Meta Model

For the Neuro-Linguistic Programming "the map is not the same as the territory". This means, that people don’t respond to reality, but to the perceptions they have of reality, by making representations (maps) of it. People see, feel, or listen, because of those maps. So, the models and maps that each one of us creates will be different.

It is a fact that most of the world’s problems are caused because each person firmly believes that they know the truth, and are convinced that everyone else is wrong. However, there is not one map “more real” or “truer” than the other. This can be proved in virtue that every person will have different possibilities and limitations, which Grinder and Bandler divide into three categories:

Neurological limitations

It is believed that the function of the nervous system, the brain, and the senses´ organs are more than anything dismissive and not productive. Each person is capable of remembering at any moment what happened, and perceive everything that is happening in every part of the universe. The function of the brain and the nervous system consists in protecting us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of information, that is mostly useless and insignificant.

Social limitations

Social-genetic factors are all the categories or filters to which we are subjects as members of a social system. We perceive reality the way we think our culture perceives it or accepts it. Perhaps, the social-genetic system most commonly recognized is constituted by our language system.

Individual Limitations

Just as fingerprints, each individual has a series of experiences that conform their personal history and that are unique and unrepeatable. The individual limitations constitute the roots of the deep differences between human beings and the way we create our models of the world. These differences in our models may adulterate our social standards enriching our experience, or impoverishing our experience decreasing our capacity of acting efficiently.

Precision Model

Information is power, which means that the person that has information owns the situation. Those that have reached to the optimum control of information are in conditions to modify their own experience of the world and influence in the thoughts, feelings, and actions that shape the experience of most of us; These is reached through communication. So, the power of communication over the external world and the way we represent the information of it, will determine the amount of excellence within us and with others.

A good communicator exploits the weak and strong points of language. In fact, the ability of using language with accuracy is essential in getting to be an excellent communicator.

Language allows us to share experiences through a group of signs that are commonly understood. A large quantity of objects and actions in an experience that any person would like to tell in words, will have a huge possibility of not being understood in the exact way the person wants to express it. We say that the quality in communication is a measure between the words and the inner representation that the person has.

Therefore, communication will be of quality when it can be seen, heard, or felt. Also, when it describes objects or actions that will not be confused with others. To achieve this, the NLP has a tool called Meta Model or Precision Model.

We can have the complete idea of what we want to say (deep structure), but at the moment of transforming the thoughts into words, we only express an approximation of the idea, which means that we reduce the deep structure and what we really end up telling, is the surface structure.

To go from the deep structure to the surface structure, we unconsciously delete part of the information, by simplifying it, we distort the meaning, and finally we make generalizations that take us to avoid deep conversations.

The most common way of communicating is presenting information in a superficial way. To know the deep structure that is closely linked to the visual, hearing, and sensory experience, we use the Precision Model.