According to Epictetus “We have two ears and one mouth, so that we can listen twice as much as we speak” May I also add and two eyes.
In 2017 I did my NLP trainer training with John Grinder, Carmen Bostic St. Clair and Michael Carroll. This is where you certify so you can train NLP practitioners and give certifications with the names of the three masters just mentioned. During the course we got a very specific task from Carmen Bostic St. Clair. Carmen is a fantastic trainer, she thinks out of the box, she makes you work hard and she works hard to get the best out you, did I mention she can be a little bit scary. She is definitely one of my role models and I admire her braveness, toughness, elegance and wisdom. She is definitely what we would call a pattern interrupt, someone extraordinary ready to shake up every thing you thought you knew. Anyway, the task was to create a sensory-based description of something, without saying what was. Using all of our senses without using the verbs to see, hear, feel, smell, hear and taste. Easy, don’t you think?
Here is what I wrote; can you guess what it is?
An Ice cold is gently tickling my toes and slowly but surely it creeps up my legs to my knee and then to my thigh. My heart, that until now was quietly working in my chest makes its presence known to me to and begins to knock on my conscious, BUM BUM BUM BUM. My stomach muscles tightens as to pull away from the ice cold and the suddenly my whole body is in it. My breathing is out of control and my heart is beating too fast, I can’t seem to count the beats and there is a prickling in all of the fibres of my body. As my feet find sandpaper like surface with some sharp yet friendly edges, my skin is hit by and intense warmth and smooth silky wrapping. I put one foot in front of the other and the texture beneath my feet changes and becomes softer, deeper and warmer. A scent of cleanliness caresses my nose and I lick some salt of my lips. A bright light blinds my eyes and my muscles that were tens begins to relax and then… I surrender.
Did you guess? I went swimming in a very cold Atlantic sea and then I relaxed in the warm sand. Which piece of information gave it away? Which piece of information did you connect the most to?
As you read in my blog post if you are feeling blue think green , we collect and process information through our senses: Visual, looking outside or mental visualizing; auditory, hearing external sounds or internal sounds; Kinaesthetic (tactile sensations and emotions) tactile sensations of touch, temperature, emotions, balance and body awareness etc.; Olfactory, the sensation of smell; Gustatory, the sensation of taste and what we call Auditory Digital which is your self talk.
Now we can use the submodalities, the details of each system (please see blog post if you feeling blue think green) to modify how we think and then consequently how we feel. And we can use the knowledge of our representational systems to learn about how we learn and how other people learn and adjust our communications with them accordingly. We are continually using all of our representational system, unconsciously, switching from one to the other or even using more than one at the time. When the co-creators of NLP John Grinder and Richard Bandler first mentioned this concept, it was thought that you were mainly using one of them and as such the way you learn and communicated could be defined by it. However, we now know that even though we often have a preferential system that we use, let say out of habit. We can and will change our system of collection and processing information at any given time and often do. In any given NLP practitioner course you should not only learn about this but also learn how to identify which system a person you are communicating with is using and then you can adjust your communication accordingly. Just imagine if all teachers knew this, they may find different way of explaining things to the preferential system of their students. It is also useful knowledge when you communicate with love ones for example if your child is highly visual it may be more useful for him/her to hear that you see him or her, than that you hear him or her, or saying I feel you. To a highly visual person you will connect more telling him or her that “I see what you say”, though literally that is very difficult.
This is also useful information when you create a conference a presentation or a lecture. If you make sure you connect with all representational systems you can make sure you reach the whole audience. Here are a few predicates you can use for each system: Visual, see, look, view, picture, hazy, focused, imagine etc.; Auditory, hear, listen, tune in/out, rings a bell, resonate, attune etc.; Kinaesthetic, feel, touch, grasp, get hold of, impression, sensation etc. Just to give you a few examples you can play with. You can also pay attention to these patterns in the language of the people around you and maybe you can identify their representational system within their language.
Knowing that this is just a tiny taste sample to let you know some of the things you can achieve with NLP , I remind you of one of Tony Robins quotes: “To effectively Communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding to guide our communication with others”