Mind reading and the meta model
I tried and tried but my wife and mother-in-law (who is staying with us) have had it on every night this week and it’s hard to avoid. Yes, Big Brother.
But… what viewing. Watching housemates try and psych each other out and trying to work out who is playing a game and who isn’t. Why anyone would go on there is anyone’s guess, apart from the Okay Magazine contract afterwards, I guess.
Anyway, wife and ma-in-law love it and it was interesting to listen to their conversation last night and how they both seem to ‘know’ what is going on between the housemates.
It went something like, “he’s doing that because he wants to make her feel like that… and she is look…” conversation. They are absolutely certain they get (with their birds-eye view) what is happening on an inter-personal level.
And of course, I can imagine we may all be guilty of doing the same thing from time to time, I know I do, applying my thinking and model of the world onto situations. That’s real life I guess.
But it’s amazing how much we tell ourselves a story quite happily, compared to what may actually be happening, bearing in mind that situation will be happening from more than one viewpoint itself and it will ALWAYS be subjective.
For example, my wife had our first baby at the weekend and she had to listen to every bit of advice during the pregnancy from other mothers (whether she liked it or not). Each one giving their account of how pregnancy and birth is.
She also read a lot of books, so by the time of the actual labour and birth, she had told herself how it was going to be and, of course, she reported afterwards that it was nothing like what she had expected.
When I trained in NLP at Practitioner level, I never really got the meta model, but as I have developed my knowledge and skills for listening, it absolutely amazes me, just listening to people’s mind reading, generalizations, etc.
In fact I don’t think I will ever fully comprehend how we actually communicate with each other at all.
Tags: Language, Meta programs