Chapter 6
Seeing, Hearing, and Feeling Your
Way to Better Communication
In This Chapter
▶ Exploring the amazing power of your senses
▶ Getting truly in touch with the world around you
▶ Noticing through their preferred language, how people think differently
▶ Spotting and deciphering people’s eye movements
I
n Chapter 1, we introduce you to the four main pillars of NLP. One of these
upstanding elements is what NLP labels sensory awareness, the ability to
understand how people make meaning of the world and create their own real-
ity through their senses.Just for a minute, imagine a special creature with highly developed personal
antennae. Well, actually that’s you. You come tumbling into the world as a
new human baby ready to discover all about the surrounding world. Unless
you’re born with difficulties in some way, you arrive as a mini learning
machine with eyes and ears, and a sense of smell, taste, and touch, plus that
most distinctly human quality – the ability to experience an emotional con-
nection with others.As you develop, you form mental maps of the world and get into habits of
thinking and behaving during childhood. You discover how to learn about
the world in certain ways that work best for you, by looking at, touching, tast-
ing, and smelling things, and hearing words.NLP encourages you to become curious about how you form these mental
maps. Understanding how you use your senses to represent your experience
enables you to notice how your perceptions are shaped, thus influencing
your ability to communicate with other people.