126 Part II: Winning Friends and Influencing People
Getting to Grips with Meta-Program Basics
As children, you pick up meta programs from your parents, teachers, and
the culture in which you’re raised. Your life experiences may change these
learned programs as you get older. For instance, if you grow up being admon-
ished for being too subjective, you may start practising detachment and learn
to suppress your feelings. You can find that these attributes then affect your
choice of career. Instead of entering a caring profession you may decide to
use your intellect more. Your learning style may be influenced too, and you
lean towards focusing more on facts and figures. If you deliver training, you
may depend more on drier, chalk-and-talk systems than on getting students
involved with touchy-feely experiments.
Of the many identified meta programs, we choose seven that we think are the
most useful to get you started. For example, we select the global and detail
meta program because we believe that it has great potential for conflict, and
by recognising another’s capacity for operating at the global or detailed end
of the scale, you may be able to avoid possible problems. By understand-
ing the other six meta programs, you can develop a greater insight into the
subtle ways in which people think, which gives you the tools to influence and
facilitate change by motivating not only yourself but other people too.
In Chapter 5 you can find a discussion of the introvert and extrovert meta
program. The meta programs discussed in this chapter are as follows:
✓ Proactive/reactive
✓ Options/procedures
✓ Toward/away from
✓ Internal/external
✓ Global/detail
✓ Sameness/difference
✓ Time perspective
As you think about meta programs, keep these things in mind:
✓ Meta programs aren’t an either/or choice. You operate meta programs
all the time; however, depending on the context in which you find your-
self, you focus more on one aspect of particular meta programs.
✓ Meta programs aren’t a means to pigeonhole people; they’re useful to
expand your understanding of the variety of ways in which people think
in order to improve communication.
✓ Meta programs aren’t right or wrong; you simply run various combina-
tions of meta programs depending on the context of the communication
and the environment in which you find yourself.
