It is no secret that the world we see and hear before us today is confused. Somewhat angry and talking at cross purposes. The art of conversation. The art of listening and the art of reasoned debate seem to have been lost.
A good conversation used to involve participants actively listening to opposing thoughts, reflecting on them and giving back a considered response. It used to allow for thinking out loud as part of the debate process. But now people appear to turn up to the conversation with their minds made up.
No doubt this is in large to do with the polarisation, segmentation and narrowing of their world view from the digital world they live in, and that is worthy of a article or chapter in and of itself. But it could also be a stubbornness or lack of understanding on how to “think” and “reason” around opposing views. Often if you take the stance that “I have yet to make my mind up on this point so let me hear all sides of the argument" you are seen and often accused of sitting on the fence. But what’s wrong with that? Yes, you might get a few splitters in your arse but at least you will be able to see both sides of the view before leaping one way or the other.
A good skill to harness in understanding different points of view is Perceptual Positioning which is an NLP technique where you literally visualise a scene and the different people or points of view in that scene and you take a seat and visualise yourself in each of the positions, one at a time, looking at the issue at hand. We can explore this is greater detail in future articles because before we do this, especially if we are doing it to facilitate in ourselves a better understanding of another or a group of people’s points of view its worth gaining an understanding of metaprogrammes.
So what are Metaprogrammes?
Well here let’s make it clear I am talking from a Neuro Linguistic Programming perspective and not a digital marketing or applications development perspective whereby they mean something entirely different.
There are some similarities with the digital perspective but in the human world metaprogrammes are the different ways in which people think, problem solve and gain insight into their world. Their subconscious thinking strategies that affect both the way they interpret the world around them and the way in which they communicate.
Metaprogrammes are different to, but can contain, representation systems. Metaprogrammes tend to be somewhat deeper but it is worth understanding both our own and those of the people we are communicating with.
Here are some examples of metaprogrammes
- Towards / or Away from – when they speak about something either positively or negatively are they moving towards it or away from it, are they attaching to themselves or distancing themselves away from it.
- Reflective – Active or Inactive – when they talk about an issue or about the subject matter do they do it Reflectively, thinking or pondering on it or are they more Actively action orientated and involved, putting themselves firmly in the picture. Or Inactive, giving up to the inevitable.
- Global/general or specific – sometimes thought of big picture thinkers or detailed orientated
- Internal or external – internal, are they setting their own standard or are they looking for external validation in their view point
These are just a few but they give you the general idea. I will write future articles/chapters on each of these and the other metaprogrammes but for now this list serves by way of example.
To really gain insight into how other people think we must first do some soul searching and gain insight into how “we” think. And you may say to yourself “well I know how I think as it’s me doing the thinking” but the deeper you dip your toe into NLP, mindfulness, meditation or any of the behavioural sciences you will realise how little we know about “how” we think.
It’s important to note I am not talking here about “what” we think about. But “how” we think, our thinking styles. On a surface level we may be able to quite easily get to our Representational Systems and we may be able to gain and understanding how this effects our Maps of Reality but to gain real insight in “how” we think we will need to gain access to our subconscious, our metaprogrammes. Once we do this it becomes easier to understand “how” other people think and by understanding “how” both they and we think we can build strategies for better communication.
Through metacognitive training we can gain this insight for ourselves about ourselves and “how” we think and we can develop strategies for understanding “how” others think.
If we are trying to promote a message to a wider audience through marketing and communications this understanding together with psychometrics, behavioural economics and neurolinguistics will help us to achieve amazing results. If we tie it in with big data science and digital marketing you can have programmatic real time results.
But we must be careful not to tread into the world of manipulation. Of course a side effect of learning all of is also the ability to spot analyse and deconstruct the marketing messages that are being pushed on us daily so that we can build strategies to defend ourselves against them.
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