Relax . . . you’ve got it!
Repeat this exercise with more examples of your best state in order to strengthen the anchor even further. When you need to access your confident and positive state, you can imagine the circle slightly in front of you and take a small, discreet step forward into it.
Anchoring spatially
When you’re giving a speech or presentation in front of an audience, spatial anchoring is a way of influencing your audience through anchors. When you repeatedly do the same thing on stage in the same place, people come to expect a certain behaviour from you according to where you move to on the stage. A lectern is a definite anchor – when you stand at the lectern, people expect you to speak.
While presenting, you can deliberately set up other expectations with the audience at different places on the stage. Perhaps you do the main delivery from the centre point of the stage, but move to one side when you’re tell- ing stories and another side when you deliver technical information. You may have yet another space that you step to when being humorous or light hearted. Very quickly, people come to expect a certain style input from you according to where you position yourself.
A Final Point About Anchors
Anchors may or may not work for you when you first try them. As with all the tools in this book, you learn fastest by taking an NLP class or working with an experienced practitioner. Whichever way you choose to develop your skills – on your own or with others – simply give it a go.
We encourage you to persist even if setting anchors seems strange at first.
When you do take control of your own state, you expand your options and the result is certainly worthwhile. Being able to manage your emotional state is powerful, just as the famous Rudyard Kipling poem ‘If’ says: ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. . .’
A fundamental NLP presupposition is that the person with the most flexibility in a situation is the one who succeeds.
Sliding the Controls of Your Experience
In This Chapter
▶ Finding out how you can feel good and then even better
▶ Fine-tuning input from your senses
▶ Letting go of limiting beliefs and creating empowering ones
▶ Moving from an unwanted state to a desired state
▶ Taking the sting out of a painful experience
Try this experiment: think of a really pleasant experience that you’ve had.
You don’t have to share the experience so you can let rip and really get into it. As you think of the experience, do you get a picture, feel a feeling, hear any sounds? Getting all three is great, and if you can only manage one or two out of the three, that’s okay too; we work with you in this chapter to help you experience all three. Can you now begin to intensify the experience?
Great! Now, can you ramp it up some more?
Welcome back! As you relived the experience, how did you intensify it?
Did you make the picture brighter, bigger, more colourful, or perhaps you brought it closer to you. Maybe you turned up the volume of any sounds you heard and if you had a feeling, you spread that feeling further through your body. You’ve just discovered how to play with your submodalities.
Submodalities are the basic building blocks of the way you experience your world, and therefore a very slight change in a submodality can have a sig- nificant effect on the changing of the experience. In other words, you have control over the way you choose to experience your world. You can choose to change your mind to heighten a pleasurable time or to remove the nega- tive emotions from an unpleasant one. You can also take yourself from an undesired state, such as confused, to a better state, such as understanding.
In short, you can choose the meaning you give to what happens to you in life.
This chapter tells you how.
By practising the exercises in this chapter, you become better at switch- ing your submodalities; you discover just how easily you can change the way you think and experience the world around you. Practice can help you increase the choices in your life, whether that’s to relieve stress, take the pain out of bad memories, or enhance the good times. When you set yourself a well-formed, desired outcome, for example, and pay attention to the submo- dalities, you make each goal more specific and clearly propel your future into motion. Have fun!
Recording Your Experiences with Your Submodalities
In NLP, your five senses – seeing, hearing, touching (also called kinaesthetic), smelling, and tasting – are called modalities (we describe in Chapter 6 how you experience your world through these five senses). And the means by which you fine-tune your modalities in order to change their qualities, are known as submodalities.
Examples of submodalities for your sense of sight may be the size of a picture, its brightness or colour, and whether a frame surrounds it or not.
Submodalities for hearing can be loudness, tempo, or the timbre of a voice, and for feeling a heaviness or butterflies in your stomach. You get the idea?
Contrastive analysis happens when you take two experiences and compare and contrast the submodalities of each experience. If, for example, when you compare the submodalities of something you know is real – say, a dog – with something you know is fantasy – a unicorn – you notice that each has differ- ences in its submodalities.
Grasping the Basic Info: What You Need to Know Before You Begin
Submodalities are how you give meaning to your experiences – whether something is real or false, good or bad, and so on. You can use submodali- ties to change the intensity of the meaning. In the exercise at the start of this chapter, you gave your experience a meaning – it was pleasant. By changing the submodalities of the experience, you were able to increase the experi- ence and therefore the meaning of the experience – it became even more pleasant.
So now you know that you can control your memories simply by changing the submodalities of the pictures, sounds, and feelings. And just as you know that modalities can be broken down into submodalities, similarly you should be aware that the submodalities can have further distinctions. For example, a picture can be in colour and have different shades of colours, or it can be in black and white and have variations of grey. It can have a frame around it or can be panoramic. Not clear about panoramic? Imagine standing on the top of a mountain and looking at the scenery in front of you as you turn your head, slowly, through 180 degrees. What you see is in panorama. In addition, in the next section, you discover how being associated with or dissociated from a picture can have an effect on your emotions. For example, sounds can be in your head or to the side, and feelings can take on a texture.
Because you can change each of your submodalities, we provide you with a list of them in the later section ‘Submodalities Worksheet’, to help you record the changes. We recommend that you fill out the form before you begin to make changes so that you can always revert to the original structure of a sub- modality if your change raises any anxieties.
Associating or dissociating
This section helps you to understand how you can move in and out of your memories, to get more options over how you heighten or reduce the intensity of your feelings. In our experience, this aspect is a very important submodal- ity and one that needs a little extra clarification.
When you visualise yourself in a picture, the experience is like watching your- self in a home-made film, and we call this experience dissociated. If, however, you’re in the picture, seeing out of your own eyes, we call this experience associated. Being associated or dissociated into a picture can be an extremely important submodality when experiencing emotions as a result of the pictures you make.
Usually the emotions are heightened if you associate into the picture.
Sometimes, people find associating or dissociating difficult. For instance, someone who has experienced a severe personal loss or been traumatised may find that associating hard and may need to work on it.
To get the feel of being associated or dissociated, create a picture of yourself sitting in the front seat of a car. When you’re dissociated, you perhaps see a picture of yourself in the car, a little bit like watching yourself on television or looking at yourself in a photograph. If you want to associate into the picture, imagine opening the car door and sitting down. Now look out of your own eyes. The dashboard is in front of you. Can you see the texture and colour of the dashboard? Now look up at the windscreen. Is it splattered with the rem- nants of suicidal insects (or aliens, if you’ve seen the film Men in Black)?
After visualisation, some people find that dissociating is difficult. To do so, imagine stepping out of the car and onto the pavement. Turn around and look back at the car and see yourself sitting in the front seat. If you still can’t dissociate, pretend that you’re watching a film and you’re up there on the screen, in front of the car.
If you feel that you aren’t getting the hang of this exercise (or any others), feel free to leave it for the moment. You can always come back to it and give the exercise another go when you have more NLP experience embedded in your mind and muscle. Or you can find yourself an NLP practitioner or NLP practice group to work with in order to advance your skills (Appendix A is a resource list to help you make contact).
Defining the details of your memories
While you’re sitting down to read this book, you’re probably unaware of the feel of the seat against your back and legs, although you are now because we mention it. Similarly, you’re not always aware of the qualities of your memories until we ask you to remember a time when you were, for example, brushing your teeth, playing a game, reading a book, or cooking. Then you realise that a range of qualities applies to those memories. For instance, when remembering reading a book, the picture you make of yourself, the book, or the story, may be surrounded by a frame, or it may be in black and white. Perhaps you can hear the sound of distant traffic or of the pages turning. Maybe the book you were reading made you laugh and feel uplifted and happy.
You can become aware of the qualities of your submodalities by paying atten- tion to what you see, or hear, or feel when you recall an experience. The following sections present you with questions that can help you elicit the quality of the visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic submodalities.
We focus on just the visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic submodalities in this chapter, and put taste and smell aside for now. We do so because we believe that – unless you’re a wine-, tea-, or coffee-taster – these senses don’t have the same power as sight, sound, and touch. Having said that, tastes and smells certainly affect your emotional brain and you may find the smell of roasted chestnuts suddenly transporting you back to a childhood memory of falling snow and Christmas carols.
Eliciting visual submodalities
You can define the quality of a picture in terms of where it’s located in space as you look at it. For instance, the image may be directly in front of you, to your left, to your right, or slightly displaced to the top or bottom. If the pic- ture is panoramic, it looks like you’re standing in one spot and turning your head to look at the view in front of you. The picture has other qualities as well, brightness, shape, and so on. You can discover how you make pictures
Visual Submodalities Questions to Discover Them
Location Where is it in space?
Point to the picture.
How close or how far away is it?
Colour or black and white Is it in colour or is it black and white?
Associated or dissociated Is the picture associated or dissociated?
Can you see yourself in the picture or are you looking out of your own eyes?
Size Is the picture big or small?
What size would you say the picture measures?
Two- or three-dimensional Is the picture in two or three dimensions?
Brightness Is the picture bright or dull?
Still or moving Is the picture still or is it a film?
If the picture is a film, how fast is it running?
Shape Is the picture square, round, or rectangular?
Framed or panoramic Does the picture have a border around it, or is it panoramic?
Focused or fuzzy Is the picture in sharp focus or is it blurred?
Eliciting auditory submodalities
Like the pictures you make in your head, the sounds you hear have certain qualities to them. You may not be aware of the attributes of the sounds you hear until you focus your mind on them by thinking of the following questions:
Auditory Submodalities Questions to Discover Them
Location Where do you hear the sound?
Is the sound inside your head or outside?
Point to where the sound is coming from.
Words or sounds Can you hear words or sounds?
If words, is it the voice of someone you know?
Volume Is the sound loud or soft?
Is the sound a whisper or clearly audible?
Tone If you hear a voice, what tone does it have?
Is it deep, rich, nasal, rasping?
Pitch Is the sound high or low pitched?
Mono or stereo Can you hear the sound on both sides or is it one sided?
Is the sound all around you?
Constant or intermittent Is the sound continuous or intermittent?
Rhythm Does the sound have a beat or a rhythm to it?
Tempo Is the sound you hear slow or fast?
Tune Does the sound have a tune?
Eliciting kinaesthetic submodalities
Guess what! Submodalities to do with feelings also have qualities that help to define them:
Kinaesthetic Submodalities Questions to Discover Them
Location Where is it in your body?
Point to where you can feel the feeling.
Shape Does the feeling have a shape?
Pressure Does the feeling exert a pressure?
Size Does the feeling have a size?
Is it big or small?
Quality Does the feeling make you tingle?
Is it spread out or knotted in one place?
Intensity Is the feeling strong or weak?
Still or moving Can you feel the feeling in one place or is it moving around your body?
Temperature Is the feeling warm or cold?
Constant or intermittent Is the feeling constant or intermittent?
Texture Does the feeling have a texture to it?
Picture Can you make a picture of the feeling?
Tom was prone to feeling very anxious before his weekly meetings with his manager. Consequently, he felt unable to make his case when his manager raised certain issues with him. Over a period of six months, Tom found that facing going to work became harder and harder and he was in despair when he consulted Romilla.
When questioned, Tom said that the feeling of anxiety looked like a heavy, metallic, black cube just below his sternum. Romilla asked Tom to change the colour gradually from metallic black to grey to silver. As the colour changed, the cube got lighter until Tom was left with a very ‘poky’ square. When Tom imagined getting hold of a corner of the square, he was able to ‘pull’ it out of his body and allow it to float away. Tom has gone on to use this process for dispelling other, unhelpful feelings, in different situations.
When you’re playing at changing the submodalities of a memory, you need to make a list before you start changing submodalities around. If you start to get uncomfortable with the process at any point, you can then put the picture, sounds, or feelings back to how they were. In the later section ‘Submodalities Worksheet’, you can find a worksheet designed for this very purpose. Make as many copies as you need.
Always ask yourself whether going ahead with any change to a submodality is okay. If you discover a resistance – a feeling that makes you uncomfortable – acknowledge the feeling and thank your unconscious mind for making you aware of possible internal conflict. You can simply overcome this issue
gradually, through some quiet time to yourself; or you may find that working with an NLP practitioner is beneficial.
When Romilla was working on resolving grief with a client, he didn’t want to let go of the pain of loss. He believed that if he let go of the pain he would forget his father. In fact, by releasing the pain he was able to remember his father even more vividly.
Getting a little practice
Imagine you have a remote control with three sliding buttons labelled V for visual, A for auditory, and K for kinaesthetic. You can change the qualities of any pictures you make in your mind, sounds you hear in your head, or any feelings you experience in your body just by sliding the V, A, and K controls.
(For more information on VAK modalities, head to Chapter 6.)
Why would you want to adjust the qualities of your memories? Supposing, years ago, you were rehearsing for a school play and your highly stressed teacher screamed at you, ‘You stupid child, you blew it again!’ Now you’re in a job where you need to make some strong presentations to colleagues and clients. Yet every time you get started you begin to sweat and stammer and the voice in your head goes, ‘You stupid child, you blew it again!’ You may need to adjust the qualities of your memories because they get in the way of what you want to achieve. Imagine you slide the brightness control and the picture of the teacher gets dimmer. Then you slide the size control and the teacher gets smaller and becomes insignificant. Finally, you adjust the volume control and the scream drops to a whisper. Now you find that you can make presentations the way you always wanted.
To see how effective changing submodalities can be, try this exercise, using the worksheet in the later section ‘Submodalities Worksheet’: