10 – Identifying Mind Maps

Information/Experience Filters

What makes people tick? How do they see the world? Is their view different from yours?

What are Meta-Programs?

Meta-programs are mental shortcuts that direct your decisions, behaviors, actions and interactions with others. They are internal representations of your external experience of reality. They determine how your brain pays attention to things and what it pays attention to. It’s a form of pattern recognition, where your brain attempts to sort through what the body is sensing and experiencing.

Meta-programs are like software applications for the brain where one software program controls the execution of a number of other programs. The software runs in the background and directs your thoughts, beliefs, values, memories, and responses. Meta-programs are therefore mental programs that run our lives at an unconscious level of awareness. These mental programs determine how information is processed by deciding what to delete, distort, and/or to generalize from your experience.

How the brain processes information on a daily basis is based on the meta-programs that are currently running in the background. You use these meta-programs to sort and make sense of the world around you. Without them the world wouldn’t make much sense. However, with them you are able to form your own beliefs, opinions and perspectives about your world, your life, and your circumstances.

Meta-programs work on the basis of sorting. They operate by determining which of our perceptions are selected for attention and represented internally from among a vast array of inbound sensory data and a myriad of possibilities. In other words, meta-programs are processes used to sort what you pay attention to based on the information you filter-out from your environment. This filtering process helps guide and direct our thought processes, resulting in significant differences in behavior from person-to-person.

It’s important to note that exhibiting particular meta-programs in one specific context does not automatically imply that you will exhibit the same meta-programs within another context or situation. In fact, your meta-programs are never stable and can change over time as you come across new information and expand your knowledge and understanding of your life and circumstances. Meta-programs can for instance change when you’re under heavy stress or experiencing other emotional difficulties. They are therefore never stable, but rather adaptive.

Meta-programs are neither negative nor positive. The meta-programs you use to perceive and interact with your world either work for you or they work against you. And whether or not they work for you depends on how you live your life based on your personal goals and objectives.

How Useful are Meta-Programs?

Learning about meta-programs is valuable in significant ways.

First of all, learning about meta-programs helps you to better understand yourself and your own psychological tendencies. How you make sense of the world, how you make decisions, how you interpret your life and circumstances, and how you interact with others will all begin to make sense once you understand the meta-programs that are running your brain. Meta-programs will also provide you with a great deal of insight into your values, beliefs, convictions, habits, behaviors, and self-sabotage patterns.

Secondly, for the same reasons mentioned above, meta-programs help you to better understand other people and their psychological tendencies. This is advantageous because it will help you to adapt your behavior and approach while communicating with other people. These changes can improve your relationships with others by helping you to develop deeper levels of rapport and potentially influence people to your way of thinking. This becomes possible because meta-programs will provide you with insight into a person’s motivations. And once you understand their motivations, you will then have the key that will help you to influence their choices, decisions, and actions.

Thirdly, understanding more about how you filter and sort information and experience gives you a unique opportunity that other people who don’t know about meta-programs will rarely get. It gives you an opportunity to change, shift and transform your behavior in positive ways to help improve your beliefs, values, decisions, behaviors, habits, actions, and levels of motivation.

---

How to Identify Your Meta-Programs

Identifying meta-programs within yourself or within other people does take practice and some effort. You must look for clues within a person’s speech/language, within their behavior, belief systems, and physiology. The clues will always be there, however, they may be very subtle at times, and its very possible that a person may exhibit characteristics from two extremes. This means that within a specific meta-program where there are two possibilities, the person will exhibit both. In such instances, they will be somewhere in the middle of the two polar-opposites.

When it comes to identifying your own meta-programs, it’s important to keep in mind how useful they are and how they are shaping your life and circumstances. It’s possible that once you work through some of the meta-programs we will cover in this lesson, that you will better determine when they do or do not serve your greater good. If that’s the case, then it’s up to you to make the necessary changes that will help you improve your life and circumstances. 

Key Take Aways

• Use meta-programs to understand yourself and others. Meta-programs help you understand how people sort and make sense of the world. They also help you understand your own values, beliefs and motivations and behaviors.
• Remember that people use a blend of meta-programs. It’s not this or that, it’s a spectrum of possibilities. It’s a tool for understanding how or why people behave, and then adapting your own behaviors to improve communication. They aren’t a tool for stereo-typing or pigeon-holing people.
• Change your own limiting meta-programs. If you have a way of processing the world that’s limiting your success, find a way to consciously adapt. Identifying your own meta-programs you use is a start. Once you have awareness, you can see how this shows up.

In the class you will be required to choose which answer applies MOST OFTEN between the Information Filters by contrasting the two most opposing behavioral/language patterns (imagine both ends of a bell curve or spectrum).

Usually both will apply to some degree so you must choose the one that in the widest variety of situations would be the most likely to apply.

It is also worth remembering at the outset that neither pattern is superior; each behavior will have benefits and drawbacks in certain contexts. It is not about what is ‘politically correct’ or what you believe is the way you want others to perceive you… be honest with yourself to get the greatest benefits from this exercise.

Take care not to label a person or to pass judgment. Information Filters are habitual and are very much context specific and they can change over time (home vs work, present vs future).