170 Part III: Opening the Toolkit
Understanding Your Critical Submodalities
Some submodalities are very powerful in determining a person’s response,
such as the size or brightness of a mental picture. You may find that by
making a picture bigger or brighter the experience is heightened. Or you may
find that moving the picture to a different location or associating or dissociat-
ing into a picture (as we discuss in the earlier section ‘Associating or dissoci-
ating’) can affect the sounds and feelings of an experience.
A critical submodality is one that, when changed, alters other submodalities of
an experience and also affects the submodalities of other senses. The result is
that by changing, say, the brightness of a picture, not only do other qualities
of the picture change automatically, but also sounds and feelings experienced
in conjunction with the picture change, without conscious intervention.
Romilla was working with a client, Suzy, who was having trouble with a goal
she wanted to achieve and had been struggling to reach for almost six months.
When Suzy explored the submodalities of her goal, she said it was over and up
to the left (if you imagine a giant clock in front of you, it was at the number 11
and almost at roof height). When asked, Suzy moved the location of the image
so that it was right in front of her and about one metre away.
Suzy’s reaction was phenomenal. She jumped in her chair so hard she
almost fell off it and then she turned bright pink and couldn’t stop laughing.
Changing the location of the picture had a real impact on Suzy and brought
the goal to life for her: she felt what achieving the goal would be like and the
move made it much more immediate. Using some more goal-setting tech-
niques, a delighted Suzy achieved her goal in four months.
You experience your world through your five senses: visual (eyes), auditory
(ears), kinaesthetic (feelings and touch), olfactory (smell), and gustatory
(taste). More than likely, you use one sense in preference to the others to col-
lect data about your world, particularly at times of stress. This sense is called
your lead or primary representational system, and it influences how you learn
and the way you represent your external world inside your head.
During a coaching session, Charles discovered that his primary represen-
tational system was auditory. Also, he was more kinaesthetic than visual
and felt emotions quite strongly. Charles was working to change a nagging
voice that he was allowing to undermine his confidence when he was start-
ing something new, and which kept him awake at night with its chatter. On
examining the qualities of the voice, he found that it was in fact his mother
talking to him and that he heard her voice inside his head. Unfortunately,
she had had a rather negative way of putting things. Whenever Charles heard
this voice he felt sick and a sensation like a black, shiny rock was stuck in the
region of his solar plexus.
