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NLP Glossary – Submodalities (detailed)

Stuart — Sat, 01 May 2010 05:12:51 +0000

Submodalities are like mind codes. The way it is explained is that it is a “sub” element of a modality, comprising visual, auditory and kinesthetic modalities of perception.
photo credit: h.koppdelaney

What do I use submodalities for?

Generally, submodalities are used to change the way we represent or perceive information in the mind. While this can be quite heavy to understand, think of it as a new software that you want to install into a computer.

Your mind carries a “template” of thought. This “template” is filled with your experiences based on certain codes in your mental template. This template of codes can be found in this submodality checklist.

What parts of experience are coded by submodalities?

Situations represent the context of your experience. Submodalities are the structure of our experience. Submodality Techniques are the process you use to change your experience.

I’ll give a variety of examples to illustrate this.

Do you realize that there are movies that give you a different feeling, simply based on the lighting they use in the movie? For instance, a dark movie that brings out more mystery would be “Batman: The Dark Knight”. notice the visual effects bring out a much darker, ominous feeling.

However, looking at a much more lively and vibrant scene in a show like “Sex In The City”, you’ll discover the colors are much different. The mood and rhythm of the entire movie is different, bringing out a different flavor in the movie.

How do I use submodalities?

Since we know that submodalities are like the elements that movie directors use in order to shift the way we experience the movie, then it is clear that by creating these changes in our mind, we literally become our own movie directors.

Using The Submodalities Checklist I have on this site, you can easily compare and contrast the effect within the submodalities in your mind. So I’m warning you ahead of time, until you have received proper NLP Practitioner training, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to fully grasp the way submodalities can work, even though I’m giving a detailed description here. You’ll need supervised practice most of the time in order to gain the maximum benefit out of using the submodalities.

Submodality Comparisons

First of all, submodalities are a way to understand the way we think, and how we construct our reality. For instance, taking two different emotional states, you can discover their differences through contrastive analysis.

Contrastive analysis is the process in linguistics to compare sentences and to identify the difference it makes to our mental representations.

Statement #1: Happy young boys play enthusiastically.

Statement #2: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Notice both statements follow the exact same sequence grammatically, but one makes sense and the other does not, thereby enabling a linguist to determine the effect of syntax (structure of the sentence) versus the semantics (meaning).

In the case of linguistics, we use contrastive analysis with sentences. In submodalities, however, you use situations and contexts. Think of the time you are working at your office and compare the time when you were stressed and the time you were energized. You will be able to detect the difference between two experiences quite easily, and therefore know how they were coded.

“So what?”

By understanding the way they are coded, you can:

change the way you perceive and therefore experience a context.
shift a negative experience in that context and adjust it so that it appears more positive.
shift a positive experience in that context and adjust it to become even more positive and powerful.
utilize processes that make change more habitual and natural

Example: Submodality shifts

I had a client once who had a build up of panic just prior to doing a presentation. In his mind, the audience was bright, loud and big. All I did was to get him to adjust the audience in his mind so that they were of the appropriate size and volume that made him comfortable to speak to them. He reported that he could not change the size of the audience, but said he could make himself turn into a giant in his mind so that the audience was in awe of him. This shifted his emotional state when speaking on a stage.

Example: Submodality utilization

A client once asked me how to be more motivated. So I asked what kind of pictures and sounds she made when she feels motivated. Generally, it seemed that she made brighter and closer pictures (compared with less motivated ones) and said “yeah!” in her mind whenever she was motivated.

The client has just accessed a resource state, which I can now utilize.

In this case, I got her to think of the context in which she was not motivated, or in a place where she had to be more motivated. She said it was her work. As a result, all she had to do was to perceive the workplace as brighter and closer in her mind, and as she was about to get things done, say to herself “yeah!”. This created a very obvious change in her physiological state: face flushing, smiling, and posture shifted to become more upright.

Example: Submodality Process

Another client had a phobia of snakes. Taking the image of a snake, she freaks out and goes into a phobic state, tearing and screaming. After the image is taken from her, she regained her composure. We first shifted the representation of snakes by thinking of a way to represent the data in a more comfortable way. She changed the snake to feel smooth to the touch (instead of slimy) and her favorite color. We even got her to imagine that the snake was like a baby she could cuddle. We brought in a real snake and she embraced it like a baby with little effort, because now the perception of snakes (domesticated pythons) was much different than before.

Conclusion

There are many other ways to utilize submodalities, and even in this post, I’ve barely scratched the surface. To be able to become masterful at submodalities, the processes and strategies you learn to shift a person’s emotional state must be learnt. In NLP, many people have invented dozens of useful and powerful strategies that can be applied in different situations. I’d advise you to learn how to model.

NLP Techniques – Changing Habits

Stuart — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 08:18:28 +0000

photo credit: ValetheKid

I’m constantly surprised by the fact that many people have habits they claim they can’t change. The things that are happening in the mind includes:

lack of awareness of the pattern of habit
a belief that the habit cannot be changed
a greater association of pleasure experience that is associated with keeping the habit
pain associated with changing the behavior
no need to change the behavior
possibly positive payoff for a negative behavior

NLP has several processes that enable this to be eliminated including

smoking addiction
snacking
computer game addiction
procrastination

Perhaps I can illustrate this with one of the processes I’ve used since 1997. I had a client once who had asked whether I could help him remove his craving for smoking. Of course, after a series of questions (also clarifying if there were any potential adverse effects of stopping), we went through a simple process of finding out the strongest reasons why he would stop smoking and the strongest desires for him to continue a healthy life.

Essentially, he had been facing some health issues and a few of his friends had died of cancer. So, this was a stark image in his mind that sparked off the fear of death. That formed the leverage for change.

In using a process of submodality mapping across, we made the images of smoking so negative and revolting that he literally wanted to throw up at that point. On the same note, we made the change feel positive in the mind.

Testing this several months later, this person has continued to live without the need of a cigarette, even after more than 20 years of smoking “experience”.

Comments, questions?

Learn NLP: Glossary – Analog Submodality

Stuart — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 08:01:51 +0000

An analog submodality has different shades and degrees of intensity. When looking at the submodality checklist, you can identify different submodalities which are analog versus those that are digital in nature.

For instance, Brightness is an analog submodality, but not association/disassociation.

NLP For Habit Creation

Stuart — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:19:10 +0000

It’s surprised me to no end that there are people who don’t really teach the NLP techniques properly. For example, in the process of habit creation, it’s extremely important for someone to develop the right concept and capabilities or else their habits won’t get formed in the right manner. It seems that some trainres are using a very formulaic method to teach people, rather than teaching the best way to create the changes for that specific individual.

You can use techniques; at the same time you need to realize that techniques do not define a human being.

Let’s take one habit creation strategy known as The Swish Pattern and discuss this. Common mistakes made by people when using the Swish Pattern include a lack of understanding submodality patterns and driver submodalities.

In the Swish Pattern, you basically want to think about creating a cause-effect behavior pattern.

Think about what you want to do (as opposed to what you don’t want to do). You want to be in a position where this has happened for you. Now for a moment, ask yourself what it would take for you to reach there. What emotional states will help you be resourceful to get here?

So, we have a set of resources that lead to the behaviors that create those results.

Now it’s time to build the habit. Ask yourself waht you want to trigger off this emotion. Do you want to look at something and this emotion fires off?

For example, people who are constantly in a state of lethargy don’t realize they associate certain situations with that lack of energy. If you walk into a room, and you actually want to feel great doing stuff in that room, you must use that image of the room and all its surrounding visual stimuli to trigger off the emotion (say, motivation) you want.

So, now you have something called the trigger image, and the ‘desired’ image.

Using the drivers you learn from NLP, take your trigger image and transition it as rapidly as you can to the ‘desired’ image. Your transition could be distance (i.e. trigger image moves out away from you into the distance followed by the ‘desired’ image moving toward you). You can use brightness as a transition. Use your trigger image, brighten it until it turns into complete white-out, then when it dims back to normal brightness, it reveals the ‘desired’ image.

You must remember to do this several times. The faster you do it, the more associations you make to it. Also, you will get an ‘impact’ when you do it the first few times. However, after those times, you might feel like you’ve lost the impact. That’s normal. You’re supposed to feel that way – because when you look at the desired image, it usually feels as if you already have it. After you’ve rehearsed this several times to the point of “taking it for granted it will happen for you”, you can do a future pace.

When you future pace, you go into the future and see what the trigger does for you. Does the trigger bring out that emotional state and desired image again? If not, why? Could it be that there is a benefit for remaining the same (secondary gain)? Or else, could it be you didn’t make your resources effective enough?

Go back and review your process until it works… or, seriously, get a professional NLP coach to guide you in the process. It’s not that tough to do, and you might find it easier when you have a ground foundation of NLP.

NLP Techniques: Submodality Mapping

Stuart — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 10:00:10 +0000

In identifying emotional states, we sometimes need to have control over the way we code our minds. Coding is done at a very unconscious level and I believe strongly that if you want to increase our mental awareness of this, you will need to learn NLP in a practical setting.

Here are some submodality differences:

You’ll probably notice that there are some submodality codes that are different, and based on the profile, we can simply make the depressed image Bright, and Associated. Notice the difference in the feeling you get simply by doing this.

The initial feeling you will get is that the sense of depression will typically get lifted. This is because you cannot code depression in this particular new way and still have it mean the same thing. The coding structure would be congruent with confidence instead.

These are just some examples of submodality coding. There are quite number of other variables in submodalities that you can explore and consider experientially.

Questions?

Submodalities: Dealing With Failure

Stuart — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 09:24:29 +0000

photo credit: me and the sysop

It comes a point of time when you ask yourself – who am I? What am I made of? Am I really a ____ person? It’s so common for an individual to feel that failure is a bad thing because we have gotten used to the fact that failing is bad.

In reality, failure is socially unacceptable. In organizations, people are usually not allowed to fail. There’s a double standard from top executives when they say “I can tolerate failure — as long as it doesn’t cost me anything”.

The truth is we all have failed, and we know how it feels. But dealing with failure isn’t as simple as you may think. Sure, you can attend a program and work out your “traumatic past” and stuff. But to be honest, you will definitely want to reach into yourself using the process of submodality work and alter your experience or perception of failure.

Here’s a strategy:
Step 1: Assess the feeling behind the failure.

What exactly are you feeling? Is it anger? Fear? Anxiety? Disappointment? Disgruntled? Once you know what you are feeling, it becomes easier for you to know what happened.

Step 2: Assess your values.
If you are angry at the failure, you will have to ask, what is the difference between being angry at failing compared with angry that someone was late for an appointment? Something got violated – your values. Ask yourself: what is the reason why you got angry? Be honest and let it come out. This is where you start finding out through a constant assessment of the “purpose” of your anger.

If you are angry, it could be because you knew you could do it but something happened that interrupted you, causing you to miss your target. Maybe the purpose of your anger was to show you that you were capable of achieving the target but you just lost your concentration for that moment. Now, there’s a message here, and you will need to heed your own advice. There’s always something to learn about yourself.

Step 3: Learn what you need to learn and then focus on what you need to do instead.

In order to activate your resources, remember that you can make your images of your failure more distant, smaller, darker and less focused. Send that into the distance. In place of that, bring into your mental screen a bigger, clearer image of what you want instead, and imagine that in full, vivid intensity.

Repeat this several times in quick succession.

Of course, we would like a strategy so that we won’t even need to fail. Is that possible? Well, I’ll take a look at that at a later post. In the meanwhile, your comments are appreciated.