The average person meets over 10,000 people in their lifetime. 

Some of them will be a passing glance. 

Others will be acquaintances. 

A handful will be people you interact with on a daily basis. 

But have you ever thought about how well you know the people around you?

You might get along with them more often than not, but then one day, they do something that seemingly comes out of left field.

What’s that about?

The concept of personality has been around for over 2,000 years beginning with Hippocrates back in 370 BCE. 

On the surface, personalities make a lot of sense. 

The dictionary defines personality as “The totality of qualities and traits, as of character or behavior, that are peculiar to a specific person.”

But this assumes that people act the same way all the time.

And nothing could be further from the truth. 

For instance, you might act one way when you’re attending a church service, and a completely different way when you’re at a sporting event. 

Personality doesn’t account for changing contexts. 

If the concept of personality is flawed, then you can believe that personality tests aren’t much better. 

There are many personality tests out there, such as the Myers-Briggs for instance, and all of them are riddled with problems. 

The biggest one has to be the lack of reliability when it comes to personality results. 

In 1991, a study was done by National Research Council on the MBTI test to see just how reliable it was. They found that only 24 of the 61 subjects received the same result when they took the test multiple times. 

However, all is not lost. 

There’s something that much more powerful than personality that can account for all the ways that we think, act, speak, and so on called Meta-Programs. 

It was originally discovered by Leslie Cameron-Bandler, who at the time was working closely with Richard Bandler, the co-founder of NLP. 

She noticed that whenever she would do “Textbook NLP” on certain people, she wouldn’t always get the response she’s looking for. 

It was while working through these “failures” with Richard that she began to develop the initial list of the Meta-Programs. 

Numerous people made contributions over the years (such as L. Michael Hall in his classic book "Figuring People Out") and have applied the Meta-Programs to different contexts such as business and selling. 

After doing my own research on the subject, I’ve put together the very first NLP course on Meta-Programs called the “NLP Meta-Programs Mastery Course”.