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Recall some pleasant experience from your
past. Various things will pop into your mind, whatever pops up in your
mind, allow yourself to go with that memory for now. If you don't seem to
find such a memory, then allow yourself to simply imagine a pleasant
experience. For some people, closing the eyes helps in this process. Once
you have this pleasant experience, permit it to remain in your awareness.
Now that you have this pleasant thought in
mind--just notice its visual aspects. As you recall the experience, what
specifically do you see? Notice the picture of the memory. If you do not
visualize well, then imagine what the pleasant experience feels
like. Or, allow yourself to just listen to some pleasant
sounds--words or music and enjoy that kind of an internal pleasant
experience.
Now that you have the picture of the
memory, make the picture larger. Let it double in size... and then let
that picture double... Notice what happens. When you made the picture
bigger, what happens to your feelings of that experience? Do they
intensify?
Now shrink the picture. Make it smaller and
smaller. Allow it to become so small you can hardly see it... Stay with
that a moment... Do the intensity of the feelings decrease? Experiment now
with making the picture bigger and then smaller. When you make it smaller,
do your feelings decrease? And when you make it larger, do your feelings
increase? If so, then running the pictures (sounds, feelings) in your
awareness in this way functions as it does for most people. However, you
may have a different experience. Did you? No big deal. We all code our
experiences in our minds uniquely and individually. Now, put your picture
of that pleasant experience back in a format where you find it most
comfortable and acceptable.
Maintaining the same picture now, move the
picture closer to you. Just imagine that the picture begins to move closer
and closer to you, and notice that it will. What happens to your feelings
as it does? ... Move the picture farther away. What happens when you move
the picture farther away? Do your feelings intensify when you move the
picture closer? Do your feelings decrease when you move the picture
farther away? Most people find this true for the way their consciousness/
neurology works. When you moved the picture farther away, the feeling
probably decreased. Notice that as you change the mental representation in
your mind of the experience, your feelings change. This, by the way,
describes how we can "distance" ourselves from experiences, does
it not?
Suppose you experiment with the brightness
of the picture? As you look at your pictures, do you see them in color or
black-and-white? If your pictures have color, make them black-and-white,
and vice versa if you have them coded as black-and-white. ... When you
changed the color, do your feelings change?
Consider the focus of your images: in focus
or out of focus? Do you see an image of yourself in the picture or do you
experience the scene as if looking out of your own eyes? What about the
quality of your images: in three dimensional (3D) form or flat (2D)? Does
it have a frame around it or do you experience it as panoramic? Experiment
by changing how you represent the experience. Change the location
of the picture. If you have it coded as on your right, then move it to
your left.
Debriefing
the experience
Did it ever occur to you that you could
change your feelings by changing how you internally represent an
experience? The strength of NLP lies in these very kinds of processes
of the mind. NLP works primarily with mental processes rather
than with content. Here you have changed how you feel about an
experience by changing the quality and structure of your images, not their
content. Thus, you made the changes at the mental process level
while leaving the content the same.
Question. What would happen to a person if
they made all their unpleasant pictures big, bright and up close?
What would happen if they made all their pleasant experiences small,
dim, and far away? ... The person would become an expert at feeling
depressed, miserable and unresourceful, would he not?
On-the-other-hand, consider what would
happen if a person coded their pleasant experiences as big, bright,
and up close... will it not create a more positive outlook on life? And,
what if they made their unpleasant experiences small, dim and far
away? The negative would have less influence on their life.
NLP has taught us to appreciate with a new
freshness the depth and meaning of the old proverb, "For as he
thinketh in his heart, so is he..." (Proverbs 23:7).
Consequently, much of what we do in NLP occurs as a result of these
natural processes that describe how we humans process information in
our minds. NLP directs us how to change the process by changing the mental
codings. What you just experienced, we call submodality codings in
NLP.
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Building 
Use the