We know from earlier that the way we re-present images, sounds and pictures in our minds is what creates our subjective experience of the world around us and that all behaviour is a product of the state of mind you are in at the time. Now, let’s explore just how quickly we can change that when we know how. And just how easy it can be to spot where and how to make that change in those around us.
Richard Bandler, the founding creator of NLP, often talks of ‘finding the difference that makes the difference’ to me. The pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells we re-present on the inside to create our states are a lot like ingredients when we are cooking. They are all variable, but they have to be combined and treated in a certain way to get the same outcome. Let me explain. Say, for example, we were making a chocolate cake. Not being of the culinary persuasion myself, I have taken counsel from my wife, Claire, and having sampled the example (hey, you have to test these things and I am not going to pass anything on to you without testing it myself…) I can tell you that a fairly basic but very tasty chocolate cake usually contains flour, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla essence and, of course, chocolate!
Obviously, the ingredients must be mixed in the correct quantities and in the correct order and then baked for the desired time at the correct temperature before you can enjoy the fruits of your labours, chocolate cake and a coffee… yum!
Well, it’s exactly the same in your head, only in NLP, we call those ingredients ‘submodalities’, which are all the variables we have in the pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells we re-present on the inside.
So if you are predominantly visual, you will make pictures and use visual references naturally in your language, right?
But there is a little more to it than that because, just as with chocolate cake, we have lots of variables to consider if we want to create the optimum cake (and remember that, by cake, we really mean ‘state’). Then, within those pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells, we also have lots of subconscious choices about how we do that.
Imagine (if you are visual) that the picture you make is big and bright and moving, as though you were seeing a movie on the biggest screen imaginable and in 3D too. Do you think that will be more or less emotive than watching exactly the same movie but on a tiny screen, say, set on the back of the seat in front of us on an aircraft or, worse, viewing a still from the movie in black and white in a newspaper? While the specific content of the image may be the same and the plot line is obviously exactly the same, the whole experience could not be more different.
The same is true for sounds. Contrast the experience of attending a concert or listening to a really good stereo with listening to a crackly old radio or even by just turning the volume down from the level that makes you feel good to a quiet whisper and moving it into the background. Some small changes can change everything… and it is exactly the same in our minds.
So back to our chocolate cake… let’s say that we didn’t want to make chocolate cake (that ‘state’) any more. In fact, let’s say that for some reason chocolate cake was causing us pain and we wanted to change it. Well, we have some options: we can change any of the submodalities (ingredients), but obviously some of them will have a more profound effect than others. Let’s say for example that we first of all took out or turned down the amount of sugar. What would that be like? Well, it would be a lot like the original cake. It would even look exactly the same, but it just wouldn’t be quite as sweet when we tasted it. So there’s a difference, for sure, but not much of a difference really and certainly not to look at.
Then, let’s say that we took out or turned down the chocolate. What would that do? It would make quite a difference this time, more than just taking out the sugar, but we would definitely still have a cake, just not chocolate cake. Let’s now say that we took out the flour but left everything else exactly the same, in exactly the same proportions: we mix them in the same way in the same mixing bowl, and we put them in the same oven at the same temperature for the same amount of time. With everything else constant, what do we get? I’m guessing a kind of chocolate-baked omelette, but definitely NOT anything we would recognize as chocolate cake.
And after we baked it like that, could we then go back and add in the flour to return it to cake? No, of course not. The new state is just as permanent as the original version and will serve us well. What we have effectively done is found ‘the difference that makes the difference’ and changed that. And when you change that, everything else connected to it changes automatically all by itself.
So how do you change submodalities to change your subjective experience?
Put simply, anything you can do to a picture, you can do to a picture in your mind’s eye. If it’s colour, you can make it black and white. If it is moving, you can make it still. If it is big, you can make it small; if you are seeing it through your own eyes, then you can view it from somewhere else. If it is close, you can make it far away. The choice is always there and the choice is always yours.
It’s the same with sounds. You can change loud to quiet, a harsh tone to a funny one, your own voice to someone else’s, even someone else who makes you laugh, from inside your head to outside your head or from close to far away and many, many more.
Of course, the same is true for feelings, tastes and smells, but we will get to those in just a second.
If all those things are in fact variable and the language we use tells us so much more than just the content, what do you now notice in the following statements?
First and hopefully, quite obviously, they all use visual language, but second (for bonus points), did you notice that not only is the distance, space or perspective significant, but we are also being told exactly what needs to happen in order to make us feel better.
One of my very first and still very fastest pieces of change work ever happened when I worked with a woman who was ‘stressed to the max’ (her words) and after about 30 seconds said, ‘I just need to get some distance on the issue.’
I asked, ‘Why, where is it now?’
‘It feels like it’s right here,’ she said, and held her hand about two inches from her face.
As quick as you like I got up, walked across to her and moved her hand out to arm’s length, ‘How’s that’? I asked.
‘Wow,’ she said, ‘that is so much better already.’
Simple as that! Now calmer, we then continued our session to help resolve her stress.
What we will almost certainly find is that if we close our eyes and think about the problem, the image that comes to mind will be very close, too close, in fact, and in being too close, it feels oppressive and uncomfortable. Doesn’t it just seem rather obvious that if something is uncomfortably close, moving it further away will immediately feel better? Well, it does to me…
Perhaps that’s why NLP felt so intuitive when I was a learner just like you. So what about the phrase, ‘we need to look at the problem from a new perspective’ – what does that tell you? Well, it’s a bit like when you might hear a journalist ask, ‘What’s the angle on the story,’ and, in fact, it’s a lot like you experience yourself when you go to the cinema. For now, just forget about the movie itself and imagine that you walk into a completely empty movie theatre and you can sit anywhere you want. Where do you sit? I would be about halfway back and on the right-hand side as I looked at the screen. What about you? We all have our preference and for the most part, we assume that it’s just one of those things. It’s not, in the cinema, we are orienting ourselves relative to the screen for best effect.
As we delve deeper into the workings of the mind and our experience, we learn that it is never ‘just one of those things’. Everything we do, we do for a reason. All our actions are the result of a meta program that we are running in our head that guides us in everything we do: from the way we walk and talk to the way we react in situations to the way we feel and even where we prefer to sit in the movies. If the phrase ‘we need to look at the problem from a new perspective’ tells us anything, it’s that the person saying it wants to look at things from another place and a new ‘angle’. Or perhaps, you’ll also hear them say that they are a ‘big picture person’. All these little figures of speech tell us so much about how someone is orienting things on the inside in order for them to make best ‘sense’ of it. At the movies, we can’t move the screen to suit ourselves but we can certainly move ourselves in relation to the screen.
As a slight aside, on the first day of school, all the children file into class and choose where they want to sit… for no particular reason, just randomly or so it seems. Most often, visual people tend to sit near the window, the big picture people sit at the back and the detail guys and girls at the front; the creatives on the left and the more logical ones on the right. That’s just how it works. Then the teacher wonders why the students by the window are always staring out of it daydreaming. Well, unless what’s in the room in front of them is bigger and brighter and bolder and more engaging than what they can see out of the window, what’s out there will always get their attention. And if it isn’t, they will make up their own pictures and internal reality anyway.
So, where’s your favourite place to sit in the movies or in a classroom? Now imagine sitting in exactly the opposite location. If you’re a back and right person, then imagine sitting in the front left – how does it feel? It feels weird, right? Nothing has happened any differently in the ‘real’ world – the movie hasn’t even played yet – but just sitting there feels a bit odd. Well, that’s because we orient pictures in the way that makes most sense to us and if the picture is coming from the wrong place, it just doesn’t feel quite right.
From now on, listen very carefully for visual references in conversations you have (especially when you are not the one speaking) and notice when the person (even if it’s you) is setting out exactly what’s happening and how to make it better.
But what if you don’t hear many visual references? What if the person tends to be much more auditory? I’m sure you’ve heard people say things like, ‘If I could just stop this nagging doubt’ or ‘I’m worried sick’. You’ll have heard those expressions and more, I’m sure. ‘I hear you loud and clear’ or to ‘tune in’ to what someone is saying or even ‘unheard of’ (look again at the checklist) are all examples of auditory language being used to clearly illustrate (to use a visual reference) that the person is constructing their subjective experience primarily in an auditory sense.
So what do you think we do if ‘I just need to quiet my thinking’? What is the problem? Well, we all have much more control than we perhaps think we do and so, if you were to ask the person to close their eyes and ‘tune in’ to what happens inside of them when they think about the situation, you will most likely find that their thoughts are too loud. You can play with this for yourself right now, too. Have you ever had the experience of listening to the radio or TV and the volume is just one little increment higher than you would ideally have it? It’s just not right, is it? And also, just how annoying is it? To illustrate my point, close your own eyes and think a nice relaxing thought. How about simply ‘relax, relax, relax…’? Now as you do that notice how it feels in your body. Then I want you progressively to turn up your own internal volume until you are shouting ‘RELAX, RELAX, RELAX’ to yourself in your mind. How does that feel now? Anything but relaxing, isn’t it?
So with the person’s eyes closed, or yours if it’s you (just so that they are not distracted and can focus exclusively on the inside without the outside world getting in the way), ask them to rate how they feel on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being most annoyed and 1 being fine and calm. Then, ask them to rate the volume of their ‘thoughts’ on that same scale, with 10 being blaringly loud and 1 being no more than a whisper. Now, ask them to turn down the volume on their thoughts just like you would turn it down on the TV or on the radio.
I am very fortunate to have worked with many different people in my career. It has even been said that perhaps I have done more one-to-one sessions than anyone else working in NLP today but, that aside, one particularly auditory client comes to mind.
The condition was severe; the result was profound, but the solution was remarkably simple. We’ll call my client Dan (because that was his name). Dan had only ever eaten five different foods: chips, bread and butter, tomato soup (strained), pizza (but only cheese and tomato pizza) and custard. He was about 18 when he came to see me because he was finding it increasingly difficult to have a ‘normal’ life with such a restrictive diet – not to mention the rather obvious health implications. So Dan came and sat in my chair and we got chatting about stuff… random stuff, mainly golf, which he loved to play and, as it turned out, was rather good at.
It would all have appeared very conversational to the untrained eye or ear but, of course, it was to establish his dominant representation system and how he constructed his subjective experiences. He turned out to be very auditory with kinaesthetic and then a little visual.
I began by asking him what his worst food memory was. Immediately he said, ‘Oh, that’s easy; it was a Chinese buffet. We had gone as a family to see a Christmas show and stopped for some food on the way. It was definitely my idea of hell.’
That’s quite typical in my experience. People can almost always remember the first, the worst and the most recent experience with whatever it is that they are scared of. ‘So what happened?’ I asked. ‘Not what happened in the restaurant, that’s not particularly relevant to how to change it, what happened in your head?’
For a moment, Dan looked down, thinking, and then from side to side as though checking in with something and said, ‘Well, this might sound daft, but when I see a food that’s not on my safe list, it’s like a little voice in my head just says, “no, no, don’t do it” and then I just get scared and back away or go straight to one of the things I know I am OK with.’ (As he spoke, Dan pointed to the left side of his head with his left hand and to his solar plexus with his right, not directly but so casually that you’d never have thought anything of it. After all, people move their hands all the time and it doesn’t mean anything, does it?) ‘That day, I remember just having chips. I remember the disappointment on my mum’s face and also feeling really disappointed in myself. Part of me really wanted to try but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.’
Plenty to work with there, I thought, but the most obvious thing was the voice in his head. Now, Dan clearly wasn’t really ‘hearing voices’, he just meant his thoughts, that little voice we all have in our heads – it’s us talking to ourselves – and Dan’s internal dialogue was telling him what to do; he was doing just that and scaring himself witless in the process.
Two things we need to know here are, first, no matter what the pattern or the behaviour, your brain is not trying to hurt you; even a severely phobic response like Dan’s had a very strong positive intention. In his case, the intention was to keep him safe from the perceived threat or the danger of trying something new. Second, obviously we are not going to be able to change all the food in the world so we’re back to changing the subjective experience of it, as always.
Just like with the experience of the movie being much less on a small screen than it would be at the cinema, I wondered how loud the ‘voice’ was in his head and what the tone of voice was like. ‘Oh, it’s loud,’ he said, ‘deafening in fact, and in a really harsh, almost panicky tone.’ (Try the exercise, ‘Turning down your internal volume’, and you can experience this for yourself now.)
When he thought about the situation, even years later, it still caused him that same feeling of panic and fear. ‘Turn the volume on the thoughts down, all the way down,’ I said, ‘and then move the sound so that it’s right outside your head, like it’s on a speaker that’s getting further away.’
As he did that and, in about ten seconds flat, his shoulders dropped, his face relaxed and without any prompting from me, he let out a sigh and said, ‘Wow, it’s gone.’
‘What’s gone?’ I asked.
‘The feeling; I can still think of the situation, I can remember it, but that horrible panic feeling in my chest has just gone.’
Change happens fast, and in my experience, it always happens fast when you get it right like this, but I wasn’t finished there…
He had told us that earlier when he said, ‘Part of me really wanted to try, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.’ And now I wanted to take his natural curiosity and get it working for him, for a change, so I asked him, ‘You know before you went to the restaurant and you were curious about what other food might be like? What was that curiosity like; how did you know you were curious?’
This time, he pointed to the right side of his head with one hand and again to his chest with the other, a little higher up this time, if you cared to notice. This time, I wanted him to be navigating more by the feelings than thoughts and so I simply asked him to give the feeling in his chest a colour, a shape, a size and even a texture, all of which he did easily, and then said, ‘Take the feeling and double it in size.’ As his curiosity grew and grew, I anchored that kinaesthetically by touching his shoulder with my hand and after just a few seconds, asked him to open his eyes and come back out. We’ll get to the technique of anchoring later, but for now all you need to know is that timing is everything and as Dan’s curiosity grew and I anchored it, I released the anchor and opened his eyes just as he approached what I calibrated was close to peak state.
When I asked him to close his eyes and try to get the memory back, would you believe that he couldn’t? All he could feel was a sense of curiosity and the longer he stayed with it, the more it grew inside him.
Knowing that this memory had been the worst, we then repeated the pattern from the first or, in fact, the first that he could remember, as this problem had existed since he was about two years old. I later learned from his mum that he had never really made the transition to solids. In the absence of making up any stories about that and just sticking to what was there, we fixed them one by one, the worst, then the first and then the most recent.
It was a couple of days before I heard from Dan again; I think it was the day that he discovered ice cream. That day will go down in history as one of the best of his life, I think, but he also told me what happened the day he left me. He met his gran who had brought him to Glasgow and they went to a nearby café. Without even thinking, Dan ordered a sandwich and a coffee – no big deal you might think, but unheard of for him. His gran then sat and watched as he finished those before working his way through most of the options on the cake counter and then asked what was for dinner.
In all, the session took about 45 minutes. The difference that made all the difference was that when he didn’t have the thought in his head, or he couldn’t get it, then the feeling just never came and when that happened, he allowed himself to go back home to his own inner wellbeing and curiosity that had been there all the time.
Remember, with the principle of primacy (the first) and regency (the most recent) and then taking the worst and knowing that patterns of three always tend to work best in the subconscious mind. For example, you might remember Tony Blair’s speech in which he repeated ‘Education, education, education’ to fully embed his point at a party conference prior to being elected in 1997. Or, going back further into the history of great orators, Margaret Thatcher’s famous ‘No, no, no’ speech. The pattern of triple repetition really helps to embed or break habits in the mind. So if something is worth saying, it’s worth repeating. Repetition is key and three times is king… so if it’s worth saying it’s worth repeating, got it?
What you will find with an auditory person is that the volume is almost directly proportional to their state, but just like with you and the TV volume, if it’s even only one increment too loud, they will have a tipping point. And when their internal volume is lower than their auditory threshold, they will almost automatically relax back into feeling OK.
Just try it quickly. Close your eyes if it’s safe to do so. If it’s not, then put the book down too and concentrate! And just take any phrase you want, ‘Mind the gap’, for instance, but say it REALLY LOUDLY and in a panicked tone of voice to yourself over and over again. How does that feel?
It feels a bit frightening, doesn’t it? Well, if that’s just you making something up, it should be clear the effect it has in the ‘real’ world. Now, just for fun, think of another phrase, maybe one that you often use yourself, but do it in the same loud, anxious voice. It feels much the same, right? That’s because the content doesn’t really matter that much. Only 7 per cent of all communication is the words we use; everything else, 93 per cent, is how we use them.
When we use NLP therapeutically, one of the great benefits is that we don’t have to go back into the story and dig up all those old painful memories in order to try to make it better; it’s just not necessary. The story doesn’t matter that much anyway; as we already know, it is only ever at very most an approximation of what happened and, as we also know, it changes every time we access it. So I’m sure that you, like me, will find it difficult to understand how continually opening up old wounds just so you can talk about it and put labels on it could actually help make it go away. It just seems obvious that if you have a big, bright, bold, scary image in your mind’s eye or your internal dialogue is screaming at you and every time it’s triggered (consciously or subconsciously), you feel the feelings that go with it, then all you have to do to feel better is to stop making those big scary pictures or turn the volume down or change the tone.
You can even make the same picture or the same words, but if it’s small and black and white or squeaky, funny and insignificant, that’s exactly how it will feel. Easier said than done though, eh? Well, actually no… easier done than said; that’s why I want you to use this book to guide you and practise, practise, practise. Repetition is the key here and you just need to get familiar with listening to language literally and knowing what to do.
So we know what to look and listen out for, but what about that third dominant set of submodalities, feelings? Before we go into exploring our feelings and how to change them, it is important to remember the relationship between thought and feeling and then between feeling, action and outcome.
Thoughts lead to feelings, plain and simple. We make pictures and sounds in our heads; we generally call those thoughts, which automatically create feelings in our bodies. The problem for most of us is that we’re not actually aware of the thoughts but are very much aware of the feelings.
Feelings only tend to be noticed when they move; think about that and even about how we tend to describe our feelings. Most often, we use some kind of moving adjective, which is then associated with the precise area in the body where the feeling sits. For example, look at the following often-used phrases:
In fact, lots of the time when we describe our emotions, we ascribe a sense of movement or direction to them.
I’ll tell you about one of my extreme vertigo clients and let’s pay particular attention to the feelings. We have already said that feelings are only feelings when they move, but have you ever noticed which way they move? I was working with a client the other day who had a terrible fear of heights, so much so that she couldn’t even stand on a chair to change a light bulb. Even when she stood on something less than a metre high, she would get this feeling that rushed up and forwards and it felt like she was going to fall off, almost like she was being pulled forwards. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of vertigo is ‘a sensation of whirling and loss of balance, associated particularly with looking down from a great height’.
‘A sensation of whirling…’ So it even ‘officially’ has a sense of movement to it and when my client stood on a chair, that sensation of whirling whirled up and forwards and tried to pull her over so she felt like she was going to fall. Because she felt like she was going to fall, her brain kicked in and created the rush of adrenaline, which we call ‘fear’, in order to make sure she protected herself. Even though she was only a little way off the ground, the positive intention was clear; it was just turned up way too high.
So if up and forwards felt like it was pulling her over the edge, what do you think changing it to back and down would feel like? Well, I wondered too, so that’s what I did. I got her to give the feeling a colour, a texture and to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10 as to how it made her feel and then to move that feeling outside. I counted down from 3 to 1 and then asked her to put the feeling in reverse, so that instead of it going up and forwards, it went back and down and round and round like that. Then I asked her to take the feeling back inside herself and keep it going back and down and back and down. Her shoulders dropped, she gave a sigh and said that it felt immediately and completely different. I then asked her to keep the feeling going like that and to step up onto my chair, no problem at all, and again all in a matter of minutes.
I am always looking for the seemingly small change that makes a really big difference. Just like removing the flour from a cake recipe. No matter what else you have, if you don’t have flour then you can’t make a cake; if you change the key submodality then you can’t construct the state either. NLP is a vast and varied subject but the fundamentals are very simple.
Remember, in order to be anything other than OK, we must be doing something to take ourselves away from our own wellbeing.
For people with vertigo, it is not really a fear of heights that’s the problem. It’s that when they are up high, they have a feeling in their bodies that’s pulling them up and forwards and it feels like they are being pulled over the edge. It is that fear of falling or being pulled over the edge that is the problem. We are only hard-wired to be afraid of two things – falling and sudden loud noises – everything else is learned. So it’s not a fear of heights that’s the problem; it’s a fear of falling due to the sensation of being pulled towards or over the edge. But when you take that same feeling that is ‘whirling’ up and forwards in the body and spin it backwards, so that it goes back and down (everyone has the ability to do this; we just don’t realize it), then the feeling completely changes and not only goes away, but you actually feel more anchored, grounded and safe. And just as with all these examples, nothing whatsoever has changed in the ‘real’ world!
Now, think of the term depression. Which way does depression go? Even just thinking about the word tends to pull you down that way, doesn’t it? It does for me and I just don’t understand why you would label something with a title that actually makes it worse. How depressed do you think people would feel if it were called something much more uplifting?
To me, depression is just anger or frustration without the enthusiasm. But try telling that to someone who has been diagnosed with ‘it’ and I’m not sure they’d see the funny side… if you get my point. But have you noticed how we are encouraged to talk about things like depression as if they are something that we catch or that just kind of happen to us? ‘Oh no, I caught a dose of the depression; maybe it was from a door handle. How careless is it that all those depressed people are spreading it around the place.’
You may well laugh now, but depression is really no laughing matter. And with the number of prescriptions for antidepressants increasing exponentially every year, it would appear that never in the history of mankind has the world been more depressed. How can that be? Very few of us are in physical danger every day. Very few of us wonder where the next meal is coming from and, for the most part, we have shelter, security and friendship. So if all our basic needs are met, so why is it that we are so damn depressed?
Well, what we know, of course, is that in order to feel depression or any other feeling for that matter, we must first do something in our heads to create that feeling. So, what is it that people do to make themselves disappointed or even depressed? Simple, they go inside and tell themselves stories in glorious technicolour about how things don’t measure up to their expectations.
When polled, the vast majority of people saying they were ‘depressed’ cited that their life was a bit of a disappointment compared to what they hoped/expected it to be. Richard Bandler has a great line, which is that ‘disappointment takes adequate planning’, meaning that in order to be disappointed, we must have a preconceived idea of what something is going to be like to which the reality fails to match up.
Think about another simple turn of phrase that we use when shopping: ‘I just can’t find what I am looking for.’ If we read that literally as it’s intended, we can clearly see that in order not to be able to find what we are looking for, then we simply must have an idea of what that is. You will also have found yourself browsing similar items before exclaiming, ‘It’s just not quite right.’ It doesn’t matter what we are shopping for, from black shoes for work to a new house, we go searching for what we are looking for. We try to match the reality of the outside with the constructed image on the inside, and when they don’t match up, or match closely enough, then we feel the feeling of being disappointed.
So if ‘disappointment takes adequate planning’ and we know that we need to do something in order to feel anything other than our default setting (which is OK), then might it be an idea to stop doing it? And do you think that in stopping doing it, we would feel better? Yes, of course, and that part is, in fact, automatic.
But for the most part, we don’t get that and so start from the premise that there is something wrong with us. The fastest way to feel bad is to compare yourself to someone else. In other words, compare what you know about yourself with what you think about someone else. We’ve all done it; please stop now.
You will automatically reset back to happy much, much faster than you think as soon as you lose your attachment to believing the thoughts in your head.
In fact, the feelings you feel are much more to do with the way you construct those thoughts than they are to do with the thoughts themselves. You can and will automatically go back to being OK as soon as you break the attachment to the expectation.
I say automatic because our default setting is happy. In fact, if you are striving to be happy, you are definitely doing it the wrong way round. It’s a bit like trying to relax; how do you even do that?
Just as the nature of water is clear, the nature of we humans is to be OK and happy, and so much of what you will learn in this book is effectively ways to press the reset button and allow yourself to go back to OK. For that reason, there will be no maintenance, nothing to remember to do and absolutely nothing to keep up. You will simply go back to being OK because, in the absence of anything pulling you out of shape, that’s what happens; you go back to being OK, just like that.
You’ll hear me talk a lot about ‘pressing the reset button’ because, for me, that’s what this is all about. Now I know there are lots of people who will talk about using NLP to create ‘optimum state’ or ‘building a resourceful state’, but for me, there is nothing more ‘optimum’ and ‘resourceful’ than putting people back to their natural default setting, which is to be OK. When we stay out of our own way for long enough, we tend to do just great.
Think about that for a second. Who and how would you be if you weren’t caught up in the thoughts in your head and feeling the feelings that go with them? Well, you’d still be you, right? But I’m guessing you’d be a very much better, calmer, more creative, loving, joyful version of you. And all you have to do is let go.
As a simple guide, anything you can do to a picture you can do to a picture in your mind’s eye. Anything you can do to sound you can do to internal sound, while feelings are generally only noticed when they move or have a sense of size and shape.
Just play with it for now… Close your eyes and think of the good memory from before (see exercise). You can even refer back to the ‘submodalities checklist’ too. Now play it… think of it as a TV that you have complete control over.
If the picture is colour make it black and white, if it’s moving make it still, if it’s big make it small… I’m sure you get the idea. Notice the difference to how making these changes makes you feel.
Put it back the way it was before, now.
Do the same for any sounds in the memory. If the sound is loud make it quiet, if it’s a harsh tone make it soft or even funny. If the sound is inside your head, push it far away. Just go through all the entries in your submodalities checklist and change what you can and notice the difference, and the difference that makes the most difference.
Finally it’s time to pay attention to your feelings. Close your eyes and access that memory again. Now this time pay attention to where the feeling is in your body. Think of your feeling as an object; what size, shape, colour, texture does it have? Which direction does it move in? Again anything you can do to an object you can do to the feeling. Change the size, shape, colour, texture, direction it’s moving one at a time and notice the difference it makes to how you feel… cool eh?
In Part II, we are going to get more into the techniques of NLP. But now that we have the foundations, I’m sure you can already see just how quickly things can slot into place when you listen properly to what people say and listen to their language literally for a change, because when you do that, you can really begin to get a handle on how we construct our subjective experience and understand what makes us tick. Just remember that we are all different, but we all construct our internal reality using the same building blocks of pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells, and that the story doesn’t matter when you make the screen smaller and the lyrics don’t affect you if you can’t hear them and that feelings are only really feelings when they move, but you can change that. Then you know that while the world may well be fixed and solid, how we feel about it is open to change from any minute to the next and that change happens fast, always.
So now that you know that we all construct our own internal states, please stop every time you notice yourself say, ‘I think’ when you don’t have any real evidence; stop and know that you are really only taking a reality check from your own imagination. How useful do you think that is?