92 Part II: Winning Friends and Influencing People
happens if you consider this space in terms of textures – the kinaesthetic
dimension? Perhaps then you choose a plush, velvety carpet or rush matting.
You may expose some brickwork or prefer a new smooth plaster finish on the
walls, depending on the feel that appeals to you.
In the context of learning, when you know about VAK you can start to experi-
ment with different ways of taking in information. Say, in the past you’ve
studied a language by listening to CDs in your car. Perhaps now you may
make faster progress by watching foreign films or plays instead, or by play-
ing sport, sharing a meal, or learning a dance routine with native speakers of
that language. When people discover how to develop their abilities to access
pictures, words, and feelings, they often discover talents of which they were
previously unaware.
When Kate began to learn Italian from her friend Paola in Abruzzo, she ini-
tially wanted to see everything written down in order to remember what
she’d heard spoken; and she felt she had to learn the vocabulary by rote.
Paola encouraged her to relax on a comfortable sofa after each lesson, listen
to what she had practised earlier, and allow the words to sink in naturally.
This approach saved Kate from getting anxious about how she was going to
remember everything and made the experience fun.
As a teacher who has studied NLP, Paola recognises two important things:
pupils learn best when in a resourceful state; and all pupils have their own
natural learning style.
A resourceful state is one in which you’re able to be open, curious to learn, and
able to access all the resources you need to solve any problem you’re deal-
ing with. The resources you access may be internal – such as your natural
attributes of a desire to learn – or external – including other people or techni-
cal gadgets. In a resourceful state, you have a sense that you’re behaving ‘at
cause’ where you have choices, rather than ‘at effect’ where you feel power-
less and that life is something being done to you.
In ‘NLP-speak’, the different channels through which humans represent or
code information internally using their senses are known as the representa-
tional systems, also called the modalities. (In NLP, speaking about the visual
modality is the equivalent of speaking of the visual representational system.)
You can also hear NLPers talk about rep systems for short, VAK preferences,
or preferred thinking styles. Visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic make up the
main representational systems. The submodalities are the characteristics of
each representational system, such as colour and brightness (visual), pitch
and tone (auditory), and pressure and temperature (kinaesthetic).
The sensory-specific words (such as ‘picture’, ‘word’, ‘feeling’, ‘smell’, or
‘taste’) that we employ – whether they’re nouns, verbs, or adjectives – are
called the predicates. More examples of these predicates are given in Table
6-1, which you can find in the later section ‘Building rapport through words’.
