senses

does this make sense to you?

~ steve.ridgley ~ Leave a comment

senses NLP
We experience life through our senses. We see, hear, feel, smell and taste our experiences.

Our brains code them in this way. Our memories are accessible through our senses and, when recalled, we experience, represent or rather ‘re-present’ them through our senses.

If you recall now something that happened to you last week, you will be doing so either by seeing the situation in your mind’s eye, or by re-feeling how you felt then, or by hearing the conversation again, maybe even smelling something…

This process works both ways. We ‘think’ of a memory and re-present it through our senses. Or, we have a sensory experience today and that triggers another memory where the sensory experience was similar. Have you ever had the experience of a smell taking you back to a childhood memory?

This process also works for the future – imagined future experiences are presented to us through our senses. We can imagine our holiday or that difficult conversation we have next week and we can create images, feelings, internal dialogue predicting that future experience.

We all have favourite senses to use for this. I wrote about this some weeks ago when I asked How do you think? and hypothesised that without our senses we have no experience.

We often have a primary sense, for many that is visual, but might be auditory or feeling, backed up by one or two other senses that create our experience. Some senses are less available to us in this process.

Our language reveals our preference. It shows on the outside, the way we are coding our experience on the inside.

“I hear what you say” is different to “I see what you mean”.

There are many idioms in English that we use to signal our sensory preferences for coding our own experience. Often we’re not consciously aware, nor are those around us. But it can be useful to know.

Do phrases such as these appear in the way you describe things? “Let’s get a different perspective” or “Let’s take a closer look at this”? These might be examples of a visual storage system. Whereas, “That doesn’t sound right to me”, “This really speaks to me” or “Once we get into the rhythm of the meeting” might suggest an auditory preference. Those who work with feeling, or kinaesthetically, might say “I need to take the pressure off” or “I’m aching to get on with this”…

This will be a recurring theme on this blog in coming weeks, so be curious about your practice and about what makes sense to you.

how do you think?

~ steve.ridgley ~ Leave a comment

5 senses

Take a few minutes out of your day and try this out…

You might find closing your eyes helpful.  You might also find being prompted by a friend useful, unless you’ve mastered reading with your eyes closed 🙂

Imagine yourself, in your mind’s eye (as the saying goes), having a coffee or tea with a friend. It might be a real, past experience or an imagined future one – it doesn’t matter.

Now, as you have that experience ‘in your head’, try to remove any sounds from the experience (any dialogue, coffee shop background noise etc.), so that there is no sound at all. Total silence.

Now, as you have that experience, remove any smells or tastes from the experience (any smell of coffee, taste of tea etc.)

Now, as you have that experience, remove any sensation of touch or feeling (any sense of being seated, resting arms on the table, holding the cup etc.)

Now, finally, remove the image you have.  If the image is a video, you might find it helpful to freeze frame and make it a still.  You might also find it useful to make that still image black and white or smaller to help you remove it from your experience.

What’s left of your experience in your head?

Most people, at this point, say “nothing”, or “blackness”, or “a dot in the distance”, or something similar.

The point here is that we create experience through our senses.  Without them there is no experience.  We do this for past experiences – memories – and also for imagined future experiences.

Pay attention to which senses you use to do this – this is how you think.

How do you imagine that meeting will go?  How do you recall that great weekend a while back?  How do you think about that difficult time in your life?

If you think predominantly in images, say, that means you can change the structure of your thinking, by changing the image. Changing the image will change your experience. Similarly if you think through feeling, or sound.  You may use two senses, or notice, say, that sound is present more in negative experiences. The first step is to notice your patterns.

So notice…