I’ve just put up another article at Breaking Muscle and unlike my other posts there, this one focuses on the mental part of training.
Meta Programs: How to Adjust Your Thinking for Better Results
The term meta program comes from Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). Meta, meaning over or above, indicates that these programs in our mind rule over factors like decision making and perceptions. In that way, they run in the background of our minds to influence what we do and believe. They act as filters that shape our reality. The implications of this are far reaching.
In many ways our meta programming is similar to different forms of personality typing (from Myers-Briggs to astrology and many more). But NLP makes a few key distinctions. One is the idea that meta programs are largely contextual. That means you can operate off of one program in a certain situation and another in a different situation. Where people run into problems is when a meta program is driving all of their behavior and they have no flexibility to operate differently. In certain contexts this can cause problems. The differences in meta programs between two or more people can be one of the biggest sources of conflict in relationships or business. It is apparent when two people can’t understand how another person thinks a particular way.