time/ Temporal Matrix

III Power Resourcefulness Self-Efficacy

V Others Relationships

II Self

VI World

State

End Notes 1. Dr. Bodenhamer has written an entire Training Manual for Mastering Stuttering. He wrote the book Mastering Stuttering and Block with NLP and Neuro-Semantics in 2005?? That book has now been reprinted and the new title is, In Their Own Voice.

2. For a list of Modeling books, see NLP Going Meta, Sub-Modalities Going Meta, Advance Neuro-Semantic Modeling, Meta-States. 2. For more on the Neuro-Semantics of stuttering and blocking, go to www.neurosemantics.com and look under Articles. We have numerous articles and there is also a special e-group that Dr. Bob runs.

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he Neuro-Semantics of How a Phobia Works

V II In ten tio n

I cannot resp on d other than w ith fear.

E valuation

T ry to stop . T ry not to thin k abo ut it.

I Meaning

T-F S tate

A sso ciatio n It is com pellin gly real. P resent fear and terror to the m o vie and step in.

T-F S tate

Classification

T he terror is “now .”

Cinem a

VI W orld

V O th ers

II S elf

III Po w er

I am a “fearful” perso n.

Out of Co ntro l & Help less

IV T im e

S tate

Dangerou s Place

Fearfu l & E asily Triggered In to . Associated “sem antic reactio n”

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T he “p ast” co ntro ls th e “p resen t” an d d oo m s the “future.”

Chapter 17

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B

ecause you and I make meaning via the processes of thinking, reasoning, evaluating, labeling, framing, etc., you and I are the ones who construct the meaning structures in our minds and lives. We create all sorts of concepts about things and these concepts then determine the quality of our lives. Yet all of this happens so naturally, automatically, and inevitably that we easily lose the sense that we are the ones who are actually doing it. Experientially, it just seems to happen. At the emotional level, meaning seems to exist out there and is something that comes to us and happens to us. So we speak about “finding” meaning as if it is something “out there” to locate and discover. Yet as you construct meaning, you build up conceptual frames upon frames which determine your focus and perception. You then feel the meanings in your body. You feel them as your neuro-semantic reality as your emotions. An emotion is the felt significance of the meanings. Your conceptual meanings begin cognitively and then quickly becomes somatic. This is the natural and inevitable mind-to-muscle of the mind-body-emotion system. True enough, you can linguistically separate these words (“mind” and “body” and “emotion”) and treat them as separate things. But you can only -213-

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do that linguistically, you cannot do that actually. Your concepts are not neutral, they are not merely abstract concepts which have no impact on your body or your health. Our lives are by nature neuro-semantic and cannot be otherwise. In spite of the mis-languaging involved in separating “mind,” “body,” and “emotion” as if disconnected processes. This means that the ideas that you entertain, construct, and play with in your mind construct concepts that govern your sense of the world, your sense of yourself, and of reality. Then when you language these concepts they show up so innocently and naively as words. When you call any thing or any process by some term, you “call it into being” in your mind and potentially in your body. This is a dynamic powerful enough to treat with a lot of respect. Regarding the concepts you live with—to name something is to invent it. If you didn’t say that “searching for a word in your speech” was “stuttering,” it wouldn’t be so. It would be “searching for a word” or “thinking aloud” or simply dis-fluency. But once you use the term “stuttering,” once you punctuate a piece of experience with the concept, so it becomes—stuttering. You thereby incorporate that concept into your nervous system and make it your subjective reality. If you didn’t say that “an activity which didn’t reach your goal” was “failure,” you would not embody the concept “failure” in your body. You would not feel it as “failure.” You would rather experience it as “part of the process of reaching my goal.” Or you might feel it as “feedback information about what doesn’t work.” To name it “failure” is to invent “failure” as a concept in your neuro-semantic nature. It is the concept which invites your entire mind-body-emotion system to actualize and experience the concept. This domain of words enables you to create and experience “concepts.” It enables you to invent them and give them reality in your mind-body-emotion system. This is the meaning of neurolinguistics and neuro-semantics. Yet in your meaning-making you do not stop with the words that you use for concepts. As already noted, you then meta-state your languaged concepts with yet higher frames. You keep framing your concepts to create ever more complex concepts.

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For example, even if you punctuate non-fluency of speech as “stuttering” and you only felt slightly curious about it or totally dis-interested in it, you would do yourself no semantic harm. It is when you meta-state it with fear, hate, contempt, interpret it as meaning something negative about yourself that you do yourself semantic harm. This initiates a matrix of stuttering which perpetuates the stammering, makes a person self-conscious about his speech productions, activates the mind-to-muscle process to get the concept into the person’s breathing, throat, and mouth. Then it becomes a dreadful semantic reaction. This is how you can use the meta-stating process to invent concepts which enhance your life or limit and undermine your effectiveness. The metalevel phenomena which we call concepts, principles, understandings, beliefs, knowledge, paradigms, etc. can do us so tremendous semantic harm. That’s why it is essential to understand this process to take ownership of it. Only then can you truly quality control the ideas that you entertain and make sure that they enrich your life. Meta-Stating Concepts Concepts arise as you use your self-reflexivity to understand about your understandings. As you conceive ideas about ideas, your ideas become more abstract or “conceptual.” By concepts you create categories of experiences and can put many specific activities into that category. You can create the category of “work” and “play.” You can create the category of “saving” and “spending.” Then to that category you can develop a belief or attitude— “I love it,” “I hate it.” In this way you can create an even more abstract frame of mind. You can create a bad relating to a concept. Now you could have a semantic reaction to the concept of “discipline,” “control,” or a thousand other concepts. To address the creation of such negative conceptual states, we have developed in the field of Neuro-Semantics a pattern. This pattern enables you to undo the semantic damage created by meta-stating with false, unuseful, or unecological ideas.1 Because you are a semantic class of life, you live your life mostly in conceptual or semantic states. In those metalevel states you experience some of your greatest states and your most destructive states. By recognizing this, you can use the Meta-Stating Concepts pattern to update, re-work, streamline, and correct mis-conceptions about concepts. -215-

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Further, because your reactions are often reactions to the words and ideas of concepts rather than physical triggers, your reaction is a semantic reaction. What’s pushing your buttons is the conceptual category you are operating from. That’s why your reaction is semantic in nature. One way to identify these in yourself is to ask if you have a problem with any of the words or concepts in Figure 17:1.

Figure 17:1 Authority Intimacy Morality Time Past or Future Masculinity/Femininity Race Cause (causation) Self Self-esteem/ self-concept Other Relationship Motivation The meaning of life Human destiny/purpose

Dependency Entitlement Vulnerability Justice/ Fairness Materialism

Women Freedom Criticism Money Saving Investing

Emotionality Culture Intellectuality Control Values Morality Consequences Responsibility

Power Manipulation Victim Human Nature Sexuality Rejection Criticism Aging

Meta-Stating Concepts The following questions of this pattern are designed so one person coaches another in discovering how one has framed a troubling concept. Use this process to develop a better relationship to the concept. 1) Identify a Troubling Concept. What concept category gives you problems? What idea, word, or concept “push your buttons?” Finish the sentence stem, “I have a problem with ....” Or, “I can’t stand ...” 3) Ground the Real World Event that activates the reaction. What specify actions triggers you to become aware of this concept? What is the real world event that triggers you, pushes your buttons and that you classify as the concept? When does that event occur? What do you see and hear? What could you video-tape that sets off your awareness of the concept? What are the sensory-components: see-hear-feel variables? -216-

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[Here use one or more of the meta-questions (Figure 17:2) to explore the person’s frames and frames-within-frames. Enter the person’s matrix with respect and exploration, do so without judgment or advice, enter with non-judgmental awareness.]

Figure 17:2 Meta-Questions for Exploring a Matrix. Ask, “What do you Believe? Value? Deem important? Understand? Remember? Imagine? Expect? Permit? Prohibit? Identify yourself with?

3) Enter the Concept’s Matrix.

When you think about X (fairness), what thoughts-andfeelings come to mind about it? Let’s say that’s true, what does X2 mean to you? What do you 2 believe about X ? And let’s say that’s true, so what? What does X3 mean to you? What do you understand about it? Know about it? Believe? What have you decided about it? [These are the kinds of meta-questions to ask as you track the layers of the matrix and expose the psycho-logics of the concept.]

4) Quality Control the Matrix’s Construct. As you step back from this set of frames about that event and which defines what you understand and mean by this concept, what do you think? Do you like it? Do you want it? Does this concept enhance your life or empower you as a person? Is this way of framing the concept useful for you? Does it limit you? Do you find it healing or toxic? Have you lived in this matrix of frames long enough? Are you ready to change it or leave it? 5) Identify a Preferred Frame. As you put that old matrix aside .... Over there, now just for the fun of it, playfully imagine yourself getting to choose another frame of reference, a better frame, what name would you like to use for this? If the name is fine, then let’s go with that. Renaming it or keeping the name the same, what would be the most empowering frame that you could give it? What new belief about it would give you a much better meaning, one that would enhance your life, and empower you? Now with that frame, what could you think or feel about that one which would hold that in place and enrich it?

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[Keep doing this and go up 3 or 4 or 5 levels and build a new matrix of frames using these kinds of meta-questions. Do so to texture your new frames with enhancing beliefs and meanings.]

6) Integrate by Confirming to Embody and Install. Do you like this? Really? How much? Would you like to keep it with you? What difference will this make in how you live your life? Are you ready to make an empowering decision so that you will “make this so” in your life? When you imagine taking this into your future in the days and weeks to come, are you fully aligned with this? Any objections in the back of your mind? What’s even one thing you can do to remember this? Meta-Stating the Concept of Manipulation In a training in France I had this encounter with a delightful young lady regarding one idea which she didn’t have a good relationship at all. When I asked her what concept did she had a problem with, she immediately and without any hesitation, said manipulation. “Great, then I'm not going to manipulate you too much to get you through this pattern.” And even though I smiled, suddenly there was a deathly silence. She just looked at me ... wondering ... I’m sure she was asking herself, “Was I being serious or just teasing her?” She didn’t quite know. Then she smiled a wry smile at me. I continued. “”Okay, so what does manipulation mean to you?”2 Lady: “Well, it's bad. It's wrong.” “Hmmm. So it is bad and wrong. And so when someone manipulates you, what do you feel?” “Well, bad, terrible.” “And what do you think or feel of the person who manipulates?” “He's a bastard!” “Hmmm. So his manipulation is an evil, a moral evil?” “Right. Of course.” “And you're ready to judge him for that?” “You bet.” “And what are we talking about here? If I could see, hear or feel this manipulation what would I see or hear or feel?” “Control. He's trying to control me.” “Okay, good, and how is he trying to control you? What is he trying to control about you, and in what way?” “He’s making me out of control.” -218-

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“Hmmm, ‘making you out-of-control.’ This person must be very powerful to be able to do that. How does he do this to you?” “Well, he's like a spider, a big black spider spinning his web.” “Yes, so that's what it's like ... this manipulation and control of you? It is like a spider spinning a web?” “Yes.” “Okay, so you’ve given me a metaphor and now I have a symbolic picture of it. So I’d like to know what the metaphor stands for and also, how does he do this? If I had a video-camera what would I be recording in terms of sights and sounds?” “You'd see him pulling my strings and trying to treat me like a puppet.” “Literally?” [“No.”] Okay, so another metaphor. Are you describing how you feel? Is that what this metaphor is about, your feelings?” “Yes, definitely.” “Okay, good. But I still don't know what he's actually doing in the real world. Is he putting literal strings on your arms and feet? Putting spider webs on you? What is he doing?” “Well, he is wanting something from me and I'm disagreeing.”3 “Okay, so he is saying, "Do this" and you don't want to do that? [“Right.”]. And so what does he want you to do? What is he asking you to do that you don’t want to do? Or is it now he is saying things? Is he speaking angrily or in a threatening way?” “It could be any either of those ways.” “So it is not how he's speaking, but just that he is asking for something you don't want?” “Right. I disagree and he won’t accept that.” “Ohhh, so he is persistent and continues to want to persuade you and that is what you call ‘manipulation?’” “Yes.” “So when you are persistent with someone who disagrees with you, you are manipulating them, and not just being persuasive or committed to what you want. Is that right?” “Well ... [long pause] ... yeah. ... I hate that in myself.” “When you manipulate, you hate that?” “Right.” “So for you, there's no neutral talking, just trying to sell each other on each person's ideas, there is only agreement or manipulation?” “Well, when you put it like that it sounds pretty stupid.” “When you think about talking, communicating, and working out things as a member of the class of ‘manipulation’ does that enhance your life? [“No.”] Does it empower you as a person? [“No.”] Does it make life or communication a party? [“No.”] So would you be willing, just for the sake of this exercise to look at it in a new way? “Yes.”

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“Okay, good. So if you did ... and you thought of it as a member of the class of People Want things and Say So —how does that feel to you?” “Well, that makes it seem like it's just people being people.” “And if you thought of it that way, framed it that way, what would that mean to you?” “Well, that I can just talk and communicate to find out what each person wants.” “Would you find that more acceptable and empowering?” “Oh yes.” “And what would that mean to you? What would you believe about that?” “Well, I suppose that it would just be a matter of negotiating.” “Hmmm, so that sounds much more resourceful?” “It is. ... Yes [pause] I like that.” “Well, this is just an exercise and so it is not real so I won't let you have that frame. You are not allowed to see things that way.” (Teasingly) “Right. ... I think I will keep it. I like it better than the old concept.” “You're going to keep it?” “Yes.” “It's yours? Your frame?” “Yes. It is mine.” “You’re just going to go forth in being resourceful in this way from this day forward and just recognize that there are people ... and people wanting things ... and just talk and communicate with them about what they want and what you want and just negotiate in a straightforward way? You’re going to do that?” “Yes I am.”

Figure 17:3 Old Neuro-Semantic Matrix

New Neuro-Semantic Matrix

--------- Spider/ being a Puppet to someone ----------(metaphor) ------Controlled/ being out of control ------------ Moral evil ... judgment ------

-------- Negotiating -------

------ "Bastard" ---------

------ Talking/ Communicating ------

--- "Manipulation" ----

---- Just people wanting things ----

PS: Lady –

(Real World Actions: someone saying words about wanting something from her ... that she disagreed about and did not want.) -220-

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The Trance World of Concepts Given that we’re talking about concepts, what is a concept anyway? How do concepts differ from other thoughts? Generally, the sensory-based thoughts that you represent on the screen of your mind are those that you have seen, heard, felt, etc. You then re-present them in your mind— presenting the sights and sounds to yourself again, seeing what you saw, hearing what you heard, feeling what you felt—playing a movie in your mind. These are your first-level thoughts. “Concepts” (Latin, conceptus) refers to that which you conceive. Birth and conception is a metaphor—“to become pregnant, an idea originating in the mind.” Obviously, concepts are more creative and inventive than mere representations. They therefore partake more of the nature of a trance. They speak of the hallucinated world of a person’s matrix full of a person’s images and imaginations. Take the concept of high and low self-esteem or self-value. This isn’t an idea which you can easily represent. It’s a conception, a high level abstraction. Yet, when a person gives birth to the concept that he has an inadequate self-concept of low self-esteem, he can feel it in his body, see it in his actions in the world, and experience it in his relationships. Is it real? The question, “Is it real?” depends on what you mean by “real.” It is not real in the outside world. If we ask him to point out where it is—he cannot do it. It is a concept—a product of his mind. And there, it is real. It is his matrix. So as he lives in that matrix, he will embody it and manifest it in his talk, behavior, and feelings. He will make it real. To those of us on the outside, we could say it is his hallucination. He’s seeing things, hearing things, and feeling things which we don’t see or hear. But from the perspective of his inner world, it is as real as anything else that he sees and hears. Ultimately concepts operate as a trance—except we do not hallucinate objects, we imagine ideas. We hallucinate ideas about self, others, money, criticism, etc. Would it be best to wake up from the trance? Yes, especially if we are in a negative trance that creates unresourceful semantic reactions. This is the challenge— How to wake up to the matrix? How to become aware of its pervasive influence in our lives. That’s the reason for step two—recognize the distinction between your matrix maps of reality and the -221-

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territory itself. Only then will you stop giving so much power to the matrix frames and recognize the power you have. You can quality control it. This provides you an exit from the old matrix. You can now quality control it and choose— really choose whether you want to keep those post-hypnotic suggestions going or invent new ones. Summary As a semantic class of life you inevitably make meaning as you move through the world. You cannot do otherwise. The question isn’t whether you construct meanings, but what meanings you construct, the quality of those meanings, and the degree of resourcefulness they generate in you. You make meanings from words and ideas as you construct frames and contexts to formulate your neuro-semantic reality. Knowing that your concepts are yours, and that you created them or that you absorb them from others, allows you to do a systems check and to quality control them to make sure that you have some great concepts to embody and use as you move through the world. End of Chapter Notes 1. You can find this pattern in Secrets of Personal Mastery (1997) which introduces the Meta-States Model in the context of the prerequisites of the genius or flow state. 2. By the way, this response tested the word “manipulation” and showed just how much she did have a semantic reaction to it! 3. Note how long it took to bring the concept down from its abstract forms to a see-hear referent in the real world. This is typical.

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THE MATRIX MODEL AS A PROFILING TOOL Prediction is difficult, and all the more so when it concerns the future.

W

e are a semantic class of life which inevitably creates meaning. We have to. Without meaning, we don’t know how to identify what exists or what to do. We make meaning to orient ourselves in the world, to figure out what’s happening, and what we need to do in order to respond effectively to what’s happening. Because of this innate creativity of meaning our lives are inevitably neurosemantic in nature. We develop ideas and we hold them in our minds. These semantics then govern the messages sent to our body, physiology, and neurology regarding what to feel and how to act. When you think fearfully, you commission your body to experience the fight/flight stress responses. A similar thing happens when you think lustfully, angrily, joyfully, ludicrously, etc. Your mind-body-emotion system operates via embodying your understandings, beliefs, decisions, etc. So you experience your emotions somatically in your body. You somatize your thoughts as your nervous systems and brain create and register

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meaning in your motor response patterns, muscle memory, kinesthetic patterns, etc.—your State dimension. Yet not only are your emotions embodied, so are your reasoning, understanding, and remembering. You embody events, ideas, experiences, and even concepts and encode them in your muscles (muscle memory). It’s your creation of meaning that makes your life neuro-semantic in nature so that when you entertain ideas in your mind, it affects your biology. 1 Because you inevitably make meaning which you then live, some of the most intense human suffering arises from the lack of meaning (meaninglessness, hopelessness, despair, and futility) or from toxic meanings (morbid beliefs, unsane values, etc.). Ill-formed meaning can actually lead to, and cause, suffering that extends far beyond physical pain. When that happens, people then avoid, run from, and drug themselves against their meanings. When you think lustfully, angrily, joyfully, ludicrously, etc. you signal your body about how to feel and what to do. In terms of profiling, we first note what is on your mind. What are you thinking and feeling. Then we note what you do or intend to do— your sense of motivation about what to do. Because what occurs in your mindand-emotions is translated into your neurology, we look to your physiology for what’s happening there. As neuro-semantic beings who incorporate “learnings” in our body, our neurology encodes and then “knows” ideas, feelings, experiences, events, and even concepts. This shows up in how we walk, talk, emote, carry ourselves, etc. and for this reason— these aspects of the mind-body, neurosemantic system can be detected. The embodiment of the mind-body system explains how meanings are always incorporated to some degree in our bodies. Because our bodies reveal, manifest, and express our meanings, these meanings are forever leaking out in our expressions and gestures. If we have eyes to see and the processes for eliciting, we can “read” the meanings (semantics) within a person’s actions, behaviors, and physiology as well as his or her mental and emotional responses. That’s why we look at each other’s face, posture, breathing, movement, gesturing, etc. and see our state of mind. We profile mental states via body cues.1

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As you have somatic reactions in your body, neuro-semantically you develop semantic reactions. Your ideas, beliefs, values, understandings, models of the world, expectations, etc. set off physiological reactions. The last chapter introduced the Meta-Stating Concepts pattern to deal with having a “bad relationship to an idea or concept.” As a semantic class of life we operate by the ideas we send to our neurology as signals and/or commands. This is the foundation for Neuro-Semantic Diagnosis and Profiling. In this way we can back-track from the outward expressions to the matrix of thoughts and beliefs which the person lives in. We can then begin to follow the information—energy processes through the matrix and discover how it works. Profiling a Person’s Meanings You can use the Matrix Model as a diagnostic tool when working with people to analyze what is going on with a person. You can notice what process or content dimension it is activating, what information is being processed, and how one is processing it, where the “energy” is in the matrix, how the energy is being transferred, the direction of the person’s focus, and more. As a result, you obtain significant information about what and how you can respond effectively when coaching, doing therapy, managing, leading, and/or communicating. We can profile a matrix because you “hold in mind” your frames of meaning and these ideas not only endure they also order our experiences. For this reason, what and how you frame critically determines your experiences. Framing is actually the most important facet in every experience that you have ever had and will ever have. What you have framed, and how you frame, creates your interpretative frames which, in turn, governs how you feel, what you do, how you relate, etc. Mind is always percolating down into muscle. Ultimately what you know and understand will get translated into neurological patterns in your body. Because of this if we activate a person’s mind-muscle system, then we should be able to stand back and watch how a person responds to certain ideas and how she feels about other ideas. This is the neuro-semantic basis for this way of profiling and diagnosing, when you work with a person. When you profile the meta-states and frames

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that make up a given matrix, you can learn to detect, see, recognize, and flush out the matrix of frames the person is operating from. Conversationally Profiling At a training on Games Business Experts Play, I began a conversation with a gentleman by the name of Terry. He was in his early forties. The dialogue we engaged in was designed to simply identify an area of concern and to explore the frames that governed his Business Games—games that he no longer wanted. I began by asking him, “So what business are you in?” Terry: “I’m in retail; men’s clothing. I began as a sales clerk and have now worked as the general manager for the past seven years.” “And do you like the work?” “I used to, but it has gotten old and stale in recent years. The challenge is gone; now it is just about the money.” “So what’s on your mind when you typically wake up in the morning and go to work?” “Another day, another dollar.” “That’s your frame of mind?” “Yeah. Not very exciting, but it keeps me going.” “You wake up and you orient yourself as if your work life is just about making money?” “I hate to admit it but yes, that’s it. I would prefer to be doing something else, but I can’t. You’ve got to make a living. You can’t live without making a living.” “It almost sounds to me that you’re defending yourself and perhaps even trying to persuade yourself about this.” “Well, putting it this way makes me feel a little cold and calculating.” “Do you believe that life is about money, about making money?” “No, not really. But that’s just the way it is. Well, I should say that’s the way it is when you have bills and mortgages to pay.” “And you believe that?” (Hesitating) ... “Well, yes. I do. It’s just the economics of modern life.” “So your frame of mind starts you out on this track everyday?” “Sure.” “This is important?” “Of course. It all starts here.” “And where does it go from there?” “It goes to building up my career, thinking about what I need to do to succeed. How to get a bigger share of the pie.” “Is there just so much of the pie to share? Is that what you’re saying?” “Sure. That’s the way business works. You get into a market and there’s only so much of the market share you get to obtain.” -226-

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“You believe that?” “I don’t believe it, I just recognize that that’s the way it is.” “It is a jungle out there?” “Right. You’ve got to get out there and fight for your fair share.” “And if you don’t?” “Someone else will get it and you’ll have less.” “Mmmmm. Sounds pretty competitive, hard, taxing, exhausting, demanding constant vigilance, even cruel.” “Yes, it can be cruel. There are always some people who will stab you in the back.” “Do you like that?” “Of course not, but that’s the way it is .. and it can be fun.” “Fun?” “Yes, when you win! When you win, it’s great.” “What do you mostly feel in all of this?” “I’ve been feeling more and more exhausted. It’s tiring and stressful.” “Stressful. If you had another attitude about it all — what would that frame of mind be that you’d prefer?” “Well I’d prefer to be in a more motivated and pleasant frame of mind. I’d like to feel that what I do counts, adds to people’s lives, makes a contribution. I’d like it to be less stressful and more pleasant.” “And what would that be like?”

Profiling the Neuro-Semantic Frames That conversation began at the primary level with a question about Terry’s work and everyday activities. Terry first described his work and the roles he played at work as he mentioned a little bit of his job description. That identified his primary state (see Figure 20:1). Above that we began exploring his meta-level frames of his World dimension—the feeling and belief frames about his work and career. I first asked about his level of pleasure in that domain. This was to discover the emotional affect of his matrix and the quality of his World dimension. His response indicated that he did not frame it with joy or delight at all. Instead he framed work as being boring and unpleasant, an unpleasant necessity.

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Figure 18:1

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Profiling Terry’s World of Business

Is this the Meaning of Life? [No]

What is the meaning of life? Contribution... Doing what counts

There’s not Enough; World of Scarcity Business is a Win/Lose situation. Business is a Fight People always ready to stab you in the back. Business is all about Money “Another Day/ Another Dollar.” Making Money — Necessity “It’s necessary to do this to make a living.” Pleasurable? [No] [Emotional Affect] Stale/Boring Primary State Terry —>

General Men’s Clothing —> Manager Shop Actions/ Roles/ Job Description

Customers The Public

When Terry said that his mindset was governed by the idea of “another day, another dollar,” we discovered his frame that work was only about money. It was only about making money to “make a living.” What was the emotional affect of this frame? Pressure, necessity, resignation. He had to work to make a living. This was his frame that explained why he experienced work the way he did. Did he believe that work was only about money? Yes and no. On one hand he did, yet he did not believe it consciously. And more importantly, he did not want to believe it. What lets us know that he believes it? He said it was true using a reality frame, “That’s the way it is,” he said. And in saying that, he validated the thought. He as much said, “Yes, that’s the way it is, that’s real, that’s life.” Because it is in validating a thought that we transform mere thoughts into beliefs and commission them to become “commands to the nervous system,” we thereby create our reality belief frames. Yet often we do not like them or want them. These are dis-owned frames that nevertheless operate, and sometimes operate even more powerfully because they are disowned, and therefore outside-of-consciousness. -228-

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Did he think that working for money was “the meaning of life?” No. That did not fit. His desired frame was that life is about contributing, doing something that counts. Yet at the primary level he was working, and felt that he was forced to work, to make a living. This was framed by Terry as the cold and calculating fact of “economic reality.” This is just the way business is. It is just the way to succeed in this area of life. Terry’s World dimension also involved a frame of scarcity. The metaphor frame was that work was like a fight and like living in a jungle. For him, business is a win/lose proposition. Clearly, Terry didn’t like his world-view of work inasmuch as it conflicted with “the meaning of life” that he vaguely felt and wanted. The Art of Profiling This interview illustrates how you can ask questions that go after the metalevel states and frames in exploring and profiling the mental-emotional world that a person lives in. Doing this will give you a sense of how a person’s matrix is constructed. These higher states (meta-states) describe the texturing and formatting of the person’s dimensions and gives evidence of the operating meta-programs, beliefs, reality strategies, decisions, expectations, values, identifications, etc. It enables you to formulate a clearer picture of the internal universe a person lives in and the model of the world that drives a person’s thinking, feeling, perceiving, sorting, acting, talking, etc. Formulating things in this way gives you a more systemic picture of a person’s neuro-semantic reality. Instead of sorting out the meta-phenomena (beliefs, values, understandings, identifications, purpose, intentionality, pleasure, spirituality, etc.) as if they were separate entities, you can recognize them as different facets of the same thing. It’s as if the diamond of consciousness has dozens of facets, each giving another point of view. How do you learn to profile in this way? First, shift from traditional psychological training and linear thinking to a new and higher kind of thinking. This new kind of thinking is described and facilitated in the reflexivity of meta-states: 1) Think systemically about the feedback and feed forward-loops of the mind and track the information and energy through the system. 2) Think non-linearly about these loops as you integrate reflexivity into your model of mind-emotion-body functioning. -229-

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3) Recognize that “logical levels” are not things or hierarchal, but a layering of thoughts-and-feelings which creates the person’s unique psycho-logics. 4) Recognize the dynamic and fluid nature of these meta levels. Appreciate the system as comprised of fluid frames—each influencing all of the other frames. 5) Recognize that each level presents another facet of the same thing. Every level is a “belief” and every belief is a value, is an expectation, is an understanding, a decision, etc. This simultaneous redundancy enables you to check and test your hypothesis about a person’s experience.

Meta-Questioning Elicitation Pattern Think of any emotion, state, resource, problem, or issue that holds significant meaning and value for you. You know you have picked something that has semantic significance if it initiates positive or negative emotional reactions in you. You could pick loneliness or the ability to feel connected even when alone, learned helplessness or resilience, nastiness or charm, etc. Now process that subject using the following set of questions. This will enable you to begin to develop a Neuro-Semantic profile of that experience. 1) Nominalization: What do you call this experience or emotion that you want to explore? How do you label it and describe it? How do you know to call it this? What lets you call it this versus calling it something else?

2) Value/ Importance: What do you most of all want from this experience, or want to avoid? Why is this important to you? How is it valuable to you? What’s your outcome in wanting (or not wanting) this?

3) Meta-Importance/ Outcome: When you imagine obtaining that value or outcome, what do you then get? What do you get from valuing that value? What do you not get from valuing that value? What are your higher values or meanings of that?

4) Attentional Focus: Where do you put your attention during this experience or emotion? -230-

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Are you more focused on something inside yourself or something external? Are you more focused on the now, the past, or the future? Are you more focused on content or process (structure)?

5) Way of Being in the World: What’s your style of operating when in this experience or emotion? Are you operating from necessity, option, desire, possibility? Which style of action term (modal operator) best describes your way of operating: can/ can’t; want to/ have to, must not; should/ should not?

6) Emotional/ Somatic: How neurologically engaged do you feel in the experience or emotion? Do you feel more active or passive? Do you feel passive, aggressive, or assertive? Do you feel moved toward the experience or away from it? How much intensity do you feel in this state from 0 to 10? How appropriate is this intensity in context? Would you like to experience more or less intensity?

7) Relational-Thinking Patterns: While you’re in this experience, are you sorting for things similar or dissimilar? Are you seeking to match things or mismatch? Are you paying attention to what fits or what differs? Are you paying attention to details or the big picture?

8) Alignment/ Congruency: How aligned with all of your values and visions do you feel when here? Are you aligned or in conflict? To what degree? What objections (if any) seem to hold you back from fully being here?

9) Sense of Self/ Identity: How much does this experience affect your sense of self? Does this define or influence your self-definition? To what degree? How does it affect your self-esteem as a person and your self-confidence in skills?

10) Decision/ Volition: To what extent have you decided to experience (or not experience) this? Have you made a decision for or against this? To what extent?

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A Template for Profiling Bob Bodenhamer formulated the template at the end of this chapter for collecting information. He used it when he began studying and profiling with numerous individuals who stutter.

The Matrix of Frames that Support the Experience of ...

Meaning Dimension The Meanings that Support the Experience ... Classifications Labels Associations Evaluations Frames The Intentionality Dimension From the lowest to the highest Intentions

#2 Self

Content Dimensions #3 Power #4 Time #5 Others

#6 World

Divide a sheet of paper into three basic sections: Meaning—Intention— Content Dimensions. Use the first section for gathering information about the person’s Meaning dimension. Identify what and how they classify things, the associations they create, the evaluations they make, and the frames that they set. Use the second column for the person’s Intentionality Dimension. Identify the person’s intentions within each of the five content dimensions. Collect the person’s intentions generally as well as the -232-

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person’s levels of intentionality. Inquire about the first intention, then the intention of that first intention, and so on all the way up the levels of intentions. In the third column elicit the five content dimensions: Self, Power, Others, Time, and World. Using the Meta-Domains As a Diagnostic and Profiling Tool If you want to profile a person, group, or culture using these tools, you can also use the four meta-domains of NLP. Then you can sort out what the person offers in the categories of language patterns (the Meta-Model), the linguistic markers of perceptual filters (Meta-Programs), verbal and nonverbal signals of states-about-states (Meta-States), and the cinematic features of one’s mental movie (the representations and their qualities). 1) Linguistic markers (the Meta-Model): The 22 linguistic distinctions which indicate the structuring of a person’s neuro-linguistic world. These language patterns reveal how a person linguistically codes meanings, the thinking patterns being used to process causation, equivalence, and the things left out. 2) Perceptual filters and thinking patterns (Meta-Programs): The 60+ sorting distinctions (Figuring Out People) that we call meta-programs which describe the various ways a person can sort, pay attention to, filter, and think about information. Listen for the linguistic markers of and the behavioral expressions. 3) Levels of States and the layering of meta-cognition (Meta-States): The meta-relationship of any thought, emotion, or physiology that stands in a meta-position to another. These will show up in language as meta-terms (about, of, relating, in terms of, higher, etc.) and in the physiology of one state-upon-another-state. Look for the layering of levels of mind to sort out the layers of embedded frames within frames which make up the matrix of one’s mind. 4) Meta-modalities, cinematic features of mental movies (sub-modalities): These features and properties (“sub-modality” distinctions) describe how a person codes, edits, directs, and produces the mental movies that they play to represent things. Summary You can use The Matrix Model as a diagnostic tool by questioning to explore how a given person has created his matrix—the meanings and layers of meanings that he has constructed about something. -233-

The four meta-domains of NLP give you four redundant systems for profiling a person’s responses. End of Chapter Notes 1. We call this calibration. To develop calibration skills for detecting a person’s state, see User’s Manual of the Brain. To calibrate and read “sub-modalities” on the outside, see The Spirit of NLP. To calibrate and read meta-programs on the outside, see Figuring Out People.

The Matrix of Stuttering Meaning Dimension Classify non-fluent speech as “blocking” and “stuttering.” Associate blocking and stuttering with fear and shame. Evaluate it as bad and unacceptable. Frame it as having negative meanings in the content dimensions.

Intention Dimension: Don’t look Take Control. like a fool. Control every Don’t show word spoken. Vulnerabilities. Change. Play it safe. Become very Don’t court self-aware. criticism. Try really let it Stop blocking hard not to & stuttering. look foolish.

Self I’m flawed. I’m broken. Inadequate. Foolish. Worthless. Insecure. Timid / Shy. Unique. Sensitive

Power Loss of Control & Safety. Can’t change. Do something. Fluency is the cure all. Can’t speak up. Can’t introduce self.

Don’t Don’t attract Repeat attention. Past. Don’t show Block vulnerabilities. emotions. Don’t be Don’t laughed at. Avoid all continue exposure to into ridicule. Future. Cover up.

Play it safe. Avoid situations for speaking.

Time

Others

World

This has followed me all my life & will do so in the future. No progress. Impatience.

Reject and fear of rejection. Expectations Self-conscious of others Isolation. Judged. Disliked. Seen as flawed and undesirable.

Can’t handle situations of communication. Success less likely, harder.

The Grounding Dimension of State Anxiety Powerless Self-Pity Victim Self-Contempt Insecure Timid, shy Fearful Weak

Stress Pressure. Doom

Foolish. Embarrassment Shame Discouraged

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THE MATRIX MODEL AS A DIAGNOSTIC TOOL Neo: “Do you always look at it encoded?” Cypher: “Have to ... too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, and redhead.” The Matrix

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f you can use the Matrix Model for profiling the structure of a person’s frames and entire frame network, then you can easily gather that information for the purpose of creating a diagnosis. Even given the spiraling reflexivity of the system and the central role of the Meaning dimension, you can put this intelligence to good use by thinking about using this model as a diagnostic tool for working with people. Diagnostic Criteria Diagnostic criteria are the standards and benchmarks that you use in exploring, analyzing, and evaluating a matrix. What will you look for? How will you know if a matrix is well-formed and effectively supports a person? If a person’s matrix is a construct of frames about how to identify and define reality, then as an invented set of beliefs, it is successful when it achieves the following— It enables one to achieve legitimate goals. It is practical and useful. -235-

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It empowers the person giving one a sense of value and dignity. It enhances life with permeable boundaries rather than rigid walls. It gives you a sense of control and choice. It allows one to enjoy life and have fun. It supports health and relationships. It enables one to be balanced, congruent, and aligned with values. It encourages mindfulness in moving through life. It allows one to be focused and clear. It enables one to operate as a self-correcting system, open to feedback and corrections.

Diagnostic Focus in using the Matrix Model As with any model, above and beyond the technology of the tools that it offers is the attitude and focus of the practitioner. What is the best and most effective attitude for using the Matrix Model for diagnosis? Here are some suggested guidelines. Meaning. First and foremost focus on the quality and style of the person’s meaning-making ability and results. What is the person’s typical and default thinking patterns? What is the style and quality of maps and mapping? What stories does the person narrate to self and to others and for what use? Can the person do critical thinking and examine his own thinking? What is the person’s explanatory style when bad things happen?

Developmental Experience. Focus on the quality of the person’s developmental experiences. Has the person succeeded or failed in negotiating the required stages of psycho-social-mental development. What permissions and taboos are incorporated in the person’s dimensions? What is the person’s quality of contact with the world? Does the person have any dimensions that are under-developed or overdeveloped? What does this do to her sense of balance in life? How open or closed is the person to being open, authentic, honest, vulnerable, connected, and bonded to others? How defensive is the person to a sense of threat to “self?” What defense mechanisms does the person typically use? What is the level or degree of the person’s ego-strength?

Beliefs. Focus on the person’s beliefs. These are the frames that operate as “commands to the nervous system.” -236-

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How many limiting and impoverishing beliefs compared to how many empowering beliefs? What are the key beliefs that drive the person in each of the dimensions? What is the person’s core belief about life? Is there any critical negative belief that is holding the person back or that creates a particular problem?

Reflexivity. Focus on the process of reflexivity. This is a key for how we use our thoughts and feelings on ourselves. To do this with negative states puts a person at odds with one’s self, it is to abuse oneself and to frame oneself negatively. How aware or mindful is the person about her own reflexivity? What does the person feed-forward into the future? Anxiety, fear, idealistic hopes, realism, faith, courage, passion, etc.? What event, idea, emotion, or person does the person keep looping around in his mind-and-emotions? How well developed is the person’s ability to step back from himself and gain perspective?

Concepts and Principles. Focus on the conceptual world. The person’s concepts determine the semantic world itself and identify the domains of knowledge that any given person is operating from. What semantic states does the person use in navigating through life? How enhancing or impoverishing? Does the person suffer from a bad relationship with any particular idea? What concepts dominate the person’s life?

Attitudes and emotional predispositions. Focus on attitudes as the coalesced meta-states which have become embodied as the person’s mental and physical posture. How much vitality, energy, and “life” does the matrix provide the person? What key expectations regularly set the person up for hope and/or disappointment? What are the dominant attitudes of the person’s matrix?

Intentions and values. Focus on intentions. These give birth to a person’s agendas, motivation, and life direction. What are the key intentions that the dimensions create for the person? Does the person seek worth and dignity, control, security, commitment, love, being right, approval, achievement, energy, being efficient, status, being unique and special, knowledge, independence, autonomy, authority, privacy, secrecy, enjoyment, pleasure, choices, strength, power, fairness -237-

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and justice, harmony, peace, wonder, worship, fun, adventure, exploration, travel, etc.? What are the key emotional states that the person wants? Are there any real key decisions that govern the person’s choices whether limiting or empowering?

Making Hypotheses about the Matrix The process of diagnosis first involves gathering high quality information using Meta-Model and Meta-State questions. Such questions allow you to explore the structure, nature, and quality of the higher frames of mind which operate as self-organizing attractors in a neuro-semantic system. From there you will be able to make better hypotheses or educated guesses about what’s going on and what needs to be done. Often people make evaluations based on an intuitive sense or “feel” about a person’s matrix as a whole. A central danger in doing that is failing to take your own matrix of frames into account. When you don’t, you can easily slide down the slippery slope of projecting your frames onto others. Then you are mindreading. Then you are meeting them at your model of the world, rather than theirs. When seeking to more thoroughly understand someone, approach with respect and compassion as you ask yourself such following focusing questions: Is the matrix operating well or is it dysfunctional in some aspect? If there’s a problem, what is the problem and where is it in the system? Where and how does the person experience the “problem?”

Use the following focus questions when you’re in the process of creating a working hypothesis as you work with the person for coaching, managing, communicating, or psychotherapy. 1) What is the degree of ego-strength in the person’s Self dimension? How much ego-strength does the person show in handling stressors and frustration? How much ego-strength to look reality in the face without breaking down? How defensive or non-defensive is the person about being a fallible human being? A mortal? How active and/or even proactive is the person in accepting personal responsibilities? What is the person’s capacity for humor, especially for self-humor? What is the person’s capacity for self-acceptance? -238-

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What is the person’s capacity for frustration-tolerance? For the tolerance of ambiguity? Where is the person in his or her development?

2) What resources are present or missing in the person’s Power dimension? What is the person’s level of motivation for growth, ongoing development, and for learning? What is the quality of the person’s motivation? Is it mostly toward goals and values or away from troubles and problems? How much power (control, energy) does the person feel? To what degree does the person feel in control of his or her own life? How much self-efficacy does he or she express?

3) What enhancements or repairs does the person need in the Meaning dimension? How much meta-awareness does the person have for looking at himself objectively? What is the person’s skill level for critical thinking? How does the person respond to herself when involved in a spiraling and reflexive loop? What key meta-programs color the person’s perceptions and responses? What are the key meta-model distinctions that govern the person’s linguistic habits?

Matrix Questioning for Exploration: The following offers a series of focused questions for exploring the dimensions. This should not be confused with “the right way” or the only -239-

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way, it merely represents one way to begin a useful exploration into a matrix of frames. 1) Identify the States What is the person’s primary state and meta-states? What gestalt states emerge and play a role? What are the component states that come together to create the larger gestalt?

2) Identify the Perception How is the person perceiving things? What meta-programs are being used? What perceptual position is the person using?

3) Identify the Intentions What is the person’s intention? And intention of intention? What is the person’s motivation, agenda, outcome? What desires and needs is the person moving toward? What fears and aversions is the person moving away from?

4) Identify the Matrix of Frames What is the person’s frame of reference? What is the person’s frame of representation? What is the person’s frame of mind? (Attitude) What is the person’s belief/ value frames? What is the person’s understanding/ knowledge frames? What is the person’s pain/ pleasure frames? What is the person’s taboo and prohibition frames?

5) Identify the Style of Operation What is the overall style of the person’s system of responses? Adaptability: Rigid — Flexible Open – Closed Direct – Indirect People – Task Reactive – Proactive Global – Specific Matching – Mismatching Options – Procedures Slow — Fast Obsessive — Relaxed

6) Identify the Culture What is the overall atmosphere? -240-

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The interpersonal culture? The group culture? The organizational culture? Gender, race, nationality, economics, religious, philosophical? Profiling the basic Dimensions: The following set of questions tracks through the dimensions. You can use various contents for considering the following: Making money, serving, contemplating, defending self, enjoying, enduring, accumulating, giving, thinking, protecting, gathering, etc. 1) Ontology (Meaning): What and who exists? What is its nature? Is human nature bad, neutral, or good? Are people bad, neutral or good? Are people worthy or unworthy? Do they have conditional or unconditional value?

2) Purpose (Intention) How should you live? What’s important that you should do? How should you spend your time? What values, standards, criteria should you use to evaluate your use of time, energy, and effort? What is the reason for your being and acting? What outcomes are desirable and ecological?

3) State What are your most common emotions? What is your degree of emotional intelligence (emotional awareness, monitoring, managing, connecting). Are there any emotions that you hate, fight against, or forbid?

4) Self: Who are you and what are you about? What should you be doing, how should you live? What does this or that mean to you about yourself? Do you have value and worth or do you have to earn it?

5) Power. What can you do? What skills or aptitudes do you have? What do you want to achieve (doing), experience (being), or accumulate (having)? How skilled are you in developing your skills? How skilled in learning, in handling errors and mistakes? -241-

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How are you at risk management skills?

6) People, Relationships (Others): How do you relate? With whom? How much do you believe in competition or cooperation? Do you avoid people, conform, are you hostile or friendly? Do you think of yourself as an individual or part of a team members? How do people operate? Are they helpless pawns in the world or do they have choice and free will to choose? Are people helpless and passive or do they have power to make a difference?

7) Time: What time zone (past, present, future) do you mostly prefer and/or live in? How do you mostly use the past? How effective is this? How do you handle the future? Are you time efficient? Or does time oppress you?

8) World of Work, Culture, Family, Nation, etc.: What areas or domains of life are you knowledgeable and skilled? How do you think about the larger world “out there?” Do you consider it friendly or unfriendly? What new universes of meaning are you interested in exploring?

The Matrix as a Diagnostic Tool When using the Matrix Model, look for what is regular and consistent in how the person you are observing is thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting. Regularity, as a guiding principle of the matrix enables you to discover the operational factors. What is regular and consistent typically will point to the governing patterns and these, in turn, will direct you to the person’s meanings. Because there is patterned structure to how a person’s thinking, feeling, speaking, and behaving, you can expect people to act in consistent and systematic ways. If you blink and miss a pattern, don’t worry, patterns repeat. That’s what a pattern is—a set of actions that repeat over time. Patterns that govern one’s basic modus operandi will repeat again and again.

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What’s important is to keep observing. Continue to evoke awareness by asking questions and stimulating that person’s frames. Any and every significant pattern that governs a person’s life will keep showing up. We all do this, we are amazingly consistent in our patterns. Practice accessing sensory awareness by returning afresh to your senses. The better your sensory acuity and ability to just observe without the commitment and activation of your own personal dimensions, the cleaner your observations. Begin by identifying the interactive systems at work in the person you are profiling. Similarly, profile your own Neuro-semantic patterns of thinking, emoting, and relating. Knowing your own patterns prevents you from projecting them onto others and then thinking that you see them in the other. Know and recognize your business patterns, your cultural patterns, and your general meaning-making patterns. Practice using the linguistic and non-linguistic cues that mark out a particular matrix as well as the elicitation questions. 2 As you do, keep track of the frames. Do this at first as a learning tool for identifying and recognizing the dimensions. Practice moving up and down the levels of specificity and abstraction so that you can work with the holons and the holarchy of the matrix. Then you’ll be able to test your educated guesses of “the parts in the whole and the whole in the parts.” This kind of flexibility of consciousness will allow you to identify the system leverage points and where and when to tweak the neuro-semantic system for systemwide transformations. Matrix Influences in the Neuro-Semantic System Knowing that meaning creates and drives all of the dimensions, always default to the Meaning dimension for understanding. It is the source dimension for all of the other dimensions. At the stimulus of any event, one or all of the dimensions may be activated. But which one? You’ll have to pay attention to this to catch how the dimensions interface. 1) The Meaning dimension and the entire Neuro-Semantic System. As a meaning-maker your job is never done. You continue to construct meaning as you continue to learn and experience. You are always creating more internal frames and higher levels of embedded frames. Your Meaning dimension continues to interface with all of the dimensions in this ongoing process. Because of this, you can continue to transform and update your entire neuro-semantic system. -243-

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What meanings are you currently updating? Is your style of meaning-making still relevant and age-appropriate? What’s the quality of your framing? How enhancing is your explanatory style as you make interpretations of things?

2) The Intention dimension in the Neuro-Semantic System. Behind every construct of meaning, you have some intention. This capacity for intention establishes your direction in life and sets out particular goals and objectives. You also have intentions as purposes for each of the subdimensions. It is in the Intention Dimension that you move to choice point and make choices within the constraints of life. 3) The Self dimension in the Neuro-Semantic System. Your full “self” is defined by all of the content dimensions. Each provides yet another facet of yourself. In the Self dimension is your being-self, your self as a human being, a person, and so deals with your sense of personal value. Here your sense of self relates to how you treat yourself— your appraisal of your right to be, your worth, your equality with others, etc. As your meanings create your highest intentions, you also use these for selfdefinition, defining yourself by your intentions, motivations, and agendas. 4) The Power dimension in the Neuro-Semantic System. Your mapping of meanings about your personal sense of empowerment determines how you will go about coping and/or mastering things. Those low on this scale will take a more passive and defensive role in life, those high in this area will take a more active, proactive, perhaps aggressive, and hands-on approach. Your sense of power and resources, your social sense of self (who you are in the eyes of others) and your sense of connecting and bonding. As a social creature, you inevitably interact with others and use your interactions for self-definition. You do this with your larger relationships in the world of work, play, politics, economics, race, culture, etc. Some people feel like victims. They claim no sense of power and no ownership of the responses they make or could make. Others think and act as perpetrators assuming the power to do whatever they like regardless of how it negatively affects others. -244-

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In the middle of the scale to the high end, we find the movers and shakers who seek to leave a lasting impact on our world for good. The greater your sense of personal power, the more active you will be with Others (Others dimension) and in the World of activities (World dimension). 5) The Others dimension in the Neuro-Semantic System. Your mapping of meanings about people and human nature influences how you approach people, deal with them, relate to them, love, respect, conflict with them, etc. If you think that people are dangerous and threatening or friendly and supporting, you will typically find them to be so. Your behaviors and responses will evoke what you find in most people. This affects your sense of self as well as your sense of power to cope effectively as you relate to others. All of your social skills and emotions come into play here and evoke your immediate and long-term intentions (Intention dimension). 6) The Time dimension in the Neuro-Semantic System. You similarly experience yourself in terms of time—you may define yourself as an “on time” (Through Time) person or a “lost in time” (In Time) person who can regularly show up late for appointments. Those who live in the past are past oriented whereas those locked into this moment may be impulsive and unable to either learn from the past or plan for the future. 7) The World dimension in the Neuro-Semantic System. Your mappings about how friendly or unfriendly the world is will strongly determine how you will react and what you will find. This will lead to successfully or unsuccessfully adjusting and mastering those Worlds and that will, in turn, influence your dimensions of Self, Power, and Intention. Your relationship to Time determines whether you will use time to your benefit in an efficient and pleasant way, or whether you will treat it like an enemy and feel pressured and controlled by it. This dimension governs your style of moving through the world, whether randomly or sequentially. You will then define yourself accordingly, sense the resources to either plan or to be present in the moment. This will enable or disable you in your relationships. The Gestalting of the Matrix As the matrix becomes more complex and layered, new features and properties begin to emerge. This occurs from the way the dimensions -245-

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interplay to interface with each other and all of the state-upon-state interactions. As a system, this generates new properties and qualities. These systemic processes generate gestalts—phenomena that are “more than and different from the sum of the parts.” In terms of the Matrix Model, this includes the following distinctions which partly describe how the system works as a system. Health of the System Ecology, Balance, Energy, Vitality Heart of the System Is your heart in this? Is this alive? A vital dream? Emergence What emerges from this? What is the attitude of the system? Looping Functions How does the system loop? What are the loops? How open or closed are the loops? Expectations What do you now expect? Anticipate? What self-similarity is being replicated? Summary If there is rhyme and reason to the way you work, if there is structure to all of your experiences, and if you can identify that structure and work with form and process rather than content to create more dramatic and powerful transformation—then the Matrix Model provides both a diagnostic tool and a set of distinctions for knowing what to do when. The Matrix Model makes it clear that not every frame or “logical level” has the same kind of pervasive effect in the Neuro-semantic system. The Meaning dimension is the core of the matrix and calls the others into existence. It also keeps them alive and functioning. After all, how you make meaning primarily governs the experiences you have and the quality of your life. The dimensions provide a way to sort out all of the complexity and layeredness of human thinking-and-emoting so that you can more effectively recognize what to do (which dimension is activated?) and when to do it (following the “energy” through the system), and how to check to see if the neuro-semantic system changed sufficiently. End Notes: 1. The term neuro-semantics originated with Alfred Korzybski in his work, Science and Sanity (1933). -246-

2. In addition to the steps of questions in this chapter and in the previous chapter, see Appendix A for more questions for flushing out meta-frames.

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THE SPIRALING OF THE MATRIX “It is of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.” Aristotle

T

here’s another distinction to introduce about The Matrix Model. This is an essential distinction for understanding and effectively working with the sub-dimensions of the matrix. Without a recognition of this facet of the matrix, an appreciation of it, and the ability to handle it, several things will probably happen, things that are not good. First, the matrix will have you. Second, you will not be able to develop the skills for mastering your matrix. Third, you’ll not understand what’s happening to you, or why, or what to do. Given this, the critical distinction to address in this chapter is the spiraling movement of the mind. Human minds go in circles. When you get an idea, you go round and round that idea, or which event that you’re trying to understand, or that an experience, or concept you are considering. You will also mentally spiral up and down the levels of specificity and abstraction as you seek to understand things and/or create meaning about things. It is this

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spiraling movement of your mind-body-emotion system to take into account to adequately model the human experience. Up the Spiraling Levels When you can distinguish primary states from meta-states, you will be able to do something quite revolutionary and something that will probably have some very surprising effects. You will be able to now tease out the hidden structure within a person’s states so that you can recognize the structure in its complexity. This has been sensed in NLP, but it has not been known explicitly or with precision. The Matrix Model adds this to NLP. This primary/meta state distinction enables you to recognize that your mindbody-emotion system not only goes out to take in the world as you mentally map the territory onto the screen of your awareness. Mind also goes inside in multiple directions to think about what it represents. This distinction separates primary states from meta-states. A primary state focuses on the triggers, events, and stimuli out there in the world. By contrast, meta-states focus on what you think and feel about a state. I think it was the depth metaphor of Transformational Grammar and of Psychoanalysis, as well as most of the psychological models of the time that prevented the original developers of NLP from recognizing the levels of the mind. Even Korzybski put his levels of abstraction (or Structural Differential) model up-side-down so that with each next level of abstraction about the previous, the visual digital image (the diagram) indicated responses going down. The same thing happened in the change pattern of Core Transformation (Andreas and Andreas, 1991). While they used a meta-question (“And when you get that fully and completely in just the way you want it, what do you have that’s even more important than that?”), they spoke of it as going down to the core of a person’s center. The incongruity of this mixed metaphor has prevented the development of a truly meta-level model.

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As a result, the “going down” metaphor dilutes that excellent metaquestion. Representationally, the depth metaphor visually codes things as getting smaller and smaller so the mind-body-emotion system seems to become increasingly narrow. Going down moves to tighter and smaller perspectives. It moves one down to a “core” which typically implies something that is more permanent and less changeable—an unchangeable center. These entailments came along with that metaphor and make it less useful than the height metaphor. Enter a new metaphor. The height metaphor allows you to present your understanding of the levels of the mind in a visual digital diagram so you can portray higher and higher frames or states which spiral around in loops about the previous level. This describes the foundational understanding of the Meta-States Model and the heart of the Matrix Model. When the Mind Spins Your mind-body-emotion system not only thinks, it thinks about its thinking. This meta-cognitive skill goes by numerous terms: meta-thinking, meta-feeling, meta-communicating, etc. These meta-cognitions are not about the world “out there” as much as they are about the internal world of a person’s matrix. By this reflexivity we generate meta-states. Notice the layeredness of the mental-emotional states in the following expressions: You fear that you may not be up to a challenge and will look foolish and so hesitate to act as you wonder if it’s worth the risk... I didn’t know how she really meant what she said, whether as a compliment or as a tease, so I wasn’t completely sure about how to respond. What if it was a set-up? But then again, it could just be her way of showing that she’s interested, but then why would she be interested in me? I’m really interested in going to the seminar of wealth creation, but just as soon as I pick up the phone to register I wonder if the investment in time and money is worth it, because I know myself, how I put things off and that I might go and learn great techniques but then procrastinate about doing them. Then I’d feel even worse than if I didn’t go. What’s wrong with me that I can’t make up my mind?

Mind begins with an external trigger—an event, person, or idea out there in the world and as you bring it in, represent it, turn it into your internal picture show—you spin around it. Your matrix goes into action. You loop round and round the idea, thinking this about it, feeling that about it, bringing a memory to bear upon it, an imagination, an expectation, a fear, a worry, a thrill, a joy, a story, etc. This is how mind works.3 -249-

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Daniel Goleman describes this spinning or looping in his work in the area of Emotional Intelligence. “The worrying mind spins on in an endless loop of low-grade melodrama, one set of concerns leading on to the next and back again.” (p.65)

Minds spin. They go round and round. They reflect back onto themselves. This unique human mechanism of self-reflexive consciousness or reflexivity drives and governs how your mind “goes inside” and invents a world of multiple frames, frames embedded in frames that maps a model of the world in terms of beliefs, beliefs-about-beliefs, concepts, understandings, classifications, paradigms, etc. In NLP, Robert Dilts first recognized this layered complexity and designed the first “logical level” system. Using the foundational work in Bateson, Dilts identified several of the layered structures: behaviors, capabilities, environment, beliefs, values, identity, and mission or spirit. Yet there were problems with the “Neuro-Logical Levels.” For one thing the model used and treated these nominalizations (“beliefs,” “values,” etc.) as if they were things, and not only that, but things that could stand in a hierarchical order like a series of steps. Yet these are not things, but processes. These terms refer to the dynamic, fluid, and spiraling movement of the mind-body-emotion system framing, punctuating, classifying, confirming, etc. These processes operate as a holarchy rather than a hierarchy. Made out of holons, a holarchy is dynamic, moving, fluid, and is characterized by simultaneity. No wonder the whole process is so difficult to picture. Rigid steps, ladders, and balconies don’t do justice to such processes. Nor do Russian dolls embedded inside each other. Tangible things like these simply fail to offer an accurate picture of such fluid energies of the mind structuring and framing and spiraling around ideas. While we can tease out and diagram the matrix of one set of frames around one idea, the diagraming still tends to be linear and sequential unlike the non-linear nature of the mind-body-emotion system. Neuro-semantic states do not hold still nor are they tangible. Instead, they operate as the minding, emoting, framing, and punctuating of ideas. Spiraling States

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There are several dynamic metaphors that we can use to begin to picture the dynamic spiraling states of our neuro-semantic states that more accurately and usefully describe the layering of the mind (hence, “logical leveling or layering”). 1) A spiraling whirlwind or tornado. The winds of the mind blow round and round, coming back and referencing the beginning place which becomes the center of gravity of the matrix like a spiraling whirlwind. In this metaphor you rise up the levels of your mind thinking-feeling about previous states and then dropping down through the center to bring the influence of the second thoughts, the third thoughts, etc. to the first. The whirlwind metaphor enables us to picture the looping of the mindbody-emotion system and to recognize the systemic processes at work. It gives a picture to the idea of system complexity and that while many interactive factors are at work, out of the chaos arises and emerges dynamic structures, sometimes strange dynamics emerge.

2) An electromagnetic image. An electromagnetic image offers another dynamic portrayal of our neurosemantic energies. With magnetic energies, we can imagine them pulling on and attracting things to themselves as iron filings are pulled toward a magnet and out of the chaos of a heap of filings order as a structured form emerges. This metaphor pictures a system in oscillation as also a person may oscillate back and forth between two poles, sometimes unfolding new potentials and at other times enfolding upon itself.

3) Kaleidoscope. Take the image of a variegated ever-changing set of distinctions that keep reformulating with every twist of the lens. Your mind is like that to the extent that with every turn and twist of your thinking, you see new things and new formations come into view.

Look! It Goes in Circles! Which direction does the looping go? Does it go up or down? Are you engaged in a downward spiraling of thoughts-and-emotions that become increasingly negative and limiting? Are you engaged in an upward spiraling of thoughts-and-emotions that become increasingly positive and enhancing? Are you creating a dragon state or a genius state? Is your looping going in or out? Your thoughts can go in circles and spirals, they can go backwards and forwards and turn inside out. In managing consciousness we commonly seek to directionalize our focus. We focus attention to accomplish a desired goal. For that we first need a good operational map for how to achieve our objective. Yet this is the -251-

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challenge because the brain does not work linearly. It operates by a different kind of “logic.” This non-linear and circular thinking of reflexivity has been pretty much been ignored in NLP. You won’t find much in the books of NLP. Apart from Turtles All the Way Down by Grinder and DeLozier, Meta-States was the first book that really delved into the nature of reflexivity as it modeled self-reflexivity. By reckoning with how the brain goes in circles, spins around in loops, and spirals down into vicious loops or up into virtuous loops, we discover that brains do not follow the strategy model in making clean, discreet representational steps one after the other. It would be nice if it did. But it does not. A brain that goes round in circles will reflect back onto itself again and again and again. It will think in multiple loops simultaneously. It will operate from its own psycho-logics in how it moves around and twists around rather than follow a straight path. No wonder mathematical and “logical” thinking seems strange and foreign on first exposure. Such thinking is not “natural.” It’s not the way brains normally process information. To learn such describes a new habit of mind. What is the natural habit of mind? Brains are literally structured in a network of layers. There are lower brain structures and higher structures. It’s more natural to the network of layers of the brain that when you process information, your nerve impulses go round in circles. First you process it at one of the lower levels using some of the lower brain centers, then you move up the networks of the brain. Even when you get to the highest cerebral levels, the nerve impulses move around the network circuits of a brain. Your brain is built not to process information once, but twice and three times and multiple of times. Nerve impulses entering the eye and traveling to the brain hit the lower brain structures first, the amygdala which could set off the fight/flight arousal pattern, while simultaneously other impulses are being sent to the neocortex for more elaborate processing. Then those impulses return to influence, amplify or dampen the effect of the amygdala. As the brain functions in this way, so does the emergent property of awareness—“mind.” Mind, even more so than does brain, goes round in circles. You know this experience. You have a thought ... then you have a thought about that thought, then an emotion about that second thought, -252-

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which then reminds you of a memory, which triggers an imagination, which triggers an idea or belief or decision. Mentally, you are an expert at going round and round in circles. You loop back onto your thoughts and feelings. You even loop around inside of your loops and you do it so much that you can get “lost in your thoughts” and not “know where you are.” You rehearse the same thoughts and re-experience the same emotions over and over. You know better. You even catch yourself doing it, then you do it again. You are “caught in a loop.” This occurs in indecision as well as in insomnia. Some people do it so much that they obsess about some thought and then act out that obsessiveness in compulsive behavior. The rest of us just use it for quality things like repeating a fast food commercial jingle or something nasty that someone once said to us. With the looping of the mind, we generate a wide variety of mental and emotional phenomena from which emerges: insomnia, obsessive-compulsiveness, getting to threshold about something, amplifying a states, etc. A fun way to live, right? Well, not exactly. Most of us experience out of control looping as painful, distressful, or a sign that we’re “losing our mind.” You may question your sanity or your adequacy as a person. No wonder it doesn’t cross our mind to do it consciously, intentionally, and mindfully. Why would we do that? Yet, merely because you can and do go in circles and can send your thoughts and emotions, your mind-body states in loops does not mean that this has to be a negative or disempowering experience. What if you looped around great thoughts? Inspiring thoughts? Awesome thoughts? What if you found some really great frames, frames that you would thoroughly enjoy commissioning to be the frames of mind that you default to everyday? Experience of the Looping With second-rate thoughts, you will find the looping of your thoughts intensifies their pain. When they then become so painful and distressful, you will try to “make them stop.” You may try to do thought-stopping by using pattern interrupts, distractions, even addictive behaviors that diffuse consciousness through alcohol and drugs. Yet when this happens, the process of looping is not the actual problem. The problem is what you are looping around—the content of the thoughts -253-

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and the nature or quality of the looping. For instance, it may be rigid and inflexible, impenetrable. In rigid looping you go round and round and feel stuck about shifting or changing it. It has you rather than you having it. In rigid looping you could get stuck in a loop and lose control. This happens in obsessive-compulsiveness. Yet this is only one facet of mental-emotional loops. In such loops, you lock yourself inside of something limiting or toxic. Imagine going round and round such ideas as: “That’s the way it is.” “You can’t change beliefs.” “Changing personality is trying to play god.” “This is terrible!” “You have to do this, you must, it is a moral imperative!”

When you are stuck inside of a closed loop, it’s common to feel that you can’t shut it off. The intrusion of thoughts, emotions, memories, imaginations run wild, seemingly outside your control. Yet there are other kinds of loops, empowering loops. Unlike the loops that spiral downwards into more and more desperation, there are loops that spiral upward eliciting increasing resourcefulness. There are flexible loops that are highly amendable to ongoing adjustments—self-correcting loops of the mind. The Psycho-Logics of Going Round in Circles All this looping raises several questions about rationality. Does this mean we are not rational or logical beings? Can we not think in a straightforward way from beginning to end? Obviously, the answer depends on what we mean by “rational.” Another answer is that our form of rationality involves non-linear thinking. We inevitably think by reflexively looping back onto our previous thoughts. And yes, we can directionalize our thoughts in simple strategies without much problem. The strategy of the experience of impulsive buying operates as a two-punch sequence: See—>Feel impatient impulse to buy (V—>K). Even the spelling strategy seems fairly direct: Hear word—>Make internal picture of the image of the Word—>Feel a sense that it is Right (or Wrong)—>Spell Word.

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Yet as you undoubtedly know, it is not really that simple. Minds don’t behave themselves that well. Our self-reflexivity drives our thinking to go in circles and to spiral around in loops. So what may at first seem linear, sequential, “logical,” and rational, has spirals of loops and circles when we look a little closer. Even the spelling strategy actually goes more like the following: “‘Reflexivity,’ okay, let me see what that looks like (goodness! her dress is bright!) ... re-flex-ibi-lity ... I don’t know if I’ve actually seen that word, humm ... I wonder if that’s right, I don’t know, ‘Does it feel right?’ (I’ve got to get some milk on the way home...) Well, kind of. Am I doing this right? (...and gas, I mustn’t forget about filling the car up)... Yes, it seems right.”

When we talk about “a stream of consciousness,” the metaphor suggests a single track or a single sequence of thoughts. It suggests that all of our thoughts are rushing down the same river bed. Yet you know from experience that even when you’re minding your own business, thoughts can bounce in like an explosion in a ping-pong ball factory. Mentally a lot can be on stage when you are doing something as simple as reading—the content of your thinking, the printed text, the ideas evoked, questions, background music, your sense of self. Yet all of these thoughts are not equally salient or sharply defined. Nor is it really what’s on your mind which plays the most crucial influence in your life. What plays the most crucial influence in your life are the thoughts in the back of your mind. These are among the frames which color your perspective—the meta-state structures which hold your matrix together. It is inside these stable mental attitudes that you constantly spiral around. Because your mind go round and round, it operates as a systemic network. This endows consciousness with complexity. You never just fear or get angry, you never just feel good or bad, you qualify and texture these experiences with yet additional thoughts and feelings. You feel embarrassed about your anger. You feel silly about a fear. Yet the looping does not just add more thoughts and feelings; it’s not an additive affair. It is more like multiplication or division because the higher thoughts classify and categorize the lower thoughts. The second thoughts react to the first thoughts so that they often multiply their effects.

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With every response that you make, you experience a feedback loop. After you respond to a trigger, that response re-enters as feedback. So you think, feel, or act yet again and feed-forward another response to the world. This leads to more feedback. Yet that’s just one feedback loop, the most immediate and primary feedback loop. After you get the feedback, you also feed that information back to yourself, to the higher levels of your mind where you code your matrix with various concepts. To that you then feedforward down through the levels of your thinking and emoting and send them on out to the world in your behaviors. You can now picture the feedback and feed-forward loops regarding how your mind and emotions go round in spirals, how it can spiral up or down into vicious or virtuous spirals. Summary To take charge of your mind, it’s essential to recognize that your brain not only takes you places, it also loops back onto itself and goes round in circles. Your brain can also go into a spin. When you know that, and get used to following the dizzying spirals, you can develop true mental mastery. The self-reflexive levels of your mind are not like static “steps” of a pyramid. As dynamic mental-emotional energies which spin around, they reflexively apply back onto themselves, repeatedly. Expect your matrix and those of others, to operate as a system of spirals.

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THE LOGICAL LEVELS OF THE MATRIX Modeling the Structure and Workings of Logical Levels “A systems thinker has a much better chance of accomplishing significant change than a systems tinker.” Michele L. Bachtell (2002, p. 59)

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et me just say it upfront and get it out of the way. If what follows shocks you, then at least I have your attention and I hope that you will stay with the line of reasoning to understand what I’m attempting to get at, whether you agree or not. There are no such things as “logical levels.” What we call “logical levels” are not levels at all, nor are they are actual. As dynamic, fluid, and non-linear processes, what we are referring to is actually shifting and changing thoughts-and-feelings. “Logical levels” is our neuro-semantic way of thinking, emoting, and framing things. To describe these processes using a verb, we would say, logical leveling.

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Any model of human consciousness must reflect this dynamic mind-body, or neuro-semantic, system. It must capture this fluidity of how we layer thought upon thought to create these so-called “levels.” In so layering state upon state, the first state relates as a member of a class to the class itself. For this, a static hierarchical model simply will not do. We need something more dynamically fluid. That’s why the “logical leveling” of your mind is not a hierarchy, but more like a hologram. Given this, no wonder then that writing about “logical levels” is difficult and tricky. On the surface, it sounds like I am writing about or describing a thing—an object. I am not. That’s the trick. What is the referent of the phrase “logical levels?” There is no actual referent outside a person’s nervous system. You’ve never seen that referent with your eyes. You cannot hear it with your ears. It does not exist in the world. It exists only in the mind. To what then do we refer when we talk about “logical levels?” What referent are we trying to point to? We are pointing to certain processes of thinking and feeling. What we call “logical levels” are the mental processes or activities by which we classify and punctuate experience.

If you want to understand “logical levels,” you have to begin with thought itself as the first “level.” Before you can layer level upon level of thought and emotion and create a “logical” relationship between them, it is useful to understand how you create your first level of awareness. Further, a “thought” is never just a thought, it is always a “thought-emotion” and is fully localized in the body-brain system. Thoughts as neuro-linguistic processes use symbols to code experiences. -258-

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Because a “thought” is not a thing, but a process, to treat it as a thing leads to falsely modeling “logical levels” in a static way. This is a fundamental error as it to use static metaphors like that of a pyramid. What are we really talking about? We are talking about thinking and feeling as dynamic and fluid. Thoughts as thinking-and-feeling processes go forward and backward, thoughts go in circles and spirals, and they can turn inside-out. A number of years ago I modeled the central features which characterize human consciousness: reflexivity, recursiveness, and logical levels. It all began with a modeling project on resilience which led to creating the MetaStates Model.1 Using the works of Korzybski and Bateson I discovered how to denominalize “logical levels.” Consider a state like seriousness. Most people know that state and they can easily access “getting serious.” Simply think serious thoughts and you will access corresponding body postures, muscle tension, breathing patterns, facial and throat tension, etc. All of this enables you to step into the “serious” state. Do this by considering something important and critical, when you mean business, when you get with it, and when you don’t want any fooling around. The dictionary describes serious as “thoughtful or subdued in appearance or manner, sober, requiring much thought, earnest, not joking or trifling, etc.” That a neuro-linguistic state in reference to something, perhaps to a job, a task, a relationship, a research study, buying a business, negotiating, training, etc. As a state, it is not a thing, but a way of thinking, feeling, and responding to the world. It is a level of awareness, Level I. Up the Levels Now suppose you get playful about your seriousness. Suppose you bring thoughts and feelings of lightening up and being playful to your seriousness. Layering mind-body responses upon your seriousness then creates a more complex situation, playful seriousness. Now we have two levels. By layering a set of thoughts-and-feelings upon another set. You meta-state and layer second thoughts on first. You are now operating at a higher logical level. Your thoughts are beyond the first state and are about the first. The word “meta” describes this relationship of transcending and including thoughts. The layering of states is a meta-function that creates

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levels of mind. The meta-thought becomes the class or classifier of the previous thought. Let’s not stop there. Suppose you bring thoughts of compassion and kindness to your seriousness. Now we not only have playful seriousness, but also kind and compassionate playful seriousness. This layering of states textures the original state and embeds it in higher thoughts, moving you to Level III. Suppose someone asks you about this. You might say: “Well, I believe in Win/Win relationships, I don’t want to get taken or manipulated and I don’t want to do that to others. I simply want to create an arrangement that’s joyfully good for all.”

This explanation as another layer further textures the seriousness, compassion, win/win seriousness that’s playful. You now have moved to Level IV. “You believe in doing that?” someone asks. “Sure, in the long-run things always go better that way.” Ah, now you are at Level V! “So you’re thinking in terms time–for the long-run?” Level VI. “Definitely.” “But why?” “Well, I don’t know. I guess that’s just part of who I am and what I’m about. I want to see equity among people. That’s what is really important.” Level VII.

Modeling Reflective Jumps

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How do you model or track a mind that does this kind of a thing? How do you profile the situation of a person who jumps “logical levels” in this way? Here mind is reflecting back onto itself and jumping up to a higher category to create conceptual frames. True enough, the NLP Strategy model has a “meta” response in its linear step-by-step approach. Yet it is inadequate for tracking these kinds of “logical level” jumps and holding together these meta-functions. By contrast, the Meta-States Model is fully able to track the reflexive jumps of mind level after level. As a model of self-reflexiveness, it pictures “logical levels” as a layering process which textures states. This taps into contextual meanings rather than associative meanings.2 The Strategy Model does very well in identifying and making explicit associative meanings. The expert first connects this constructed picture (V) that is in color and bright to these words (Ad) expressed in an internal tonality that has these qualities (At), then accesses these sensations (K). Several NLP technologies (i.e., anchoring, eye accessing cues, linguistic markers, swishing, etc.) enable us to perform this kind of magic. 3 Contextual meaning, however, involves the higher frames. To have contextual meaning requires an internal mental-emotional context which serves as a frame-of-reference for making sense of something. This is the beauty of meta-stating. When you apply one state to another, the higher state functions as a contextual meaning or frame for the lower. Playful seriousness Playful and compassionately kind seriousness Playful, compassionately kind, and win/win thinking for the long-term seriousness

Each layering of neuro-linguistic states not only textures the first state, it also creates an entire neuro-semantic network of embedded frames (a “logical level” system). By transcending to the first state, the meta-state includes the previous state. Yet is not the collapsing of the states or the anchors. It textures the state with a higher state. Then, with repetition and habituation, the higher state eventually coalesces into the lower state. That’s how meta-programs are created. Meta-Programs, as solidified metastates, arise when you bring a thinking-feeling-perceiving state to a state. Globally serious —> serious about almost everything Globally playful about seriousness Option oriented about seriousness —> having many ways to be serious -261-

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Procedure oriented about seriousness —> there’s a right and a wrong way to be serious

In a “logical level” system, layers of thoughts-and-emotions about thoughtsand-emotions so that the higher layers classify the lower. The subsequent “logic” that emerges in the system holds the system together. Developing a Fluid Model The traditional models of the mind do not picture mind as fluid, non-linear, systemic, dynamic, and reflexive, but static. This makes them more simple and manageable. Dynamic mind functions more like a dynamic tornado. I often begin the Accessing Personal Genius training by giving a caveat about the way our minds go round in circles and spiral around. 3 “To learn the Meta-States Model requires a different kind of thinking. I will try to keep it as straightforward as possible, but your mind will go in circles, spiral around forwards and backwards, you’ll jump logical levels, you’ll layer your awareness with dozens of resources and limitations. That’s the way mind works. You will probably get lost in these processes. You’re supposed to get lost. You will get dizzy and confused. When that happens—go for the ride and trust the process. You will come out on the other end more resourceful than you have ever been before because you’ll get acquainted with one of the most powerful facets of your mind—self-reflexivity, and you’ll learn how to manage the layering of your mind in your framing all the way up.”

Frequently those who have learned various “logical level” systems have to first unlearn them and get used to the idea that there are no static levels. “But isn’t identity always a higher level?” “Yes, when you identify yourself with something that typically indicates layering several levels up. And yet ... What do you believe about how you have identified yourself? Does it serve you well? Would you want to update it and reinvent yourself? Would you value that or find that important? And if you did transform, who would you rather choose to be? And if you make those decisions, what could you then expect of yourself? And what would your highest intention be in doing that? And how would you represent that? Is there any metaphor that comes to mind?”

How’s that for layering multiple levels above identity? “Logical levels,” as non-things, are higher level layering and texturing of neuro-semantic states about other states. “Is there any order at all for ‘logical levels?’” -262-

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“No. Whatever you think or feel about anything, you can then think or feel something about that using whatever category you wish. As an infinite progress you can always step up to a higher level and outframe.”

“So how many logical levels are there?” “As many levels as there are categories, classifications, concepts, ideas, beliefs, values, etc. All of these, and hundreds more, are all potential ‘logical levels.’

Above and beyond the list of levels that Robert Dilts has bequeathed us in the “Neuro-Logical Levels” (environment, behavior and capabilities all occur at the primary level; beliefs, values, identity, mission, and spiritual), there are scores of others—in Neuro-Semantics (2012) I identified 104! Understanding Domain of Knowledge Decisions Intentions Pleasures Philosophy Convictions Self-Definitions Story/ Narrative

Mathematics Expectations Anticipations Presuppositions Memory Explanations Frames Concepts Symbol

Metaphor Paradigms Assumptions Fantasies Culture Excuses Meanings Principles Imagination

Meta-Stating Higher Logical Levels Let’s say that I want to frame my thoughts about my experiences of fear and anger (primary state, Level I) with the realization that they are just emotions. They are “Just signals in my mind-body about the relationship between my map of the world and the territory (experience) of the world." When I bring this understanding, set it as a frame about an experience of fear and anger, this conceptual belief classifies my emotions. It puts fear and anger into the category of “Just emotions.” Do this and you can play an entirely new game: "Emotions are Just Emotions, not a Report Card on Self." You can now stop playing the old game: "Emotions determine Who I Am.” There’s a secret in this: As you move up the levels of your mental framing or punctuating each mental-emotional move upward creates a new logical level. As you do, keep reminding yourself that these levels are not things or real. They are fluid and keep shifting as you frame. That's why there is no hierarchy to “logical levels.” We cannot say there is first Environment,

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Behaviors, Abilities, Beliefs, Values, Identifications, etc. It does not work that way. It's fluid frames all the way up. Actually it is framing all the way up ... because the so-called “levels” are simply the way you layer one thought upon another to formulate your understanding. There are no things in your mind, just the activity of framing. Language is the trickster here. If you name the framing using nouns (i.e., beliefs, values, identity, etc.), then you will tend to believe these as real entities. Yet ultimately it’s all process. It’s all the contexts and contexts-of-contexts that you invent. This also explains why the primary level states come and go so quickly. Your states come and go minute by minute so you never stay in the same state for long. The more you layer states the higher you go in the matrix. This allows you to set higher frames of reference so that you create a greater sense of stability. Then you can carry beliefs, understandings, decisions, metaphors, expectations, etc. for years. These higher semantic states are more enduring than the primary states. You get them into your body, into your muscle memory and so the higher frame self-organizes our neurology. Modeling “Logical Levels” Using Meta-States Start with a state as a dynamic mind-body-emotion process, then map this understanding of "logical levels.” A meta-state is a state that you apply to yourself at a higher “logical” level. It is your neuro-linguistic reaction to a previous situation. It’s your reflexivity layering and texturing thought to thought. Doing this creates a "meta" relationship: joy of learning, playful about being serious, flexible about being sure and confident, awareness of your awareness, etc. These meta-stating structures reveal the “magic” of NLP by exposing the structure and how it works. Meta-States explains and expands the magic of NLP because the magic occurs mostly at meta-levels—where “the -264-

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difference that makes a difference” occurs. Now you know how you create logical levels: you apply one state to another. This operationalizes the meaning of a "logical" level. You put one idea or understanding at a higher level to another.

“Logical Levels” and the Matrix

Meta-States explains and expands the magic of NLP to the extent that the magic occurs at meta-levels. It is there that “the difference that makes a difference” occurs.

Meta-States as Systemic Consciousness As a systems model, when you frame or meta-state, you simultaneously use every logical level. That’s because— Every “logical level” is at the same time every other logical level—a belief, a value, an identity, a decision, an understanding, a mission, an intention, expectation, etc. As this statement is not simple or trivial, it offers a critical insight. It moves us beyond the “Neuro-Logical Levels” to a systemic model. This does not make Neuro-Logical Levels model wrong, yet it does extend and expand it. Here again we have a problem with language. Using nominalizations, the terms (beliefs, values, identity) sound like actual things. They are not. So let’s return to process language: believing, valuing, giving importance, identifying with, intending, expecting, etc. Consider again what happens when I set the frame, "Fear is just an emotion..." On the first level is an emotion, fear. Above that is an idea, “It is just an emotion.” Yet what is this idea? Is it a belief? A value? A decision? A memory? An imagination? The answer is Yes. It is all of those at the same time. Simultaneously I am confirming that thought, believing it, thinking it is important, understanding it, deciding to think this way, and I may even identify with it and expect it. What’s fascinating is that simultaneously all of these facets of minding-emoting are true. That’s because as an ongoing process your mind-body system operates simultaneously. In the process of your systemic framing of your fear state with a belief, a value, an understanding, etc. Do this often enough and it will habituate to become "the ecology of [your] mind” (Bateson). To think more systemically about your neuro-semantic states shift to thinking about your states as fluidly dynamic. Ultimately, "logical levels" -265-

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is a metaphor about the layering, texturing, and qualifying of your experiences. So every time you transcend one level of thought, emotion, physiology, etc, you both include the lower levels and texture it with higher levels of resources. When that happens, all of these frames-within-frames qualify your everyday experiences and set up new rules for the games of life. Your frame games is a holarchy of logical levels. These frames determine your games. Do this for creating wealth, slimming, demonstrating expertise in business, etc., you layer frame upon frame (logical levels) that construct an understanding of the rules, the set up, the players, the payoffs, etc. If you use this to model experiences with dynamic structures, it will take you to new places. Summary What we call logical levels are really the way you layer classifications and evaluations upon your thoughts and feelings which create your mental frames. As the meta-function that governs your self-reflexive consciousness, it determines the quality of your experiences, The logic within these levels partakes of a psycho-logical nature and so makes sense from the inside out. Ultimately, it is framing all the way up. That's where the “magic” occurs. Then it's games all the way down to "reality." End Notes: 1. For more about the discovery of Meta-States, see the book by that title. It is also in the Training Manuals on Modeling. 2. For more about how we texture our states when we think about our thinking or feeling, see the articles on Texturing States www.neurosemantics.com. 3. For more about NLP strategies, see Robert Dilts’ NLP: Volume I (1980), and NLP: Going Meta (2001). 4. You can read about Accessing Personal Genius in Secrets of Personal Mastery or check the website for 3-day trainings in APG — Accessing Personal Genius.

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THE MATRIX AS A SYSTEMIC MODEL "The beauty of a new theory or model that works, is such that all the good ones before it perfectly inside it, expanding them to a higher levels of knowledge and understanding ..." Albert Einstein “We and other creatures exhibit intelligent behavior, and since the regular production of such behavior requires thought, and since thought requires representation, and since nothing can represent except within a system, we must be endowed with and utilize a system of internal representation having its own ‘grammar’ and ‘vocabulary’, which we might call the language of thought.” Daniel Dennet, Brainstorms (1978)

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ystems—system thinking, system dynamics, system processes—are crucial terms today and will be increasingly so in the coming centuries. Systems is also a central focus of Neuro-Semantics because if we want to effectively address, relate to, consult, coach, manage, or do therapy with the human mind-body-emotion system as our neurosemantic system (or matrix), we not only need an awareness how we are a system, but also an understanding of how our entire system works. This raises numerous questions: How do systems work? How does the mind-body system work as a system?

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What are the central operational processes or mechanisms that govern the matrix?

Now as a systemic model, the Matrix gives you a practical way to view and work with experiences. The following pages details the content and structure of the Matrix Model for using it in working with people for remedial change (therapy), generative change (coaching), for leading and/or managing, for parenting, for communicating, etc. to that end here are a few basic principles of the neuro-semantic framework. #1. The Neuro-Semantic Matrix is a System. Mind-body-emotion operates as a singular system of interactive parts. While we speak about each as if separate parts, that’s only a way of talking, not a statement of actual facts. All of the aspects of what we call mind, body, and emotion are highly interactive so that they influence, and are influenced, by each other. It is with and in the mind-body-emotion system as a whole that you construct your frames (frames of mind, of meaning, of reference) and then operate from those frames. You first construct your matrix then you “live and move and have your being” in that matrix. #2. Neuro-Semantic States create the Matrix. You live your life within sets of embedded frames of reference and meaning which, in turn, define and describe how you make meaning of things. You learn these meanings and then, as you hold them in mind as your perception, you live in them. Having created them, you then experience them through your culture, language, learning, life-style, etc. #3. The Neuro-Semantic System works Systemically. Your frame of mind is never singular. Every frame is embedded within higher level embedded frames. As a system, your neuro-semantics work as an interactive dynamic of multiple frames. For input you bring information in and send that information upward to the next highest level. In this way you input information about the information you received from the outside. You then output energy by first feeding-it-back into yourself in the form of feelings, nervous system responses, emotions, and then out in the form of speech and behavior. #4. There are Clues to a Matrix System. Recognizing the frames within all of the dimensions enables you to recognize that person’s essential states and meta-states that make up that -268-

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person’s operational style. Recognizing these clues provides information about the person’s belief frames, value frames, thinking patterns (metaprograms), linguistic markers of personality patterns, etc. by practicing seeing and hearing the cues of the matrix, you are able to profile and more accurately diagnose. #5. The Matrix is Dialogue Activated. You and I create our matrix one conversation at a time and by our conversations we can transform our matrix. If you want to activate a person’s matrix, say “Hello” and start a conversation. Via dialogue you can recognize a matrix. By engaging in a dialogue, you can detect that person’s belief and meaning frames. The person’s words and responses can provide entrance into that person’s matrix for both discovery and intervention. Organizing the Sub-Dimensions as a System The eight dimensions of the Matrix Model is comprised of multiple frames which are embedded within yet higher frames which as a whole make up a person’s sense of reality. It defines the core of who one is, what one is about, and how he or she operates in the world. The Three Process Dimensions Three process dimensions identify the central processes of the Matrix. Meaning: What you “hold in mind,” your ideas and understandings about any given subject. Meaning includes the person’s content of meaning and the person’s style of meaning-making. It includes the person’s thinking style, way of processing information, cognitive distortions, cognitive biases, etc. Intention: The capacity to “intend”—to set a direction and a purpose to establish an agenda, to develop a motive. Intentionality, as the human capacity to direct attention, endows us with the ability to choose our motives and motivations. We can set goals and objectives that reflect our values. State: Your embodied state which is a function of your neurology, physiology, and emotions. These are the processes by which you ground your matrix and embody it. The Five Content Dimensions The content dimensions describe the meanings (beliefs, ideas, understandings, etc.) which you create about yourself as a person. The first

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and most crucial content of what you create is your sense of self in its many dimensions. Self: Your sense of your value and worth, hence your self-esteem. This first content dimension includes your sense of identity and selfdefinition. Power: Your sense of your abilities, capabilities, resources, skills, competencies, assets, liabilities, and efficacy in responding. This generates your self-confidence and/or ego-strength (for facing life’s challenges). Others: Your social self is your sense of other people, relationships, and groups. This includes your beliefs and understandings about getting along with others, your social skills and social intelligence. Time: You as a temporal being is you in your sense of past, present, and future activities which you construct. It includes your sense of how you invest mental and emotional energy into living in these time zones, handling schedules, your beliefs about time, etc. World: You in your life-world is your sense of yourself in various domains of life (work, career, profession). Who you are in all of the universe’s of meaning that are possible (agriculture, medicine, music, mathematics, education, business, therapy, etc.). Your understandings and mental maps about these domains and the potential roles you play in them. Handling Human Complexity A simple fact is that human nature is not simple. There is incredible complexity in how the human mind, body, and emotions work. Even the behaviors or actions that might seem simple and easy to understand are not. You only have to explore a little bit with anyone to discover layers upon layers of complexity. This is the complexity of meaning. It’s the complexity that arises from the various ways and kinds of meanings that you create and how these meanings interface with each other, and what they do within your body and emotions, and how you can get into spins going round and round these meanings. With The Matrix Model you can manage this complexity. How? By sorting out the levels of meanings, the kinds of meanings, and the essential matrix of frames within frames, the complexity becomes more manageable. Yet all complexity is not the same, Peter Senge noted that there is detail complexity and dynamic complexity.

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Let’s start with detail complexity. Today there are some 200+ NLP patterns with another 200 patterns in Neuro-Semantics. As processes for working with various facets of the mind-body-emotion system these patterns enable you to facilitate renewal and transformation. There are also scores of MetaProgram distinctions (60+) and 22 Meta-Model distinctions. With so many processes, how can a person keep track? How can you know what to do when?1 One answer which The Matrix Model provides is that you can sort out and organize all of these details into eight categories. In this The Matrix Model gives you an over-arching framework for organizing a large field of information, distinctions, and patterns. Then when you work with a person or a group for developing more expertise, you can focus your attention on eight categories. For dynamic complexity, we need principles more than categories. As a systemic model, The Matrix Model involves the nature and dynamics of a system. Frequently, people new to systems, system thinking, and systemic processes can find this challenging. And indeed there are several things that may challenge you at first. What helps is to understand some of the basic principles of systems. Here are a few. #1: Every experience operates from and involves a basic state—the mindbody-emotion state. Think about state as the space that a person works from. Given how the person is thinking-and-feeling, speaking and doing, what state does that imply that the person is in? #2: Every state is informed by meaning. Look for the dimensions informing the state. With The Matrix Model you have seven sub-dimensions to check out, seven that will be informing and governing the primary state. Behind every experience there will always be these dimensions activating the experience. Which ones are most active? How do they interface with each? #3: As a systemic model, The Matrix moves and operates in a non-linear way. Do not expect it to operate linearly. Release your expectation that things will follow in a straight line or in a step-by-step process. System models do not work in that way, system models work reflexively. They go round and round and so within them there are loops that spiral or that circle. Because this is crucial for thinking and working systemically, it requires a different kind of thinking to use the model efficiently. To learn this, start -271-

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with an overview of the model. Then adjust your own matrix so that you can calmly and joyfully embrace ambiguity. When you can do that, you can then follow the loops, spin around in circles, and enjoy the ride. #4: Within the matrix there are simultaneous processes in play. In a system, there’s simultaneity—lots of things go on at the same time. In a system, you will want to minimize either/or thinking and develop your ability for both/and thinking. Systems call upon you to shift your thinking to perceiving in terms of processes, movement, fluidity, and dynamic change. The “excluded middle” of Aristotelian logic will be replaced by thinking in terms of in-between, indeterminacy (“fuzzy logic”) and degrees. Further, as you enter any neuro-semantic system, your very presence will change things. There is no objective observing in a system. #5: A person’s matrix operates as “energy” moves through the system. Watch for the dimensions to flicker on and off depending on how that information activates the frames and flows through the system. When you work within one matrix system, the effects will cascade down through the levels and layers of frames, as well as up the levels of other frames. Nor will these effects always be immediate. Sometimes there will be a delay. Sometimes it takes a certain amount of time before an effect will register at another level. As you move on to work within another matrice, the cascading, percolating, and coalescing effects will continue. #6: Systems operate by information and result in energy. In any system, there are three functions: input (information, events, activities, references in the real world “out there”), through-put (the internal processing that activates and creates the dimensions and output (the activities, behaviors, emotions, speech, skills, etc.). The speed and openness of the feedback loops will determine the speed and effectiveness of the neuro-semantic system to adapt to the changing environment. In the human neuro-semantic system, input is information in the primary and meta-loops. Information moves upward (inductively) in the system. When it returns back down through the systems it is translated back into energy. Through-put takes the form of embodiment or incorporation which shows up as emotions, learnings, memory, and the activation of motor programs. And output is response— behavior, speech, feelings, etc.

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#7: A matrix is only truly understood from within. This statement explains why you have to enter the system to feel and sense the system from inside its own logic. From the outside, the human neuro-semantic system is a “black box.” You can’t tell what’s going on. That’s why you have to enter it through pacing and matching to get rapport. Using the sub-dimensions allows you to enter into a person’s communication loops. If you don’t, you will be outside of the loop—outside of the communication and information of that person, and therefore not really able to understand. The psycho-logics that work inside are unique to each person and must be understood from the inside. From that perspective, the person’s matrix of frames always makes sense. It may not be useful, practical, or healthy, but it makes sense. It is psycho-logical. Using the Matrix as a System As a neuro-semantic system, the factors and variables within the human mind-body-emotion interact in ways so that every variable influences every other variable. Thinking systemically means shifting your thinking from a linear and Aristotelian style to a non-linear and self-organizing system. 1) Begin with the feedback and feed forward loops of the system. The best way to understand and model a neuro-semantic system is to begin with the information (feedback) and energy (feed-forward) loops. Structurally we have two basic or primary loops and then many secondary loops. There are two basic loops: the primary state loop of stimulus—>response and the meta-state loop to the higher levels of mind. From the meaning-making of the meta-state loop comes the other six matrix loops. What moves through these loops? Information—energy. By defining, representing, framing, classifying, and evaluating, we send information as the “difference that makes a difference” through the loops. Bateson noted that’s the only thing that “gets onto the map.” This elicits the neurological and metabolic energy of the system. In this way, we can follow the “energy” through the systemic loops observing what it activates and what programs it sets off. Feedback in a system operates as the central mechanism for self-regulation and self-organizing processes. This process works in a non-linear way, that is, they work as network patterns. In systems terms, feedback refers to the -273-

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output of a system re-entering that system as the input that influences the next step. Feedback is not “a comment about your performance.” Rather feedback relates to the results and consequences of a process and how it comes back into the system as additional information. The two most basic forms of feedback in a system are self-balance and self- reinforcing feedback. 1) Self-balancing or “negative” feedback. When feedback is self-balancing we call it homeostasis. Selfbalancing feedback enables you to engage in self-correcting or selfadjusting behaviors as when you are riding a bicycle or steering a boat. Here the outputs of the system cause a dampening and/or corrective effect. The more you eat, the less hungry you feel. The more hunger you feel, the more you eat—a virtuous cycle. 2) Self-reinforcing or “positive” feedback. These terms describe what we call a runaway system or a vicious spiral. In this form, an initial effect continues to be amplified as it travels repeatedly around the loop. Here the outputs of the system cause an amplifying effect so that you get more of what you put out. The more you save money, the more the savings grow. The more you spend, the more the indebtedness increases—a vicious cycle. How can you visualize these feedback and feed-forward loops in a system? If you attempt to use linear thinking or thinking in direct and singular causeeffect movements, it will be difficult to track a system. Instead, shift to thinking in a more non-linear way so that you can visualize the system in terms of loops, circles, and spirals. All of the major achievements of cybernetics have stemmed from the circular causality within a feedback loop. Wiener said: “Feedback is the control of the machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance.”

Today we have self-regulating machines that use feedback loops—Watt’s thermostat, mechanical governors, and other cybernetic processes. Wiener and colleagues recognized feedback as the essential mechanism of homeostasis and the very basis for self-regulation. When we have selfregulation through feedback, the responses seem “purposeful,” that is, with an intentional “mind.”2

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“Today we understand that feedback loops are ubiquitous in the living world, because they are a special feature of the non-linear network patterns that are characteristic of living systems.” (Capra, 1996, p. 59)

2) Look for, and take into account, multiple variables. As you learn to think systemically you will be shifting increasingly from either/or to both/and thinking.3 Why? Because very few things (if any) are uni-causal, caused by one and only one factor. Almost everything involves a multitude of causes and contributing factors. Aristotelian language, thinking, and reasoning delude us with its either/or frame and lead us to exclude so many things. In terms of neuro-semantic states, begin to make a list of all of the causation factors, contributing factors, and contexts. In this, you can also ask several mathematical questions: What is X (confidence, resilience, hope, trust, etc.) a function of? It is a function of what variables? It is a function of how many variables? In what order are they?

The following is an example of modeling the many physical variables that are involved in something as simple as the falling of an object through space. I have quoted it from the training manual on Advanced Modeling Using Meta-Levels.4 Suppose we begin with a simple formula from Newtonian physics for calculating the time it takes for an object to reach the ground. Doing so allows us to create a model of the dynamics involved. Yet the calculation neglects the resistance of the air, and shape of the object. Because of that it will not be completely accurate. If we drop a feather, our model from the first experiment will not work as a description. If we’re not satisfied with that “first approximation” we could take air pressure into account by adding a simple term to the formula. Now our second approximation will give us a more accurate model. But not completely. Air pressure depends on the temperature and pressure of the air. Suppose we take those variables into account? This gives us a more complicated formula or model. Yet are we done? Not on your life! Air resistance is also influenced by air convection, on the large-scale circulation of air particles through the room. And air convection is influenced by an open window, the breathing patterns of those watching, and other things! So, “the fall of an object” has numerous influences ... it’s different on earth and in earth’s gravity than it would be, say, on the moon. In our descriptions, we’re forever leaving characteristics and variables out. We have to. We’re primarily -275-

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after a model of sufficient approximation so that it allows us to do things.

Capra (1996) commented on this kind of complexity of multiple factors and variables when he wrote: “This may sound frustrating, but for systems thinkers the fact that we can obtain approximate knowledge about an infinite web of interconnected patterns is a source of confidence and strength.” (pp. 41-42)

3) Identify and map out the self-organizing patterns. The term “self-organizing” has been around a long time. Surprisingly (at least to me), it actually goes way back several centuries to the philosopher, Immanuel Kant. He was the first to use it. He noted that we must think of each part of an organ ... “... that produces the other parts (so that each reciprocally produces the other) ... because of this, [the organism] will be both an organized and self-organizing being.”

He used this term to define the nature of living organisms. It highlights that within every pattern we have both substance and form. Substance answers the question, “What is it made of?” It gives us content. Form answers the next question, “What is the pattern?” This gives us the structure. In the process of modeling we synthesize both of these approaches. Again Capra (1996) has noted the difference between quantitative and qualitative approaches: “In the study of structure we measure and weigh things. Patterns, however, cannot be measured or weighed; they must be mapped. To understand a pattern, we must map a configuration of relationships. In other words, structure involves quantities, while patterns involve qualities.” (p.81)

In terms of human experiences, this means you can now map out the frames that establish and perpetuate self-organizing patterns. We call these frames attractors. Robert Dilts writes about this in Strategies of Genius: “Self-organization theory is a branch of systems theory that relates to the process of order formation in complex dynamic systems. Paradoxically, it arose from the study of chaos. Scientists studying chaos (the absence of order) noticed that when enough complexly interacting elements were brought together, rather than create chaos, order seemed to ‘spontaneously’ form as a result of the interaction. According to ‘selforganization’ theory, order in an interconnected system of elements arises

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around things that are called ‘attractors’, which help to create and hold stable patterns within the system.” (p. 255)

In perceptual mapping, an attractor is a focal point in a phenomenon around which the rest of a person’s perceptions become organized. This is easy to observe in the old lady/young lady gestalt switch picture. When I use it in a live training, I ask people to identify the line, the shadow, the focal point in the line drawings that pulls them to see the images in a certain way. Given that, what is the attractor when we move to representational and conceptual mappings? The attractor here is the content of some thoughtfeeling—some idea. An idea or concept which pulls on other thoughts-andfeelings to support it is “the attractor.” What idea or ideas have attracted you to this book? The word “matrix?” Self-mastery? Understanding human functioning? Experiencing new possibilities? An unifying model? Any of these ideas could be an attractor for you. In the end, the attractor becomes a “program,” so to speak, which energizes your neuro-linguistic system. Attractors are the ideas that attract and organize your way of seeing, thinking, feeling, and acting. Use the following questions to identify attractors: What attracts you to experience one of your hobbies or sports the way you do? What configures the images or representations inside your frames about wealth so that it attracts you to a certain way of seeing, hearing, feeling, languaging, or responding? What structures the foregrounding and backgrounding of your perceptions about the idea of discipline? What organizes your computations about self-development? What ideas, beliefs, understandings, values, experiences, references, etc. pull on you when you think about helping others?

Self-organization arises out of the chaotic nature of a system due to the iterations. In fractal geometry, the fractal shapes which occur in their characteristic patterns are found repeatedly at descending scales, so that at any scale, their parts are similar in shape to the whole. This gives them the quality of self-similarity. You can see this self-similarity in so many things -277-

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in the world: rocks look like small mountains; branches of lightning, borders of clouds, coastlines, a river delta, ramifications of a tree, the repeated branching of blood vessels. 4) Map the neuro-semantic network of the structural patterning that occurs in nested loops within nested loops. A network, like the neural network of the brain, is non-linear. Simultaneously it goes in all directions. Because a network allows you to iterate messages repeatedly, no wonder it has even more non-linear relationships. When you meta-state, you rise above some primary experience and relate other ideas and feelings to it. You transcend the first state and include it inside of a larger frame. Now we have holons—“parts in wholes; wholes with parts.” When we have a network system that uses feedback for correction (one which “learns from mistakes”), we have a network of loops which regulates and organizes themselves. Self-organization emerges and governs the life of the system. With regard to the matrix: What is the pattern of organization? What is the nature of the non-linear inter-connections? What frame of meaning, frame of reference, or frame of mind seems to be organizing the very life of this mind-body system?

5) Identify the system’s leverage points. Here is a magical thing about systems: In a non-linear system, small changes can have dramatic effects. That’s because they can be amplified repeatedly by the self-reinforcing feedback. Iteration, as a non-linear process, refers to repetition or repeating and describes what happens when a function operates repeatedly on itself. In mind-body states, this shows up as both, vicious and virtuous circles or spirals. You can go round and round with fear so that you become more and more fearful, timid, intimidated, anxious, and paranoid. And, you can go round and round about love or joy or competence so that you become more and more resourceful. The iterations and reiterations set up the spiraling which puts the system into a spiral movement. It sets up “the more—the more” patterns, “the more—the less” patterns, and “the less—the more” patterns.” Of course, the more you study this and see it in action in your own mind-body system, the more you will comprehend this and the more skilled you will become, will you not? -278-

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6) Identify the emergent properties of the layering of the holarchies. At each level of complexity, the phenomena that you initiate and observe will exhibit properties that do not exist at the lower levels. Things emerge from the system functions. This means that you will not be able to find them below a certain level. So you have to ask, “At what level?” “Temperature,” for example, which is central to thermodynamics, is meaningless at the level of individual atoms where the laws of quantum theory operate. The taste of sugar is not present in the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms that constitute its components. It does not occur at that level. So “emotions” do not occur at the level of molecules. They emerge at a much higher level in the nervous system. The fact of emergence is important for many reasons. For one thing, emergent properties and qualities are typically destroyed when a system is dissected. That’s why systems cannot be understood by strict analysis. Scientific reductionism cannot understand a system as such. The properties of the parts are not intrinsic properties, they can only be understood within the context of the larger whole. Again, Capra (1996) has distinguished between thinking in terms of building blocks and principles: “Systems thinking concentrates not on basic building blocks, but on basic principles of organization. Systems thinking is ‘contextual,’ which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a larger whole.” (p. 30)

Thinking systemically means thinking more holistically. It is thinking in terms of integrated wholes, gestalts, and the overall configuration that emerges. To do that step back and get a sense of the whole. 7) Identify the “difference.” Bateson created the first model of the mind based on cybernetic principles. His 1979 work, Mind and Nature, described “mind” as a systems phenomenon. Viewing “mind” (a nominalization) as a process, he described how we mind things in terms of representing information, using symbols, creating “meaning,” jumping levels, using feedback, using feed forward, etc. In Neuro-Semantics I designed the levels of thought in the Meta-States Model using these insights from Bateson. -279-

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The human nervous system and brain which gives rise to what we call “mind” sorts for difference. Bateson said that it is difference (i.e., “news of difference”) that actually gets “onto the map.” This difference that makes a difference refers to meta-levels of frames which shows up in our consciousness as our references and meanings. Mind and cognition function as relationships. In minding (the experience of “mind,” and “mind” put into verb form), we relate one thing to another. Then, the way one variable relates to another distinguishes one thing from another. Bateson called this, “The pattern that connects.” In modeling we constantly ask: “What pattern connects ... X to Y?” Together, “the difference that makes a difference” and “the pattern that connects” enables you to search for the organizing activity within an experience, the self-organizing attractor or frame in the neuro-semantic system. Bateson expressed cognition as a process of knowing that’s broader than thinking. Such knowing involves perception, emotion, action, etc. It involves the entire neuro-semantic process of living, organizing, functioning. Summary The matrix you live in is a system of many interactive parts. That’s why understanding it, and working with it, necessitates thinking systemically about the whole. The frame within frame upon frame structure calls upon you to think and see the feedback and feed-forward loops of the system. Practically, you will detect information entering the system from outside and information being sent upward to the higher levels of your mind as you draw conclusions and construct your frames of mind. You will then sense energy being sent back down the levels of mind and out into the world. This will show up as feelings, emotions, and behaviors. Information in, energy out describes how the mind-body-emotion system works. Thinking systemically also moves a person to work in terms of finding the leverage points in the system and in terms of using the mechanisms or system dynamics.

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End Notes 1: The book, The Sourcebook of Magic (1997) provides an early attempt to figure out how to know what to do when with regard to NLP patterns. It has 77 basic NLP patterns and a couple chapters on discerning what pattern to use with what client when, and why. 2: See Bateson’s fabulous work, Mind and Nature (1979) for a system’s definition of “mind.” Also see Systemic Coaching (2012) 3: See Communication Magic (2001) for this language pattern and distinction that I added to create the expanded Meta-Model. 4: This training manual and the two dozen others are available via Neuro-Semantic Publications.

The Matrix is the world we live in and operate from and the universe which we take with us everywhere we go. The 7 Matrices of our Neuro-Semantics SQ VII Purpose/Intent Matrix I Meaning/Value Matrix

Meaning of Meta-Levels

M

Evaluating

Meta-Stating Classification

IV Time/ Temporal Matrix

II III Self Power Resourcefulness Self-Efficacy

V Others Relationships

VI World

State

EQ

IQ

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ROBUST DIALOGUES TRANSFORMING THE MATRIX “Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” Voltaire It’s better to ask questions than to make assumptions.

Y

ou never leave home without your matrix. It is always there and you always operate from within it. Though typically invisible to you, its presence is there, “the world pulled down over your eyes to blind you to the truth.” It is there just waiting for you to discover it, take the red pill, enter it, explore it, understand it, and master it. You invented it by your thinking-feeling-and-choosing and your freedom to enter it lies at your command. It awaits your interest, your attention, your curiosity, and your skill at exploring and changing the meanings that inform it. Using Dialogue to Enter the Matrix Now to enter into your matrix, use the power of conversation. After all, conversation is what called your matrix into existence in the first place. -282-

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Originally you and others spoke your matrix world into being. No wonder language itself plays such a crucial role in your mental-emotional world. Language is the primary mechanism that you use in forming the your subdimensions. Yet while language plays a central role in your conversations, it is not merely the fact of language, it is what you do with language. What do we do with language? We converse, we engage in dialogue. Via interchanging words, we “cut through” (dia) “meanings” (logos). That is, meanings begin to flow through us. When you dialogue with another you are participating in the construction and/or destruction of meaning which thereby enables you to discover, create, change, and embrace the structuring of your matrix. By language you explore, share, and/or invent meanings. In this way your conversations construct your matrix. Are not conversations the context in which you create your frames and meanings? Further, for this there are many kinds of conversations. It may be the internal conversation which we call “thinking” as you talk to yourself and reason through something. It may be through your external conversations personally with people, or the conversation you have with your culture as you receive the stories, frames, meanings via the media, family, community, and political leaders. Even today, as you continue to relate and converse with self and others, you continue to refresh and/or create your matrix “one conversation at a time.” In this way you and I literally talk our “reality” into being. Susan Scott (2002) says that we succeed or fail “one conversation at a time.” I like that. You call your matrix into being one conversation at a time. It all began with the first conversations that you experienced as you interacted with parents and others. What they said, how they said it, the quality of the relating that the words elicited, the states they came from and those induced in you—these factors critically defined your first definitions of self, life, and others. These were the original conversations that constructed your fabric of reality. What was the quality of talk that you received from your parents and early culture? What is the quality of conversation that you engage in today? How does it affect the quality of your matrix?

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The Communication Is the Relationship There are two words that we commonly banter around in a careless way. Yet they are critical for how we create and recreate our matrix. “Communication” and “relationship,” two different words, at first glance seem to point two very different things. It’s another trick of language, the reality is different. In Communication Magic (2001) I noted that they refer to the same thing. To create a communion between two people, we communicate. Yet in doing so we relate by the sharing of ideas, emotions, hopes, dreams, fears, joys, etc. In this, the communication is the relationship. That’s why the quality of a relationship is the quality of our communications. Given that our communication with each other is our relationship then in relating our words and meanings we can create our matrix. If then we construct our matrix one conversation at a time, we need high quality Matrix Conversations. Once upon a time, it was revolutionary to think that talk could cure. Sigmund Freud is celebrated for discovering “the talking cure.” Today this is common knowledge. Scott (2002) writes: “Our lives succeed or fail gradually, then suddenly, one conversation at a time. While no single conversation is guaranteed to change the trajectory of a business, a career, a marriage, or a life, any single conversation can.” (p. 1)

The marvel s that any single conversation has the possibility of changing the very direction and trajectory of life. Certainly you have had conversations like that. Life-changing dialogues on that order occur frequently in the intense conversations you might have with a therapist, a coach, or a mentor. Yet it can also occur with a friend or associate who participates in co-creating a new reality with you, as you do you “cutthrough” (dia-) the layers of meanings (logos) in your mind. Susan Scott describes this kind of a conversation as a “fierce conversation,” —a robust, intense, powerful, passionate, unbridled, uncurbed, and untamed conversation. That’s what makes it especially powerful. You come out from behind yourself into the conversation to speak authentically what you are and how you are experiencing. The power of being real enables us to create life-enhancing meanings.

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The Magic of Robust Conversations Such robust dialogues are not for the faint of heart. It takes a lot of egostrength to dance with that level of authenticity. It requires self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-responsibility. Many fear and avoid such. Fearful of what they will find within, they judge what they dislike. Judging, as a meta-state, prevents the adventure of entering the matrix in the first place. To prepare yourself to enter the matrix, remind yourself, “It is just frames.” “Whatever you think-and-feel is a function of your frames, not fate. You are more than your frames. It’s your mapping, not the territory. Your matrix at any given moment works only as well as those frames work to empower you for navigating life. The awareness and choice you can learn to master your matrix.”

With this frame, enter the matrix to elicit a robust dialogues. The matrix is at your command when you until you develop the mindfulness and skill for having an intense and passionate conversation about your frames. Start frame awareness, then frame exploration. Interrogate the frames, challenge them, provoke them, set new and more empowering frames, this will transform the matrix. What conversations will you engage in? The first one is the conversation that interrogates reality. Question everything until you can describe reality so simply and compellingly that the truth emerges. Beyond there will be awareness conversations; strategy conversations, transformative conversations. The Magic of Just Asking Questions For years, I’ve been searching and creating a list of great questions. Why? Because I wanted a repertoire of questions to cut right to the heart of a matter when interviewing, researching, intervening with a client, gathering information, modeling, and coaching. Because the Meta-Model questions provide a tremendous resource for inviting a person inside one’s matrix and re-mapping the experience, I wrote an entire book on that subject (Communication Magic, 2001). This also describes the very heart of Coaching as a model for working with people. Coaching is not about solving a client’s problems or therapy, it is about facilitating new levels of mindfulness by which a client takes full responsibility for his responses. This leads to empowering client to really -285-

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listen to her inner desires, to clarify her desired outcomes, and to make that happen. Michelle Duval, a master coach, says that her intentions in such conversations are to “get to the heart, to find the truth, to get to what is really going on, and to find the highest frame of mind with the greatest leverage.” She does that through engaging questions. There’s a wondrous power in questioning. On the surface, making statements to share your brilliant ideas feel more powerful than just asking questions. There’s a problem with that. It only makes the speaker feel more powerful, not the person receiving the information. When you ask questions, questions that probe an experience, they elicit an internal response. The listener goes inside and activates his matrix of frames. Frequently this will elicit the original referent experience from which the person mapped something. Then by questioning the linguistic frames, it evokes the person to generate more accurate and useful meanings. In Neuro-Semantics we have a whole series of meta-questions for flushing out higher level frames. These meta-stating questions get to the thoughts behind the thoughts, the feelings beyond the feelings, and all of the references that a person uses in filtering and thinking about the immediate experience. Powerful questions can unveil the meta-levels of a person’s structure of contextual meanings. Use them to flush out a neuro-semantic network of embedded frames and get to the heart of a person’s truth. The following list of questions from Scott (2002) enables you to have a fierce conversation. Robust conversations are actually a collaboration of two people who are committed to exploring the matrix. Duval writes: “In a true ‘fierce conversation’ there is a consent that both persons wish to be in it—by the very nature of the contribution they make to the conversation. One person puts a statement, question or response out there ... and the other responds. In this way the conversation is co-created. They make it up as they go. I set this as a pre-frame at the beginning of the coaching relationship—that we are going to ‘make it up’ as we go. There is no right or wrong in such conversations.”

Typical Fierce Conversation Questions Any conversation that fiercely searches out a person’s meaningful “truths” which she feels and experiences in any domain, is a fierce conversation. This includes the most basic questions which get to the heart of the matter -286-

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—questions about how you are living your life, questions which deal with your direction, purpose, essence, and style. For both coaching and self-coaching, ask the following: Where are you going? Why are you going there? Why is that “why” important? What does that give you? Who is going with you? Why that person? What do you get from this companion? What are you giving to this person? How are you going to get there? What is your plan? Do you have a plan? How strategic are you? Will this enable you to reach you full potential? Are you willing to realize your full potential? Are you fully extending yourself in using your capabilities? Is there value and fulfillment in your work today? Do you feel the value and passion in your relationships today? What unmet needs are you positioned to meet?

You can engage in fierce conversations about the truths and reality at work, in your career, or with any given task that you are engaged in. What is the issue that you most need to resolve? What’s going on? How long has this been going on? How bad are things? How is this issue currently impacting you? What results are currently being produced for me by this situation? How is this issue currently impacting others? What results are currently being produced for them by this situation? When you consider the impact on yourself and others, what do you feel? If nothing changes, what’s likely to happen? What’s at stake for you relative to this issue? What’s at stake for others? When you consider these possible outcomes, what do you feel? What is your contribution to this issue? How have you contributed? When this issue is resolved, what difference will that make? What results will you enjoy? When this issue is resolved, what results will others enjoy? When you imagine this resolution, what are your emotions? What is the most potent step you could take to move this issue toward resolution? What’s going to attempt to get in your way, and how will you get past it? When will you take this step? Why are we here? So what? What do we do for our customers that matters to them? What is our ideal relationship with one another? -287-

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What is our ideal relationship with our customers?

You can engage in fierce conversations with others, inviting them into their matrix to encounter whatever is actually going on with them. What’s going to try to get in your way? When you consider these outcomes, what do you feel? What are the words that wake you up? What words are semantically loaded for you? What contribution do we wish to make to the larger community? What has become clear since last we met? What is the area that, if you made an improvement, would give you and others the greatest return on time, energy, and dollars invested? What is currently impossible to do that, if it were possible, would change everything? What are you trying to make happen in the next three months? What is the most important decision you’re facing? What’s keeping you from making it? What topic are you hoping I won’t bring up? What area under your responsibility are you most satisfied with? What area are you least satisfied with? What part of your responsibilities are you avoiding right now? Who are your strongest employees? What are you doing to ensure that they are happy and motivated? Who are your weakest employees? What is your plan for them? What conversations are you avoiding right now? What do you wish you had more time to do? What things are you doing that you would like to stop doing or delegate to someone else? If you were hired to consult with our company, what would you advise? If you were competing against our company, what would you do? What threatens your peace? What threatens the business? Your health? Your personal fulfillment?

How to have a Transformative and Robust Dialogue To have a truly robust dialogue you have to be present. This means that you fully show up, accept reality on its terms rather than yours, and use your ego-strength to develop the personal efficacy and competency to use the knowledge gained to make changes. Obviously, having a robust dialogue that cuts through the layers and layers of superficial meanings to find the frames that are driving an experience and the over-arching frameworks is not for the faint of heart. It takes a lot of ego-strength.

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In business today, leaders who are in the forefront know that getting high quality information from their people is absolutely crucial if they want to stay current with the speed of change. Having entered into the era of the knowledge worker where information, especially applied practical information, separates those who lead from those who follow or are retired, having a robust dialogue with people is critical. Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan (2002) speak about this in their work on Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. “You cannot have an execution culture without a robust dialogue—one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor, and informality.” (2002: p. 102) “The reason most companies don’t face reality very well is that their dialogues are ineffective.” (p. 103)

To increase your effectiveness in gathering information, understanding what it means and making great decisions you need robust dialogue. What does it take to facilitate a robust dialogue whether between friends, between lovers, in a business, or in a group? How can you do this? 1) Acceptance. Realize that you have nothing to fear from information or from what is true. Whatever is, is. Denying it, rejecting it, pretending that it isn’t so will not help things. 2) Openness. A willingness to be open to information. This means a learning state, a thoughtful non-judgment state to just perceive and witness, the willingness to be wrong and to be corrected. Without these personal attitudes, you will be defensive, rather than open. 3) Authenticity. Formality generally suppresses dialogue. By contrast, an informal context invites questions, encourages people to be spontaneous, uses critical thinking skills for questioning and exploring the validity and strength of a position. Informality invites candor. Ultimately, it is the quality of your dialogue that makes the difference. A robust dialogue which is not afraid to ask the hard questions, the out-of-thebox questions, and to challenge the assumptions and presuppositions, is the kind of dialogue that can actually alter the way you think and a group’s capacity for creative thinking.

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Even when it is uncomfortable, robust dialogues bring out the reality of situations. It is open, tough, and focused, it is open and inquisitive. It is based on the realization that nobody knows everything and that two or more minds can meet in a robust dialogue and all can come away with more intelligence and wisdom. “None of us is smarter than all of us.” Such conversations facilitate greater comprehensive understanding of things, especially other people. Since leaders are the ones who set the tone of any conversation, they will be the ones using dialogue to create the culture in any given group. As a leader, do this by going first and using robust dialogue to surface realities. Doing this requires rigor and intensity in exploring the depths of a situation. Flush out assumptions, push for realistic and compelling goals, and invite the best imaginative and critical skills of people. Refuse the seduction of surrounding yourself with “Yes” men. Appreciative Inquiry David Looper-Rider developed a change management approach in business — Appreciative Inquiry. Rather than approaching things from a problembased orientation, this approach uses two powerful states— appreciation and inquiry—in leading change. Appreciative Inquiry is the cooperative search for the best in people, organizations, and the world. It’s a systematic discovery of what gives a system “life” when it is most effective in terms of economics, ecology, and human well-being. To do that, Appreciative Inquiry involves the art and practice of asking questions which strengthen a system’s capacity for higher quality performance by mobilizing the imagination and creativity of people. Appreciative Inquiry is based upon several empowering beliefs about people, systems, and business. The key premises are: Human systems grow toward what they persistently focus on, the questions they are asked. A solution oriented approach focuses on resources on making a positive difference and creating what we believe is possible. The seeds of change are implicit in your first questions. Questions set the stage for what you will find and discover. Inquiry itself is an agent of change. Questions can elicit new possibilities, hope, and inspiration. Words create worlds. Deficit language and vocabularies are often the source of problems. People and organizations are mysteries to be embraced. -290-

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Sharing best practices, “magic moments,” and life endowing experiences enables people to grow toward these things. Appreciative stories give wings for flying. Inquiry is intervention.

The Appreciative Inquiry approach enables you to create a narrative-rich culture in a business, family, or personal life. It uses storytelling as a way of setting new and more exciting frames. Appreciative inquiry sets up a new game—The Game of an Appreciative Perspective. Play the game with language as you ask about and evoke appreciation about the best of what is, envisioning what might be, and dialoguing about how to make that happen. Use the following Appreciative Inquiry questions for a fierce conversation of appreciation. What are some of the high-point experiences you’ve had in this organization? What was it like when you are most alive and engaged in what you do? Without being modest, what do you most value about yourself, your work, your company? What are the core factors that give life to this business, without which the business would not be the same? What three wishes do you have to enhance the health and vitality of your organization? What are some of the magic moments you’ve experienced in life?

Meta-Questioning that Teases out Higher Frames Since all meta-levels are made up of the same “stuff” governing the primary level: thoughts, feelings, and physiology, it is by using your see-hear-feel representations and words that you build up meanings at the meta-levels. The following set of questions in various categories offer lots of ways to explore and elicit these higher-level structures. As you use these, remember the different categories are not different things—just other ways of expressing the same thing, the meta-frame. Every frame has every one of these categories within it. 1. Meanings: 2. Beliefs: 3. Frames: 4. Realizations:

What does this mean to you? What else does it mean? What do you believe about that? What’s your frame of reference for this? How does it feel to realize this? When you realize this, what do you think? 5. Permissions: Do you have permission to think or feel this? As you give yourself permission and notice what happens, how well does that settle? How many more times will you need to give yourself permission? 6. Feelings: What do you feel about this? -291-

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7. Appreciation: What do you appreciate about this? How much appreciation? 8. Value: How is that important to you? When you get that value from it, what’s even more important than that? 9. Interest: What’s the most fascinating thing about this experience or idea? 10. Decision: What decision or decisions drive this? What will you do? 11. Intention: What is your purpose or intention in this? 12. Outcome: How do you want to see this turn out? 13. Expectation: What are you expecting? 14. Connection: How connected are you to this idea, feeling, or experience? 15. Cause: What causes this response, feeling, thought? What’s the rule that makes this so? Does it always work this way? 16. Culture: Is this part of your culture? What cultural context did you learn this? 17. Assumption: What’s implied in that statement? How does it make sense? What is your premise or presuppositions? 18. Memory: Does this remind you of anything? What comes to mind when you surrender to these thoughts or feelings? 19. Rules: You should, must, and have to do this? Why? Who says? 20. Class, Definition:

What does this word or term mean to you? How do you define it? 21. Understand / Know: What do you understand about that? What background knowledge are you accessing that creates your understanding about this? 22. Identity: Does this affect your self-definition or identity? Who are you when you think this? 23. Paradigm: What is your model of the world? Your paradigm?

Coaching Life Strategies Phillip McGraw (1999) nicely demonstrated meta-level questions and the effect they can have in coaching someone to a solution. He repeatedly asks questions to generate a desired outcome state and the steps for making them real. The sequence of these questions is: Outcome ... Action ... Feeling. 2 What do you want? What do you have to do to achieve that? You don’t know? If you did know, what would that be? Well, just guess at it and let’s notice what you say. Who do you know who achieves that? What does that person do? How will you feel when you have it? When you feel that state fully and completely, how will that empower you? When you’re empowered in that way and operating from that place, how will that transform things in your life? So what you really want is .. And when you get that, what does that give you? What do you have to do to achieve that? -292-

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When you get that in a way that you find satisfying, how will you feel? When you feel that fully and completely, how will that change your perspective and empower you so that you can transform things.

What do you want? What do you really want? What do you want from your heart? Brenda: I want to move from this neighborhood. I want to get out of this dangerous place before something really bad happens. I feel scared living here.

If you really don’t want to live here, then what would you have to do to make that happen? I don’t know. We can’t move. We are just barely getting by as it is, that’s why we feel so trapped here, and there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s no point in even talking about this. I don’t want to talk about this, it makes me feel worse. [Seeking to avoid awareness, stuck in a frame of inability, impossibility.]

I can see that you’re feeling frustrated and discouraged about this. How would you feel if you did have what you wanted; how would you feel if you were able to move away from those fears and threats? Oh, my God, I would feel so safe and happy, ... and I would be able to feel optimistic again. I used to be so optimistic, but now I don’t even think we will be safe. I feel anxious and fearful constantly. [Construction of a desired outcome using the “what if...” frame.]

What you really want then is to feel safe, happy, and optimistic so that you can look forward into your future with hope for your family? (Beginning to cry). Yes, that’s right. I’m so tired of being afraid and of feeling so trapped. I just don’t know what to do or where to turn. I feel like I’m letting my family down and I feel ashamed that I cannot provide better for my family. [Validation of desired outcome, she bounces back to the downward spiral of negativity.]

What would you have to do to create that? What would you have to do to create that kind of quality in your family life and what would you have to do to not be ashamed? I don’t know. ... I just don’t know.

If you did know, what would it be? I don’t know ... I guess I would have to get close to my boys again and share with my husband more; we just don’t share or support each other anymore. [She begins to map out her own solutions.]

How would it make you feel if you were connected with your boys again? And if you had your husband back in the sense of sharing things with him?

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I wouldn’t feel so ashamed. I wouldn’t feel that I was such a lousy mother and wife. I wouldn’t be ashamed about the condition of my marriage.

That’s how you would not be feeling and when you are not feeling those things, what will you be feeling? I guess I would feel proud of myself again, that I can succeed at making my family succeed and that I would feel more whole and complete. And I’d feel more at peace with myself and my family.

So what you really want is to feel proud of yourself again. What you really want is to feel whole and fulfilled in your role as a woman in how you relate as a wife and mother? Yes, yes, that’s exactly what I want. I used to feel that way. That’s how it was when we first moved here. I don’t know what happened. I felt proud and fulfilled then. [Mapping out more resources to draw upon.]

What do you have to do to recover these things and put them back into your life? I have to quit feeling sorry for myself and quit being so alone. I know that doesn’t help. I have to take my husband’s hand, and say, ‘We’re not going to live like this anymore.’ I’ve got to start the change and alter the direction that we’re going before it gets any worse. I have to sit down with the boys and ask for their help.

How would that make you feel? That would make me feel proud and whole, and I’d feel that we were on the right path.

And when you feel that way, if you woke up tomorrow and viewed life from that perspective, how would that change or transform anything in your life? Well, I ... uh, it would make a change in about everything. I’d be warmer to my husband, and feeling closer to my boys, and more optimistic...

And how much would you like to have that as your program for living– as your way of being in the world? Well, very much!

Summary Conversations invite people to construct a matrix of meaning frames. You created your matrix and re-create it one conversation at a time. No wonder words, language, and linguistic patterns are so important in human psycho-logics. Questions are incredibly powerful for inviting someone to explore and to re-create his or her matrix. There are numerous ways to have a fierce conversation that explores the matrix inviting transformation. -294-

End Notes: 1. Howard Gardner has written several books on a model of Multiple Intelligences that expands “intelligence” from the singular monolithic idea of I.Q. 2. Philip McGraw (1999). Life Strategies: Doing What Works; Doing What Matters.

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“REALITY” AND THE MATRIX If the Matrix is our constructed and invented Reality, then what is Real? “What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you feel, taste, small, or see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” Morpheus

T

hroughout this book we’ve talked about “reality”—about the different levels and dimensions of reality. The matrix is your inner model of reality as you know and sense it. So, what is “reality?” What do we mean by the term “reality?” Are there different levels or degrees or dimensions of “reality?” If the matrix makes up our invented sense of reality, then what is really “out there?” And does it make any difference?

“I thought it wasn’t real.” Neo said to Morpheus after they returned from the program for jumping program where they practiced leaping tall buildings. On his first jump, Neo didn’t make it. “No one’s ever made their first jump.” Tank said. And he was right. Neo didn’t make it on his first attempt. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the key for knowing how to do it. Morpheus gave him the key for how to jump tall buildings. Just before he jumped and demonstrated it, he said: “Let it all go, Neo. Fear. Doubt. Disbelief. Free your mind.” -296-

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That was the key, but Neo didn’t free his mind, so he didn’t make the jump from one tall building to another. Upon launching himself into the air, his eyes widened as he then plummeted downward story after story until he hit the ground. Hitting the pavement of the road below, it first gave way like a trapeze net, and then he slammed into the hard concrete street. “Do you know why you didn’t make it?” Morpheus asked when they were back in the hovercraft, the Nebuchadnezzar, and he was unplugging Neo from the Matrix. “Because ... I didn’t think I would?” As he then disconnected Neo from the training program, Neo spit blood from his mouth and asked Morpheus: “I thought it wasn’t real.” “Your mind makes it real.” Morpheus replied.

The Realization Process How We Make Ideas, Concepts, Frames, and Mental Movies Real By now you probably realize the power and wonder of language as both a way into the matrix as well as an indicator of the matrix. As a linguist, I find our language fascinating in how we create our inner worlds and inform our body how to respond. What do you realize about the word “real-ize?” What happens in your mind-body-emotion system when you realize something? What actually happens when you have a new realization? How do you “make real” your ideas, concepts, frames, and mental movies so that they become the programs or information that governs your everyday life? From the representations of the movies that you play in your mind all the way up all of the frames that you create, you send information signals throughout your entire neuro-linguistic system. These signals communicate messages to your body about how to respond. That’s why you can think yourself sick by playing horror movies in your mind about all of the terrible, awful, and disastrous things that have happened or that are going to happen. You then make those thoughts real in your mind-body system—you embody those ideas. Literally. This same process enables you also to think yourself well. Bio-feedback today enables people to learn how to feed forward the kind of thoughts and ideas that allow them to slow down one’s heart rate, reduce blood pressure, warm fingers, and bring greater health to one’s entire system. Norman Cousins checked himself out of the hospital and began entertaining his -297-

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neuro-linguistic system with humorous thoughts as he watched comedies for hours on end. In the process he discovered a way to experience pain relief from a debilitating disease and a way to recovery. He had been given six months to live due to a degenerative bone disease, but as he recovered he lived another 16 years and wrote about the experience in his book, Anatomy of an Illness. While we are at the very beginning of the adventure of learning how to truly take charge of our mental signaling processes, we now know the basic principle. How you think in terms of your beliefs, values, the frames and concepts you set in your mind have a determining and governing influence in the mind-body system. Many years ago I heard Richard Bandler explain this. “Beliefs are commands to the nervous system,” he said. Hearing that I juxtaposed two kinds of awarenesses: “beliefs” and “thoughts.” Mere thoughts on the screen of the mind send signals to the nervous system. That’s why we can have strong emotional experiences at the movies. We can laugh and cry, dodge bullets, apply our breaks, feel our heart and lungs racing when watching action scenes, aliens popping out of people, etc. Yet, for the most part, these are innocent signals which do no long-term semantic damage. They are just “thoughts.” How is that? Why do they not harm us? Because we know that they are just representations and symbols, and not real. In other words, we don’t believe them. We don’t attribute “reality” to them and think that they are real. If we thought that they were real that would transform the thought into a belief. That’s because within the structure of a belief— one thought is framed by another thought. The first thought is confirmed by a second thought which validates it. Then we have a belief— “a command to the nervous system.” Now with that we can do ourselves harm. This describes the structure of a belief. Dr. Bob Bodenhamer and I first described this in the Meta-Yes pattern which we published in a book on sub-modalities.1 This is why we have to be careful what we believe. Nor is this a new understanding. People have long recognized that beliefs operate as self-fulfilling prophecies. If you believe that people won’t like you and are ready to take advantage of you, guess how you will be feeling, thinking, and perceiving. How that will affect your behaviors? -298-

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If you believe that criticism is terrible, that it hurts your feelings, that it robs you of self-esteem, guess what affect that will have in the way you handle relationships, risks, opportunities, etc.

In terms of the Matrix Model, everything above the representational movie is a belief. It’s beliefs all the way up. You have beliefs about what you deem important called “values.” You have beliefs about what you anticipate to happen—called “expectations.” Every frame is a frame because you believe “that’s the way it is,” “that’s true,” “that’s the way it works,” etc. All of your understandings and knowledge frames are beliefs. All of your ideas and maps about self, others, the world, time, etc. are beliefs. It’s beliefs all the way through the matrix. Now beliefs—as commands to the nervous system—is what translates all of those frames into felt reality into your emotional states, behaviors, talk, perceptions (meta-programs) and into the ways that you operate in life. By believing you make ideas real. Confirm or validate (say yes) to any thought, and you begin the realization process. It begins to command your nervous system.2 What Do You Want to be Real In Your Matrix? When you enter the matrix through conversation you essentially seek to find out what is currently “real” inside. In doing so, let your attitude be that of curiosity, observation, acceptance, and awe. First go in to simply find out what is. Enter to discover the person’s “truth.” This truth isn’t absolute truth, it is the person’s truth. What is true for you isn’t what is right in a moral or ethical sense. It is what is—what exists, what works given your frames. So seek to discover what is true for the person given the frames and beliefs she uses to construct her reality. Enter with a non-judgmental attitude and accepting awareness. There’s magic in this. The magic of non-judgmental awareness allows you to touch what is “real” for a person or what is real for yourself.3 It invites you to be real, to be authentic to what you actually think, feel, see, want, fear, hope for, dream, etc. And just because it is authentic at this point in time doesn’t mean that you should give in to it or act on it. “I authentically want to wring your neck” as a desire is one thing, as an action is another. As a feeling, just accept it. It’s an authentic feeling of anger. But that’s all. It is just a emotion, not an obligation or a message about what to do.

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If you bring a state of judgment, fear, commands, “shoulds,” etc. to yourself, you blind yourself to your constructed reality, to what you are experiencing. You create “dragon” states because you are turning your own energies against yourself. By implication, you are acting and behaving as if you believed it was bad or wrong to know the “truth” about yourself. Conversely, the acceptance frame of mind that acknowledges what is—is inherently healing. This awareness shines a light in the dark. Many feared and dreaded “realities” suddenly vanish with acceptance. Dragons shrink. Accepting thoughts, emotions, and experiences as just expressions of yourself sets several healing frames, frames of self-acceptance, courage, and honoring the self. Frequently it leads to eureka experiences: “Oh that’s what that was all about!” “How silly that I thought that way!” “Now I know how to interpret that!”

It also leads to setting new frames of choice and empowerment. Now you can truly begin exploring higher levels of “reality.” What do I want to become real in my life? What realities do I want to pursue and give myself to? What would be the most enhancing ideas to make real in my mind-body system? What inspiring ideas am I now beginning to realize?

Human “reality” or “truth” not only involves an accurate description of what has been and what is, but also what can be. Of course, you need a strong and robust Time dimension to be able to look forward into the future to decide what you want to make real in your mind, in your emotions, in your experiences, in your relationships. What do you want to make real in those areas? What principles do you want to set as belief frames in your matrix so that you can then command your nervous system to realize them in how you live and move and feel in the world?

Truth and the Matrix How would you respond if I said, “There is no such thing as ‘truth’?” Would you object? Most humans would. “What do you mean there’s no such thing as truth? Of course, there is truth! What’s wrong with you? Some things are true and others are not. Is it true or false that I’m a man, that the sky is blue, that things thrown out of a tall building will fall to the ground?” -300-

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Have you ever tasted “truth?” What about smelling it? Have you caught a whiff of it? How about its sound, volume, tone? What does truth look or feel like? Ah, yes, “truth” as a thing, as an object, okay. Yes, it is not that kind of “thing.” But it is real, isn’t it? Linguistically, the word “truth” is a nominalization. It comes from the relative term “true” in contradistinction to “false.” We evaluate ideas and statements as true and false, not things. We can evaluate things as being actual and real, but not true. So, yes, as an idea, a conceptual understanding of a domain of knowledge—there we have the concept of truth. Is something “true” to a model? That is, does it fits within a body of knowledge and is true to that field and conceptual theory? In the domain of physics, the idea of gravity helps us explain how things fall when dropped. Of course, we also have to specify contexts within which this is true. It’s not true in space, there things float. But on the planet, things fall when dropped. So it is real and true that things drop when thrown from a tall building and will fall to the ground. We turn “true” into a nominalization (“truth”) in those contexts within the definitions, descriptions, and concepts of a field of knowledge and then we can speak about “the truth of gravity.” Yet there’s a danger in doing this. We can make the idea too concrete and forget that it is a concept and fail to index or de-nominalize it. Because each of us live in a matrix of meaning that we have both inherited and constructed, our “truth” depends upon the background knowledge of our understandings, experiences, and conclusions. What is the truth? It all depends. Actually, the question is a seductive and a tricky one. It presupposes there is some absolute truth equally valid for all. A better question is, “What is your truth about X?” and then specify the referent X. What is your truth about anger? About fear? What is your truth about feeling open and vulnerable? About creating wealth, about exercising discipline to be healthy? An even more transformative question is: What would you like to be true for yourself in your matrix of understandings that would empower you as a person and enhance your life so that you can live more fully?

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How could you make that true for yourself and others so that you enjoy your life, contribute to the health and happiness of many, and tap into all of the rich meanings of being fully alive?

Summary There is a real world “out there” beyond your nervous system yet your only contact with it is through your maps—through your matrix of frames which gives you a structure for experiencing it. The map/territory distinction enables you to recognize that your maps, your matrix, is only as good and valuable as it allows you the freedom and power to navigate through life. If you have maps which allow you to learn from mistakes, feel good even when your fallibility shows, experience love and connection, make good use of your skills, contribute to life and to your communities, have fun and enjoyment along the way, etc., then your maps enable you to live effectively. If you have developed or received maps that trip you up, undermine your health, mind, relationships, career and that make your matrix a chamber of horrors ... the problem is not you, it’s those damn frames. Whatever you confirm and validate as real becomes real to you in your mind-body-emotion system. So be sure to quality control the frames that you set. If any idea can become a command to your nervous system, make sure it’s realistic and palpable. Beware of toxic and crappy ideas. Notes at the End of the Chapter 1. The Structure of Excellence: Unmasking the Meta-Levels of “Sub-Modalities” (1999). It now has a new title: Sub-Modalities Going Meta (2005). 2. See articles on www.neurosemantics.com about Beliefs and Changing Beliefs. 3. See The Crucible and the Fires of Change (2010).

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HEALING THE MATRIX “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” Ralph Waldo Emerson In the Twentieth-First Century it is not a luxury to have healthy and well-formed frames, it is a necessity for sanity, health, and success.

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ometimes the matrix you were born in, and/or the one you built over the years in response to life’s events, needs to be healed. Sometimes the matrix that you have co-created in interaction with your culture, friends, family, loved ones, associates, enemies, media, books, etc. becomes so toxic, sick, corrupt, perverse, and morbid that it undermines your health and peace of mind. If your matrix is made up of lots of limiting beliefs and toxic ideas then it will work against you. You will feel it as a dragon lurking and threatening you “in the back of your mind”—a dragon that you will not be able to get away from. How the Matrix Can Become Sick As a way of mapping things, there are many ways in which your matrix of frames can become distorted and sicken you. Just because you can create a mental-emotional frame of something doesn’t make it healthy, good, or useful. People can come to truly believe in some really sick frames. Adolf Hitler did. He infected others with his sick thought viruses. 1 A human matrix can become that sick and distorted. Most are not. Yet we all have

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some thought viruses. Where do these come from? How are we exposed to them? What can we do about them? We inherit a lot of the twisted belief frames from our family and culture. All it takes to experience a toxic matrix is to be born into a dysfunctional family or culture. If that happened to you, you simply absorbed a lot of morbid belief frames without knowing about their toxicity until later. It happens all the time. It happens because we are all born into flawed and fallible homes. It would be nice if human bodies could only give birth to babies if they are a healthy and loving couple. But, of course, that’s not the way it is. People who are bitter, hateful, and full of resentments, people who are traumatized and tormented by horrible events in their lives, people who are neurotic, psychotic, and criminal—all of them can give birth and become parents and not have a clue as to what they are doing to their kids(!). Even caring and loving people can have kids and then behave as if they don’t know the first thing about parenting, as if they had flunked or never attended Parenting 101. Amazingly, while we license cars, guns, and most professions, we give free reign to the profession that has the most influence on shaping human consciousness for anyone with active sperms and eggs. We want those who teach our children to be intelligent about how to teach, how people learn, how to create the best environment for learning, etc., yet teachers don’t have a hundredth of the influence for shaping minds and hearts as parents. Becoming a parent requires no intelligence, no preparation, and no license. As children we often jump to twisted conclusions if we don’t have guidance from a wiser mind. If you create your matrix from how you think (your thinking patterns) and what you think, then you begin constructing your matrix using the best thinking that a child can muster. To the extent that you have not set your matrix with a bias for self-awareness and selfdevelopment, you will have a lot of frames created by the mind of an eightyear-old, or a twelve-year-old, or a fifteen-year-old in heat. There is a particular danger to old frames—familiarity. Having gotten used to them, they seem familiar and not dangerous at all. No wonder you need a policy of continual re-examining of your assumptions, beliefs, understandings, values, etc.

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No wonder many philosophers and psychologists have noted that we spend a good bit of our adulthood getting over our childhood. What do you have to get over? Not only hurtful and distressing events from poor parenting, humiliating events at school or on the school playground, but also from your own earliest thinking and interpreting. You have to update and transform the old frames in the back of your mind of limiting beliefs. We experience loads of upsetting, distressing and even traumatizing events. Another obvious source of sick frames is how we, with our childish minds and from the inaccurate and superstitious ideas of our parents and culture, mis-interpreted so much of what happens to us. No one lives a totally charmed life. We all experience upsetting and distressing events during childhood. Even the birth experience itself can result in traumatic effects. Then there are childhood illnesses, diseases, and accidents. There is the early home environment that often fail to provide the information, love, value, trust, nurture, etc. which a child needs. When bad things happen, we frequently do our selves even more damage by drawing toxic conclusions that set the content of our basic subdimensions: “I’m worthless.” “I’m flawed, damaged goods, inadequate.” “I have nothing to offer.” “I’m not allowed to go after what I really want.” “I’m powerless to make any difference.” “It will always be like this.” “Life is against me, all I get is bad luck.” Etc.

All of this provides a rich source for filling up the video-arcade of the mind with horror movies, melo-dramatic tragic episodes, self-contempting films of never amounting to anything, victim cinemas, etc. It’s these movies and their meaning which does the damage. Of course, above and beyond these movies are your interpretations and the script themes that you invent about them. What conclusions have you drawn about yourself, life, your powers, etc.? What frames have you set about authority figures, pressure, insult, humiliation, love, sex, responsibility, being wrong, and a thousand other concepts?

Psychotherapy to the Rescue

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Psychotherapy arose as a discipline to deal with “psychological problems.” Various psychological models have been proposed to deal with the things that create problems and limit people. Numerous theoreticians used various metaphors to describe what they thought was wrong, bad, or deficit in the human system. Psychoanalysis took this attitude. As an early model, it aimed at “analysis” assuming that, if you knew what was wrong, that analysis would cure the problem. It seldom works out that way. Frequently the opposite occurs. Knowing what was wrong makes matters worse. People “analyzed” in this way could then use the very matrix which created the problem to feel bad about their understandings. Now they have something else to feel bad about! With that, the vicious cycle only gets deeper. The Behaviorist Model reacted by completely shunning what they called “the black box” of the mind and sought only to condition new ways of behaving and recondition them through reward and punishment. While they identified the Stimulus—>Response patterning which creates the first levels of meaning (associative conditioning), all they could do amounted only to classical conditioning and the extinguishing of behaviors. Doing this, however, treats people as unthinking and mechanical machines. The Third Force in psychology arose in the 1940s (Humanistic or SelfActualization Psychology) and then the Human Potential Movement in the 1960s. Within that movement Maslow focused on the healthy side of human nature. Carl Rogers and others promoted client-centered therapies. Later, others promoted therapies which focused primarily on one’s emotions. Then a new idea evolved: People have to “be true to their emotions.” This over-rated emotions as it treated them as cause rather than symptom. It further asked emotions to accomplish what they are not designed to accomplish—transformation. Expecting so much from emotions typically made the symptoms worse as it reinforced them and gave them too much power. It invited people to semantically load their emotions as if they were the ultimate arbitrator of what to do. Eventually many schools of psychology began converging on the realization that people have mental-emotional and behavioral maps by which they navigate reality. When people are limited and stuck, the problem is their impoverished maps. Korzybski discovered this in General Semantics, -306-

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Tolman in Behaviorism, Miller in Cognitive psychology, Bateson in anthropology and systems thinking, and Bandler and Grinder in NLP. This is also the foundation of Neuro-Semantics and the Matrix Model 2. How a Sick Matrix Works Actually, it is so easy to create a flawed, distorted, and sick matrix about these different things, and very easy to become convinced that they are true and inescapably real. With repetition they become increasingly real to a person on the inside and literally in-form the mind-body system. As this happens, they coalesce into the very fiber of one’s neurology and end up in muscle memory. Then we feel the frames in our bodies as emotions and in our guts as our somatic states of health and ill-health. No wonder belief frames become self-fulfilling prophecies that work like system attractors. In this way the old events which a person recorded on the theater of the mind enter and become thoroughly incorporated into the matrix so that the person cannot even imagine life apart from those ideas. This is how a person gets “stuck in the past.” By rehearsing the inner movies and playing them over and over trying to figure them out, they habituate and drop out of conscious awareness. They then play “in the back of his mind” —only occasionally intruding as “flashbacks” or “intrusion of old thoughts.” One may never suspect that it is in this way that he keeps refreshing the old childish matrix that keeps him stuck and miserable and ineffective. A sick matrix works by inaccurate and false beliefs and understandings. Then, when a false-to-fact map doesn’t function well in navigating reality, the map is the problem. The problem is not the person, the problem is that people are using maps which will not get them what they want. The problem is that when you construct self-contradictory frames, you will experience self-conflict, incongruency, and the lack of alignment. In navigating the real world “out there” you will continually experience yourself torn between what you want, indecisive, incongruent, and unable to focus. You will think there’s something wrong with you, that you have attention deficit disorder (ADD), that you can’t focus, that you can’t get yourself to come through on what you know you need to do, that you’re flawed. But none of that is the real problem. The problem is that you have a matrix full of horror movies, videos of terror, dread, inadequacy, impossibility, contempt, etc. Because you live in that world, no wonder your frames now attract -307-

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experiences which validate that matrix. Your frames are selfreplicating, self-fulfilling, and self-validating. This is the doublebind dilemma people experience whenever they cannot question or explore their own matrix, but confuse that mapping with the territory.3 The problem is that when you construct a matrix with a child’s mind, you live in a child’s world and will be impulsive, reactive, immature, demanding, and fragile. You will lack the ego-strength to face the real world “out there’ on its own terms. You will be impatient, fearful, and ready to throw tantrums. You will want what you want, when you want it, and you will experience every disappointment, every hurt, every set-back as a major issue and not understand why the world is so cruel and people so mean. The real problem lies in the frames. It is never the person. You live your life and relate to what’s real “out there” through what you mentally map. On the inside, it is real to you. That’s why the ability to enter a matrix, to distinguish your maps from the territory, and to continually update your meanings by taking ‘error’ messages as feedback is critical for getting on in life, in order to be happy and productive at work, with yourself, and in relationships. The Art of Healing a Wounded Matrix Every matrix is flawed and always will be. Given fallibility, you can only create fallible understandings. As you accept this fact welcome and even celebrate your fallibility. Now you can adjust yourself to living life as an ongoing journey of discovery, learning, and development. You can now make learning part of the fun of being human. A frame that demands or pretends that you can create a perfect matrix and that you shouldn’t make mistakes or that errors are terrible—puts you at odds with reality. Healing a matrix begins with the meta-state of awareness and acceptance of what exists. This is the state that every therapy ultimately gets to— acknowledging and accepting reality on it’s own terms. This is ego-strength. Ego-strength enables you to look at and acknowledge what is. This comes before you set out to figure out what you can do about it. Problem-solving and developing skills for coping and mastering come after the ability to recognize what is. If you jump to the judgment of trying to fix things before -308-

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accepting them, you make yourself an enemy to reality. You then are more likely to fly into reactive fight/flight responses before you even know what you’re dealing with. We all do this with such brute facts as— Mistakes: We mis-perceive, mis-understand, mis-speak, and mis-behave. Fallible Learning: Usually we do not get things the first time. Learning involves repetition and practice. Incompetence: No one is skilled and talented in everything. In some things we will never excel. Up and down moods: We aren’t always at our best. We all have down days when we are out-of-sorts. Illness: We get sick and ill, or have accidents. We can suffer various kinds of hurts and traumas. Frustrations: Things don’t always go the way we want them. We will be disappointed and frustrated as things will get in our way and the universe doesn’t exist to serve us. Death: As mortal human beings, we will die. Death is inevitable. None of us will make it out alive.

In addition to these sensory-based facts, there are a hundred-thousand concepts that you can and do build negative, distorted, and false maps about. These often torment and torture you mentally-and-emotionally because you “fear” what something means or could mean. Consider that. We are the class of life and we can fear not only what something means, but also what something could mean. This describes the neuro-semantic structure of human life. We not only fear brute facts “out there” that could hurt us (wild animals, fire, falling from high places, dangerous people, etc.). We can and do fear ideas. What would it mean if I failed? What would it mean if they laughed at me? What would it mean if I don’t succeed at this business? What would it mean if I look the fool in front of my peers?

How do you heal a matrix which is formulated in these ways? By deframing, reframing and outframing. What you need are new ways to think and feel about these conceptual ideas. All problems occur inside the matrix, there’s no “problem” out there. The only problem you have is how you think about these ideas and events. Ultimately all therapies involve reframing, some overtly and explicitly and others more covertly and implicitly. Therapy is all about transforming meanings—neuro-semantic

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states so that you can respond to the world of events in a new and more resourceful ways. It is about cognitive re-structuring. The Embodying or Incorporating Mechanisms What mechanisms cause your old maps to induce pain, distress, and trauma so you not only get “stuck in the past” but the pain and trauma gets “stuck in you?” How does a “bad” event take up residence within a person?

Several mechanisms are involved. One such mechanism is the mind-bodyemotion system itself. We call this our neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic state. It is your mind-body creating meaning (your Meaning dimension). You do not just “think” apart from “feeling.” You feel your thoughts. You somatize and embody your thoughts so that they become incorporated in your body and neurology as muscle memory. Whenever you have an experience in the world, positive or negative, you go into state. This may seem too simple and obvious. Yet this process is profound. It is the very process by which you take ideas and thoughts and use them to literally in-form yourself. When you “in-corporate” ideas and concepts—that information runs neuro-pathways and structures your neurology. When you go into state, the more intense and powerful the state—the more neurology is committed to the experience. The more neurology committed, the more fully you “know” and remember the state. The events that trigger the state then become one of the movies in your video-arcade. And if the event was shocking—that very experience of being shocked itself becomes a mechanism for getting the event, as an outside reference, inside as your “frame of reference.” That’s why we ask, “What are you referring to?” The person then recalls the reference that was originally outside. Now it is inside the mind-body system. It is a represented reference that the person can see-hear-feel on the screen of the mind. She has brought it inside so it plays in the theater of her mind. When he draws conclusions and creates beliefs, understandings, values and dis-values, intentions, etc., he brings the event and its pain into himself. The rabbit hole gets deeper (and higher). He turns a represented reference -310-

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into a frame of reference and uses it to see the world. Now this is how he thinks and feels about other events out there. Yet it doesn’t even stay at that level. Repetition habituates the trauma movie and eventually it will drop outside of conscious awareness and will play in the theater of the mind—in the background. It will run as background information and constitute the person’s frame of mind. In this way bad events take up residence within, so no wonder we don’t “get over it.” When you build your mental-and-emotional library of references out of a particular event—you can’t just “get over it.” That event now structures one’s sense of reality, the very fabric of what one feels. You bring the movie in, set frame upon frame over it, and repeatedly go into state. This feeds this information more and more into the body. It teaches neurology how to feel those ideas. If they are toxic, then you incorporate the error deeper inside you, creating ill-health and disease. This warns that, while some changes in the neuro-semantic mind-body system can work with amazing speed, other things take more time. When a person has erroneously built an entire life around a particular event, then the renewal and transformation doesn’t involve just eliminating some interfering frames, it is re-constructing an entire new matrix which honors one’s entire experience. This also explains why it is so easy to shock and traumatize a child. Children are especially vulnerable to traumas because a child has a very simple model of the world, with simple black-and-white frames and beliefs. They have few if any frames for handling distressing events. So when something terrible happens, such as sexual molestation, rape, divorce of parents, loss of home, etc., their entire matrix is shaken and disturbed. They are in shock and do not recognize anything familiar. They have no map or frame for dealing with the distress. Then, to make matters worse, they use patterns of “childish thinking” and personalize what goes on “out there” as meaning something about them, usually that they are “bad,” “inadequate,” or “at fault” and needing to be punished. Thinking in extreme terms, they catastrophize the event —making it about “everything” (pervasive) and “forever” (permanent). This induces a terrible and intense traumatic state of terror, dread, fear, confusion, etc. and create “learned helplessness”or clinical depression. 3 -311-

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No wonder they feel it so strongly that it becomes a significant emotional event in their matrix. When Time Stops in the Matrix If a distressing event is too much of a trauma for a person, the very shock of that trauma can cause “time” to stand still inside the matrix. This is what frequently happens with those events that are so horrendous and unacceptable that one becomes “frozen in time.” If all of your meaningmaking frames are so assaulted that your entire “sense of reality” is thrown off, then everything you have constructed about Self, your ability to cope (Power), Others, the World, etc. can become so interrupted and violated you enter into, as it were, a black hole which puts you in a spin in the Time dimension. In that void you then go round and round the same event as if drawn to it with a perverse attraction. This is what happens to people shocked by horrendously unacceptable traumas like war, rape, the sudden natural disaster of hurricane, tornado, floods, etc. And the more sudden and intrusive the event—the greater the possibility of a person being shocked, overwhelmed, “blown away,” “devastated.” This is not unlike being suddenly interrupted by a call or someone at the door. Afterwards, you suddenly find yourself scratching your head wondering, “Now where was I?” Without a bridge you experience a momentary amnesia. Suppose now that a person is knocked off course to such a degree that not only is there no way back, but there is nothing to go back to—the “world” from which they come from has been devastated. There is no innocence to return to. One’s loved ones are gone. One’s youth is gone. Then with one’s foundations gone, gone also is the future. In looking forward, one only has the trauma movie as a reference—a film which says you’re worthless, inadequate, and flawed. You are damaged goods for life. You are unclean. You are powerless and helpless with no map for coping. Others are scary, not trustworthy, and unable to help. The world is frightful, unpredictable, and terrifying. What future is there when that’s your matrix. This creates a trauma time-lock in the Time dimension. It’s as if everything you know and can trust has been blown away except the worst thing possible—the horrendous event. It’s the one that you know, and you know it fully. And so it plays ... in the theater of your mind over and over and -312-

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over ... This is that “strange fascination” which traumatized people speak about the way they are continually seduced back into the trauma images. Ironically, the more they “try to make it go away”—the more they actually empower it. The command negation, “Don’t think about that horrible event!” actually gives it energy. That’s why it then becomes an obsession and the trauma symptoms appear: flashbacks, thought intrusions, nightmares, “free floating anxiety,” hyper-arousal, etc. How is it that a thirty or fifty-year old man can feel like a little boy inside? How is it that a mature and corporate CEO woman can feel like a thirteenyear old girl around men? It’s because time has stopped around one thing, or many things, in the person’s matrix. The focus has locked in on one thing—a horrible thing. Psychologists speak about the earlier events being “locked in the person’s nervous system and memories.” This is not literal, but a metaphor. The movie of the old event is still playing inside without any time framing that can index the “when.” Back to Healing the Matrix If these are some of the key mechanisms of the matrix, then how do we heal a wounded matrix like this? Healing begins with non-judgmental awareness that allows you to accept whatever happened as what happened. You can then look at your childish ways of coping as doing the best you could do with the resources that you had. Accepting that allows you to realize that many of the conclusions you drew were indeed stupid and based on limiting beliefs. That’s the point. They are just ideas, not who you are or even real. You are more than whatever you think or feel. Your thoughts and feelings are just expressions at a given moment in time. This gives you distance—psychological distance—from the old movie. You can now step out of the old movies to realize that the hurtful events are no longer occurring. This changes the messages being sent to the body. As long as the movie plays, and you are the actor in the old movie, your body gets the messages that you are there, that the distress is occurring, and that you have to defend yourself. When you step out of the movie, index the time element—“old,” “not now,” and “then,” those messages stop. New messages are sent to your neurology about what to respond to.

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The frames that you built up from the event are now all loosened. Deframing has begun. Now you can do a systems check to quality control your matrix. Do these frames enhance my life? (State) Do these frames empower me as a person? (Self and Power) Do these frames represent the present and enable my future? (Time) Do these frames enhance my relating to loved ones or friends (Others). Do I want these frames to guide my actions in the world of business, career, hobby, finances, etc.? (World) Do these frames enable me to live purposefully (Intention)?

Asking these ecology questions of the matrix enables you to step aside from the matrix so you can frame, reframe, and outframe to shape your matrix so it serves you. By stepping out you can access new possibilities and new kinds of thinking. Doing this puts you in control of your own mind and states so that you can become the master of your matrix. Running a systems check on your matrix puts you at choice point whereby you can now design frames that will enrich and empower your matrix. How do I want to think and feel about this as I move forward? What would be the most empowering beliefs for handling this? What are the belief frames, understanding frames, intentional frames that experts in this area use? How much more resourceful can I become? What else is there to learn and develop? What resources would I like to access to texture and qualify my states so that I operate at my best with all of my resources available?

As you then heal your matrix, you move beyond merely remedying the damage to creating generative and transformative change. You can now model the best so you can effectively navigate life and fulfill your highest dreams. Summary The matrix you were born into was mostly an accident of history. It does not determine your future, unless you so construct it in that way. Because of your self-reflexive consciousness you can choose your constructs and therefore the matrix you build. You, like the rest of us, were born into a flawed and fallible matrix and you can step out of such and into a more respectful and

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enjoyable matrix. As this requires conscious mindfulness, you have to wake up to the matrix. Waking up to the matrix lies at the heart of how to live in a human and purposeful way. With mindfulness you can become more of who you can become. The problem is never you, it’s always the frames, the maps, or the matrix. Awareness leads to choice to response-power which then leads to being resourceful.

End Notes: 1. See the article on the website, The Games that Hitler Played. See also Political Coaching. 2. You can read about the therapeutic approach that we take in Neuro-Semantics in the following works: Dragon Slaying, The Structure of Personality, and Meta-States Magic. 3. See the book MovieMind for a fuller description of how to detect and work with your internal movies.

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MATRIX SKILLS Neo: “What? Are you telling me that I can dodge bullets?” Morpheus: “No, Neo. I’m trying to tell you that when you are ready, you won’t have to.”

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astering the matrix—for Neo in the movie— meant developing the ability to change the matrix at will. It meant being able to see it in code and alter it in real time as he pleased. This was the scene in the movie where he stopped the bullets in mid-air, picked out one of them which stood still in the air in front of him, looked at it, and then let all of the bullets fall to the floor. At that point, he had the skill to master the matrix. Yet that happened a long time after Neo took the red pill and left the Matrix which had pulled the world down over his eyes to hide the truth. Before he could become the master of that matrix he had to learn many new skills —skills that would enable him to control the matrix. He learned new fighting skills to handle the Agents and skills for handling his frames of mind. He learned to jump tall buildings to release his fears, doubts, and disbeliefs. This summary chapter pulls together crucial Matrix Model skills—skills to empower you to enter and master your matrix. While these have been described previously, we now review and highlight the skills you need to develop to become the master of your matrix.

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Matrix Skills

#1. A Non-Judgmental Witnessing Awareness The first Matrix Model skill is the ability to witness or observe without needing to do anything about your perceiving. It is to perceive cleanly, accurately, and curiously—to be in a state of non-judgmental awareness. Of all the states to develop, practice, and habituate until it becomes your frame of mind, non-judgmental awareness is the key one. Meta-state acceptance of what is and the willingness to just perceive until you can step into a non-judgmental awareness and calmly, respectfully, and caringly observe without evaluation. To see with sensory-awareness of what exists for what it is enables you to reduce the biases which distort what you see. Take the realization that you are “more than your thoughts, more than your emotions, more than your frames.” This idea that you exist as a person who is not defined or limited by what you’ve experienced in the past, suffered, or by your body, behaviors, or thinking style. You are so much more. By knowing this you can refuse to jump into judgment or to be harsh and demanding on yourself or others. Love yourself as you love the most precious and darling person in your life. #2. Stepping Back to Perceive When you step back from something—mentally, emotionally, and conceptually, you can gain a broader, larger, and more expansive view of things. You “go meta” to see the internal and external contexts. This crucial skill leads directly to personal empowerment because it enables you to exit the matrix and enables you to see the frames that construct your matrix. Practice taking a deep breath and stepping back in your mind from your thinking and feeling. If the image of a metaphor helps, then imagine moving up a hillside to get a broader view than is possible when you’re in the thick of the action in the valley. Or, imagine moving up floor after floor to a higher perspective, a roof-top perspective, then getting into a helicopter and riding high over the details and actions and feelings on the streets below. With your self-reflexive consciousness, you can always step back from yourself, your states, your mental-and-emotional experiences to think-andfeel new thoughts about them. This meta-stating accesses awareness of your second thought about the first one. It could be your fifteenth thought

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about your previous fourteen thoughts. Use it now as your “infinite progress” for higher level outframing. Practice formalized Step Backs. Step back before you begin your day to refresh your highest intentions. Step back to access the resources you want to experience and develop today. Step back at the end of the day to review your performances and receive feedback to set new learning goals, enjoyment goals, performance goals, etc. for the coming days. The Step Back empowers you to distinguish between content and process. While this has always been fundamental in NLP, it takes on special meaning in Neuro-Semantics. The reason for this lies in the terms we use to describe the different levels—content and details, process and structure. All of these words are nominalizations which you can’t put on the table. They do not exist “out there,” they are entities of the matrix. Further, they are multi-ordinal terms. Can you have content about content? Content about process? Process about content? Process about process? Yes, of course. In Neuro-Semantics, unlike NLP, we know that we can have, and do have, content at higher levels. That’s why I have formulated five dimensions as content dimensions in the Matrix Model. The detailed information of the specific ideas, stories, narratives, details, etc. in the categories of “Self,” “Power,” “Others,” “Time,” and “World” make a tremendous difference in our lives. By way of contrast, NLP has sought to eliminate all content. The mantra of NLP, especially Grinder’s version, is, “Content doesn’t matter.” Yet in dismissing content, and especially the content of the higher levels of your frames of mind, NLP became less and less capable of handling some states and experiences. The Matrix Model resolves this by recognizing the multiordinality of these terms. The Step Back as a skill enables you to distinguish what’s on your mind (what and how you are representing) and all of the content information in the back of your mind. This refers to the entire labyrinth of the matrix, the rabbit hole that you fall into and explore.

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#3: Mindfulness — Meta-Awareness In today’s world, emotional intelligence first and foremost means selfawareness, self-acceptance and then monitoring and managing one’s emotions, which then enables connection with others. In her research and writing, Ellen Langer calls this mindfulness. This meta-awareness of your awareness empowers you with the ability to easily and gently maintain such higher level awareness while stepping in and out of experiences. Use the Step Back to generate this higher mindfulness. This goes beyond just “running your own brain” at the primary level of representations in your inner movie. This involves being able to move up the levels with a mindfulness about how you are editing your movies, the screen play script you are playing out, how you are directing the movie, and the productions you are creating. This “consciousness of your consciousness” meta-state elevates your awareness to new levels about how you are operating at all of these levels. Step back by reflecting on what you are doing as well as on how you are doing it. You will gain a richer mindfulness of the ecology of your entire mind-body system. From this emerges “wisdom.” You gain a higher perspective. This meta-reflection will enable you to transcend and include your experiences to create a larger gestalt. It will put you in touch with your highest intentions, enhance your intra-psychic intelligence, and activate your highest being-states. As long as you don’t know the matrix you’re living in, the matrix has you. That’s why waking up to the matrix is your first task. Matrix detection means becoming aware of the frames and meta-frames that govern your mind-body-emotion system. #4: Respectful Pacing As you distinguish person from person and behavior, you distinguish being from expression. All of your expressions (thinking, feeling, remembering, judging, acting, relating, experiencing, etc.) are expressions, not your essence. Now you can focus on persons above and beyond expressions. Now you can treat each and every person (including yourself) with respect and dignity. People are incredibly marvelous and wondrous and deserve to

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be treated as sacred beings. In so honoring each person, you can value the person and the potentials. This will prevent you from selling yourself and others short.

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In Winning the Inner Game I put this in bullet points for easy remembering: Where there’s a Game, there’s a Frame.

Now you can enter a person’s matrix with honor and appreciation to Where there’s a Frame, there’s facilitate his own discovery and a Game. empowerment. This lets you know how to match and mirror the person’s own style of thinking, emoting, reasoning, and acting that creates rapport, trust, and connection. You feel and act the way you do because of your frames. This means many things. Most of all it means that you are not the problem, the problem is never the person. The problem is always the frame. This realization is crucial for mastering your matrix. It enables a witnessing awareness, it takes off the stress and semantic load from “problems,” it eliminates blame and negativity, and it directs you to the true source of things—your frames. #5: Welcoming the Counter-Intuitive Because “paradox” is not “out there” in the real world, but exists only in the matrix world, you create paradox when you confuse levels and by confusing levels. To reverse this, simply accept and welcome that which seems counter-intuitive. The prototype of this is seen in how you deal with your negative emotions. Most people dislike their negative emotions. They find them uncomfortable and so they do not like them. They don’t want them. Therefore they try to command them away: “Don’t feel angry.” “Don’t feel upset.” “Don’t be afraid.” Yet in refusing and rejecting the negative emotions you give them more power. When you do this, you energize them and build thinking-feeling states around them. Paradoxically when you accept, welcome, appreciate, and seek to understand negative emotions—they have less power over you. This is the structure of all “paradoxical interventions” in the matrix. “Show me your panic.” “Turn on your stuttering and see how well you can stutter and as you do notice how long you can feel a block with a word or sound.

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“You say a harsh tonality ‘pushes your buttons’ and makes you insanely angry? This is fascinating. I’ll tighten my vocal chords and see if I can make my voice have the quality of harshness, you tell me when it is just right for insane anger, which is too light, and which is too much.”

What you “know” (tuit) inside yourself (in) is what you have learned and absorbed from your culture and family. Your intuitions are what’s familiar, not necessarily right. Every higher idea, principle, and belief that operates at the higher levels of your mind, which is toxic due to erroneous information and distorted reasoning seems and feels “real” and intuitively right. This is the structure of deception. The feeling of rightness does not make it right, an idea can feel right and yet be totally wrong. Feelings are derived from thinking, and if you think anything long enough, it will come to feel right. #6: Meta-Questioning Using meta-questions empowers you to curiously explore a matrix’s inner structure and to enter into the “logical leveling” which makes up your particular psycho-logics. Use the “Know Nothing” frame to enter into a matrix—freshly, naively, and assume nothing. Then just ask ... ask in a matter-of-fact way, respectfully to find out how the matrix of frames works. For most people to shift to asking questions rather than making statements is a fairly significant shift. Yet questions much more powerfully activates a matrix than do statements. What frames of mind and states would support you asking more questions and operating from an explorative attitude? 1 #7: Frame Challenging When you challenge a frame, you question the interpretative schema or context that a person uses to classify and understand something. By challenging the frame, you invite the person to notice that it is just a way of thinking which may not be accurate or useful. You thereby bring into awareness that the frame is no more real than a person believes it is. Challenging a frame deepens awareness that we are the ones who call them into existence by our thinking-and-feeling. We are the framers. We frame by thinking, reasoning, remembering, imagining, defining and all of the other meta-stating processes. In challenging a frame, you question it, explore it, probe it, and open up the embedded frame system.

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In questioning and challenging the frames of a meaning, you open up and expose the inner structure of a matrix. Frames almost never occur as a single units. They operate as embedded systems, as belief systems. And both innocent questioning and challenging open them up. Additionally there are specific patterns such as The Opening Up Pattern which provides a way to pry open a whole system of embedded frames. #8: Riding the Loops of the Matrix Because thoughts-and-emotions go round and round in circles and can spiral up and down positively and negatively, a Matrix Model skill is to learn how to ride the loops. This entails embracing ambiguity and confusion as you follow the information–energy around the circuit. It means valuing the wild and sometimes chaotic flow of thoughts and emotions as they “take you for a ride.” To do this, recognize and embrace the dynamic fluidity of the matrix. This skill requires and enables you to cope with the non-linear reality of the matrix and give up the need to make things fit an external logic. This then frees you to appreciate the inner psycho-logics of minds and to jump the logical levels of the meta-levels faster than your clients. #9: Reframing To do this, first seek to understand a matrix on its own terms. In entering and detecting the world of meaning of the matrix, explore it to find out what is there and how it works. Then when you intervene, your invitations to reframe meanings will be an invitation for the person to take charge of the meaning-making process as she gives something a new meaning. This respects every person’s right to believe what he wants to believe, to interpret things in ways that fits for his values. Reframing comes after the initial framing which a person does. The first framing creates the person’s matrix. Re-framing gives new and different meanings to behaviors, events, and ideas. Typically this changes the person’s inner world. When you change content, you alter what a person is thinking—content reframing. In changing context, you alter the person’s frames. This transforms how the person is thinking and framing.2 Appreciating the power of frames initiates you into the adventure of creating great frames. You can reframe with elegant skill only to the extent that you know that and appreciate that you are a framer. Appreciate that -322-

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you are free and response-able to create and set frames. This is your glory and agony. #10: Framework Creation Imagine transferring a text file from one computer to another. You can easily do this—send a file attached to an email. Yet in order for the second computer to access and run that file, it will have to have the right program or at least a complementary one. The software program that runs the content of the file is the background frames that have to be set in order to make the file work. Similarly you can create and offer a set of frames as a small framework which can be installed as a whole. How does creating the framework of a small matrix of frames differ from framing? The difference is that instead of setting one frame for a singular meaning, you are initiating a whole set of interrelated frames and typically you’ll present it in a way that seems unrelated to anything. Perhaps it is thought of as small talk, storytelling, or questioning. You can then interject an idea, suggestion, or intervention which will make perfect sense and be influential given that framework. Similarly in the matrix, if you don’t have sufficient frames for interpreting and decoding an idea, experience, or intervention, you will not be able to access and use it. It will not compute in your matrix system. “This just doesn’t make sense to me.” If, however, you prime or pre-frame the matrix with ideas that the person can easily “take on board” and then uses as her “operating system,” then you create response potential for the later communication. Milton H. Erickson was famous for this skill. How can you do this? Simple. Identify the frames by implication (the assumptions and presuppositions) of your idea or intervention and covertly offer them. You can do this by using narratives, asking semantically loaded questions (questions that presuppose the frames), or by distracting to a different subject. #11: Meta-Detailing The skill of meta-detailing is the ability to take any frame (which is a metalevel phenomenon) and translate it down to specific details. In systems terms, this is feed-forwarding through your own levels of mind great ideas, principles, understandings, beliefs, etc. and embodying them in neurology and physiology. It is a key factor in the structure of every kind of expertise. 3 -323-

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I have described meta-detailing in numerous Neuro-Semantic works, from wealth creation, to health and fitness, to writing excellence.4 #12: Thresholding a Matrix. A final skill involves dealing with a matrix that becomes exceptionally ugly and negative. After all, given the cascading of thought and emotion which can spiral round and round an idea, event, or experience and make it worse and worse with each loop, what do you do? What if the meaning of a person’s way of framing becomes so negative that it creates a world of pain? What if there are multiple frames that encode what, in human experience, is evil? In that case, the further you go into that matrix, it is like you are entering into the labyrinths of a dragon’s lair where the person’s states are more toxic, destructive, and poisonous due to the framing. In Meta-Coaching we use a process, called Coaching to the Matrix, for this very purpose. In doing this we begin by embracing a hurting person’s matrix and then gently follow the path of pain in that matrix by asking questions that pace the person’s experience: Where or how are you stuck in some symptom or pain? How bad does this feel? What else is not working? We then shift to a set of meta-questions: Let’s say that’s true, if it is true, then what would that mean to you? And if it means that, what would you then understand or believe? And let’s hold that frame in place, whether it is true or not, whether you like it or not, if that is so, then what? What are you aware of or what comes to mind? By beginning at the primary level with the symptomatic negative emotions or limitations, we are then able to ground the person’s matrix in a context of life. Then from there we are able to explore the full range of meanings which hold it in place. By doing this and by moving up through the entire matrix we can the take it to a threshold where the person is ready to say a definitive no to its value and ecology. “Is this ecological for you?” “Does it enhance your life?” “Does it bring out your best?” And with that the person is at a choice point and ready to escape that matrix. “You’ve Got the Gift, But it Seems that You’re Waiting for Something.” In the movie, The Matrix, the Oracle engaged Neo in a fierce but mystifying conversation in which she told him “just what he needed to hear.” While -324-

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she challenged him by action and word about his concepts of fate, destiny, and free will, she seeded many of the things that would come thereafter giving Neo time and experience to discover things for himself. “What do you think? You think you’re the One?” she asks.

When he says, “Honestly, I don’t know.” She points to the Latin words on her kitchen wall, “Know thyself.” Then she speaks about an inner knowing. “Being the One is just like being in love. Nobody can tell you you’re in love. You just know it. Through and through. Balls to bones.”

She then prods him about whether he thinks he’s the One, and he—in his doubting and skeptical state—says, “I’m not the one.” To which she said: “Sorry kid. something.”

You got the gift, but looks like you’re waiting for

He was. He was waiting to be convinced. He didn’t know himself well enough. Previously when the Oracle had said, “You’re cuter than I thought. I see why she likes you” Neo asked, “Who?” That’s when the Oracle said, “Not too bright though.” Being the One, and knowing that you are the One, the only one who has the ability to master your matrix, is both an exciting and a frightening possibility. Yet we hold back from that. It seems too much, too bold, too outrageous. We look for someone else to give us the key to our own inner matrix. We want someone else to be responsible. But ... you have the gift. And you may be waiting ... or you may even now be learning the lessons and beginning to believe and to take charge and walk the path of your own mastery. Summary Mastering your matrix requires that you develop numerous Matrix Model Skills by which you then are able to detect, explore, and transform your matrix. Mastery comes through deliberate practice, commitment, and engagement. May you find yourself joyfully learning and practicing these skills until you, like Neo, know that you are “the One” who will master your own matrix.

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End Notes: 1: See Coaching Conversations (in production, 2003). The first several chapters identify the power of questions. 2: Mind-Lines (2002) is an entire book on identifying conversational reframing patterns. The original NLP book Reframing (1985) is also an excellent source. 3: Bob Bodenhamer and I first described meta-detailing in our 1999 book which is now titled, Sub-Modalities Going Meta. In that book we unmasked the meta-levels of the socalled “sub-modalities” and identified numerous patterns which resulted. 4: See Inside-Out Wealth, Games Slim and Fit People Play, and Writing Genius (training manual).

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PRINCIPLES OF THE MATRIX "If you are pained by an external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your judgment about it" Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, AD 165

T

o effectively work in any field, you have to understand the governing principles of the field. So what are the principles of the matrix? After you discover the principles you have to develop the know-how for putting them into practice. This is as true for aerodynamics and education as it is for psychotherapy and modeling. It is also true for the Matrix Model. What then are the basic principles of the matrix—the secrets which govern the structuring of the matrix? The following principles summarize the mechanisms that bring a matrix into being, that govern how it works, and that inform about how to use it. These principles are expressed as succinctly and memorable as possible. #1: The Matrix is an Universe of Meaning As already noted, every matrix is constructed, activated, and driven by meaning. The dimensions of your frames are not created by events and external circumstances, but by your mind-body system as it constructs understandings of the world. Your matrix is brought into being by how you think about the events of your life. How you represent the events and encode the movie that plays in -327-

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your mind operates as your first construct. It describes what’s playing in the theater of your mind. So do the classifications and categories you use, the interpretations, the evaluations, the thinking patterns you rely upon, and the frames that you give to each and every event whether real or imagined. Further, as the one who brings meaning to your experiences, you are the architect of your matrix. You also have the power to change those meanings. If it dis-empowers you, you can alter that meaning. Doing this puts you in the driver’s seat because when you change meaning, you thereby change your experience of reality. You also can call new realities into existence. This is the key to every matrix. The meaning you give is the meaning you live. As the code of your matrix translates your meanings into your actions and your way of being in the world. #2: You Create Meaning by Reflexive Meta-Stating The central core of your matrix lies in your meaning-making ability. You do this by classifying things—naming, labeling, categorizing—framingone. Then you reflexively associate thoughts and feelings with the experience to meta-state the first classification frame—framingtwo. This is a higher level of awareness and feeling to the label. Then, as you bring another state to this internal framing, you evaluate the significance of it all—framingthree. This is the meta-stating core at the center of the dimensions, which creates the matrix itself. While using different terms for these facets of meaning-making seem to indicate different and discreet processes, they only do so to a small extent, they are actually very similar. The different terms simply provide different perceptions on the same thing. You create meaning through attaching emotions, through representing, through classifying, through meta-stating, through framing, and through evaluating. #3: Self-organizing Frames Create the Entire Matrix System The Matrix Model has an epistemology. What is this theory of knowledge (epistemology)? It is the meaning-making or meta-stating process. This is how you create meaning, how you know what you know. The origin and structure of your experiences arise from the frames that make up the individual dimensions. For example, the system can selforganize around a problem frame in an attempt to understand it and to

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manage the difficulty that it creates. In this, your dimensions often arise as attempted solutions to a problem. At the intentional level of a given matrix, you attempt to do something of value and importance. Yet often, however, the very thinking that creates the problem, and forms the meaning-making, is the very kind of thinking that cannot solve that problem. When this happens, you have to go deeper-into the labyrinth of a matrix to understand the structure and to change the selforganizing frames. At this point, the frames themselves are the problem. For example, the problem in “stuttering” begins when a person punctuates the experience of searching for a word as the classification of stuttering. Before labeling it, “stuttering” does not exist. But once you name it and language it, you are then able to attach one or more negative emotions (e.g., fear, shame, regret, contempt, etc.) to it. This framing creates the problem by calling it into existence and constructing perceptions, emotions, and behaviors around it. From there the person’s thinking typically exacerbates the problem and makes it worse as a person tries not to stutter. Of course, trying to not stutter focuses attention on stuttering and on one’s speech. Typically this has the effect of making the person more self-conscious and more sensitive to what other’s think. At this point, the matrix will have the person who now defines him or herself as “a stutterer.” (Chapter 16) Or consider the problem in a phobia. The problem is that after one represents something as fearful, he then steps into the horror movie that he creates. This puts him in the movie with his fearful object. To create a phobia, take a past referent (or even an imagined future referent) and encode it so that your body responds as if you are there and in this moment threatened by the fearful object. This will send fear signals to your mindbody system and put you in state. Then, try hard to make it stop and go away (the “command negation” in the Intention dimension). This will make things worse as it will add pressure to the experience. Then when it does not work, it will convince you that you not only do stuttering, but that you are a stutterer. It’s your identity. “This is the way I am” (Self dimension). It will also underscore your inability to stop it, “I’m powerless to do anything about it” (Power dimension).

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#4: Your Internal Map of the World is Comprised of Sub-Dimensions The matrix you live in, and operate out from, is actually a network of beliefs and cumulative learnings from many experiences about many things over many years. As a semantic class of life, you inherit and create hundreds of concepts and conceptual frames. These, in turn, govern and order your life. Taken altogether, this makes up your model of the world. This “model of the world” is the matrix which is made up of multitude of beliefs about numerous concepts. #5: Your Focus Becomes Your Attractor Frame In the meta-stating core, you mentally ascribe “reality” to your thoughts and feelings. This creates your frames of meaning that you know as your beliefs. Doing this also makes them compellingly real to you ... real in your neurology, which you then real-ize (make real) via your behaviors. What you map as “real,” especially as compellingly real, drives how you operate in life. What you experience as compellingly real creates a demanding response from you. After all, beliefs are commands to the nervous system. To the extent this happens without your mindful awareness, the matrix has you. This typically involves forgetting that a matrix is simply a set of embedded frames. Instead you confuse your mapping with the territory. Doing so, you signal your body to respond to your maps as if they were the territory. In this identification, you identify your maps of the territory as if they are one. #6: Human Responses Follow One’s Meaning-Making Style How you respond at any given time reveals the kind of meaning-making that you are doing. Because of this, your style (i.e., your interpretive and explanatory style) determines the kind of life you have, and the world you live in. It generates your style of making meaning. Whether you use an optimistic or pessimistic explanatory style, whether you use an option or procedural style, your thinking and perceptual metaprogram style define and create that which you experience. What is your style of thinking, perceiving, responding, communicating, etc. to the world? What is your modus operandi for how you get yourself to take action? What kind of thinking patterns govern your thinking? What cognitive distortions typically characterize the way you think and reason? -330-

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Whatever it is, it arises from and reflects how you create meaning. For this reason the Meta-Programs Model provides a way to detect a matrix. #7: The Internal Movie Operates as a Hologram Every meta-stating frame that you create not only spirals off to create the sub-dimensions, it also shows up in the cinematic features in your mental movie. Do you know what does this means? It means that you can discern the whole of the matrix in the parts of the movie. Like a hologram, you can take the parts that you find in the cinema and discern the whole. Your second and third and fourth thoughts which spiral out of your meaningmaking set additional frames about your movie. Some integrate into your movie as cinematic features. Now you can use these cinematic features as yet another way to detect a matrix. This movie metaphor is just a way of talking about your information coding. None of it is real. Yet as a model, it allows you to understand yourself and others and to make changes. #8: Meta-Stating creates the Holons of the Holography A holon in systems thinking describes a part/whole structure. An aspect of a system (a part) redundantly gives information about the whole. “The whole is in the part and the part is in the whole.” That’s a holon. You can use a part of the whole to identify the whole. The part is holographically and cinematically photographed in the cinematic features of the movie. It is here that you can find the whole in the part and the part in the whole. The cinematic features of what you see, hear, feel, smell, and taste as sensory-based representations are holons that semantically or symbolically stand for higher level ideas and meanings. So for example, if you think about something fearful and you use the code of “close” and see the movie of the scary thing right in front of you. The part of the movie within the code of “close” contains the whole of the structure of fear. #9: The Matrix has Causes, Contributing Factors, and Symptoms As a detective you’ll want to distinguish the thoughts that set a frame and create a matrix, those that contribute to the context, and those which are symptoms. Every thought or emotion which spins out from a matrix system is not of equal value. There will be many secondary and tertiary emotions and thoughts that spin out from the system. What’s important for transformative leverage is finding those key thoughts-and-emotions.

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Usually, it is not useful to deal with the symptoms of the neuro-semantic system. That is like putting a band-aid on a gapping wound that needs stitching. Ferocious dragon states often are nothing more than symptoms of the matrix. And as symptomatic responses they are not the real problem. #10: Matrix Analysis Shows the Leverage Points The value and importance of Matrix Analysis is that it provides you an understanding of the two key feedback loops. It is in the meaning-making meta-stating loop where you will find leverage points in the system for intervention. The first loop is the primary state loop which Behaviorists called Stimulus —> Response. The second is the meta-level loop in the Meaning dimension. In addition we have six system loops, one through each dimension. Following the energy of the system means recognizing the loops and following information–energy through those loops. In this way, you can find out and detect which dimension is flickering on and off in response to an event. #11: The Sub-Dimensions Operate Simultaneously There is simultaneity within the systemic nature of your neuro-semantic reality. Influence and energy (thoughts and feelings) will be activated in every system at the same time. Whenever anything happens, the entire system can potentially be activated. Normally however only a few dimensions are turned on. When the dimensions are operating, they operate simultaneously. You can have one or two, or any number of the dimensions triggered and activated at a given time. In our analysis of the creation of a phobia, typically five or six of the dimensions are activated, whereas in “stuttering” all seven are typically activated. The permeability of the dimensions means that what starts in one dimension can easily spread to any of the other dimensions. #12: Resistance is a Response to Perceived Dangers When you perceive a danger to your model of the world, your defenses arise similar to the way they do when you are physically in danger. But the danger here is to your frames. You feel week, vulnerable, ashamed, etc. Then to manage your emotions of anxiety, fear, shame, anger, upsetness, tension, guilt, etc., you become defensive. This defense system is as natural as it is good and valuable, although it can be falsely activated and misused. -332-

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Respect for a matrix’s defense system enables you to work with it by pacing and creating a context of safety. This is true for you and for others. You are then able to work more effectively with and within the system. Your interventions will be more like invitations than interventions. The NeuroSemantic approach is to operate more like a coach in facilitating the retrieval of resources. This follows Erickson’s philosophy. “In psychotherapy, you can change no one. People change themselves. You create the circumstances under which an individual can respond spontaneously and change. And that’s all you can do. The rest is up to them.”

#13: Symptomology is Valuable Communication About the Matrix A symptom signals that something is wrong. This is not “wrong” in the sense of “bad,” but wrong in the sense that the given matrix is not working to achieve what the person thinks he will achieve or what she truly wants to achieve. Typically, we experience symptoms as frozen sequences of behaviors that have repetitively habituated an attempted solution that does not work. When that happens, then the symptoms themselves often block us from the resources which we need. As a message from and about our matrix, the symptom essentially says that something is wrong somewhere else, usually in one of our belief frames. It could also be an understanding frame, decision frame, identity frame, etc. It is typical that we build a matrix around a problem in order to manage it or solve it. That’s why it is common and easy for the matrix to become organized around a problem. You want to solve or deal with some problem experience. If your frames do not bring resolution and if the problem exacerbates, then your matrix system will continue to evolve, change, grow, and transmute to accommodate the problem. This usually generates more symptoms. Symptoms are loud, obvious, and usually highly unpleasant. But a symptom is not the problem, not is it the cause. Symptoms differ from causes. The symptoms which result from trying to deal with a problem can arise from many sources—from influencing and causative factors. Through repetition and habituation, the symptoms themselves can become a frozen sequence of behaviors that make up a matrix. More often than not, many people use symptoms as defenses to manage their anxiety or other negative emotions (or even positive emotions). A -333-

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person may refuse to face an emotion like fear, anxiety, or sadness. This refusal or denial occurs as an attempt to save one from pain. Yet it often creates other problems. When the defense can no longer manage such, the symptoms not only block one’s resources (i.e., acceptance, learning, growth), but is also a witness to the blocked resources. A strange factor about symptoms is that when a person enters into the symptom, that person will lose a sense of time, or regress in time to a younger age, and feel helpless. When this happens it indicates that one has entered into a trance-like state. At such times the person’s matrix itself can become harmful. In fact, one’s matrix itself can be one big symptom. When that happens, the person is usually in need for a complete paradigm shift to move into a more healthy, balanced, and ecological matrix. #14: The Solution often Differs Radically from the Cause Matrix Analysis enables you to understand the mind-body system, how it works, what drives it, what mechanisms govern its operations, and the causative factors that play a role. Yet more often than not, merely knowing how it works does not resolve the problems which the matrix creates. In fact, often the solution to a system will look very different from the knowledge about how it works. What is called “The Phobia Cure1” is a good example of this. We know that a person can create a phobia by simply playing the B-rated movie in the mind over and over, amplifying it and exaggerating it, until it scares the hell out of one. At the point a person steps into the movie to experience the full range of the terror. That’s how to create a phobia. Yet the metaphor of watching the horror movie from a projection booth until it comes to an end, forwarding it to a scene of comfort or pleasure, then stepping into that comfort and rewinding it to just before the beginning ... none of that directly relates to how the person created the phobia in the first place. Yet if you do that, it will reduce the phobia. (See Games for Mastering Fear) This is similar to the solution to a broken leg. Namely, immobilizing the leg and putting it into a cast, differs from the cause of the broken leg. If you broke your leg by stumbling and falling down a flight of stairs, you will not fix it by dragging yourself up those stairs. Solutions often look completely different from reversing the cause. Conversely, the cause does not always indicate the solution.

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#15: There are Many Options for Resolving a Problem As a neuro-semantic system, the Matrix Model offers numerous ways in—many places for intervention. This is the wonder, delight, and complexity of systems. As an interactive system of many parts, there are many places to intervene to transform the system. There are many leverage points in the system. This also explains why sometimes a very small change in one part of the system can have pervasive system-wide changes through the whole. It’s not the size of the intervention that matters. Sometimes a tiny adjustment can totally alter an entire system. #16: Focus Governs Frame In every situation, there are thousands of things to focus on. When you do set your focus of attention, you thereby create higher frames of intention, understanding, and belief. What is the nature of your focus—is it empowering? In a matrix, what and how you focus presents a fascinating and dynamic. Obviously focus begins with simply noticing, looking, and thinking. It begins with a non-judgmental awareness of something. Eventually however, focus becomes patterning. That is, it becomes the way that you form, format, and punctuate your internal world. In this way you create meaning. You label things, you frame things, you categorize and classify. Doing this colors your world in terms of your frames. As this focus moves up the levels, they create higher level frames that operate as self-organizing attractors in your neuro-semantic system. Be careful; what are you focusing on? This can call a matrix into existence and can explain the presence of a matrix. The Matrix as an Organizing Template When it comes to the bewildering complexity of human beings, without a manageable structure for organizing your thinking and perceiving—you can become easily overwhelmed. There are so many facets and dynamics and variables in human experience. That’s why one of the things that distinguishes an effective model is a structure that can sort things out and give you a way to identify, distinguish, and work with multiple variables that influence a system. The Matrix Model provides a template for sorting out and separating many of the multiple variables that govern everyday experiences of mental-and-emotional health, emotions, skills, and experiences.

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1) Representing and Framing The Matrix Model offers a coherent model of human functioning by organizing the structure around the representation and framing of information and how information creates and induces one into mind-body states. This is the first organizing principle and mechanism of this model. This cognitive-behavioral model gives expression to the fact that, as “The map is not the territory,” people map at multiple levels. 2) Reflexivity The second organizing mechanism is reflexivity or meta-stating. The mindbody-emotion system operates by how you reflect upon your thoughts-andemotions and so create layer upon layer of frames. This layering of your thinking-and-emoting creates “logical levels,” or meta-states, and so a set of embedded frames. You have levels of thoughts as you keep abstracting at various levels. 3) Meaning Making The third organizing mechanism is meaning making. With each representation and linking, each layering of states, you create mental structures which you “keep in mind” as your mapped meanings. Via linking, framing, pattern detection and creation, you organize your internal world in the way that it is organized and that you recognize its patterning. 4) State The fourth organizing mechanism is state. With each thought —whether a memory or an imagination, whether a sensory based representation or a conceptual understanding and generalization, whether created by yourself or received from another—you go into state. You experience a neurolinguistic or mind-body-emotion state which then governs your experience. It also collects all of the second and third thoughts that you think and feel about your state and incorporates those into the primary experience. 5) Feedback and Feed-Forward Loops The fifth organizing mechanism is the feedback and feed-forward loops. There is the Stimulus—>Response loop from the outside to the inside and back out again. There is the internal constructing and feeding-back to the next higher level of one’s mind in the meta-meaning-making core, and there is the internal loop within each of the sub-dimensions as a person simultaneously reflects upon one’s experiences.

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Principles of The Matrix

Summary There are organizing principles and processes of the Matrix Model. As you understand it as a system, you will develop the ability to work effectively with it. A core principle is that every matrix is about frames that govern the meaning-making processes.

End of the Chapter Notes: 1. See the Phobia Cure in The Sourcebook of Magic or in Games for Mastering Fear. In Neuro-Semantics we call this pattern “The Movie Rewind Pattern” because that’s what a person does in the pattern, he or she rewinds the internal movie. Further, this pattern does not merely handle phobias, it essentially takes the neurological charge (emotion) out of any “thought” (awareness) that activates a person’s mind-body system so that he generates far too much emotion about something.

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Development, and Death. San Francisco: Freeman. Seligman, Martin E.P. (1991). Learned Optimism. NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Watzlawick, Paul. (1976). How Real is Real? New York: Basic Books. White, Michael; Epston, David. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New York: Norton. Zeig, (1985). Experiencing Erickson. NY: Brunner/Mazel.

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L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. L. Michael Hall is a visionary leader in the field of NLP and Neuro-Semantics having been a modeler of human excellence for 30 years. Searching out areas of human expertise, he continues to model the structure of that experience and then turn that information into models, patterns, training manuals, and books. With his several businesses, Michael is also an entrepreneur and an international trainer. His doctorate is in the Cognitive-Behavioral sciences from Union Institute University. For two decades he worked as a psychotherapist in Colorado. When he found NLP in 1986, he studied and worked with Richard Bandler. Later when studying and modeling resilience, he developed the Meta-States Model (1994) that launched the field of NeuroSemantics. He co-created the International Society of Neuro-Semantics (ISNS) with Dr. Bob Bodenhamer. Learning the structure of writing, he began writing and has written more than 60 books, many best sellers in the field of NLP. Applying NLP to coaching, he created the Meta-Coach System. This was co-developed with Michelle Duval (2003-2007). He co-founded the Meta-Coach Foundation (2003), created the Self-Actualization Quadrants (2004) and launched the new Human Potential Movement (2005) which is now one of the Professional Tracks of Neuro-Semantics. Regarding creativity, Dr. Hall has created a dozen major models in the field of NLP and Neuro-Semantics, hundreds of patterns, and including the serial books, more than 75 books. He created a board game for learning Meta-Programs. He co-created the Neuro-Semantic and Meta-Coach communities and the NLP Leadership Summit. Contact Information: P.O. Box 8 Clifton, Colorado 81520 USA (1-970) 523-7877 Website: www.neurosemantics.com

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Books by L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. NLP and Neuro-Semantics: 1) Meta-States: Mastering the Higher Levels of Mind (1995/ 2012). 2) Dragon Slaying: Dragons to Princes (1996 / 2000). 3) The Spirit of NLP: The Process, Meaning and Criteria for Mastering NLP (1996). 4) Languaging: The Linguistics of Psychotherapy (1996, spiral). 5) Becoming More Ferocious as a Presenter (1996, spiral book). 6) Patterns For Renewing the Mind (with Bodenhamer, 1997 /2006). 7) Time-Lining: Advance Time-Line Processes (with Bodenhamer, 1997). 8) NLP: Going Meta—Advance Modeling Using Meta-Levels (1997/ 2001). 9) Figuring Out People: Reading People Using Meta-Programs (with Bodenhamer, 1997, 2005). 10) SourceBook of Magic, Volume I (with Barbara Belnap, 1997). 11) Mind-Lines: Lines For Changing Minds (with Bodenhamer, 1997/ 2005). 12) Communication Magic (2001). Originally, The Secrets of Magic (1998). 13) Meta-State Magic: Meta-State Journal (1997-1999). 14) When Sub-Modalities Go Meta (with Bodenhamer, 1999, 2005). Originally, The Structure of Excellence. 15) Instant Relaxation (with Lederer, 1999). 16) User’s Manual of the Brain: Volume I (with Bodenhamer, 1999). 17) The Structure of Personality: Modeling Personality Using NLP and Neuro-Semantics (with Bodenhamer, Bolstad, and Harmblett, 2001). 18) The Secrets of Personal Mastery (2000). 19) Winning the Inner Game (2007), originally Frame Games (2000). 20) Games Fit and Slim People Play (2001). 21) Games for Mastering Fear (with Bodenhamer, 2001). 22) Games Business Experts Play (2001). 23) The Matrix Model: Neuro-Semantics and the Construction of Meaning (2003/2016). 24) User’s Manual of the Brain: Master Practitioner Course, Volume II (2002). 25) MovieMind: Directing Your Mental Cinemas (2002). 26) The Bateson Report (2002, spiral. 27) Make it So! Closing the Knowing-Doing Gap (2002). (Out of Print) 28) Source Book of Magic, Volume II, Neuro-Semantic Patterns (2003). 29) Propulsion Systems (2003, spiral). 30) Games Great Lovers Play (2004). 31) Coaching Conversation, Meta-Coaching, Volume II (with Michelle Duval & Robert Dilts 2004, 2010). 32) Coaching Change, Meta-Coaching, Volume I (with Duval, 2004/ 2015). 33) Unleashed: How to Unleash Potentials for Peak Performances (2007 Vol. III). 34) Self-Actualization Psychology (2008, Volume IV). 35) Achieving Peak Performance (2009, Volume V). 36) Unleashing Leadership: Self-Actualizing Leaders and Companies (2009, Vol VI). 37) The Crucible and the Fires of Change (2010, Volume VII). 38) Inside-Out Wealth (2010). 39) Benchmarking: The Art of Measuring the Unquantifiable (2011, Volume VIII). -342-

40) Innovations in NLP: Volume I (Edited with Shelle Rose Charvet; 2011). 41) Neuro-Semantics: Actualizing Meaning and Performance (2011) 42) Systemic Coaching: Coaching the Whole Person with Meta-Coaching (with Pascal Gambardella, Ph.D., 2012, Volume IX). 43) Group and Team Coaching (2013, Volume X). 44) Executive Coaching: Facilitating Excellence in the C-Suite (2014, Volume XI). 45) Political Coaching: Unleashing Self-Actualizing Politicians. (2015, Volume XII). 46) Collaborative Leadership, with Ian McDermott. (2016). 47) The Field of NLP with John Seymour and Richard Gray (unfinished). 48) The Meta-Coaching System (2015, Volume XIII). 49) Get Real: Unleashing Authenticity (2016, Volume XIV). 50) Inside-Out Persuasion (2017, Volume XV). 51) Creative Solutions (2017, Volume XVI). 52) Executive Thinking: Activating Your Highest Executive Thinking Potentials (2018). 53) NLP Secrets: Untold Stories (2019). 54) Thinking as a Modeler (2019). 55) Thinking Hypnotically to Unleash Potentials (2020). 56) Hypnotic Conversations (2020) 57) Humorous Thinking (2020) 58) Resilience: Being the Phoenix (2020) Volume Books Books written in weekly installments to the Neuro-Semantic community (Neurons), to the Meta-Coaches egroup (Morpheus), to the Neuro-Semantic Trainers egroup (Framers). These are now PDF books on the Neuro-Semantic website. Neurons began as the Meta-Reflections in 2008 and each year consists of another book. 1) 2008. 2) 2009. 3) 2010. 4) 2011. 5) 2012. 6) 2013. 7) 2014. 8) 2015. 9) 2016. 10) 2017. 11) 2018. 12) 2019. Morpheus began as the Meta-Coach Reflections in 2009. 2) 2010. 3) 2011. 4) 2012. 5) 2013. 6) 2014. 7) 2015. 8) 2016. 9) 2017. 10) 2018. 11) 2019. Framers is the Trainers’ Reflections which began in 2010. 1) 2010. 2) 2011. 3) 2012. 4) 2013. 5) 2014. 6) 2015. 7) 2016. 8) 2017. 9) 2018. 10) 2019. Other books: 1) Emotions: Sometimes I Have Them/ Sometimes They have Me (1985) 2) Motivation: How to be a Positive Influence in a Negative World (1987) 3) Speak Up, Speak Clear, Speak Kind (1987) 4) Millennial Madness (1992), now Apocalypse Then, Not Now (1996). 5) Over My Dead Body (1996). Order Books from:

NSP: Neuro-Semantic Publications P.O. Box 8 Clifton, CO. 81520—0008 USA (970) 523-7877

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Neuro-Semantics as an Association In 1996 Hall and Bodenhamer registered “Neuro-Semantics” and founded The International Society of Neuro-Semantics (ISNS) as a new approach to teaching, training, and using NLP. The objective was to take NLP, as a model and field, to a higher level in terms of professional ethics and quality. Today Neuro-Semantics is one of the leading disciplines and movements within NLP as it is pioneering many new developments and demonstrating a fresh creativity similar to what characterized NLP when it was new. Dr. Hall is known as a prolific writer, having authored 60 books in the field of NLP, many of them best sellers through Crown House Publishes (Wales, UK) and many of them translated into numerous languages: German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Norwegian, Portuguese, etc. www.neurosemantics.com

The Meta-Coaching System As a complete and comprehensive coaching system, the Meta-Coaching System began in 2001 when L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. modeled four expert coaches. He then applied the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Neuro-Semantic models to the burgeoning field of Coaching. As a systemic model, the Meta-Coaching System enables a professional Coach to answer the question: How do you know what to do, when to do it, with whom to do it, how to do what you’re doing, and why? When you can think strategically as a Coach, you will be able to recognize where you are with a client and what to do. Having a theoretical model that answers the why are you doing that? question saves your coaching from being a grab-bag of tricks so you don’t have to coach-by-the-seat-of-your-pants. To meet this rigorous criteria, the Meta-Coaching System is based on eight models— models which are based in Cognitive-Behavioral, Developmental, and Self-Actualization psychologies. The design is to give Meta-Coaching a credible scientific basis. Then as a coach you will not fall back on what you “feel like” on a certain day, your “intuitions” (which may be your own unresolved issues), or some trick that you have picked up on a weekend training. Today Meta-Coaching standards are the highest in the field of Coaching as it offers specific behavioral benchmarks for every one of the 50 coaching skills. It also has developed a Benchmarking Intangibles Model for how to generate rigorous benchmarks for any value or skill. The Meta-Coaching System also has an accountability structure to the ethics and standards which governs every licenced Meta-Coach. There are now 16 books detailing the curriculum of Meta-Coaching, and several more in the works. The Meta-Coaching System is inclusive of other systems as Meta-Coaches around the world in 70 countries are often on the board of ICF and many other Coach training programs. Trainings in MetaCoaching occur every year dozens of times in every continent.

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Meta-Coaching Series In the field of Coaching, the Meta-Coaching System is a leading model in framing the process of effective coaching in a highly systematic way. The design is to provide a Professional Coach the ability to know what to do, when to do it, how to do it, with whom to do it, and why to do it. The design also is to establish the field of coaching in the unique psychology for psychologically healthy people who want to change and develop, namely, Self-Actualization Psychology. To achieve that Dr. Hall has committed to writing the models and processes in a series of books that comprise the curriculum of Meta-Coaching.

Volume I: II: III: IV: V: VI: VII: VIII: IX: X: XI: XII: XIII: XIV: XV: XVI:

Meta-Coaching Series Title Model Coaching Change Axes of Change Model Coaching Conversations Facilitation Model Unleashed: Self-Actualization Self-Actualization Quadrants Self-Actualization Psychology Self-Actualization Volcano Achieving Peak Performance Meaning–Performance Axes Unleashing Leadership: Axes of Leadership Self-Actualizing Leaders & Companies The Crucible The Crucible Model Benchmarking Intangibles Benchmarking Model Systemic Meta-Coaching The Matrix Model Group & Team Meta-Coaching Group Trust Spiral Executive Coaching Political Coaching The Meta-Coaching System Get Real: Unleashing Authenticity Inside-Out Persuasion Creative Solutions The Neuro-Semantic Precision Funnel

Meta-Coaching also based on the following Books: Figuring Out People (2006) The Meta-Programs Model Secrets of Personal Mastery (1997) The Meta-States Model Winning the Inner Game (2007) The Meta-States Model The Matrix Model (2003) Neuro-Semantic Systems Model Communication Magic (1999) The Meta-Model of Language

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