Chapter 6: Seeing, Hearing, and Feeling Your Way to Better Communication 95
Listening to the World of Words
The notion of sensory awareness isn’t new, and dates back at least to the
days of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who talked about the senses
in his book On The Soul. The nineteenth century psychologist William James
was the first to discuss the primacy of modalities, which NLP refers to as the
visual, auditory and kinaesthetic representational systems (check out the
earlier section ‘Getting to Grips with the Senses’).
In the early days of NLP, the founders Richard Bandler and John Grinder,
became fascinated by how people used language in different ways. The whole
NLP notion of modalities came out of their seminars and study groups when
they identified patterns of speech linked to the VAK senses. People represent
their experience through their senses, and so NLP came to call the senses
representational systems (or modalities).
The representational systems are much more than information channels
coming in through the eyes, ears, or hands. The term refers to a whole com-
plex system of activity that includes input, processing, storage, retrieval, and
then output.
For example, you may take in information through your eyes – such as the
image of a favourite person’s face – and mentally process that information,
store it for the future, retrieve the memory of it the next time you’re feeling a
bit blue, and say to yourself ‘Never mind, things will look better tomorrow.’
All of this happens outside of your conscious awareness.
The everyday language that you use provides clues to your preferred repre-
sentational system, the one that you’ve developed through your life. In order
to enhance your own communication skills, listen to the types of words that
people use, and ask yourself whether these words are visual, auditory, kin-
aesthetic, or neutral (not sensory-specific). You can find all sorts of clever
clues as to what’s going on inside people’s heads, and whether they’re more
responsive to pictures, words, or sounds. You can then go on to note what
kind of language gets you the best response from a particular person.
Building rapport through words
In our own training sessions, we often test out the method of representa-
tional systems and observe how easily and quickly groups with the same
preferences can build rapport. Such people find that speaking to those who
‘speak their language’ is naturally easier.
So what can you do when you feel that you’re speaking a ‘different’ language
and the conversation is harder? Begin by listening more carefully and iden-
tifying other people’s language preference. Then you’re in a great position
