164 Part III: Opening the Toolkit
In short, you can choose the meaning you give to what happens to you in life.
This chapter tells you how.
By practising the exercises in this chapter, you become better at switch-
ing your submodalities; you discover just how easily you can change the
way you think and experience the world around you. Practice can help you
increase the choices in your life, whether that’s to relieve stress, take the
pain out of bad memories, or enhance the good times. When you set yourself
a well-formed, desired outcome, for example, and pay attention to the submo-
dalities, you make each goal more specific and clearly propel your future into
motion. Have fun!
Recording Your Experiences with Your Submodalities
In NLP, your five senses – seeing, hearing, touching (also called kinaesthetic),
smelling, and tasting – are called modalities (we describe in Chapter 6 how
you experience your world through these five senses). And the means by
which you fine-tune your modalities in order to change their qualities, are
known as submodalities.
Examples of submodalities for your sense of sight may be the size of a
picture, its brightness or colour, and whether a frame surrounds it or not.
Submodalities for hearing can be loudness, tempo, or the timbre of a voice,
and for feeling a heaviness or butterflies in your stomach. You get the idea?
Contrastive analysis happens when you take two experiences and compare
and contrast the submodalities of each experience. If, for example, when you
compare the submodalities of something you know is real – say, a dog – with
something you know is fantasy – a unicorn – you notice that each has differ-
ences in its submodalities.
Grasping the Basic Info: What You Need to Know Before You Begin
Submodalities are how you give meaning to your experiences – whether
something is real or false, good or bad, and so on. You can use submodali-
ties to change the intensity of the meaning. In the exercise at the start of this
chapter, you gave your experience a meaning – it was pleasant. By changing
the submodalities of the experience, you were able to increase the experi-
ence and therefore the meaning of the experience – it became even
more pleasant.
