How NLP Techniques Work - an example

Time to get straight to the point and describe for you how a particluar technique from the tool box works. The co-creators of NLP, Bandler and Grinder, developed a pattern that utilises what are known as 'submodalities'. These are the images, sounds and feelings associated with our experiences.

I'll describe it in laymans terms, non-techny, no jargon. What we are going to do is this. Below are a set of instructions, read through them one by one and take your time developing the images (you'll find out what I mean in a second or so). Be prepared to close your eyes and you may want to do that, as for some it heightens the effectiveness of the process.

TRY THIS SIMPLE PROCESS

Here you go, start now, after you have read the first part of this process:

Part 1 - Take a moment to think about where you live, your house, the place you go home to.

Imagine you are stood looking at your house, facing the front, looking at the front door, noticing some of the finer details that only you know exist or noticing some other feature.

(By doing this you have probably seen a visual image in your memory of your house)


Part 2 - Now. See that house image again, theone you just had and note the following:

Is the image colour or black and white?
Moving or still?
Are you in the image or not?
Panoramic or TV or Postcard in size?
If you were to reach out and touch it where would it be?
Is it 2D or 3D?
Where is it located in your visual field?

You should now have a set of data that describes a small section of the 'code' of that memory of your home. (There are many others involved across all of the senses. The questions contained here are from the 'visual' sense)



Part 3 - Now. Think about your workplace..

..and choose a task or situation where you experience a 'feeling' that is not the best feeling for the task to be completed to the best of its ability.

When you think about you doing that, or your memory of it, take a moment to think about it and you'll begin to recall an image/memory of that time. Let that happen.

Part 4 - Think of the image again and ask the following questions:

Is the image colour or black and white?
Moving or still?
Are you in the image or not?
Panoramic or TV or Postcard in size?
If you were to reach out and touch it where would it be?
Is it 2D or 3D?
Where is it located in your visual field?

By now you have a small part of the code of that experience you imagined.

Why ask the questions? What's going on?

These are some of the questions I ask my clients about their 'experiences of being in challenging situations' and when I say experiences I'm talking about things like public speaking, cold calling, meeting people for the first time, negotiating and many other challenges people face where they 'behave or feel' a way that is not productive to the task at hand.

What I'm doing by asking these questions about the memory is defining the 'code' of the experience. After that you ask a client 'what word describes how you feel' and then to 'point to where the feeling is.' I then go on to change some of the memory coding and that changes the position of the feeling and that in turn changes the word the client uses to describe how they feel. Same memory, slightly different in structure now and a different word to describe it.

Imagine a piano keyboard. From key 'C' up an octave to 'C' there are different keys that when stroked produce a different sound. The same applies here with this technique. The word panic is mostly associated with feelings in a different place to confident. The techniques allow you to play any tune you want to in any given situation.

Straight forward and effective change that gets results. That's what it's all about, changing your experience so you can feel different. You know as well as I do, when you feel different about something, you get a different result.