Chapter 6: Seeing, Hearing, and Feeling Your Way to Better Communication 103
Making the VAK System Work for You
When you become aware of the VAK dimensions (which we describe in the
earlier section ‘Filtering reality’), life becomes more interesting. Here are
some ideas on how you can pull this technique out of your new toolkit and
use it to your advantage:✓ Influencing a business meeting, training session, or presentation.
Remember that when you speak to a room full of people they all have a
preference for how they take in information and you don’t know what
that is. Unfortunately, people don’t have a label on their foreheads to
inform you about what they want to know and how they want to receive
it – give me the picture, tell me the words, share your feelings about this
subject. So, you need to ensure that you connect with each and every
person in the room by presenting your ideas with a variety of media.
Vary your presenting style and aids to help the visuals see the informa-
tion with pictures, the auditories to hear it loud and clear, and the kin-
aesthetics to experience it with feeling.
✓ Making home projects fun for all. Recognise that each family member
has a different way of thinking about a major project. Perhaps you want
to extend the house, redecorate a room, or redesign the garden. Not
everybody wants to spend hours talking it through, with discussions
that stretch late into the night. Your partner may want to pore over the
drawings, whereas your children are motivated by the chance to get
stuck in and get their hands dirty with paint or earth.
✓ Developing your goals so that they’re more real for yourself. When
you set goals in your personal or professional life, they come alive if
you use all your senses effectively. Think of what the goals look, sound,
and feel like when you’ve achieved them and at every step along the
way. NLPers get proficient at imagining all the fine details of their future
experiences – you may hear the phrase ‘putting up a movie screen’ to
describe how people can create their own dream. Therefore, if you want
to motivate someone (or yourself) to push out of their comfort zones,
help them to explore what things may look like when the task is com-
plete and the hard work done.
✓ Helping children to learn better. Thank goodness education has
changed dramatically since we were at school, and teachers now recog-
nise that pupils learn in different ways. As parents and/or teachers, you
need to support children to understand how they learn at their best –
and appreciate that the method may be different to the way you were
taught or prefer to learn. Visual learners benefit from pictures, wall
displays, and diagrams. Auditory learners need to hear what they’re
learning – through discussions, lectures, and music. Kinaesthetic