It’s high time you became familiar with the way we create maps and models of the surrounding world in our minds.
But before I get to it...
Surely, you are surrounded by various kinds of people. Sometimes, it seems that you understand one another without words, but there are also people with whom this process is more complicated, and it appears to you that you speak different languages.
Surprisingly, sometimes you find it difficult to communicate with people whom you like, or you feel that you have something in common with people whom you dislike.
Why is that? Perhaps now you will find the answer, because...
Everyone perceives the world that surrounds us by means of our five senses (although some people claim that we have more): sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch.
In NLP three of them were singled out:
Three types of world perception mentioned above are called representative systems. Most of us uses these three senses (taste and smell are in minority) to create in mind the representation of the world around us.
As you surely remember from the part operational assumptions NLP we do not have an access to the objective world, we act exclusively in its representation.
When you think about different things, recall countless pleasant situations from your life, or imagine how it will be nice in the future, you see in your mind fantastic pictures, hear harmonious sounds and have agreeable feelings somewhere in your body.
However, everyone uses these senses in a different way creating our own predominant representative system dependent on what kind of duct we employ most frequently.
If I ask you now: Think about some exceptionally nice situation which has happened to you recently or about a person very important to you... Do it now, please :)
Pay attention to the senses that dominate. Do you see a picture? Perhaps you hear sounds? Are you aware of the existence of any feelings in your body? Or maybe everything occurs in one time. It is also possible, but one of the senses should gain the dominant position.
In this way you will recognize your main representational system.
In accordance with the type of sense that plays the most important role people are divided into three groups:
This group is the most numerous in our culture of TV viewers (I am a visual as well). Here, there are people who think in pictures and movies projected on the virtual screens of their minds.
How to recognise them? – they are easily recognisable by words (do you remember the notion “linguistic”).
Visuals see various things, situations, problems. They perceive them more or less clear.
They usually speak fast because the picture they see is worth thousands of words, and that is why thoughts and words have to keep up with rapid changes of pictures.
I hope that everything I have told you is perfectly clear.
These people draw a particular attention to sounds; they also carry on internal conversations. They frequently use such phrases as: listen, it sounds good, something tells mi that... etc
The feelings are very important for kinesthetics. They are trying to be in a constant contact with them.
Since feelings require concentration and the moods are changing at a slow pace, kinesthetics speak slowly, much slower than visualisers, they make intervals, which can be sometimes irritating for visualisers.
What about a characteristic phrases? It’s simple: I feel that... I sense... etc...
Pay attention to what kind of representative system your interlocutor uses in a given situation and do everything to become more comprehensible to him, even if you do not feel comfortable with it (you will feel like this while talking with somebody with a different predominating system).
This should be the main goal if you want to be able to communicate efficiently.
It is not very easy since it is in fact a different language, and probably this is your first impression when you try to adjust to the way your interlocutor speaks.