How to Make Them Think You See/Hear/Feel It Just the Way They Do
About ten years ago, I had a roommate named Brenda. Brenda was a tap
dance teacher who didnt just tap dance to make a liing. She lived to tap.
Posters of Bill Bojangles Robinson and Charles Honi Coles plastered her
walls. She didnt walk around the house. She tapped her way from room to
room. It was noisy, but at least, when a phone call came for Brenda, I never
had troble finding her.
Once I asked Brenda when she got interested in tap. She said, From the
moment I first opened my ears. Her ears? I thought, thats strange. Most
people say from the moment I opened my eyes. At that moment, I realized
Brenda saw the world more through her ears than her eyes.
We all perceive the world through five senses. We see the world. We
hear the world. We feel the world. We smell the world. And we taste the
world. Therefore, we talk in terms of those five senses. Proponents of
neurolinguistic programming (NLP) tell us, for each person, one sense is
stronger than others. For Brenda, it was her hearing.
Brenda told me she grew up in a dark apartment below street level in
New York City. She remembers, as an infant, hearing the pitter-patter of
feet walking just above her crib on the sidewalk.
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How to Make Them Think You See/Hear/Feel It Just the Way They Do
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As a toddler, her tiny ears were bombarded with honking horns,
shrieking sirens, and tire chains slapping the icy streets. She espcially
remembers the clumpety-clomp of police horses hoofs on the pavement
outside her window. Her first perceptions of the ouside world came to her
through her ears. To this day, sound doinates her life. Brenda, the tap
dancer, is an auditory person.
Since neurolinguists suggest invoking our listeners strongest sense, I
tried a few auditory references on Brenda. Rather than saying, That looks
good to me, Id say That sounds good. Instead of saying, I see what you
mean, Id say, I hear you. When I used these auditory references, I felt she
paid more attention.
So I started listening very carefully to all my friends to dicover which
was their primary perception. Sometimes Id hear visual references like
I see what you mean. That looks good to me. I cant picture myself doing
that. I take a dim view of that idea. From my perspective...
ooja
(Ooja)
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