Читать книгу NLP Workbook: A practical guide to achieving the results you want - Joseph O’Connor - Страница 48

In many ways, touch is the most immediate of the senses. It brings you ‘into contact’ with the world. We say that ‘seeing is believing’, but for many people, touching makes it real.

NLP helps us to come to our senses, especially through our body awareness. The kinesthetic representational system has four aspects:

Body awareness (Proprioceptive sense or muscle memory)

Your sense of your physical body is an essential part of rapport with yourself and is the basis of your feeling of physical health and well-being. Without a sense of physical awareness it is impossible to relax.

Muscle memory takes longer to acquire than visual and auditory memory, but also takes longer to fade. Once we learn something ‘in the muscle’ it is reliable, even impossible to forget. If you learned to ride a bicycle once in your life, you can probably still do it years later without further practice.

If we consistently tense certain muscles, then we ‘learn’ that pattern of muscle tension. This can lead to chronic backache, headache or poor co-ordination. We pay the price, even if we are not aware of the tension. A good massage will often give you a completely different experience of what it means to be relaxed.

We may also store emotions in our body through muscle tension. We see laughter lines and character lines on a person’s face because they have habitually worn those expressions. Our bodies store our characteristic postures in the same way. These can lead to stress and physical illness.

Kinesthetic awareness means being able to discriminate between subtle feelings in our bodies. Fine body awareness will warn us when we need to rest and we will not be caught out by stress and overwork. The more subtle the body signals you can read, the better you can take care of yourself and the better your sense of health and well-being.

The sense of touch (Tactile)

Touch is our most basic way of communication. It begins when we are babies, reaching out to touch and understand the world. The loving touch of our parents tells us the world is a friendly place. The more sensitive we are to feelings and touch on the inside, the more we will be on the outside as well.

Balance (Vestibular)

The sense of balance is usually treated as a special case of the kinesthetic system, although it is sometimes treated as a separate representational system in NLP literature (see Cecile A. Carson, MD, ‘The Vestibular System’, Chapter Four of Leaves Before the Wind, Grinder, DeLozier and Associates, 1991).

Emotions (Empathic)

Emotions are ‘meta kinesthetics’, in other words they are feelings about other feelings or experiences. Being aware of our emotions and being able to feel them is part of being in rapport with yourself and pacing yourself. As you become more sensitive to your emotions, so your emotional expression becomes greater and you find that there is meaning and value in all emotions, even the ones you might regard as negative.

Emotions can be overwhelming, yet we own them because we create them through our physiology and biochemistry in response to what we see, hear and feel. Sometimes we fear an emotion only because we have never really felt it properly. It is an unknown quality. We may also fear emotions because we are afraid that they will be uncontrollable, or they are associated with too many painful experiences. Once you feel emotions as your own, not something to be kept at bay, you will own them and you will have more choice about how you deal with them.

DEVELOPING KINESTHETIC AWARENESS

You can do this exercise at any time. It will help to ground you and make you aware of your feelings of balance, touch and body awareness. It will also help you establish a strong first position and connect you with your values. It is good to do this exercise when you are confronting a problem or difficult decision.

Pause.

Become aware of your body – without judgement.

How would your body look if you were to freeze in that position? Would you look strange?

Which parts of your body are tense?

How is your sense of balance?

Feel the connection between all the parts of the body.

Which parts feel at ease and which parts feel uncomfortable?

Feel where your body is touching other objects, such as a chair.

Be aware of the touch of your clothes on your skin.

What are you aware of with your sense of touch?

Ask yourself:

‘What am I feeling right now?’

‘What am I doing right now?’

‘What am I thinking right now?’

Then ask:

‘What do I want right now?’

Now ask:

‘What are the values that I want to express?’

‘What is important to me right now?’

‘How does what I am doing help me achieve that?’

‘What am I doing right now that prevents me getting what I want?’

Finally, make a choice. Say to yourself, ‘I choose . . .’

REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEM PREFERENCES

We constantly use all of our representational systems. We cannot think about anything without using at least two: the first to carry the information and the second to consider it in a different way. NLP considers thinking as chains of representation systems forming strategies – sequences of representational systems for a purpose.

What we call ‘talent’ is the result in part of the way a person uses their representational systems to make unusual and creative strategies.

All memories are a creative cocktail of representational systems. They all have a visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory component. This is sometimes called a ‘quintuple’ and is represented as [VAKOG].

As already mentioned, however, we tend to favour one or two representational systems. We will typically turn to our preferred system when we are under pressure or stress. This could be a weakness if it limits our thinking to what is familiar in unfamiliar situations.

You can discover your own preferred way of thinking by listening to how you speak or analysing your writing. You will find more predicates (see pages) from your preferred system than from the other representational systems.

There are two things you can do to increase your own self-knowledge and flexibility of thinking:

Know your own preference.

Develop your weaker representational systems.