“What on earth are Submodalities?!” …. I remember saying the first time I heard about them!
The thing is, as with most things in NLP once you get under the skin of them it’s really quite straight forward to understand and get your head around …. as long as someone explains it in plain English and you put it into practice!
This week, I had the pleasure of leading the Cardiff NLP Practice Group. My chosen subject was Submodalities. I was delighted to see a mix of people come along; some had already undertaken NLP training and some people were simply curious about NLP (knew a little or nothing about it) and had seen the subject of the session and decided to come along and find out more. The great thing about the Cardiff NLP Practice Group is that it’s free of charge and so accessible to everyone (the only thing that the group asks is that you make a contribution to the tea and coffee).
Submodalities are one of the NLP techniques I love (in fact I pretty much love them all, but if I had to pick just one I think I’d be hard pushed to find a technique that is as flexible as this one). If you’re interested in a way to make very fast changes through an easy process that makes changes to your behaviour, read on. Submodalities gives us a technique that can change Limiting Beliefs into Empowering Beliefs, change things you like to dislike (or reverse), help get rid of Phobias, and a ton of other things as well ….
What are Submodalities?
Every experience has a structure (how we internally re-present the data gathered by our senses) and the structure is formed through what we call Submodalities (they are like the building blocks of the Internal Representation). Changing these is a very practical NLP technique that is able to change our state almost instantly. Our emotion will be changed when the submodalities of the internal representation are changed.
Are you up for a bit of fun? If it’s safe to do so (Note: Health and Safety Warning!) just stop what your doing and try this …
Do you have a favourite Movie? Good, what I want you to do in a moment is close your eyes and start playing the movie in your mind. After a short while, make it black and white …. then make it smaller ….. turn down the sounds …..make it darker (notice what these changes do, how your feelings towards the Movie change) and then put back the movie as it was before, then open your eyes.
Now I’ve never got people to do this exercise remotely via my blog before (I use it on the NLP training I run all the time) so this is an experiment for me to! …. typically what happens when you make the above changes is that the Movie becomes less compelling … did you find that? You see the thing is, you didn’t change the content of the Movie did you? but what you did was change some of the Submodalities and this in turn changed the meaning …. cool eh? We did this exercise at the Practice Group this week and it worked a treat – everyone noticed the change in how they felt about the Movie and experienced first hand what changing Submodalities can do. (if you haven’t already please do make sure you put the Movie back to it’s original Submodalities – I’d hate to be responsible for you no longer having the same feelings towards your favourite Movie!).
Another way of thinking about Submodalities is to think back to an old TV. Do you recall the TVs that used to have the dials on the front for brightness, contrast, picture size and so on? Well, when you adjusted these knobs what you were doing was changing the Submodalities of the Picture.
In the group we went on to Practice using Submodalities and we ended the session with me doing a Demonstration of a Dislike to a Like (for those of you that have already undertaken NLP training, its a twist on the Like to Dislike script that we learn at Practitioner level). Its was a huge success and as soon as we completed the process our willing volunteer told us how great it was to have made the change!
I absolutely love working with people and seeing how quickly people can make life changing changes through what is a relatively simple and fast process.
If you’d like to find out more about working with Unleash Your Potential either through coaching or because you’re interested in attending one of our training courses (so you can make change for yourself and learn how to help others) we’d love to hear from you!
Have a great day!
