Meta Outcome

What is a meta outcome? It is what a person is trying to achieve by striving for a goal or having a difficulty. If a person's goal is to be rich, the meta outcome might be to have a better life, to have time to relax, or to have items like a car or house..

To find a meta outcome, the person asks himself, "What would Goal X do for me?" or "What am I trying to achieve by having Goal X". For example if the goal was to find a soul mate, the question to ask might be, "What will having a soul mate do for me?".

If it is a difficulty such as an unwanted habit, the same question can be asked. Let's say a person wants to quit smoking. They could ask themselves, "What does smoking do for me?" or even "What does smoking do for me that's even more important?"

Finding a meta outcome can cause a shift in and of itself, especially if the person is judging the symptom as "bad" or "something to get rid of". Also, each meta outcome has a meta outcome. Let's take an example.

Say the person wants to quit smoking. They ask themselves, "What does smoking do for me?" After processing for a moment, they come up with, "smoking helps me relax and socialize"

Then the person could ask themselves, "What does relaxing and socializing do for me?" Then they might come up with a response like, "It lets me enjoy myself".

The process can be repeated until the person finds the highest meta outcome that will be associated with a core state. There is a whole three-day training that is focused on utilizing meta outcomes and core states. It's called Core Transformation.

As noted earlier, a simple single meta outcome is many times useful when a difficulty is labeled "bad", "wrong", or "unwanted. A presupposition in NLP is that every behavior has a positive intent. In other words, a meta outcome. Positive intention gives any difficulty or goal more value and meaning, uncovering the essence of what is being achieved, even if it is an unwanted behavior.

Bandler and Grinder stumbled upon this simple, powerful presupposition for NLP, the meta outcome, one of the many foundations of NLP today, and it is a key element in many pieces of NLP changework. It is revisited many times in NLP trainings, and is a fast effective way to gain resources in many different contexts.