NLP Training: Eliciting Submodalities

Submitted by Craig on Sun, 04/30/2017 - 04:03

What's it like in there?

Eliciting Submodalities is the NLP term for learning how we represent the outside world in our internal maps. We already know how to do this to some degree, and every time we ask somebody to recount an experience, we are doing it. In NLP, we just want to do it more skillfully and with positive intention.

Remember that submodalities are the way we structure our experience. Submodalities are the components of experience consisting of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches.

In order to help bring the building blocks of experience into the awareness of yourself or a client so that they can be manipulated, the skill of eliciting submodalities is required.

The common aspects to all experience are:

  • What is the perceived location of the experience?
  • What is the perceived distance of the experience?
  • What is the intensity of the experience?
  • Was the experience associated or dissociated?

So in addition to simply asking someone to recount their experience, we ask additional questions about how the experience was represented, so that when we present it back to the person, we present it in a way that seems like how they perceived it.