July 2001
Something to think about ......
Waking Hypnosis - Part II
When I have not trained regularly in my martial arts, I find that my basic skills get rusty. The masters tell you to keep your basic skills sharp, or the intricate, detailed moves will never flow as they should. This is why even in a Black Belt class you will see these experts practicing kicks, punches, and blocks. A black belt who understands this will start back after a layoff in a basic class.
Due to my recent travel schedule I have not trained as much as I like, and this spring when I started back into my karate schedule I was frustrated with myself. I could not do the moves I had been doing before my layoff. I forced myself to attend basic classes and work on the simple skills. I would even work with the white belts in the class, to force myself to stay as basic as I could.
I used our NLP/Hypnosis skills to increase my learning curve. Then came the moment of truth. I had the opportunity to spar with a vastly superior opponent. What could I learn from this experience? I learned a lot about myself and where my skills were. They were coming back and I did better than I expected, but I also signed up for a seminar to motivate myself even more.
HOW CAN YOU USE THIS INFORMATION?
If you want to master waking hypnosis you will need to review the basic skills of using Representational systems. To bypass a target's conscious mind, you have to use his/her language. You could do all the imbedded commands, layered commands, and more advanced techniques, but if you are not in tune with your target, you will miss the mark. To master this you need to work on your calibration skills.
CALIBRATION SKILLS
Through our eyes, ears, and sense of touch, taste, and smell, we make contact with the world, what we call reality. However, it isn't so much what is out there, the things we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, which fills our everyday experience. It is the maps of reality inside our heads -- our beliefs, values, and biases; experiences of the past; dreams, hopes, fears and expectations of the future; and, immediate, short-term and long- term wants and needs -- which fill our thoughts and feelings, which are the major portion of the reality to which we respond. The same is true for each person we encounter.
The way we speak grows out of the mental or thinking processes in our brain. In order to function, these mental processes need the help of certain bodily and physiological processes for consolidation and expression. These physical reactions are important. They give observers an opportunity to understand and confirm what kind of mental processes are going on with the speaker. By paying close attention to specific behaviors as others communicate, we can know the structure of their thoughts. We can not tell what they are thinking, but we can know "how" they are thinking.
By effectively calibrating as to those things we are also able to understand human thinking and behavior. We are able to do this by directing our conscious efforts to seeing, hearing, and sensing the other person's internal representations through the external manifestation of the same. If I know that you are making pictures internally (visual), then I can establish deep rapport with you by entering your world using visual language. Or, if I know that you are talking to yourself internally (auditory digital), my rapport-building behavior will involve auditory language. Conversely, if I am aware that your experience is centering on kinesthetic awareness, then my language will be oriented toward touch and feelings. The following information covers five physiological clues that tell you "how" another person is thinking. Not what the person is thinking, but how the person is thinking.
EYE MOVEMENTS: Automatic, unconscious eye movements usually accompany a particular thought processes, indicating the accessing of one or more of the sensory representational systems.
When people are thinking and talking they move their eyes in what are known as eye-scanning patterns. These movements appear to be symptomatic of their attempts to gain access to internally stored or internally generated information in their central nervous system. This information is encoded in the speaker's mind in one or more of the representational systems. When a person "goes inside" to retrieve a memory or to create a new thought, the person "makes pictures", and/or "talks to himself/herself", and/or "has feelings and kinesthetic sensations".
With a little bit of practice, eye-scanning patterns are easily observable behavior. When you see people talking and thinking you can notice their eyes are constantly in motion, darting back and forth, up and down, occasionally glancing at objects and people, but just as often "focused" on inner experiences. As previously mentioned, these movements are symptomatic of the way they are thinking. In the descriptions that we will be discussing "looking" refers to the movements of a person's eyes in the direction indicated. "Left" means toward the speaker's left and "right" means towards his/her right. It is helpful to keep in mind that this accessing behavior represents "looking" internally. That is, during the moment of information retrieval, people are generally not conscious of external visual stimuli. Rather, they are concentrating on internally stored or generated images, sounds, words, and feelings. Please notice also that the
words in parenthesis in each category indicate the kind of information being accessed.
EYE ACCESSING MOVEMENTS
The diagram illustrates the direction of a target's eye accessing movements as you are facing and looking at the target.
When we process information internally, we can do it visually, auditorialy, kinesthetically, olfactorily, or gustatorily. It is possible to access the meaning of a word in any one, or a combination, of the five sensory channels.
Vc - Visual Constructed: seeing images of things never seen before, or seeing things differently
than they were seen before. Questions include: "What will you look like at 90?"
Ac - Auditory Constructed: hearing sounds not heard before. Questions include: "What would your name sound like backwards?" "How would a dog barking, a car horn and children playing sound like?"
K - Kinesthetic: feeling emotions, tactile sensations (sense of touch), or proprioceptive feeling (feelings of muscle movement). Questions include: "Is your nose cold now?" "What does it feel like to run?"
Vr - Visual Remembered: seeing images of things seen before, in the same way they were seen before. Questions include: "What does your coat look like?"
Vr - Visual Remembered: seeing images of things seen before, in the same way they were seen before. Questions include: "What does your coat look like?"
Ar - Auditory Remembered: remembering sounds heard before. Questions include: "What's the last thing I said?" "What does your alarm clock sound like?"
Ad - Auditory Digital: talking to oneself. Questions include: "Say something to yourself that you often say." "Recite the pledge of allegiance."
V - Visual: the blank stare is visual - either constructed or remembered.
Virginia Satir and others have observed that people move their eyes in systematic directions, depending upon the kind of thinking they are doing. These movements are called eye accessing cues. The chart above indicates the kind of processing most people do when moving their eyes in a particular direction, however, a small percentage of people are "reversed" or mirror image the chart.
ACCESSING CUES: When people are thinking and speaking, they cue or trigger certain types of sensory representations in a number of different ways, including breathing rate, "grunts and groans," facial expressions, snapping their fingers, scratching their heads, and so on. Some of these are unique to the individual and need to be noticed and "calibrated" to the particular person performing the behaviors. Many of these cues, however, are associated with particular sensory processes and can be generalized across individuals. The following are some typical examples:
Visual: High (in the chest), shallow breathing, squinting eyes, voice of
higher pitch and faster tempo.
Auditory: Diaphragmatic breathing, knitted brow, fluctuating voice tone
Kinesthetic: Deep abdominal breathing, deep breathy voice in lower tempo.
GESTURES: People will often touch, point to, or use gestures indicating the sensory organ which they are using. Some typical examples include:
Visual: Touching or pointing to the eyes; gestures made at or above eye level.
Auditory: Pointing toward and gesturing near the ears; touching the mouth or jaw. Stroking the chin thoughtfully.
Kinesthetic: Touching the chest and stomach area; gestures made below the neck.
As a therapist it is easy to understand that it is just another way of gaining rapport with the client and then phrasing your waking hypnosis inductions using a representational system to which they are most likely to respond.