Neuro Linguistic Programming

Chapter 5: Pushing the Communication Buttons 83

you may delete subtle messages that would be very obvious to you in your

familiar office environment.

Figure 5-2:
Meta pro-
grams work
along a slid-
ing scale.

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Introvert Extrovert

Extroverts can really annoy their more introverted friends and acquaintances.

So, extroverts, please take care to tone things down when you meet people

who aren’t as responsive as you are, and be careful not to encroach on their

body space!

An extrovert NLP nerd (who plays at NLPing with everyone and everything,

all the time) danced a poor introvert that they met at a party all around the

room, invading the body space of the introvert who kept moving away only to

have their body space encroached upon again.

Remembering that people can show different tendencies in different settings,

can you think which side of the scale you favour? Can you make a guess at

assessing your friends and family? Here’s a tip: the answer to the question ‘Do

you prefer company or being alone when you need to recharge your batter-

ies?’ gives a very strong clue to a person’s tendencies.

Some people with an extrovert preference may have a very strong bond with

their pets and seek out the company of their four-legged friends instead of

other humans when recharging!

Values

Your values are also filters that are unconscious, although less so than the

meta programs that we describe in the preceding section. You learn your

values, almost by osmosis, from your parents and close family up to about

the age of seven, and then from your peers and friends. Values are what moti-

vate you to do something, but they can also work as brakes, stopping you

from achieving your desires. They are the factors that are important to you

and let you assess whether something that you’re considering doing, or have

done, is good or bad. They influence how you delete, distort, or generalise

data from incoming stimuli.

Values are arranged in a hierarchy, with the most important at the top of the

ladder. Examples of values are health, wealth, happiness, honesty, friend-

ships, job satisfaction, and so on. You can find out more about values in

Chapter 3.