Chapter 15: Getting to the Heart of the Matter: The Meta Model 243
Generalisation – beware the always, musts, and shoulds
Think about when young children get on a two-wheeled bike for the first
time. They pay tremendous attention to keeping their balance and steering.
Perhaps they need stabilisers until they master the skill. Yet, some weeks or
months later, they’re competent and don’t have to relearn each time they
cycle away – because they generalise from one experience to the next.Your ability to generalise from past experiences is an important skill that
saves huge amounts of time and energy in learning about the world. These
generalised experiences are represented by words. Think of the word ‘chair’.
You know what one’s like: you’ve sat on many and seen different types. As
a child, you discover that the word represents a particular chair. Then you
make a generalisation. So the next time you see a chair, you’re able to name
it. Now, whenever you see a chair, you understand its function.Although vitally important to communication, the skill of generalisation can
also limit your experience of options and differences in certain contexts.
When you have a bad experience, you may expect it to happen time and time
again. A man who experiences a string of unhappy romantic encounters may
conclude that ‘all women are a pain’ and decide that he’s never going to meet
a woman with whom he can live happily.Abstract nouns and the wheelbarrow test
The Meta Model is very useful in the way that it
helps you clarify vague statements. If you say to
someone ‘Love is so painful,’ that person needs
more information to understand what’s going
on in your life.
Abstract nouns – such as love, trust, honesty,
relationship, change, fear, pain, obligation,
responsibility, impression – are particularly
difficult to respond to. NLP calls these words
nominalisations – where a verb (for example,
to love) has turned into a noun (love), which is
hard to define in a way that everyone agrees
on. In order to extract more meaning from your
statement, another person needs to turn the
noun back into a verb to help get more infor-
mation and then reply. Therefore, that person’s
response to your statement above may be:
‘How specifically is the way you love someone
so painful?’
Imagine a wheelbarrow. If you think of a noun
and can picture it inside the wheelbarrow,
it’s a concrete noun – a person, a flowerpot,
an apple, a desk are all concrete examples.
Nominalisations are the nouns that don’t pass
the wheelbarrow test. You can’t put love, fear,
a relationship, or pain in your wheelbarrow!
Instead, when you rephrase these words as
verbs, you put the action and responsibility
back into the language. This helps people who
speak in nominalisations to connect with their
own experience, and thus find more options,
rather than distancing themselves from it.