What’s the secret?
In addition to the limiting attitudes and thought-viruses within the original “pure” NLP that some are promoting, there is a basic problem of limitation due to the original NLP idea of modeling. Let me put this forth as simply as I can:
Modelling something that occurs in a moment of time radically differs from something that occurs over time.
Modelling “wealth creation” is not, never has been, and cannot be a “moment in Time” experience. It is an experience that occurs “over time.”
In the first instance of the moment in time experiences, the NLP strategy model is superb. So, if you want to model how an excellent speller spells, how to get out of bed in the morning with ease and grace, how to delegate a responsibility, how to make a decision, and many other things that occur in a given moment of time, then use the classic NLP strategy model. Interview a person with that skill and mastery, watch eye accessing cues, listen for sensory predicates, map out the step-by-step representations as to the person processes from the first triggering stimuli to the final activity.
Do that and you will obtain a pretty good model for how to replicate that competency and get those results.
In the second instance, however, of experiences that occur over time, the NLP strategy model will not be very helpful. You can watch eye accessing cues all day; gather pages and pages of predicates, and map out the micro-activities of the expert and in the end, all of that information will be pretty much useless. In fact, it will mostly be irrelevant.
Now the surprising thing is that most NLP people, and even trainers, do not seem to know this. They seem to think that they can model lifestyle activities that occur over weeks, months, and even years, in the same way, they model a micro-activity like spelling or deciding. But they cannot; it does not work that way. And why not?
The reason is that lifestyle activities involve lots and lots of micro-strategies embedded within layers of beliefs, belief systems, matrices of meanings, and even higher-level understandings and concepts. And because of this—to model complex lifestyle activities requires some Meta-State structures; it requires a shift to some of the Neuro-Semantic modeling tools. Yes, I know. That is an extremely bold statement, so let me see if I can justify it.
Consider health. If “health” was just a state, just a “moment in time” experience, and just a micro-activity, then we could find that state and the strategy for getting into that state.
Then we could access “the state of health,” anchor it, and then whenever we don’t feel so well or feel a cold coming on, or lack of energy, stress, etc., we could just fire the health state anchor and presto! Health! And if we could do that, we would totally revolutionize the field of medicine! But obviously, that’s ridiculous. “Health” is not a moment in time experience or activity. Health doesn’t occur in just a moment, and is not a “state” like confidence, relaxation, excitement, anger, love, etc. are stated. It is a state as in a condition of one’s overall mind emotions- body in relationship to one’s lifestyle activities—eating, exercising, drinking, sleeping, getting along with others, work, sense of purpose, and so on. There are so many variables and factors that go into the overall condition of being healthy, energetic, free of disease, accident, and illness.
So how would we go about modeling health? After we find some good exemplars of health and healthiness, we would begin to identify all of the multiple sub-strategies involved in attaining a state of health. In this instance, we would specify strategies for eating right, exercising regularly and properly, adopting attitudes and beliefs that support health, handling work, effort, relaxation, and sleep properly, and so on.
The same considerations apply to the state of wealth.
Wealth also is not a moment in time activity. It is a lifestyle activity that occurs over time. And in terms of wealth, it is created not in a day, a week, a month, and very seldom in a year. Generally, it takes a decade.
That’s what most of the leading thinkers and researchers say (not the ‘get rich quick gurus’). So when we set out to model “wealth creation” we similarly need to identify many sub-strategies:
• The activities that are financially viable in our culture.
• Our skill level and competency of the required activities.
• Our beliefs about ourselves learning and developing those competencies.
• The self-management and discipline of taking our performances to the higher levels of expertise and eventually mastery.
• Our relationships with and through others in all of the business relationships
(suppliers, customers, clients, employers, partners, colleagues, employees, etc.).
• Our best states in these many different activities.
• Our skills in handling money (earning, saving, budgeting, investing, etc.).
• Our skills in marketing, selling, negotiating, seeing opportunities, seizing opportunities, etc.
• Our skills in adapting to the market, branding, meeting the needs and wants of clients, etc.
• Our skills in creating a business, the systems required so that the business operates when we are there and when we are not.
And so on. Is that complex? Is it complicated? Yes. And given that it requires multiple strategies about multiple areas of concern at the same time and holding all of those together within a larger framework, it requires understanding and working with multiple meta-levels. And that’s why classic NLP apart from the Meta-States model is inadequate for modeling a lifestyle, over-time activity like “wealth creation.”
This also explains how and why the Meta-States Model, the Matrix Model, Self-Actualization Quadrants, etc. do provide the required tools for effectively modeling how to create wealth over a decade and becoming financially independent. And because there’s more to say about this, I’ll do that in our next meeting when you are ready to create wealth.
Referencing,
Dr. Michael L. Hall, NLP Cognitive Psychologist &
Nicolas Hagen, B.Soc Sci (Psych), Licensed NLP Meta-Coach.
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