Questions are one of the most powerful communication tools available… and there are many varieties of questions
Whereas most questions are about environment or behavior, e.g. “What are you doing today? What did you do yesterday? How is the weather today? How was your vacation?”, etc., there are a specific breed of questions that allow us to explore deeper than that surface level.
One category of questions that allow us to go deeper are Meta-Questions.
In fact, the Meta-States Model of Neuro-Semantics opened up the whole realm of questioning at meta-levels and so introduced the meta-questions.
Meta-Question Meaning
Meta-questions are questions that allow us to peel back the curtain of somebody’s experience and see what is going on ‘behind the scenes’ that is driving their lower level states and behavior.
Examples of Meta-Questions
Meta-Questions are questions such as “What do you believe about X”, “What does X mean to you?” or “What do you value about X”, which when used effectively tease out the higher frames of a person (level upon level) so you can discover, explore and model them.
Rather than bringing the mind ‘down’ to their mental movie (as we do with the meta-model), Meta-Questions bring the mind ‘up’ to the frames around that movie and can also be used to ‘install’ frames (such as with the milton model.)
If you’d like more examples of meta-questions enjoy this full article on the topic.
The Source of Meta-Questions
Meta questions have been around for a long time, however have been misunderstood…Here’s what they wrote in the first NLP book:
“When you ask questions like, ‘How do you feel about that?’ (Whatever ‘that’ might be) you are, in fact, asking your client for a fuller representation (than even Deep Structure) of your client’s experience of the world. And what you are doing by asking this particular question is asking for what you know is a necessary component of the client’s reference structure.” (The Structure of Magic, Vol. I, p. 160)
Actually, “How do you feel about that?” is a meta-question which takes us upward to the next higher logical level inasmuch as it asks about thoughts-and-feelings at the next highest level.
Meta-Questioning & Neuro-Semantics
In terms of the Meta-States model, it elicits the person’s frame-of-reference and the semantic state that governs the experience. These are typically largely unconscious.
The power of meta-questions is that they allow us to enter into a person’s (including our own) matrix of frames of meaning, level upon level, and identify the full structure of a model of the world. Currently in Neuro-Semantics we have identified over 100 some terms and expressions that can be used as meta-questions.
Do you have any additional questions about meta-questions? Share them here!
Want to master the skills of meta-questioning? Enroll in our Meta-Questioning Home Study Program
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