Welcome to the Control Booth of Your Experience

You don't have to be an NLP rockstar to use what you've learned in an NLP class right away. You don't even have to practice hard or read a million books. Indeed, that's the beauty of NLP: we're already using our brains and bodies and emotions all the time, whether we know a slip of NLP or not. And knowing NLP puts you in the control booth of your experience.

This post is about how I learned the power of being able to change representation systems easily.

First, some definitions.

In NLP, a "representation system" is the way a person represents the world. You can represent the world in pictures (visual), in sounds (auditory), in feelings (kinesthetic), in smells (olfactory), and in tastes (gustatory). We use these 5 senses to experience the present, remember the present, and consider the future.

Some people experience senses beyond these 5 senses, but that's a story for another day.

Most people use all 5 of these Representation Systems, with a strong emphasis on visual, auditory, and kinesthetic information. And many people tend to favor one "Rep System" in a given context. In order to represent the past and future and to sort through the present, we must delete some information (otherwise, what's happening on the inside would take exactly as long as what happened on the outside, but we can all remember an event and play it back in our head faster than the event actually occurred). Representation Systems help us do that sorting and deleting.

For example, when I write, I like to use auditory information (the way the words sound in my head) and visual information (how the words scan on the page). This kind of deletion is a great gift when things are going well. And when it's time for change, trying a different Representation System can be one way to get more information.

Now, onto the story of how I learned about the power of representation system changes.

Just after I completed my NLP Practitioner training, one of my friends complained of feeling overwhelmed whenever she went into busy restaurants. "There's so much going on in a place like that -- everyone is talking and laughing so loud, silverware is clanging on plates, there's just too much input." I could see her eyes move left to right, the classic pattern for accessing auditory information.

I remembered my teacher Tom Best doing a demo with a woman who had a similar dislike of noisy places. He had her remember a noisy experience and then, just as it was starting to become uncomfortable, turn down the volume. Once the volume was almost inaudible, he asked her to turn up the amount of visual information coming in: soft lighting, smiling faces, beautiful food.

It worked beautifully in Tom's demo, so I thought I would try it.

Sure enough, my friend visibly tensed when she started to remember the last time she was in a noisy restaurant. And when she turned down the volume, her face relaxed. By the time she finished turning up the visuals, she was glowing!

After going through the sequence a few more times, and practicing for the future, she was relaxed and curious about trying her new strategy. A week later, she called, excited that "it worked!" when she tried the strategy out at a restaurant.

When I asked her about how her restaurant strategy was working, she had actually forgotten that it was an issue.