Chapter 6: Seeing, Hearing, and Feeling Your Way to Better Communication
This section introduces you to some dimensions of your thought processes
that you may never have considered before. As you open up your own aware-
ness as to how you think and make sense of the world, some interesting
things happen. You begin to notice that you can control how you think about
a person or situation. You also realise that not everybody thinks like you do
about even the most mundane, everyday events, which seem so clear and
obvious to you. You may well decide that life can be more rewarding when
you begin to think differently by paying attention to different senses.Filtering reality
As you experience reality, you selectively filter information from your envi-
ronment in three broad ways, known in NLP as visual, auditory, and kinaes-
thetic, or VAK for short (or VAKOG if you include the olfactory and gustatory
aspects):✓ Visual dimension: Some people see clear pictures of the sights.
✓ Auditory dimension: Other people tune in to hear the sounds.
✓ Kinaesthetic dimension: A third group grasp the emotional aspects or
touch – they experience a body awareness (for our purposes we include
in this group the sense of smell (olfactory) and taste (gustatory)).
Think for a moment about the way you experience using this For Dummies
book. Everybody who picks it up notices the look, sound, and feel in different
ways. Take three individual readers. The first one chooses the book because
of the friendly layout and amusing cartoons. The second likes the sound of
what’s said and discussed in the text. The third enjoys the feel or smell of the
paper or has a gut feeling that this book is interesting to get hold of. Perhaps
you experience the book as a mix of all three senses.Check it out for yourself. As you use this book, start to notice how you prefer
to take in information. Begin to check which pages make you sit up and pay
attention. What works best for you? Are you most influenced by the words,
the pictures, or the feel?In everyday life, you naturally access all your VAK senses. However, in any
particular context, one sense may dominate for you. As you become more
sensitive to the three broad groupings of visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic at
work and play, we promise that you’re going to benefit from this exercise.Imagine, for example, that you want to change a room in your home. You may
have been thinking about this task in purely visual terms – what paint colours
to choose or patterns for the fabrics. If you begin to engage in the auditory
dimension, you may think about the sounds of objects in the room, those
squeaky floorboards, the music or conversations you want to take place, and
how to cut out the noise of the external traffic or let in the birdsong. Or what