by Charles Curtis
“Why does that seem true?” I ask my client. He tilts his head back and to the left. “Well”, he says, as his eyes go up and follow the tilt of his head,”When I look back at the past, it’s pretty clear to me that this problem has been right behind me everywhere I go.”
“I see. And what’s the part of it that brought you to my office? Is a solution not clear to you?” I ask again. He looks down to the right, puts his chin down in his hand, sighs deeply, looks worried and says, “When I get down about this, I have a bad feeling, and it seems that I better get a grip on where this is going pretty quickly.”
“It’s obvious that the way things are right now doesn’t feel good to you. So what DOES the future seem to hold for you?” I reply. Looking up and to the right, he says, “Well, some things DO seem to be clarifying. If things keep going in this direction, I can see that I’m still in the picture, and the situation is looking up.”
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AN NLP MASTER PRACTITIONER?
One thing that happens is that you begin to integrate, at the unconscious level, little understandings that, together, add up to an instinctive understanding that makes hypnosis so much easier.
One very interesting skill to master is Eye Accessing Cues. When you’ve familiarized yourself with the NLP Eye Accessing Cues, you’ll find that, all of a sudden, you can read the client like a book.
To see how this is done, look at these cues below and then read the opening paragraphs again:
Eyes Up and to your right (client’s left) is visual remembered
Eyes Up and to your left (client’s right) is visual constructed
Eyes Centered and to client’s left (auditory remembered)
Eyes Centered and to client’s right (auditory constructed)
Eyes Down and to client’s left (auditory digital (thinking in words))
Eyes Down and to client’s right (kinesthetic)
The client’s body language moves with the eyes and the client’s verbiage simultaneously signifies whether a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic experience is being accessed.
So the client in the opening paragraphs is predominantly visual. However, when he depresses himself, he accesses another part of his personality that generates a feeling in his body that feels bad and focuses in on that, in other words, he “feels down”. But then when he gets himself back into a more optimistic frame of mind, he’s making pictures again, and so “things are looking up”.
So you know that, as a hypnotist, you need to use visual words to help him to clarify his success, but to move into kinesthetic mode when helping him deal with his depressed feeling. And if you can connect his bright future to his past, then he will no longer have that experience called “feeling down”, that part of things will be gone. And then when he thinks of his problem, he’ll remember that part where things are looking up, and the solution will become clear again.
These rules are not hard and fast (for some clients, the cues may be reversed or otherwise different). But once you have found out how a particular client uses his/her brain (i.e. done calibration), this particular client will usually be consistent with whatever his/her pattern happens to be.
Play with these ideas. Have fun with them. When you have casual conversations, watch people’s eyes, observe their body language and listen to their verbal cues. Notice how, when they shift into another personality part, the whole pattern changes.
Soon you’ll be reading clients like an open book. And that’s when NLP really gets to be fun!