Any NLP Practitioner worth his or her salt needs to master the Meta-Model.
Now, there are a few distinctions on the Meta-Model that very few beginners discover and very few trainers make explicit.
Let's tease some of those out in this post.
1. The Meta-Model is actually the Meta-Model of Language in Therapy.
It's fundamental that you learn this distinction and keep it in mind at all times until it becomes second nature to you.
The Meta-Model was created based on modeling the language patterns used by Fritz Perls and Virginia Satir in therapy sessions with their clients. Bandler and Grinder coded it based on existing transformational grammar models.
As such, and as with every genuine NLP-modeled patterns or collection of patterns, the Meta-Model is designed precisely for that use.
2. Generalization, Distortion and Deletion only exist in the Bandler/Grinder lexicon.
In The Structure of Magic I, Richard Bandler and John Grinder offer Generalization, Distortion and Deletion as the three key processes involved in map-making or modeling. In other words, when we model, we generalize, distort and delete "reality" in order to produce a model.
It took me a few years to figure out that these terms and processes were themselves modeled by Bandler and Grinder. If you run a search on Google for these terms, you'll discover that they inevitably lead back to Bandler and Grinder. No other field, apparently, has picked up this terminology or purports to have coined it.
3. The Meta-Model can be much easier to learn.
Since the two previous distinctions were arbitrarily created by the co-founders, it means we can improve on them.
A model is simply a representation of reality. As such, the Meta-Model of language in therapy is simply a representation generated by two people collaborating. They did the best they could. I think we can do better.
If you're committed to mastering the Meta Model, enroll in Meta Model Mastery. In 45 minutes, you will know exactly which questions to use and in what order.
