Source: Richard Bandler & John Grinder

Build your modeling skills with this form of analysis. This skill will dramatically improve your ability to understand the world of another person, as well as your own, so that you can influence them with excellence. In this skill, you will be finding and structuring the keys to people’s subjective experience. It can be done in less than three minutes, non-verbally, using eye accessing cues.

Step 1: Arrange things with your partner. #

Select a partner for the exercise. Establish that you will be creating the mind map, and that the person can best cooperate by following your instructions and without answering verbally. As you proceed with the following steps, pay attention to the person’s eye movements. You may want to take notes for review. When I elicit the accessing cues, I use my five fingers:

Finger 1: for Vr (Visual Remembered),

Finger 2: for Vc (Visual Constructed),

Finger 3: for Ar (Auditory Remembered),

Finger 4: for Ac (Auditory Constructed) and

Finger 5: for K (Kinesthetic).

I then imagine key points around their heads as they speak. For example, if their eyes go up and to the left for Vr, I imagine a floating point there. Then I make an arrow between that point and the position of their Vc, and so on. This way, I can even guess the movements they’ll make ahead of time.

Step 2: Get Visual Remembered cues. #

Have your partner recall a pleasant memory, and then ask them to focus on the visual aspect. Prompt them to access visual cues with questions such as: Can you see yourself yesterday? What did you wear?

Step 3: Get Visual Constructed cues. #

Have your partner construct a visual impression that they do not already remember, with a question such as: “Now imagine yourself with blue eyebrows. What if the room lost gravity and everything started floating around?”

Step 4: Get Auditory Remembered cues. #

Have your partner recall the audio aspect of a memory. “Listen for a bit to your favorite song. How does it sound in your mind?”

Step 5: Acquire Auditory Constructed Cues. #

Have your partner create an internal auditory experience, by imagining something they have never heard before.  “Imagine that BMW is testing their motorcycles by asking one hundred riders to drive their motorcycles into a four foot deep reservoir of water all at once. How does that sound?”

Step 6: Get Kinesthetic Constructed cues. #

We skipped Kinesthetic Remembered, because people generally do not recall kinesthetic memories, but rather re-construct the feelings according to visual or auditory cues in the memory. Try a cue such as: “Imagine that you are rolling around on an iceberg in light clothing.”

Step 7: Test. #

As you develop skills in this area, see how well you can observe and predict eye movements, and how well you can remember which eye movements are associated with each strategy. When you work with a partner, practicing an NLP pattern or tool, it is better if you go through the process completely as a client a few times, and then give it a few days before you change places and work on it as the practitioner. The reason is that we tend to get so caught with the need to complete steps or to work methodically through a pattern, that we may miss the important non-verbal cues of our “client.” When practicing with a fellow practitioner, work on real problems rather than inventing one. This will further your personal development, provide a more realistic “laboratory,” and show you that the pattern really works.