NLP Workbook: A practical guide to achieving the results you want. Joseph O’Connor

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but some people have better quality film in their camera.

      Hearing Mental Sounds

      Being able to imagine sounds clearly will make your thinking more flexible and creative. You will get more enjoyment from music and be able to change your internal dialogue to make it supportive and positive.

      The next exercise will develop your auditory representational system. Notice which parts are easy and which parts are more challenging.

DEVELOPING YOUR HEARING

      

Close your eyes.

      

Make a noise by hitting your fist against your chair.

      

Now hear that sound again in your mind.

      

Now imagine it again, first louder, then softer. Make the sound again if you have difficulty remembering it.

      

Now imagine the sound coming from across the room.

      

Imagine it from above you, then from below you. It may help if you imagine hitting your fist against the chair again.

      

Now imagine the voice of someone in your immediate family. Hear them saying something. It may help if you make an image of them and see them opening their mouth and speaking. It may help if you look across to the side. This eye position makes it easier to hear internal sounds.

      

Next, imagine some of your favourite music.

      

Make it louder, then softer.

      

Make it faster and then slower.

      

Make it come from different parts of the room.

      There are two strategies that may help you hear sounds more clearly in your mind:

      1 Visualize other people making the sound. See them strumming a guitar, blowing a trumpet or hitting the drums. As you see that, the sound will come naturally. This strategy works well if you are good at making mental pictures.

      2 Imagine yourself playing the instrument. It does not matter whether you really can. Imagine yourself strumming the guitar, blowing the trumpet or hitting the drum. Hear the sounds as you do. Make it an ‘associated’ picture, as if you are really there, looking out through your own eyes. This strategy works well if you find it easy to imagine feelings.

      Getting in Touch with Feelings

      In many ways, touch is the most immediate of the senses. It brings you ‘into contact’ with the world. We say that ‘seeing is believing’, but for many people, touching makes it real.

      NLP helps us to come to our senses, especially through our body awareness. The kinesthetic representational system has four aspects:

       Body awareness (Proprioceptive sense or muscle memory)

      

Your sense of your physical body is an essential part of rapport with yourself and is the basis of your feeling of physical health and well-being. Without a sense of physical awareness it is impossible to relax.

      Muscle memory takes longer to acquire than visual and auditory memory, but also takes longer to fade. Once we learn something ‘in the muscle’ it is reliable, even impossible to forget. If you learned to ride a bicycle once in your life, you can probably still do it years later without further practice.

      If we consistently tense certain muscles, then we ‘learn’ that pattern of muscle tension. This can lead to chronic backache, headache or poor co-ordination. We pay the price, even if we are not aware of the tension. A good massage will often give you a completely different experience of what it means to be relaxed.

      We may also store emotions in our body through muscle tension. We see laughter lines and character lines on a person’s face because they have habitually worn those expressions. Our bodies store our characteristic postures in the same way. These can lead to stress and physical illness.

      Kinesthetic awareness means being able to discriminate between subtle feelings in our bodies. Fine body awareness will warn us when we need to rest and we will not be caught out by stress and overwork. The more subtle the body signals you can read, the better you can take care of yourself and the better your sense of health and well-being.

       The sense of touch (Tactile)

      

Touch is our most basic way of communication. It begins when we are babies, reaching out to touch and understand the world. The loving touch of our parents tells us the world is a friendly place. The more sensitive we are to feelings and touch on the inside, the more we will be on the outside as well.

       Balance (Vestibular)

      

The sense of balance is usually treated as a special case of the kinesthetic system, although it is sometimes treated as a separate representational system in NLP literature (see Cecile A. Carson, MD, ‘The Vestibular System’, Chapter Four of Leaves Before the Wind, Grinder, DeLozier and Associates, 1991).

       Emotions (Empathic)

      

Emotions are ‘meta kinesthetics’, in other words they are feelings about other feelings or experiences. Being aware of our emotions and being able to feel them is part of being in rapport with yourself and pacing yourself. As you become more sensitive to your emotions, so your emotional expression becomes greater and you find that there is meaning and value in all emotions, even the ones you might regard as negative.

      Emotions can be overwhelming, yet we own them because we create them through our physiology and biochemistry in response to what we see, hear and feel. Sometimes we fear an emotion only because we have never really felt it properly. It is an unknown quality. We may also fear emotions because we are afraid that they will be uncontrollable, or they are associated with too many painful experiences. Once you feel emotions as

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