144 Part II: Winning Friends and Influencing People
With this thought in mind, we invite you to develop your abilities by consid-
ering the following aspects:
✓ Can you identify the meta programs that you run in different areas of
your life? This exercise can be particularly useful when you want to
model a successful part of your life in order to improve another aspect
of your life that isn’t working as well.
If you find that you’re better at planning your holidays than at progress-
ing your career, is this discrepancy because you’re more proactive,
toward, and procedure focused when you come to plan your holiday,
but you don’t show these tendencies when thinking about your career?
Do you feel like a very tiny cog in a very large wheel and hold yourself
back from being proactive as regards your career? Perhaps you allow
your boss to dictate your future, which may be due to past, negative
memories (check out the earlier section ‘Tackling Time Perspectives’).
Working with a coach or therapist would allow you to take on-board
the lessons from your past and focus on the future, in order to progress
your career by putting a road map in place to follow.
Perhaps, after deciding your big career goal, you may need to be more
procedure driven in order to define and attain the steps that get you
there. You may also need to focus towards the goal and become more
proactive in achieving it.
✓ If you’re having problems with another person, perhaps you’re at oppo-
site ends of a meta-program scale. Can you identify the meta programs
that you and the other person are using? For example, the global/detail
meta programs can cause a lot of grief between people. If you talk about
the global, big picture and the person with whom you’re communicating
is a details person, bite the bullet and chunk down (as we describe in
the earlier section ‘Going Global or Detailed’). Mismatched meta pro-
grams can result in a great deal of conflict and miscommunication. So
make the effort to listen to the language that people are using and use
their words when you’re talking to them.
✓ If you’re recruiting for a job, write down the traits for the ideal candidate
when you’ve identified the roles and responsibilities inherent in the job.
Ask yourself what questions you need to ask to establish how well an
applicant fits the role, because employing the wrong person for a job
can prove very costly. So, if you’re employing a tax accountant you may
decide that the person needs to be:
- Proactive to keep abreast of the changes in tax laws.
- Procedure and detail driven to implement the law to the letter.
- External focused to be receptive to the government’s dictates.
- Difference inclined to spot any discrepancies in people’s tax affairs.
