by Tom Hoobyar
Just as learning to view your memories in a disassociated way can change your experience of that remembrance, discovering how to tinker with the other sub-modalities of your experiences can dramatically change how you feel about something and how you integrate it into the way you think about things in the future.
Because exploring sub-modalities is interesting and fun, much has been written about them and we could easily spend a lot of time on each one—but we won’t. Instead, you’ll have an opportunity to discover the sub-modalities of sight. Later, you can apply these same steps to exploring the sub-modalities of your other senses.
Discovery Activity:
Tinkering with Visual Distinctions
The process of making these discoveries may be unfamiliar and yet you’ll know the answers to the questions I ask. My experience is that you’ll have enough information available to you to recognize the differences between generalities about human behavior and the particulars that are very specific to you. In fact, you already successfully did some of this fine-tuning in the last activity.
Let’s get started by exploring a specific example where you can compare and contrast a few of your select mental pictures.
Right now, I want you to imagine your favorite food, the one food on the planet that you most enjoy eating, and just imagine a picture of it. When you’re seeing that picture, hold on to that in your mind’s eye.
Leave that in one place, and now look at the food that you like the least, and observe the differences between the two. They may be in different positions in your imagining. If you really look at the images, you may find them with one slightly to the left and one slightly to the right, or one higher and one lower.
But look at the pictures and notice the differences in brightness. Notice also the differences in nearness. Which one’s closer? Notice if there are any other differences in the pictures. As an example, does one have a frame around it? Is it kind of flat? Is one in color and one in black-and-white? Is one smaller than the other? Is one still and the other a motion picture?
The modality of vision is optimal to play with because most people are usually somewhat aware of their pictures or mental movies. We can easily access and reference them and notice that they have a lot of distinctions. These differences make a difference, as you’re about to experience. You already know about association and disassociation, so let’s try to experiment with that sub-modality and several new ones.
Look back and find a very pleasant memory that you may not have thought of for some time, something that you really enjoyed. Actually go back as if you were having that experience right now, so you’re actually “in” it. As you look around, you’re seeing what you saw at the time of the original experience. You can see what you saw.
Now, step out of it so you just see it as a movie with yourself in the picture. You can see yourself in that movie wherever you were.
When you were first remembering this pleasant memory, you weren’t seeing yourself in a movie, you were “there,” right? So when I asked you to step out and see yourself in a movie, that was a brand-new image that your brain just put up there. I have no idea what camera angle it picked or how distant you were, but your brain just automatically selected something.
Many of us experience memories as though they’re mental movies. When you step into your mental movies and associate, you find that you can turn your head. You can see all the way around. When you’re associated, it’s like you’re really in the picture. When you’re disassociated, it’s like you look at it from a slight distance. Most of the information we have in our heads, we see in a disassociated way.
So let’s get back to this really pleasant memory of yours. As you’re in the picture, go back in and associate into the memory so you’re reliving it, and as you relive it, increase the brightness and notice any changes in your emotions about that.
Now don’t bring the brightness up to blinding, but if you gradually increase the brightness, most people notice that they feel more attracted to that experience or that picture. It has more impact on them.
Now do this: Decrease the brightness slowly, slowly. Let it dim down until the image is hardly visible and see how that changes your feelings about it. Then brighten it up again. Bring it back to normal or better than normal (if you like that and it was a good experience for you).
There are some exceptions here. For instance, if your really pleasant memory involved candlelight, then increasing the brightness might take the romantic feeling away. Similarly, if you had a yucky feeling about being afraid of the dark and you make it dimmer, that’s not going to work because you’re even more afraid of the dark because you can’t see.
So there are some places where brightness and dimness might work in the opposite way you expect, but you’ll quickly discover when that’s the case and can readjust the brightness to give you a positive effect. Now that you’ve experimented with brightness and associating, I’d like you to play with a different memory in these same ways.
Take an unpleasant memory. Now do not associate into this; see it about five to ten feet away from you in your mind’s eye, as if it were a movie, and notice how your feeling changes about that memory when you do that, when you push it away from you a little bit and when you’re outside it.
Then dim the picture. Slowly turn the brightness down on the picture and notice the change in your feelings. These are new sensations, so I don’t expect you to be moaning with ecstasy or shuddering in horror. These are brand-new experiences and you need to get used to this. Your brain has been doing this for you all of your life.
Now let’s try another one. From your vast scrapbook of pleasant memories, pick another really good experience that you had in your life. This time, I’d like you to see the memory like a movie. If you had a dozen memories like that, maybe you pick out one. What I’d like you to do with this pleasant memory is increase its size and notice how that changes your feelings about it. Notice how you may be more attracted to it as it gets larger.
And if you decrease its size so it’s smaller than other memory photos that you might have lying around, you’ll notice it’s less noticeable and less attractive. It has less draw for you.
The sub-modalities of vision are fascinating. In addition to brightness, distance, and size (which we played with), there are sub-modalities that involve color. You can have the contrast turned up so it’s very harsh light and dark. There can be just a lot of gradations of gray and pastels or the colors can be rich and vivid. An image may also be shifted from two-dimensional to three-dimensional. It can be crystal clear or it can be fuzzy.
A picture can vary in scope; it can even appear with a boundary around it. Usually you don’t notice these subtle distinctions.
When you think of a picture of a grandmother, immediately some image pops into your mind. I don’t know what that image is, but if you study that image you’ll notice whether the image is in a context. Do you see that person actually doing something? Is the picture moving? Is it still? And as you look at the image, does it have a boundary around it? And is the boundary a formal frame or does it kind of fade out or is it sort of irregular?
For additional demonstrations and/or examples, go to: http://eg.nlpco.com/2-4.
To make it easy to play with different adjustments, in the Bonus Activities for this chapter you’ll find a chart of sub-modalities for vision, hearing, and feeling. Take notes about your experiments of tinkering so you can identify which subtle distinctions make the biggest difference in your experience.
What’s Your Day Going to Be Like?
Sub-Modalities and Your Emotional State
Because you can influence your experience of the past, present, and future by fiddling with your sub-modalities, imagine how much more pleasant and compelling your life could be if tomorrow you started to consciously shape your day. This is a self-management process that you can use to make your life easier every day.
Here’s an example. When I wake up and I’m just coming to the plan
et, I ask myself five questions before I let my feet hit the floor. My first question is “What am I looking forward to today?” The second question is “Longer-term, what am I looking forward to?” Having something to look forward to gives me and most people a sense of direction and purpose.
The third question is “Am I doing things that lead directly to my goals?” If the answer is no, then this is an important area to explore because there’s no reason why anybody should be doing things that don’t lead them to their goals. Some people who find themselves on an unproductive path discover that their goals are unclear or not compelling.
When I ask this third question, I immediately hear the voices that have been in my head for decades saying, “Well, I have to do it. I have responsibilities. I have commitments.” Right, we all do. Truth be told, almost all of those responsibilities and commitments were voluntary. What you’re doing each day should be managing your time and energy, because that’s the best thing you can do to support your goals.
The fourth question is “Am I being my best friend and supporter right now?” Are you your own cheerleader or your greatest critic? Research has shown that people who cheer themselves on generally do better. They’re happier and they’re actually physically healthier than people who are constantly criticizing themselves.
The fifth and final question is to scan your five senses and ask yourself, “Am I present in my body, here and now, feeling what I feel, seeing what I see now, hearing what I hear, and am I enjoying the gift of being alive?” Think about that. Are you in your head? Are you in your chest? Are you aware of your whole body? Are you fully inhabiting it?
If you’re not in your body, you may be experiencing the kinds of negative feelings that hold some of us back or hold all of us back some of the time. Let’s talk about when we’re not in our bodies. If I’m feeling worried or anxious, I check myself to see if I’m in my body, and I find I’m really not. I’m often in my head probably just thinking about the future and occupying some future space that’s unpleasant. That’s how I rehearse worry, so the smart thing for me to do is to stop that and come back to being in my body right now.
One way to stop this sort of free-floating is this very simple physical technique you can do almost anywhere. I just take several deep breaths, focus my eyes upward, change my physiology (if I’m sitting down, I stand up; if I’m standing, I sit down or stretch), and all of a sudden I’m back in my body and in the present.
Now, when I look at that future worry, I disassociate from it. I make sure that the picture that I’m seeing is away from me. This way I still have the information, but I can make notes and determine if I need to make some changes or take some action. This physical and mental “reset” enables me to deal with the concern constructively instead of being a victim of the experience.
The phenomenon and impact of sub-modalities is very powerful, and the shifts you make with them can last a long time.
The Way You Do the Things You Do:
Understanding Motivation
Another important aspect to understanding how you work is to discover how you are motivated. A fun way to explore this that is also sort of counterintuitive is to play with getting unstuck from procrastination. Now, you may not have this issue, but many of us (especially entrepreneurs) do, because we always have more on our to-do list than we seem to be able to get done.
When someone is stuck, they usually complain to a friend or walk into the therapist’s office saying, “I can’t get anything done. I can’t do my taxes on time. My boss is yelling at me because I don’t turn my expenses in on time. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, doc. Help. Can you fix me?”
At this point, they’re usually seeking help pretty late in the process. After all, by the time they’re aware of the problem, which is being stuck, a whole lot of things have happened, right? Let’s take a look at how that worked.
The idea is to reel back the movie to before the person was stuck. Being stuck is, after all, also a behavior. If a person doesn’t do something, that’s also an activity. (Rosa Parks’s refusing to move from her seat on a bus? Pretty profound activity that was.) They have to intend to do something and then stop themselves.
Before that behavior, there was a feeling. There was a feeling of motivation to do something. It might be to do something bad like eating too much chocolate or smoking too many cigarettes or giving in to unfair demands or it might be to do something good such as doing work on time or being more attentive to a friend.
So, when you’re exploring motivation and procrastination, go back to the time right before the behavior and you’ll find a feeling. You may actually find a series of feelings that flicker by so rapidly you’re not aware of them until you get stuck; then you get anxious about being stuck. So let’s go back before you’re stuck. How did you get stuck?
Discovery Activity:
Exploring Roots of Procrastination
From my personal experience and the people that I’ve coached through the years, it’s clear that we all generally have some sort of an image in our mind of what we want to do and then, alas, something else comes up. It’s either an image or a voice that says, “But don’t. Wait. Wait a minute.”
The experience is going to be different for all of us, but what I’d like you to do is to find a time when you wanted to do something and you didn’t do it right then. You hesitated, and you put it off. Maybe you eventually got it done, but it was difficult for you. You either put it off or you did it by overcoming huge internal resistance. Notice the picture you called up about this experience. Notice any feelings this image brings up for you.
I’m pretty sure you don’t like that picture, and that you’d like to make it go away or alter it, so here’s how to do that. As you look at that experience, keep going back to before. Keep going back before until you get to a place where you fully had the intention to do whatever it was.
Now, if it was your intention to do it, if you wanted to do it, if you’re clear and congruent about that, then you can move forward and find out where the block is. Let’s say that this task is something you knew you needed to do, maybe you wanted to do, even if you were not going to like doing it, for example, taking out the trash or flossing your teeth. After all, we do many things we don’t like, but we know we’re going to do them because we need to do them. Yet this particular task wasn’t getting done. Perhaps it had a deadline and as the deadline was approaching, you were getting more and more nervous.
So go back, and there’s a point where your brain produced a cue that said, “I’m not going to do that now.” What do you see? What feelings does that image bring up for you?
This picture and the feelings you have will provide you with insight into what’s underneath your procrastination. As you are exploring, you may encounter a few cues that other people commonly notice. The most innocent one is a distraction. It acts like an anesthetic. “Oh, I’m just going to do this for a second,” and then you find that a couple of hours have flown by. These are just side trips that take you away from your destination.
If that was something that happened for you, if you look very, very closely you’ll find that there was a picture or a voice that suggested something distracting, like “Oh yeah, I really need something salty right now. I’m going to go downstairs and make some soup,” or “I’m just going to check the Web. There’s this one site that I need to check out. I’m going to go look at it now,” or there will be somebody you intended to call. The important point is to find the moment that you went from intending to do, to doing something else, and find the sequence of pictures, sounds, and/or feelings that you experienced.
That Damn Report: An Example of Procrastination
Recently, I worked with a forty-three-year-old sales rep who felt that procrastination was becoming a problem for her. She had to produce a report and waited until the very last minute—right before we were scheduled to talk—to get it done. I could relate to her dilemma because putting off a report is something I’m very fami
liar with. I was an expert at that when I ran my company. In my case, I put it off because I just don’t like homework. I didn’t like it when I was in school and I don’t like it now. The picture in my mind was a picture from the eighth grade of me doing fractions, which I hated. I didn’t have much of a choice then, but I do now, so I sometimes find myself procrastinating.
When I asked my client what came up for her when she thought about putting off a report or a phone call, she said, “If it hadn’t been for the deadline of talking with you, I probably wouldn’t have gotten it done yet. One of the things is that I had to have money to go with it, so I had to make sure I had the money. That’s always stressful. I guess it’s like you; it’s just this boring detail that I don’t like to do.”
Accepting her explanation would have been the easy path, but we persisted until she realized that she saw a picture of an administrative assistant who used to do these reports. Now she feels frustrated and resentful about not having someone to help her. She was stunned to find this clue to her procrastination.
Two for the Road:
Tips for Uncovering Roots of Procrastination
Of course, determining a solution is a separate step, but identifying the clue to what’s at the root of procrastination is the first thing. You want to find the image that’s linked to this behavior. And it’s not always easy because the mind automates tasks. We’ve been doing certain things for years and no longer notice them. We have to be patient and thorough to understand what’s underneath a behavior.