Have you ever paid attention to the subtle nuance with which you experience the world around you?  

From the moment you were born you’ve been either seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, or smelling things. 

As kids, it’s a stimulus response world. 

You experience a stimulus through one of your five senses, you respond in some way, you learn from your very next experience whether or not the stimulus was “good” or “bad” and you start the process over again. 

Those moments are the very beginnings of the process of learning, but we somehow forget this as adults, or maybe we think we’re somehow more sophisticated or evolved. 

The fact is you still process the world through your five senses, and you communicate this way too. 

The third key assumption of NLP is:

All distinctions human beings are able to make concerning our environment and our behavior can be usefully represented through the visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory senses.

This means that when you communicate, you’re communicating about something you see, hear, feel, taste or smell.

Whether those sights and sounds are images or voices inside your head or you're actually seeing and hearing things on the outside, the basic premise remains the same.

Take some time today and just listen to the representational systems people use in their speech.

Some basic examples:

Visual (Look/See)

appear - focus - glance - foresee - look - observe - obvious


Auditory (Say/Sound/Hear)

articulate - hear - inquire - noise - say - sound - tell


Kinesthetic (Feel/Do)

charge - emotional - pressure - solid - motion - hold


Olfactory/Gustatory (Smell/Taste)

dank - musty - reeks - smells - sweet - tasty - spicy


Unspecified

active - decide - know - think - plan - execute


You find that a lot of times miscommunication happens when one person is speaking in images and the other person is speaking in sounds or feelings.

Give it a try today, and notice what’s different as you do.

​​​You just might be surprised by what you find.

Death - Before - Dishonor

To your success,

Nate

​P.S. If you’d like to share your reflections with me, feel free to email me at reflections@mindvaultllc.com as I’ll be happy to hear your thoughts. This email goes directly to me and is reserved only for those who read these Reflections.