Do you prefer working as team player? Or are you happier working alone?
Would you like to live and work in an environment where facts matter most? Or does creativity rock in your world?
Are you driven to take risks? Or would you prefer the safe life?
These are metaprograms – and we all run them. Whether we have a preference to introversion or extraversion, whether we prefer rules or freedom, whether we enjoy seeking for details or we can only ever see the big picture, we have these preferences. Of course, these metaprograms work well for us, most of the time – otherwise we would have changed them.
The problems arise, then, when we need to go against our preferred metaprogram, or someone challenges our program. Usually we don’t even realise what’s going on for us, and we just feel deep discomfort, challenged or stressed.
Because we don’t always understand that they exist nor how we can manage them – that alone can cause us stress. Often the behaviour of others can be difficult for us to understand when we come at it from our own perspective. Sometimes having to step outside our own preferred way of being can also be a source of stress for us.
This means that we can use Metaprograms as a brilliant resource when it comes to careers. Once we have a clear grasp of our clients’ preferred metaprograms, we can use these to identify the career elements that would be most rewarding for them. And clients themselves can use their understanding of their metaprograms in order to be even more flexible in their behaviours, thus developing further in careers, or moving to new ones.
Using Metaprograms
Metaprograms and work
Every job is likely to have an ideal metaprogram profile. So unpacking and identifying that metaprogram can help prevent people making mistakes in both recruiting and in taking on challenges. It can also be a great way of identifying roles that will be appropriate for people, opening up the scope of careers into new areas they may not have thought about previously.
Supporting Change with Metaprograms
We know that change can be uncomfortable, however some people’s metaprogram may be much more towards “keeping things the same” than “seeking change”, so it can be useful to understand other metaprograms that they run, in order to help them manage change.
For sure they may prefer similarity and repetition, however they may also be risk-averse, and pro-safety, and detail-orientated rather than big-picture. So framing conversations around how much “safer” the change will be, and then ensuring that they have all the details about how it will be managed, can be a much more comfortable route for people.
Self-awareness
It’s true that the more we understand ourselves, the better we can perform. Often self-awareness can be boxed into themes, for example MBTI or DiSC (I’m a fan of both). However it does mean that to use these effectively career practitioners need to be qualified in these tools. Fortunately metaprograms can be a lot more flexible, and people can understand and use them without an online assessment.
What a metaprogram is not…
- A way of putting someone into a box. We can all be flexible in our approach, and understanding our metaprograms is a useful way of flexing them.
- Absolute. Metaprograms are always influenced by context and emotional states. For example: someone who is truly interested in a subject will be much more detail focused when concentrating on it. That same person may be very big-picture when it comes to a different subject.
- Either/or. Most metaprograms are not extremes, we run on a sliding scale and often people will be somewhere closer to the middle of the spectrum. We operate much more in the grey zone than the black or white extremities.
What to do with this information
Perhaps try it out on yourself or a friend first? The Towards/Away-from is a useful metaprogram, so see where they sit on this spectrum.
Towards/away from.
Are you motivated towards goals and targets? Are you drawn to the future that you’ve designed? Or are you motivated away from problems or issues?
The towards/away from metaprogram, like all other metaprograms, is context dependent, so try out a couple of contexts, you could use the wheel of life, or just the question below:
If you were considering moving home, talk this through with someone, and notice:
- Are they talking about what they want, what they would like to see? What they can get/achieve, and the benefits? (TOWARDS)
- Are they nodding, positively animated, gesticulating that they are moving “towards”?
- Might be more future-focused, goal-orientated? (TOWARDS)
OR:
- Are they talking about solving problems, the pitfalls, avoiding issues, “hmm, let me think about this”… showing caution. (AWAY FROM)
- Is their body language, more negative, dismissive, shaking head? (AWAY FROM)
- Might be more past-focused, talking about what has happened before? (AWAY FROM)
Once you have more information about what they find most influential to them you can help them build a vision of a goal that is more compelling.
One metaprogram does not fit every situation.
Remember – metaprograms are context dependent. So somebody who is very “away from” focused when it comes to their career, could be very “towards” when it comes to starting a family, so make no assumptions.
You can also imagine how useful each end of the towards/away from spectrum is in different occupations. At the “towards” end of the spectrum could be creatives, big-picture, gung-ho people. Whereas the risk-averse health and safety focused folk are more likely to be at the “away from” end.
Where did the term come from?
The term metaprogram first appeared in John C Lilly’s book, “Programming and metaprogramming in the human computer” (1968). However it is mostly attributed to the originators of NLP – John Grinder and Richard Bandler, who introduced it in the 1970’s, as a way to understand how people manage to stay coherent in their cognitive patterns.
There are currently assumed to be around 50 or 60 metaprograms.
