Chapter 10: Sliding the Controls of Your Experience 171
When Charles changed the voice to a whisper and moved it to just below his
left ear, outside his head, he realised he didn’t feel sick and he felt a warm
glow in his stomach. Charles wasn’t prepared to change the voice further,
however, because he believed the voice served to watch out for potential
problems. He just needed to change the quality so that it allowed him to get
on with his life.
Making Real-Life Changes
As you experiment with the exercises in this chapter, we hope that you begin
to get a pretty good idea of your critical submodality: the submodality that
can impact on and change other submodalities. And we hope that you gain
the conviction that you’re in control of your experiences and can change
them in order to choose how you feel. In the light of this knowledge and
belief, experience real change in your life by working through the exercises in
the following sections.
Just think: you can sit and program your mind on the train, in a traffic jam, or
even over a boring meal with your in-laws (or should that be out-laws, just kid-
ding!). And remember, practice makes perfect, so start experimenting, safe in
the knowledge that you can’t get arrested for playing with your submodalities,
even in public.
Removing the pain from an experience
Can you think of an unpleasant experience you’ve had? We don’t mean some-
thing life shattering, just an incident that, when you think of it, makes you feel
less than good. Got one?
Now, using the form in the later section ‘Submodalities Worksheet’, examine
and note the submodalities of the experience. With this knowledge, start
changing the picture, sounds, and feelings that you get when you think of the
unpleasant experience. What happened? You do feel better now, don’t you?
No? Then discover what happens when you change the submodalities of the
unpleasant experience to those of the pleasant experience we asked you to
recall at the start of the chapter.
Changing a limiting belief..................................................................
How often have you heard yourself say such things as, ‘I can’t do that’, ‘I’m
no good at maths’, or ‘I should learn to cook properly’? These statements are
all examples of limiting beliefs, generalisations that you make about yourself
and your world. These beliefs can disable you, holding you back, or they
