166 Part III: Opening the Toolkit
After visualisation, some people find that dissociating is difficult. To do so,
imagine stepping out of the car and onto the pavement. Turn around and
look back at the car and see yourself sitting in the front seat. If you still can’t
dissociate, pretend that you’re watching a film and you’re up there on the
screen, in front of the car.
If you feel that you aren’t getting the hang of this exercise (or any others), feel
free to leave it for the moment. You can always come back to it and give the
exercise another go when you have more NLP experience embedded in your
mind and muscle. Or you can find yourself an NLP practitioner or NLP practice
group to work with in order to advance your skills (Appendix A is a resource
list to help you make contact).
Defi ning the details of your memories
While you’re sitting down to read this book, you’re probably unaware of the
feel of the seat against your back and legs, although you are now because we
mention it. Similarly, you’re not always aware of the qualities of your memories
until we ask you to remember a time when you were, for example, brushing
your teeth, playing a game, reading a book, or cooking. Then you realise that a
range of qualities applies to those memories. For instance, when remembering
reading a book, the picture you make of yourself, the book, or the story, may
be surrounded by a frame, or it may be in black and white. Perhaps you can
hear the sound of distant traffic or of the pages turning. Maybe the book you
were reading made you laugh and feel uplifted and happy.
You can become aware of the qualities of your submodalities by paying atten-
tion to what you see, or hear, or feel when you recall an experience. The
following sections present you with questions that can help you elicit the
quality of the visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic submodalities.
We focus on just the visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic submodalities in this
chapter, and put taste and smell aside for now. We do so because we believe
that – unless you’re a wine-, tea-, or coffee-taster – these senses don’t have the
same power as sight, sound, and touch. Having said that, tastes and smells
certainly affect your emotional brain and you may find the smell of roasted
chestnuts suddenly transporting you back to a childhood memory of falling
snow and Christmas carols.
Eliciting visual submodalities
You can define the quality of a picture in terms of where it’s located in space
as you look at it. For instance, the image may be directly in front of you, to
your left, to your right, or slightly displaced to the top or bottom. If the pic-
ture is panoramic, it looks like you’re standing in one spot and turning your
head to look at the view in front of you. The picture has other qualities as
well, brightness, shape, and so on. You can discover how you make pictures
in your head by thinking about the following qualities:
