| Consider this: everything that is within your mind (thoughts, ideas, concepts, pictures, stories, films, perfume, feelings, emotions, etc) arrived there only because at some point in your life, you have already taken in these pieces of information using your senses…
There are many senses*, however for NLP we tend to focus on the main 5 senses. Visual (seeing) Auditory (hearing/sound) Kinesthetic (touch, feel) Olefactory (smell) Gustatory (taste) In the main, within NLP, we utilise the 5 “animal” senses (VAKOG) above to create ways in which we can calibrate situations and people. (Calibration occurs when we take a measurement between how an individual is/appears to be when in “neutral”, and then when they are discussing or experiencing something). When we experience something through our senses (and remember we experience EVERYTHING through our senses) then our physiology changes minutely. When we re-experience something, by bringing to mind a memory, we also re-experience the changes of our physiology. Hence the VAKOG senses are most useful when talking to someone to find out what they are really experiencing at that time. For example, someone may be talking about a “most beautiful sight”, and then they shiver. What is their physiology saying to you? PS: NLP is all about clean language, so all we can actually say is that they have experienced a physiological reaction and it’s up to us to ask them, gently, what they just experienced. (No mind-reading please! ) |
| *Many senses. Scientists agree there are far more senses than the NLP 5 VAKOG senses. We have the sense of space, of gravity, of time, of height, of orientation, of balance, speed, inspiration, temperature, etc. And then, senses which are much more of a combination: sense of fairness, of humour…. |
