Did you get mainly V, A, or K, or was your total evenly mixed? Check your preferences below and see whether our explanations make any sense for you:
✓ V – visual: A visual preference may mean that you’re able to see your way clearly, keep an eye on things, and take a long-term view. You may enjoy visual images, design, watching sport, and the symbols involved in studying physics, maths, or chemistry. You may need to live or work in an attractively designed environment.
✓ A – auditory: An auditory preference may mean that you’re able to tune into new ideas, maintain harmonious relationships, and that you’re happy to sound people out and listen to the opinions of others. You may enjoy music, drama, writing, speaking, and literature. You may be highly tuned into the sound levels in your environment.
✓ K – kinaesthetic: A kinaesthetic preference may mean that you’re able to get to grips with new trends, keep a balance, and hold tight on to real- ity. You may enjoy contact sports, athletics, climbing, and working with materials – electronics, manufacturing, hairdressing, or construction.
You may be sensitive to the textures and feel of your environment.
Within Britain and America, researchers estimate that visual is the dominant style for approximately 60 per cent of the population; which is hardly surpris- ing given the daily bombardment of our visual senses.
Beware of labelling people as visuals, auditories, or kinaesthetics – a gross generalisation. Instead, think of people as having a preference or habitual behaviour in a particular context, rather than identities. Be mindful, too, that no one system is better or worse than any other. (You can’t help but operate in all the different modes, even if this happens unconsciously.) The systems are simply different ways of taking in, processing, and outputting information, as you experience the world around you. After all, everyone’s unique.
Listening to the World of Words
The notion of sensory awareness isn’t new, and dates back at least to the days of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who talked about the senses in his book On The Soul. The nineteenth century psychologist William James was the first to discuss the primacy of modalities, which NLP refers to as the visual, auditory and kinaesthetic representational systems (check out the earlier section ‘Getting to Grips with the Senses’).
In the early days of NLP, the founders Richard Bandler and John Grinder, became fascinated by how people used language in different ways. The whole NLP notion of modalities came out of their seminars and study groups when they identified patterns of speech linked to the VAK senses. People represent their experience through their senses, and so NLP came to call the senses representational systems (or modalities).
The representational systems are much more than information channels coming in through the eyes, ears, or hands. The term refers to a whole com- plex system of activity that includes input, processing, storage, retrieval, and then output.
For example, you may take in information through your eyes – such as the image of a favourite person’s face – and mentally process that information, store it for the future, retrieve the memory of it the next time you’re feeling a bit blue, and say to yourself ‘Never mind, things will look better tomorrow.’
All of this happens outside of your conscious awareness.
The everyday language that you use provides clues to your preferred repre- sentational system, the one that you’ve developed through your life. In order to enhance your own communication skills, listen to the types of words that people use, and ask yourself whether these words are visual, auditory, kin- aesthetic, or neutral (not sensory-specific). You can find all sorts of clever clues as to what’s going on inside people’s heads, and whether they’re more responsive to pictures, words, or sounds. You can then go on to note what kind of language gets you the best response from a particular person.
Building rapport through words
In our own training sessions, we often test out the method of representa- tional systems and observe how easily and quickly groups with the same preferences can build rapport. Such people find that speaking to those who
‘speak their language’ is naturally easier.
So what can you do when you feel that you’re speaking a ‘different’ language and the conversation is harder? Begin by listening more carefully and iden- tifying other people’s language preference. Then you’re in a great position
to adjust your language pattern so that it aligns with those around you and therefore build rapport through the similarity of your language pattern.
Table 6-1 lists some of the sensory-specific words and phrases – the VAK predicates mentioned in the earlier section ‘Filtering reality’ – that you hear people say. You can start to build up your own lists and notice which words you say or write frequently. When you have difficulty getting through to cer- tain people, check whether you’re stuck in a rut with your own language.
Table 6-1 VAK words and phrases
Visual Auditory Kinaesthetic
Bright, blank, clear, colour, dim, focus, graphics, illuminate, insight, luminous, per- spective, vision
Argue, ask, deaf, discuss, loud, harmony, melody, outspoken, question, resonate, say, shout, shrill, sing, tell, tone, utter, vocal, yell
Cold, bounce, exciting, feel, firm, flow, grasp, movement, pushy, solid, snap, touch, trample, weight
It looks like. . . It sounds like. . . It feels like. . .
A glimpse of reality So you say We reshaped the work We looked after our
interests
I heard it from his own lips
Moving through This is a new way of
seeing the world
Who’s calling the tune? It hit home Now look here Clear as a bell Get a feel for it This is clear cut Important to ask me Get to grips with Sight for sore eyes Word for word Pain in the neck Show me what you
mean
We’re on the same wave- length
Solid as a rock
Tunnel vision Tune into this Take it one step at a time Appears as if. . . Music to my ears Driving an organisation What a bright day That strikes a chord The pressure’s on
A few olfactory and gustatory words also exist, such as the following: fra- grant, fresh, juicy, odour, pungent, salty, smell, smoky, sour, spicy, sweet, and whiff.
Many words in your vocabulary don’t have any link to the senses. These words are non-sensory, and because they’re ‘neutral’ you neither connect nor disconnect with somebody else’s modality. Neutral words include the following: analyse, answer, ask, choose, communicate, complex, educate, experience, favourite, imagine, learn, question, remember, transform, think,
When people’s thoughts and words are highly logical, conceptual, and devoid of sensory language, NLP calls this style digital processing. Documents from insurance companies are typical of digital language, as in the following example: ‘The obligation to provide this information continues up to the time that there is a completed contract of insurance. Failure to do so entitles the Underwriters, if they so wish, to avoid the contract of insurance from incep- tion and so enables them to repudiate liability.’
Bringing on the translators
Two people can sometimes struggle to communicate, despite sharing similar viewpoints, because they speak with different language styles. One may use an auditory style, for example, and another a visual or kinaesthetic style. To be an effective communicator, you need to be able to do two things: know your own preferred style or modality and also practise using other ones.
Have you ever heard a dispute that goes something like the following one between a manager and a team member in the office? To demonstrate the dif- ferent language styles, we show the predicates (the sensory-specific words and expressions) in italics:
Rich or digital?
In any walk of life, people develop their own shorthand style of language with co-workers, friends, and family. Listen to a group of doctors, teenagers, or builders; they have their own way of getting the message across quickly and efficiently.
Speaking from personal experience, we can safely generalise that many business people, and especially those who work in the IT indus- try, stay highly tuned into their own digital style of language. Surrounded by logical technology they forget how to put any sensory-specific language into their communication (until they discover NLP, of course!).
Communication issues arise for any group of people when they step outside their peer group.
All too often, corporate-speak sends people to sleep. Just contrast the average script of a Death by Powerpoint presentation in corpora- tions across the globe with the inspired ‘I Have a Dream’ speech of Martin Luther King, and you soon see why so many executives power nap in front of their laptops in the afternoons.
The solution lies in passion. When people live their passion and want to share it with the world, they naturally engage all their senses and this reality is reflected in the words they speak.
If you analyse the speeches of Barack Obama or Winston Churchill, or the narration from a TV series by world-renowned naturalist David Attenborough, you notice the richness and use of sensory-specific words in their speech.
Manager: (Betty) ‘I can’t see your point of view about your appraisal’ (visual).
Employee: (Bill) ‘Well, can we talk about it further?’ (auditory).
Betty: ‘It’s perfectly clear to me – just black and white’ (visual).
Bill: ‘If you would discuss it, it may be more harmonious around here’ (auditory).
Betty: ‘Just have a closer look. I’m sure you’ll get a better perspective’
(visual).
Bill: ‘You never listen, do you? End of conversation’ (auditory).
Betty, the manager, stays with visual language, and the employee, Bill, is stuck in auditory mode: they’re disconnected and not making progress.
Here’s how a third person – maybe Bob from human resources or another department – can help to shift the dispute: