NLP

by Tom Hoobyar

  When we perceive a particular characteristic about someone, good or bad, and apply it to all aspects of that person, that’s distortion, too. With distortion, when we perceive someone as a slow talker, we might distort things so we imagine that they’re also a slow thinker. Similarly, we may conclude that someone who’s a sharp dresser is a sharp thinker. When you remember a moment of an event as representing the whole thing, that’s distortion. When you tell the story of that experience and leave things out and embellish others, that’s distortion. We do this quite frequently.

  These three ideas don’t really operate independently—they interact. For example, generalization requires deletion, and is a form of distortion. It doesn’t matter that you remember these terms, what’s important is that you recognize that there are billions of bits of information flooding into your brain every second—to manage all this, your awesome brain automatically generalizes, deletes, and distorts information.

  A Well-Oiled Machine: Body, Brain, and Mind

  Each of us is a blend of three different parts: the body, the brain, and the mind. These all work together and influence each other. A problem in one area affects the others. For our purposes right now, here’s how to think about these parts:

  THE BODY

  The body is your physical body, your nerves, muscles, and circulation. Your body includes your endocrine system and other organs that are constantly adjusting your bloodstream to make you as effective as possible. Ever miss a meal or a good night’s sleep and then discover that you just aren’t “up to par” the next day? You may have all the information you need to solve a problem and yet the solution just doesn’t come. What’s happening is that your body is producing fatigue toxins, your blood sugar is low, or you’re having an insulin reaction, and that chemistry is affecting your mind.

  THE BRAIN

  The brain is the three pounds of stuff inside your skull. This amazing organ is where most of your consciousness takes place. The brain uses 25 percent of the total amount of oxygen you breathe. It is composed of about 100 billion neurons. Each neuron has one to ten thousand connections to other neurons. A single human brain equals the entire computing power of our planet in 2007. The human brain can perform 100 trillion calculations every second. What’s it do with all of that processing power? A staggering amount of work!

  The brain handles all of the information about how your body is working and feeling, and all of the information about the outside world that is fed into the brain. That’s a total of two million bits of incoming information per second! But most of this data is handled automatically. We are only aware of a tiny fraction of this information at a conscious level.

  If we have a brain malfunction, either physical or chemical, it affects our feelings. Things seem real to each of us in a way that no one else can possibly understand. And once our mind is engaged with a negative thought, the body is triggered to produce chemicals that can increase the negative effect and we spin out of control. Physical brain problems can be the result of disease or injury. Chemically, this can happen with too many martinis, prescription drugs, and even some foods.

  THE MIND

  When someone has a sudden scare or flash of anger, it triggers a reaction in the body. Their bloodstream is flooded with hormones and chemicals. Their heart races and their eyes narrow. Their breathing increases and they get ready to fight or run away. Chemicals like these go into the brain and change the way it works. Then those parts of the brain devoted to higher functions, like creative thought, shut down and other, more basic parts take over. When this happens, you become a specialized survival machine. Back in the days when we were running around in the tall grass and might easily become lunch for something bigger and hungrier than we were, this was a good design.

  This design is not as useful when we’re on the way home in commuter traffic and someone cuts us off. Using our higher brain functions might be more optimal when we’re driving two tons of steel down the freeway. This survival design also isn’t very efficient if we’re in a work situation and some unexpected remark triggers our “fight-or-flight” instinct. When that happens, we lose the ability to think rationally and express ourselves persuasively. Again, it’s how we interpret our situation with our mind that causes our brain to revert to our flight-or-fight instinct.

  So, body connects to brain, and brain to body. And your mind, the part that feels like “you,” is a pattern of nerve connections in your brain. You are housed in your brain and your body. But if someone were to cut open your body or brain, they wouldn’t find a picture of your home, or the taste of chocolate milk, or the sound of birds singing. All that you experience, all that you think, you create in your mind.

  The bits of data are stored in the brain, in billions of neurons, but to make the connections and to create the experience that make up our lives requires “us.” The brain is not a hard drive that can operate on its own. It takes our conscious minds to make everything work so that we can ride a bicycle, go shopping, enjoy a meal, or make music.

  Different Planets: The Worlds Inside Our Minds

  I bet you think you know what’s real, right? If we were in the room together, you might assume that the world you live in is the same one I live in. Sorry, Charlie, it just ain’t so.

  As soon as we’re born, we begin noticing things. At first, it’s chaos. You can imagine all that stuff flooding in, all those images, all those sounds, smells, tastes, body sensations. What does your mind do with all this stuff? Well, it develops languages, five languages. The only way you can think is to use pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells; these are the basis of the mind.

  For now, maybe you need to take my word for it that the world that you see and the world that you live in is really IN YOUR HEAD. It’s in your head and no one else’s. Your own mind is creating the world you live in. The relationships that you have, the way you feel about the people around you, and the way you feel about yourself are all filters, and almost all of these filters were created unintentionally.

  Because you’ve chosen to pick up this book, you’ve probably already done a lot of work on yourself. You’ve worked on the content of your thoughts. You’ve worked on what you think. Here’s my point: how you think can profoundly affect what you think. Until now, you’ve had no tools to deal with how you think and how that affects you. The process that we’re going to be immersed in is dealing with the HOW, not the WHAT.

  Your brain has sight, sound, feeling, taste, and smell, but you don’t use them all with the same intensity. Rather than talk about this more, let’s play with an example of your own so you can discover your own personal world. Throughout this book, I’m going to ask you questions you’ve probably never thought about before. Even so, you’ll always know the answer, even if you’ve never heard the question before. So here’s one to get started.

  Discovery Activity:

  Discovering Your Inner World

  Think of the clothes you wore yesterday. When you think of them, how are you seeing the clothes? Are they hanging in the closet or do you see them on your body as though you’re looking in a mirror? Perhaps they’re laid out on the bed before you put them on—or lying on the bathroom floor after you took them off. There are lots of ways you might see yesterday’s clothes.

  Here’s what I’d like you to do next. As you see them, notice how you are really seeing them. After all, it’s not like yesterday’s clothes magically appeared in front of you.

  In your mind’s eye, can you actually see the clothes you remember wearing yesterday? Take a good look at the image itself, how you see them. Notice that you actually made a mental picture. This is your brain’s way of saying, “Oh yeah. He said yesterday’s clothes; here they are.”

  You automatically went in and retrieved the data. Your brain constructed this image for you. This particular picture probably wasn’t filled in the way you’re seeing it now. After all, as you went through your day yesterday, you filed countless images of the day’s experiences. But you may ha
ve been unaware of this particular image until you called it up in response to my question, so notice that.

  Here’s another example. No matter where you live, there’s probably a front door to your home, right? Whether it’s a house, an apartment, a room, a tent, or a cave, there’s some sort of way to close the entrance. I invite you to notice something.

  When I mentioned the entrance to your home, you thought about it, didn’t you? And you can think of it now, and when you do you’ll notice that you know exactly what it looks like. You can see the color and the form of the door or tent flap, and you know what side has the handle, and exactly how to open it.

  How do you know that? You may be thinking, “I just know it, that’s all, I live there!” Here’s the deal: being able to imagine your front door requires a new awareness on your part. You just have to look inside your mind, and slow your thinking process w-a-y down so you can see your thoughts in slow motion, like watching a movie frame by frame.

  Think of your front door again. You see a picture of it in your mind, don’t you? Check it out and you’ll see I’m right. When you think of your front door, you can see it. You’d have to see it to be able to know what it’s like from memory.

  So now you see your front door. Let’s open it and step inside.

  Is there any sound as you open the door? Listen for a moment and notice the sound of the door opening. Perhaps you hear the latch as it releases, a squeaky hinge, the door scraping along the floor, or some other sound as the door opens. Maybe you also noticed how heavy the door was or how cool the knob was when you touched it. What physical sensations did you notice?

  Again, it’s just your front door. But you have lots of information about it that’s stored and automated. You only notice these pictures, sounds, and feelings when you slow down and try to remember them.

  Let’s explore a very different example that will show you more about how your mind works. I’m going to ask you to think about something that I bet you’ve never thought about before. Think of being at the beach, and think of using your elbow to scratch something in the sand. If you’re right-handed, think of using your left elbow. If you’re left-handed, think of using your right elbow. In other words, this is an elbow with no special skills. Now, think of scratching the letter A in the sand. Can you imagine doing that? I bet you’ve never done it before, certainly not with your off-elbow.

  Here’s an interesting thing. To imagine doing that, you have to see the letter A. Maybe you saw it in the sand, but you began with the shape of the letter A in your mind. You’re doing this and you’re sitting someplace reading this book. My question to you is, what does that letter A look like in your mind?

  We’ve all seen the letter A printed in lots of different styles and sizes. We’ve seen it as big as a billboard and as small as directions on a jar. We’ve seen it in an array of colors, bold script, lit-up letters on neon signs. But when you think of the letter A, what comes to your mind? After all, your mind has a way of producing the letter A for you.

  Writing the A in the sand required you to do more than remember something you’d experienced. You had to remember the letter A and how to write it, as well as what sand at the beach is like. And you had to construct an imaginary experience where you combined all these remembered elements—including how to write with your opposite elbow! Your mind can do amazing things.

  Okay, let’s leave the beach and go back to your door; remember how it sounds and feels when you open it.

  Think about other doors in your life, and think about how they sound.

  Notice other differences when you enter other places.

  Notice not only the sounds associated with the door, but perhaps the smell. When you think of the door to a coffee shop or a bakery, a friend’s house when dinner is grilling on the barbecue, the door to the gym, the door to the hospital. Or maybe you might remember a different smell.

  Think of other places you might visit in your mind. Let your mind wander to your old school or workplace, or other homes and businesses. Think of parks and outdoor spaces.

  As you think of the different places you might visit, you may notice other feelings attached to these memories.

  Perhaps you need to walk up steps to a certain place, or pull extra hard on a door. Or maybe your memory took you to a camping spot . . . somewhere wet . . . or somewhere cold.

  You might notice that your emotional feelings are different depending on the place you think about visiting. They might range from unpleasant . . . to neutral . . . to excited . . . to happy, depending on the experiences you connect to the place you’re thinking about.

  Here’s the reason. We live inside our bodies and the only way we can know what’s outside our bodies is with our senses. We see, hear, feel, taste, and smell the world, and that information has been flowing into our brains since a little while before we were born.

  When information first began to enter our awareness, there was no way to make sense of anything, so it must have been pretty confusing for a while. Then our brains began to put the sensations together.

  As we learned earlier, our brains figured out how to sort and file this information. It decided what went with what. It stored everything you have ever thought, felt, seen, heard, dreamed, or imagined. Even now, as you read this and check the memories and ideas that I’ve suggested, you are pulling up old pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells from your personal storage.

  Not Just Basic Cable: “Representational Modalities”

  As your thoughts occur, your experience of life is re-presented in your mind in words, pictures, taste, smell, and feelings. (Okay, usually just pictures, words, and feelings.) Understanding how this works makes lots of things possible. These phenomena are what we call—here comes the jargon—“Representational Modalities,” or “Rep Modes.” Rep modes is a fancy label for the five senses.

  Most of us tend to favor one rep mode over the others. Some of us will favor an image. Some people favor voices. That’s me; I’m highly auditory. People like me tend to remember something by the way it sounds rather than how it looks. It’s better for me to remember a phone number by hearing it than seeing it. But because now I both hear and see the phone number, it’s even easier to remember. Other people remember more kinesthetically, which means physical and emotional feelings.

  The ways we behave and express ourselves reflect these kinds of thinking. To give you a little preview, here are some broad generalizations. Auditory thinkers tend to have more melodious voices and tend to talk a lot. Visual thinkers, like my wife, Vikki, tend to talk more quickly. Kinesthetic thinkers tend to talk more slowly.

  There’s a difference in the way they process, too. Kinesthetic thinkers tend to process things more slowly and thoroughly. They like to really get a feel for things or have a firm grasp on the situation. They don’t get the point until they’ve wandered all the way around it and have satisfied themselves that they have completely covered the territory.

  If someone is auditory, they really need to hear what you’re saying. These people march to their own drummer and tend to make their own music. People who prefer visual modes of thinking are people who see your vision, picture themselves driving that new car, or talk something through until they can see eye-to-eye with someone. Someone’s rep mode preferences are also evident in their language (which you’ll learn more about in a later chapter).

  The different ways our minds create thought, using these five senses, touch every part of our lives. The more you think about that and the more time you spend exploring these concepts, the more it will become apparent that these processes affect every part of your life.

  Most of us have grown up not thinking about the HOW of how we think. So, at first, we may have a hard time doing that. Some of us don’t visualize as much because we’re feeling people. Some of us are visual people, like “quick take” artists, who get things really fast and then are on to the next thing. There’s a big contrast between that kind of thinking and kinesthetic thinking, whic
h is slower and more thorough.

  It takes all kinds, so wouldn’t it be useful for all of us to become a little more well-rounded? All of us have access to parts of our brains that we just haven’t used. You do what you do because it’s what you’ve always done. One of the great benefits of learning about NLP is that you’ll have many more choices and ways to think.

  When you’re focusing on this book, you’re doing more than just reading, aren’t you? You are adding NEW stuff to your memories and images. You are adding your comments right now, as you read this.

  I’m talking to you and you’re also talking to yourself. You might be saying “That’s interesting” or shaking your head in disagreement. In fact, you’re doing it right now!

  And the next time you think of your front door or one of the other places you might have thought of during this last Discovery Activity, you will also remember where you were when you read this section of the book. You’ll remember what you said to yourself and how you felt about what I’m telling you.

  So basically, in your mind, your brain has created a whole model of your world, with every viewpoint you have ever seen, sensed, or imagined. When you think of the world, you don’t actually think of the real thing; you just think you do.

  What you actually are thinking of is your “model of the world” in your brain, the way that you particularly remember it.

  And your emotional reactions are determined by this internal personal reality, not by the outside world. All of the information coming from outside is taken in and blended with all of the information that we generate in reaction to it.