European Journal of Experimental Biology Open Access

Key Words

Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Meta Model, Self-Talk, Cognitive Error, Self- Confidence and State- Confidence.

Introduction

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a model of interpersonal communication chiefly concerned with the relationship between successful patterns of behavior and the subjective experiences underlying them and a system of alternative therapy based on this which seeks to educate people in self-awareness and effective communication, and to change their patterns of mental and emotional behavior [1,2]. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) consists of a diverse collection of psychological techniques that aim to enhance peoples’ lives [3]. The term "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" refers to a stated connection between the neurological processes (Neuro), language (Linguistic) and behavioral patterns that have been learned through experience (Programming) and can be organized to achieve specific goals in life [1]. The NLP approach of communication draws evidence from a variety of disciplines and therefore is a model for those utilizing life coaching techniques as it enables psychologists, coaches and other practitioners to classify and respond appropriately to athlete experiences [4]. Bodenhamer presents NLP as a composite model for use within a sports psychology framework as it incorporates psychodynamic concepts, a cognitive-behavioral perspective and a humanistic approach [5]. NLP is therefore an integration of concepts related to a variety of psychological perspectives [6]. This study is written to provide an informed view of NLP through a compressive intervention of NLP Meta-Model within Sport. The language in which a person expresses himself is an exact encoding of his internal experiences [7]. When a person thinks, he uses the representational system of the senses. The person represents in his mind what he originally saw, heard, felt and smelt. These understandings are then coded into words. The words function as a symbol of the sensory representations and the representations function as a symbol of the actual experience [8]. Words can give an accurate map if they are similar to the territory they represent, or inaccurate if certain parts are left out, or over-generalized. The result is a distorted map [9]. The empirical evidence for the use of NLP is limited [10], however this article is written to provide an informed view of NLP through an introduction of NLP within Sport, an overview of NLP. It is hoped that this research will provide area for researchers in the field of NLP. This research focused on one Meta-Model distinction from the 22 distinctions. 12 in the original model (1975) and 22 in the 1997 model that Michael Hall [11] in Communication Magic with Richard Bandler. This model is distortion pattern, with a focus on mind-reading defect. We assume that this model may be beneficial to increasing athlete’s state-sport confidence in boxing.

Linguistic patterns of a person, determines what and how he thinks and feels. These patterns reveal a person’s selftalk and his mental status. It is there for important to guide the cognition and normal conversation to make it as positive as possible for self enhancement. If a person can replace the mind-reading of another person’s thoughts, feelings, intentions, etc. by stating it to oneself as a “guess,” as a “possibility”. Then this reduces the distortion of mind-reading and will make the self-talk of the person more accurate and appropriate with the result that the selftalk helps the person deal with the athletic event of boxing [11]. The socio-psychological concept of stateconfidence relates to assess people's beliefs in a special moment, especially in relation to their ability on that state [12]. Like an athletic, he has an overwhelming body language, breathing deep and bright eyes. Sport psychologists define state-sport confidence as the belief that athletic can successfully perform a desired motor-behavior in a moment. Confident athletes expect success and have a high level of self-belief that appears crucial in determining how far they strive towards their goals. It is largely confidence that determines whether people give up or remain committed to their goals following a series of setbacks [8]. The Meta-Model is a pragmatic communications model used to specify information in a speaker's language [10]. According to Figure 1, it is often contrasted with the intentionally ambiguous Milton Erickson inspired-Milton model. The Meta-Model was originally presented in The Structure of Magic I: A Book About Language and Therapy in 1975 by Richard Bandler and linguist John Grinder, the co-founders of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, who collaborated between 1973 and 1975.

Figure 1

Intrapersonal communication is a language use or thought internal to the communicator. It can be useful to envision intrapersonal communication occurring in the mind of the individual in a model which contains a sender, receiver, and feedback loop [13]. One of the most important tools for interpersonal communication is self-talking. According to Hatzigeorgiadis, self-talk is analogous to techniques such as visualization that aim to improve focus and relaxation by mentally rehearsing a performance [14]. Self-talk includes all the purposeful and random thoughts that run through an athlete’s mind; it includes all the things said both silently and out loud [12]. Self-talk can be positive, it can tell an athlete what to do, where to focus, and get one motivated (“You can do it”) Unfortunately, self-talk can also be negative pessimistic, and critical. Such internal talk definitely does not help performance and, in most cases, probably hurts performance [15]. Like when athletic is thinking or talking about his opponent’s abilities, referees or his coach feeling about him (mind-reading). Recognize that negative self-talk is going to occur; the key is to not focus on the negatives and instead focus on the positives [16]. When NLP talks about mind-reading it is not talking about psychic powers. The 'Mind-reading' that NLP refers to comes in two forms. First, a person is considered to be 'mind-reading' when they claim to know, without direct evidence, what another is thinking or feeling [11]. Another form of mind-reading is when you believe that another person should understand you without having to explain yourself [11]. The problem with mind-reading is that the person who is doing the mind-reading can use this information as fact and make decisions based on it. This can be dangerous because the information can be incorrect and their decision will not be properly informed so the decision could be bad. Also, when a person makes such assumptions in a relationship then miscommunication and misunderstanding can follow [11]. This survey is about reconstruction of mind-reading language and thought pattern by a Meta-Model and Its impact on state-sport confidence. Often this pattern show itself by self-talking. Like when an athletic is talking about opponent abilities or what does the referee thinks about him. However, what he says to himself can have a big effect on the way that he feels, and on what he can achieve. His self-talk can be like an internal coach, encouraging him, boosting his confidence, believing in him, and motivating him to achieve his goals, or it can be like an internal bully, undermining him, criticizing him and beating up on him when he is down. Sports psychologists have long recognized the importance of positive thinking in helping athletes achieve their potential. Everyone who play competitive sport or who competes at a serious level faces adversity and obstacles to success: physical pain, poor conditions, strong opponents, fatigue. The only way an athlete can succeed in the face of these difficulties is to have powerful self belief and great determination. Positive thinking is one tool that athletes use to achieve their best in competition. According to NLP view a person who speaks never gives a complete description of the thoughts behind the words. The speaker will always have a more complete internal representation of what he wishes to communicate [16]. The description is therefore shortened. The representation of a person’s experience lies in the subconscious (deep structure). As the person transforms his experience it is done through words and called the surface structure [7]. Bandler and Grinder call the process of moving from deep structure to surface structure, the modeling process [17]. At a deep level of thought, a speaker has a more complete representation of the intended communication. Bandler and Grinder equated this level of thought to what Noam Chomsky described as the deep structure. In 1957, Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, in which he developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation — a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure represented the core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure via transformations. Bandler and Grinder believed that for efficiency in communication, information is transformed, that is, thought is subject to an unconscious process of deletion, generalization and distortion which is influenced by pre-existing beliefs, strategies, memories, and decisions [9]. What is represented as spoken word or written down is a mere subset of the original thought revealing distorted assumptions, mystical thinking, over-simplification, impoverished experience and, thus, limited maps of the world [11]. These limitations are challenged in the Meta-Model to clarify, and elaborate a client's communication and maps of the world which Bandler and Grinder believed had therapeutic benefit. The Meta-Model consists of categories of questions or heuristics which seek to challenge linguistic distortion clarify generalization and recover deleted information which occurs in a speaker's language [17]. Typically, questions may be in the form of "What X, specifically?", "How specifically?", "According to whom?" and "How do you know that?” [11]. There are a few scientific researches about NLP manipulating related to Meta-Model in sport performing. For example, Doemland’s Research investigating performance enhancement in sport psychology has primarily focused on theory and practice related to cognition and behavior [18]. One such possible mechanism, language, was addressed in this research. The relationship between an athlete's cognitive model of performance, as expressed through language and level of athletic achievement was examined. The hypothesis under study was that a positive relationship would exist between the level of attained athletic achievement and degree of representational organization present in verbal performance descriptions, as measured by the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Meta-Model. Existing transcripts of verbatim interviews describing the use of imagery in canoe-slalom performance by 12 elite canoe-slalom athletes (6 of whom were world ranked) were analyzed using the NLP Meta-Model.

Another important research is Lazarus and Cohen investigation. They have investigated about NLP relationship and athlete’s performance. Theirs research focuses on how Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques may be beneficial to athletes and to those working in sport [19].

Materials and Methods

This study is the kind of quasi experimental intervention survey. Which is based on research objectives, researchers taught Meta-Model of mind-reading to the athletics. And finally the Meta-Model affect on state-sport confidence was measured by State sport –confidence inventory (SSCI) as a pre test and post test. There was 30 Athletes under studding that selected from a boxing club of Visakhapatnam city. Their average age was 22.4±3.5 years, height 174.7±3.2 cm, and weight 73.5±3.3 kg. They separated with 2 groups according the following equation. After that they placed two 15 persons groups, one of them control and the other one experimental group.

Methods and tools for data collection in this research were using the State Sport –Confidence Inventory (SSCI). In this research mind-reading deficit was addressed using the Meta-Model by distortion pattern. How a person speaks to himself about others was also discussed, as the spoken words are directly linked to the speaker’s internal representation of the world. During this session the players had to become aware of words as symbols of their internal representational system as mind-reading deficit. The goals of this session were to:

1.Does Meta-Model have any effect on increasing state-sport confidence by using mind-reading coping model? In this survey at the first, researchers taught to athletes’ Meta-Model pattern, mind-reading, and how to deal with it. This educational duration was 7 days 1 hour per day. After that the players had to become aware of the actual words they used in self-talk and daily speech about their opponent, referees and coach as a mind-reading. If they detected any negative words they had to apply thought stopping and change the words or thoughts according to Meta-Model method.

This method was based on this question and give answer to them

· How do you know that he feels that way?

· How do you know she thinks that?

· Has that intention?

After 10 day from the last session researchers was used State sport –confidence inventory (SSCI) again as a post test. For measuring dancer’s state-sport confidence we sued state sport –confidence inventory (SSCI). This inventory includes 13 indicators and to assess people's beliefs in the moment, especially in connection with their sport capabilities. The answers are assigned a 9 likerts type. All participants are asked to at that moment, how confident do they have for participating in a serious competition.

Results and Discussion

The rate of athletics’ state-sport confidences before learning Meta-Model of mind-reading; 64% very low, 6% low, 12% medium, 14% high and 4% was very high. These scores after learning Meta-Model of mind-reading and post test increased 24%, 20%, 24%, 16% and 16%.

In Table 1. Findings related to the pre test mean = 30.62, post test mean = 36.68, pre test SD = 7.73, post test SD = 6.60 and pre test and post test difference = - 6.06 of the variables studied are presented. As shown, scores mean of state-sport confidence is increased in post test.

Table 1

In table 2 the SD =5.28, df =49 and t test = -8.107. As the result shown in table for variable of state-sport confidence test is significant.

Table 2

Conclusion

Sports psychologists have long recognized the importance of positive self-talk in helping athletes achieve their potential. Everyone who play competitive sport or who competes at a serious level faces adversity and obstacles to success: physical pain, poor conditions, strong opponents, fatigue. The only way an athlete can succeed in the face of these difficulties is to have powerful self belief and great determination. Positive self-talk is one tool that athletes use to achieve their best in competition [14]. Researchers also believe self-talk can help everyone improve performance in a variety of settings [12]. The Meta-Model of NLP techniques can be a useful tool for educating and restructuring of athletics’ self-talk. According to Grinder and Bandler every sentence (internal and external) has a surface structure [3]. When an athlete talk to himself, surface structure of his sentences has a huge impact on his feeling and performances. This affect determines his state-sport confidence level at a certain moment. According to Doemland his findings suggest qualitative analysis of the Meta-Model violations, the deletion, distortion and generalization that were being used. Findings also suggest that where these were presented they had a varied effect on how the athlete verbally expressed their perception of their performance [18]. In our study also using Meta- Model as a linguistic model for restructuring athletes language pattern was useful and showed the meaning full effect on experimental group compare to control group. It seems Meta-Model can be used to informing athlete’s language patterns for increasing their awareness and reduce the use of defective surface structure when they are giving verbal feedback on themselves or preparing themselves for a completion. According to our investigation, Meta-Model; mind-reading, has a meaning full affect on enhancing state-sport confidence level on athletes. When an athlete thinks about his abilities or predicting the result of a next competition, cognitive processing will formed as a self-talk. This kind of self-talk is usually affected by mind-reading defect. In this situation athlete thinks that he is aware of next results and he knows about intentions and thought of other people. He represents this fault in his sentences that he uses for self-talk and make a verbal communication to others. If he does not reconstruct this pattern, will treats based on his faulty thought. Meta-Model mind-reading can help him for being aware about sentences that he uses in self-talk and also aware him about his real situation and concentrate on his real world. He will realize what source he is using for having information about his athletic future, opponents, Etc. It helps the athlete to be confronted on his real-self and expand him-self according to reality not only some cognitive fault. Our thought has ability for captivating us in the world of imagination and incomplete information’s. Our language can be a clear representative of our thinking process. According to Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Meta-Models can help us for restructuring our language patterns and then re-pattern our cognitive process [17]. One of the most important things for an athlete who wants to participate in competition is having mastered on his cognitive processes and emotion. In this research we figure out Meta-Model can be a useful tool for increasing athletic self-awareness and cognitive controlling that has affect on state-sport confidence. We recommend that Meta-Model can be used in sport psychology consulting approaches, relationship process between coach and athlete and use other Meta-Model except mind-reading in sport conditions.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank to Dr. L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. Neuro-Semantics Executive Director, Because of his step by step guides and putting this article in a scientific NLP’s framework.

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