Neuro Linguistic Programming

Chapter 15: Getting to the Heart of the Matter: The Meta Model 241

NLP Meta Model

Patterns

Examples of Patterns

You May Hear

Questions to Help Gather

Information or Expand

the Other Person’s

Viewpoint

Generalisation

Modal operators of

possibility

I can’t... it’s not

possible

What stops you? Is that

true?

Modal operators of

necessity

We have to do this...

we should, ought to

What would happen if

we didn’t? Who says we

should?

Universal quantifiers He never thinks about

my feelings

We always do it this

way

Never, ever?

Every single time? What

would happen if we did it

differently?

Distortion

Complex equivalence With a name like that,

he must be popular

How does having this name

mean that he’s popular?

Mind reading You’re going to love this How do you know that?

Who says?

Cause and effect His voice makes me

angry

I made her feel awful

How does his voice make

you angry?

How exactly did you do

that?

Deletion – you’re so vague

When you’re listening, you naturally ignore many extra sounds, saving you

the effort of processing every single word. When you speak, you econo-

mise on all the details that you could share. This practice is called deletion,

because details have been removed. Figure 15-2 shows some everyday exam-

ples of deletion.

Figure 15-2:
The
language of
deletion.

‘You were good.’

‘This is important.’

‘Just do it!’

‘I‘m scared.’

‘I don’t know.’