Chapter 15: Getting to the Heart of the Matter: The Meta Model 247
Another example of distortion is attempting to read other people’s minds.
You can never know what other people are truly thinking, even though they
may give out interesting clues. When negative distortion is combined with
generalisation the result can be quite debilitating. For example, a child comes
home from school and says: ‘Everyone stares at me every time I walk into the
classroom and they all think I’m stupid.’Beware of making judgements about what other people think until you gather
specific information and review the facts.Here are some useful questions to ask when you want to check for distorted
meanings:✓ ‘How do you know?’
✓ ‘How exactly does X lead to Y?’
✓ ‘Who says?’
Using the Meta Model
The Meta Model questions give you powerful verbal tools in business, coach-
ing, education, therapy, and in life. They let you use language to gain clarity
and get closer to somebody’s experience. You can adopt the Meta Model
when you want to do the following:✓ Clarify another person’s meaning: When you need to be exactly sure
what the other person has in mind. Are you both on the same wave-
length or making assumptions that you don’t really understand?
Tennis anyone?
At times, when people want something very
badly, they believe that thing to be true even
when the evidence is against them. As a tennis
coach, John Woodward finds that the most
frustrating people in the junior tennis leagues
are the competitive parents.‘They so desperately want their children to win
that they become blind to the facts of the game.
They see what they want to see, even if it’s
not true, to the extent that as they watch theirchildren play matches, they give faulty line calls
in favour of their own budding tennis star.Grandparents are even worse! I once saw a
grandfather attack his grandson’s tennis oppo-
nent with his umbrella because he was con-
vinced that his grandson had won a shot that
everybody else saw as out.’
Reproduced with the permission of John
Woodward.