198 Part III: Opening the Toolkit
The Eyes Have It: Recognising Another’s Strategy
Each personal strategy has distinct stages, such as Test 1 (Trigger), Operate,
Test 2 (Compare), and Exit (as discussed in the preceding section, ‘The NLP
strategy model in action’), using your five senses (check out the earlier sec-
tion ‘NLP strategy = TOTE + modalities’). Consider the following example: Ben
has just started university and uses the following strategy for telephoning
home:
- Feels that he’s missing home. Test 1 (kinaesthetic).
- Makes a mental picture of his family. Operate (visual).
- Says the phone number to himself. Operate (auditory digital).
- Dials home. Operate (kinaesthetic).
For the purpose of this exercise, we assume that Ben’s call gets through, sat-
isfying his Test 2, and so he exits the dial-home strategy.
When a strategy of your own is embedded in your neurology, you have little
or no conscious awareness of its steps. Yet, if you know what to look for, you
can figure out other people’s strategies. Just look for their eye movement.
You can get a pretty good idea of how people are thinking about a topic (in
images, words, or emotions) by watching their eyes (as we show in Figure
12-3). Generally, people’s eyes move in the following ways (you can find out
more about the secrets that your eyes give away in Chapter 6):
When they’re doing this Their eyes do this
Remembering a picture Move to their top left
Creating a picture Move to their top right
Remembering a sound or conversation Move horizontally to their left
Imagining what a sound is going to
sound like
Move horizontally to their right
Accessing emotions Drop down and to their right
Having a conversation with themselves Drop down and to their left
Think back to Ben and his phone call and imagine that you’re watching
him as he phones home. At first, his eyes go down and to his right (feeling
of missing home), and then to the top and to his left (visual picture of his
family). His eyes stay looking to the top and his left (as he visually recalls his
family phone number) before he dials the telephone number.
