Hey everyone,

I'd just like to make a few comments on a couple of things I’ve noticed recently being said on a few different posts.

Its often extremely useful when giving out advice, especially advice that includes certain ideas or philosophies of any given system, to ensure that the information is correct, at least up to the point of it being more liberating than could otherwise have been.

I'd like to pick up on one main concept that I’ve seen in at least 2 locations recently, and just open that up so we can all get a little more flexibility in our knowledge of what is being conveyed.

The concept I’m going to focus on just for a moment is that of meta-programs, and more specifically, meta-programs that seem to easily fit into what seems like an analogue category.

The "towards-away" MP has been mentioned a couple of times I’ve noted, and a comment was made about both ends of the scale leading a person in the same direction. I also often hear people say that "if you're doing one, you're automatically doing the other". I believe this is actually a false-logic, but it does seem logical until you begin to dig a little deeper in the actuality of what’s happening.

"What do you mean it seems logical?" - Lets take this "towards-away" MP for a moment and just take a look at it in the context of "pain-pleasure". If you're moving away from pain, then you must also be moving towards pleasure, right? And if you're moving towards pleasure, you must be moving away from pain, correct?

Well I’m not convinced by that. It certainly seems logical, at least semantically, however its seems to me that real people are just ever so slightly different and more complex than a simple 'logic' like this.

To cover what I mentioned above about direction, we can begin to look at it from a different perspective.
In order to be partaking in the behaviour in either end of the scale (assuming for a moment we're dealing with an analogue, which in reality isn’t quite the case), then our focus of attention, at least for the time period in which we engage in the behaviour, must by definition, be aimed towards one of the analogues. If a person is moving away from pain, their focus must by on pain, otherwise how will they know when their away from it? And the same goes for moving towards pleasure.

The catch here is that we are in reality dealing with a more complex scale. A scale in which there is no pain-pleasure analogue, and in some cases their is a complex equivalence (or a cause effect) between the 2 concepts (i.e. pain is equal to pleasure or pleasure causes pain).

You may be wondering what caused me this bring up this topic, so I'd just like to qualify my reason by suggesting that it can be important to notice the difference that makes the difference. What happens if we assume moving-away from being poor, is the same as moving towards being rich? What if those people who want to be thin, move away from being fat, only to find themselves in a situation where their neither thin nor fat, and still haven’t quite achieved what they wanted? My point is (one of) that if we are to pretend that meta-programs like this really work at an analogue level, lets not also assume that either end is going to lead to the same thing, or is the same thing. I don’t feel that this belief is either usefull or conducive to our development as practitioners of NLP.

As many of you know, when you combine the use of a seemingly obvious analogue meta-program so that you incorporate both ends of the scale, you can begin creating a propulsion system in order to get to the desired state/goal etc, as quickly and effectively as possible.

I think that this idea, the idea of propulsion systems, could seem to contradict some of what I’ve said above, so I thought it could be useful to explain partly how the propulsion system idea operates, and how it fits in with the idea that the direction in which each end of the scale takes you, may not be the same.

At its most basic level, the idea of the propulsion system is simple. You move away from one thing, and towards another. In some ways this seems to presuppose that the moving away is going in the same direction as the moving towards, however this isn’t usually/always the case.

The propulsion system idea works, because you are setting a direction. You’re basically saying “move away from this and towards this”. If we were to simply set up the away-from, who knows what we might end up towards, especially if the 2 ends of the scale as seemingly unrelated. (i.e. moving away from biting nails and towards feelings of confident)

I was also going to write about the way in which it can often be easy to over generalise meta-programs both in terms of people and space/time, however I’ll leave that one depending on the feedback from this post. I will however leave you with a quote from one of the best people I’ve trained with, Eric Robbie, when he says “Meta-Programs are mostly true, mostly right now”.

I look forward to all of your comments on this, and to posting again soon.

Kindest Regards

Jamie Dixon