IMO, the NLP metamodel (sometimes referred to as the “precision model”) is easier to use than E-Prime, and more useful in practice. (Bandler and Grinder were heavily influenced by Bateson and Korzybski in its creation; in some senses, NLP is a more practically-oriented offshoot of General Semantics.)
While there are conceptually more patterns involved in the meta-model than in E-Prime, the patterns themselves contain the questions you need to ask to expose the missing information or challenge the generalizations contained therein. (E.g. “who says? better for what purpose? All? What happens if you do? What happens if you don’t? How do you know?”) That is, they are explicitly questions for finding out about someone’s map, as opposed to the territory they’re claiming to point to.
(I also found them tremendously valuable in my work as a computer programmer/management consultant/tech manager long before I used them in the self-help field. They’re a great way to separate people’s actual requirements from the designs and specs they try to give you instead.)
Of course, the NLP founders themselves pointed out that when they first taught people the metamodel questions, people were prone to “meta-meddling” and creating a “meta muddle” by overusing them on friends and family members, rather than pointing them at themselves or at clients. So, use wisely, and as the NLP guys would say “apply to self first”. ;-)
IMO, the NLP metamodel (sometimes referred to as the “precision model”) is easier to use than E-Prime, and more useful in practice. (Bandler and Grinder were heavily influenced by Bateson and Korzybski in its creation; in some senses, NLP is a more practically-oriented offshoot of General Semantics.)
While there are conceptually more patterns involved in the meta-model than in E-Prime, the patterns themselves contain the questions you need to ask to expose the missing information or challenge the generalizations contained therein. (E.g. “who says? better for what purpose? All? What happens if you do? What happens if you don’t? How do you know?”) That is, they are explicitly questions for finding out about someone’s map, as opposed to the territory they’re claiming to point to.
(I also found them tremendously valuable in my work as a computer programmer/management consultant/tech manager long before I used them in the self-help field. They’re a great way to separate people’s actual requirements from the designs and specs they try to give you instead.)
Of course, the NLP founders themselves pointed out that when they first taught people the metamodel questions, people were prone to “meta-meddling” and creating a “meta muddle” by overusing them on friends and family members, rather than pointing them at themselves or at clients. So, use wisely, and as the NLP guys would say “apply to self first”. ;-)
Top tip: use backslashes to escape brackets in links, like this [something](http://foo.com/link_\\\(brackets\\\)\)
EDIT: figured out how to stop hyperlinking by reading Vladimir_Nesov’s comment below. The trick is not to escape the first open parenthesis!
If you write in the editor
then it’ll render as
which is what you’d need to write in the editor to get
That’s what I wrote, except that I escaped the first parenthesis; not doing that suppresses the hyperlinking. Thanks!