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

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 your own, not something to be kept at bay, you will own them and you will have more choice about how you deal with them.

DEVELOPING KINESTHETIC AWARENESS

       You can do this exercise at any time. It will help to ground you and make you aware of your feelings of balance, touch and body awareness. It will also help you establish a strong first position and connect you with your values. It is good to do this exercise when you are confronting a problem or difficult decision.

      

Pause.

      

Become aware of your body – without judgement.

      

How would your body look if you were to freeze in that position? Would you look strange?

      

Which parts of your body are tense?

      

How is your sense of balance?

      

Feel the connection between all the parts of the body.

      

Which parts feel at ease and which parts feel uncomfortable?

      

Feel where your body is touching other objects, such as a chair.

      

Be aware of the touch of your clothes on your skin.

      

What are you aware of with your sense of touch?

      

Ask yourself:

       ‘What am I feeling right now?’

       ‘What am I doing right now?’

       ‘What am I thinking right now?’

      

Then ask:

       ‘What do I want right now?’

      

Now ask:

       ‘What are the values that I want to express?’

       ‘What is important to me right now?’

       ‘How does what I am doing help me achieve that?’

       ‘What am I doing right now that prevents me getting what I want?’

      

Finally, make a choice. Say to yourself, ‘I choose . . .’

REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEM PREFERENCES

      We constantly use all of our representational systems. We cannot think about anything without using at least two: the first to carry the information and the second to consider it in a different way. NLP considers thinking as chains of representation systems forming strategies – sequences of representational systems for a purpose.

      What we call ‘talent’ is the result in part of the way a person uses their representational systems to make unusual and creative strategies.

      All memories are a creative cocktail of representational systems. They all have a visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory component. This is sometimes called a ‘quintuple’ and is represented as [VAKOG].

      As already mentioned, however, we tend to favour one or two representational systems. We will typically turn to our preferred system when we are under pressure or stress. This could be a weakness if it limits our thinking to what is familiar in unfamiliar situations.

      You can discover your own preferred way of thinking by listening to how you speak or analysing your writing. You will find more predicates (see pages) from your preferred system than from the other representational systems.

      There are two things you can do to increase your own self-knowledge and flexibility of thinking:

       Know your own preference.

       Develop your weaker representational systems.

      Lead Representational System

      A lead representational system is the system we use to retrieve information from memory. For example, when you think about a holiday, you may first recover the visual memory and then think about it. In this case, the visual is the lead system. The lead system may be the same as the preferred system, but need not be.

      You can tell a person’s lead system by watching their eye accessing cues. For example, if you ask them about their holiday, they might make a quick visual access to retrieve the memory (so the lead system is visual) and then tell you about the enjoyable time they had using many kinesthetic predicates (showing their preferred system is kinesthetic).

       Warning!

       Avoid describing people as ‘auditory’ or ‘visual’ or ‘kinesthetic’ based on their preferred system. These are not identities, only preferences and capabilities.

TRANSLATING AND OVERLAPPING REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEMS

      Translation

      Translating across representational systems means taking an idea and expressing it in different representational systems. These translations may be simple metaphors, for example:

      ‘Comfortable as a warm blanket . . .’ (K)

      ‘Comfortable as a well decorated room . . .’ (V)

      ‘Comfortable as a familiar name . . .’ (A)

      ‘Uncomfortable as clashing colours in abstract art . . .’ (A)

      ‘Uncomfortable as crumbs in the bed . . .’ (K)

      ‘Uncomfortable