Plus a word about how you can detect them in people, and why they’ve traditionally been regarded as ‘advanced’ NLP even though they’re easy to learn
Five Reasons You Need To Know About Metaprograms
- Achieving rapport: metaprograms are another thing you can match to help people feel at ease with you, along with the more widely known factors like body posture and voice tone.
- Self-awareness: if you are aware of your own metaprogram preferences, you will have a better idea about activities and career paths that allow you to play to your strengths.
- Recruitment: every job has an ideal metaprogram profile. If you recruit people to match that profile, they will perform better in that role. You can even write job ads in a way that will attract the people you want, and put off the people that won’t be suited to the job.
- Influencing: you can use language that suits people’s metaprograms to influence them and communicate with them in the way that it is easiest for them to understand.
- Managing change: describing changes in a way that is compatible with people’s metaprogram profiles will make it easier for them to accept and feel enthusiastic about changes, and avoid triggering knee-jerk resistance.
- Sales: you can help people to reach a buying decision by presenting them with information in the style and sequence that works for their metaprogram filters.
Detecting Metaprograms
Depending on the specific meta program, you can detect them from:
- The words that people use, the structure of their language patterns, and the way they talk
- The way they behave
- Their history, for example how frequently they have changed jobs
- Their posture or (NLP jargon alert) ‘physiology’.
Metaprograms in Business
Traditionally, metaprograms have been taught at Master Practitioner level. This is more to do with the fact that they were discovered later than the ‘classic’ NLP components like submodalities and anchoring, rather than saying anything about their complexity or level of difficulty.
In fact, metaprograms are easy to understand, recognise and use – and too useful to leave out of business-oriented NLP blog. The next few articles cover six of the most useful metaprograms for business, with tips on how to identify them, job roles that different patterns may suit, and advice on how to influence and manage them.
A quick reminder that the most comprehensive book on metaprograms is also the most readable – it’s Shelle Rose Charvet’s Words That Change Minds: The 14 Patterns for Mastering the Language of Influence, now in its third edition and highly recommended.
Next: Useful Metaprograms In Business: Towards/Away From
© 2019, Andy Smith. All rights reserved.
