Neuro Linguistic Programming

'General' and 'specific'

Some people feel at home when dealing with details and others prefer the big picture. Jackie's well known among her friends for not reading instructions and avoiding detail like the plague. When she is asked to proof-read a document she sometimes misses small errors. She loves abstract conversations about concepts and likes to think holistically. Caroline gets great satisfaction from obtaining every tiny piece of information she can lay her hands on. She enjoys 'number-crunching' and checking that written work is entirely accurate. She loves telling stories but when she loses the flow she has to start from the beginning again.

Understanding general and specific patterns

The General-Specific Meta Program is sometimes known as Big Chunk-Small Chunk in NLP. It concerns the level of either specificity or generality in thinking style. Most people start from one and move to the other. So if they start with the big picture they 'chunk down' to the detail.

In NLP the idea of chunking up or down is used extensively. Questions are asked to elicit the next level of information and bring about a new way of perceiving a situation. For instance to 'chunk up' a useful question to ask might be 'What