Understanding Your Critical Submodalities
Some submodalities are very powerful in determining a person’s response, such as the size or brightness of a mental picture. You may find that by making a picture bigger or brighter the experience is heightened. Or you may find that moving the picture to a different location or associating or dissociat- ing into a picture (as we discuss in the earlier section ‘Associating or dissoci- ating’) can affect the sounds and feelings of an experience.
A critical submodality is one that, when changed, alters other submodalities of an experience and also affects the submodalities of other senses. The result is that by changing, say, the brightness of a picture, not only do other qualities of the picture change automatically, but also sounds and feelings experienced in conjunction with the picture change, without conscious intervention.
Romilla was working with a client, Suzy, who was having trouble with a goal she wanted to achieve and had been struggling to reach for almost six months.
When Suzy explored the submodalities of her goal, she said it was over and up to the left (if you imagine a giant clock in front of you, it was at the number 11 and almost at roof height). When asked, Suzy moved the location of the image so that it was right in front of her and about one metre away.
Suzy’s reaction was phenomenal. She jumped in her chair so hard she almost fell off it and then she turned bright pink and couldn’t stop laughing.
Changing the location of the picture had a real impact on Suzy and brought the goal to life for her: she felt what achieving the goal would be like and the move made it much more immediate. Using some more goal-setting tech- niques, a delighted Suzy achieved her goal in four months.
You experience your world through your five senses: visual (eyes), auditory (ears), kinaesthetic (feelings and touch), olfactory (smell), and gustatory (taste). More than likely, you use one sense in preference to the others to col- lect data about your world, particularly at times of stress. This sense is called your lead or primary representational system, and it influences how you learn and the way you represent your external world inside your head.
During a coaching session, Charles discovered that his primary represen- tational system was auditory. Also, he was more kinaesthetic than visual and felt emotions quite strongly. Charles was working to change a nagging voice that he was allowing to undermine his confidence when he was start- ing something new, and which kept him awake at night with its chatter. On examining the qualities of the voice, he found that it was in fact his mother talking to him and that he heard her voice inside his head. Unfortunately, she had had a rather negative way of putting things. Whenever Charles heard this voice he felt sick and a sensation like a black, shiny rock was stuck in the region of his solar plexus.
When Charles changed the voice to a whisper and moved it to just below his left ear, outside his head, he realised he didn’t feel sick and he felt a warm glow in his stomach. Charles wasn’t prepared to change the voice further, however, because he believed the voice served to watch out for potential problems. He just needed to change the quality so that it allowed him to get on with his life.
Making Real-Life Changes
As you experiment with the exercises in this chapter, we hope that you begin to get a pretty good idea of your critical submodality: the submodality that can impact on and change other submodalities. And we hope that you gain the conviction that you’re in control of your experiences and can change them in order to choose how you feel. In the light of this knowledge and belief, experience real change in your life by working through the exercises in the following sections.
Just think: you can sit and program your mind on the train, in a traffic jam, or even over a boring meal with your in-laws (or should that be out-laws, just kid- ding!). And remember, practice makes perfect, so start experimenting, safe in the knowledge that you can’t get arrested for playing with your submodalities, even in public.
Removing the pain from an experience
Can you think of an unpleasant experience you’ve had? We don’t mean some- thing life shattering, just an incident that, when you think of it, makes you feel less than good. Got one?
Now, using the form in the later section ‘Submodalities Worksheet’, examine and note the submodalities of the experience. With this knowledge, start changing the picture, sounds, and feelings that you get when you think of the unpleasant experience. What happened? You do feel better now, don’t you?
No? Then discover what happens when you change the submodalities of the unpleasant experience to those of the pleasant experience we asked you to recall at the start of the chapter.
Changing a limiting belief
How often have you heard yourself say such things as, ‘I can’t do that’, ‘I’m no good at maths’, or ‘I should learn to cook properly’? These statements are all examples of limiting beliefs, generalisations that you make about yourself and your world. These beliefs can disable you, holding you back, or they
can empower you. Beliefs can all too easily become self-fulfilling prophesies, which start off just as a notion or a hint of an idea. Then your filters (meta programs, values, beliefs, attitudes, memories, and decisions – which we discuss in Chapter 5) begin aligning themselves like gates to let in only those
‘facts’ and experiences that reinforce your beliefs.
For instance, imagine that you decide that you’re a little more cuddly than you want to be and so you start on a diet. Perhaps you stick to the diet for a few days, but then temptation gets the better of you. At this stage you receive a hint of the notion that ‘Maybe I’m not good at following a diet.’ Then you try again and submit to temptation again, until eventually you come to the limit- ing belief that ‘I can’t stick to a diet.’