238 Part IV: Using Words to Entrance
This chapter takes you from the surface structure and leads you into the deep
structure so that you can get beyond the vague words of everyday speech to
be more specific about what you mean. You meet the incredibly useful Meta
Model, one of NLP’s most important revelations, which clarifies the meaning
of what people say. Remember that people never give a complete description
of the entire thought process that lies beneath their words; if they did, they’d
never finish speaking. The Meta Model is a tool that allows you to get closer
access to people’s experience that they code through speech.Gathering Specifi c Information with the Meta Model
Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the co-creators of NLP, discovered that
when people speak, three key processes happen naturally, which they
labelled deletion, generalisation, and distortion. These processes enable
people to explain their experiences in words without going into long-winded
details and boring everyone to death.These processes happen all the time in normal everyday encounters. People
delete information by not giving the whole story, make generalisations by
extrapolating from one experience to another, and distort reality by letting
their imaginations run wild.It’s been a hard day’s work
Supper table talk in Kate’s family often goes
as follows: ‘So, has it been a hard day’s work
today?’ In recounting the highlights of the day,
the conversation invariably centres on what
constitutes a hard day’s work. Does a 12-hour-
long stint in a warm, comfortable office sur-
rounded by the latest labour-saving computers
and coffee-making devices qualify?
The question stemmed from watching a TV doc-
umentary of motorway maintenance workers
who shift traffic cones in the dead of night. The
family agreed that this really was hard work in
comparison with the reality of a hard day for us,
as well as most of our friends and co-workers.What’s a hard day for you? In just one sen-
tence, you can conjure up a wealth of differentmeanings. The qualities of the work experience
when you’re running a home or an office are
very different in comparison with the physical
reality of, say, a fire-fighter tackling blazes or a
builder constructing houses and exposed to the
elements in all weathers.
A statement such as ‘a hard day’s work’ can
be interpreted in numerous different ways.
To get to any one speaker’s precise meaning
requires access to more information – the facts
that have been left out. As you read this chap-
ter, you can discover how to gain easy access
to relevant information to stop you jumping to
the wrong assumptions about somebody else’s
experience.