Figuring out People: Reading People using Meta Programs
By L. Michael Hall, Bobby B. Bodenhamer
Figuring out people is something we all do. We want to know what makes people behave as they do, what their intentions are, and more importantly, to predict what they are likely to do. This important book about Meta programs goes beyond slotting people in categories.
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It may come as a surprise, but our personality is a mental construct developed as a coping mechanism. It is a stable way of perceiving and behaving. Personality is a description of a set of behaviors and states that get evoked in particular contexts.
Meta Programs
Meta programs describe our habitual style of noticing, thinking, emoting, sorting, valuing, choosing and behaving. They tell us what to delete from our awareness and what to attend to. They are the basis of our strategies and the roles we play.
Thinking in terms of traits makes things static and unable to see how we create our personal reality.
Meta programs reflect our values. We come to value a particular way of thinking and devalue its opposite.
Knowing Someone's Meta programs
Understanding others and their world can increase our ability to influence and persuade, but also prevent them causing us trouble. We can make informed guesses about someone's Meta programs in a particular context by paying attention to certain cue words, body language.
Modeling expertise and best practice discovers which Meta programs are vital for particular types of tasks. For instance, quality control needs the ability to work with detail/specifics also known as global specific (program 3) to mismatch also known as the relationship filter (program 4) and be pessimistic (program 6)
Changing
By understanding our own Meta programs, we can change processes and strategies that aren't working for us. By making a conscious choice, and directing awareness to what we normally delete we can use a different style.
Dr Hall gives six different patterns for changing Meta programs, including the use of time line therapy and NLP anchoring.
Maps of reality
We relate to the world indirectly through our maps. Research has shown that only 20% of the information we use to create perception comes from the outside. That 80% of information the brain works with is already present.
We delete, distort and generalize both with our senses and with our language. It's the meanings and interpretations we make of events, not the events themselves that cause us to think and feel like we do.
Mental Meta Programs
Attending, thinking, representing, sorting, perceiving and conceptualizing. We create our understanding of the world by inputting, processing and outputting.
- Representational systems: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Gustatory, Olfactory
This is our most central Meta program. - Sensing Intuiting
Sensing uses our senses as we gather and process information. Intuiting moves through the world mind reading and using meaning to determine facts. - Scale: General Specific
We can package information in various sizes. - Relationship Comparison: Sameness (matching) and Difference (mismatching)
Is how we work with and compare data. Do we notice how things are the same, or how they are different? - Information staging: Counting and Discounting
Is what and how we foreground and background things. - Direction - Optimistic and Pessimistic
Is a powerful pattern, which can affect us significantly in all areas of life. - Classification Scale: Either/or and Continuum
As kids we think broadly and not in either/or terms. - Nature: Linear and Systemic
Linear thinking sees change as rare, hard and painful. Non-linear thinking uses systems thinking to think operationally. - Screening and Non screening
How much of the environment are we able to screen out? - Philosophical and Practical
Philosophical why focuses on origin and source. The practical how is purpose, use and solution focused. - Communication Channel: Verbal and Non-verbal
Do you pay attention to what people say or how they say it? - Durability: Impermeable and Permeable
This is about how we process ideas, beliefs and values in terms of their influence on us. - Causation
These are our different explanations about how things come to be. It is what kinds of causation we notice. - Closure/Non Closure
Can we live comfortably with the unfinished? - Information kind: Quantification and Qualification
Do you favor measurements or meaning?. - Stream of consciousness: Focused or diffused
Do you focus in a direct concentrated way or scatter attention? - Conventional: Conformist and Non Conformist
How we think about fitting in with groups and getting along with people - Deliberate/Slow and Witty/Quick
Do you make up your mind quickly or deliberately?... Next
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