According to NLP, we represent the world to ourselves in a visual, auditory or feeling-based (kinaesthetic) way. These are ‘representational systems’. When we think about something, we will make a picture of it in our mind, hear something in our heads, connect with a feeling, or combine the above possibilities. For example, imagine you are asked if you want to attend a lecture about Smurfs at the Royal Albert Hall. In the second it might take you to answer ‘yes’, you might a) picture Smurfs, b) picture the Royal Albert Hall, c) hear a vague excerpt from what you imagine the lecture might be, or hear yourself asking that delicate question about Smurfette that has always concerned you, and then d) check your feelings on the above and note that the feelings are pretty good.
It is said by many NLPers that people tend to be predisposed to one or another representation system. In other words, one person will tend to make pictures in her head rather than hear voices, and another will prefer immediately to connect with her feelings. A composer, for example, might be expected to have a primary representational system that is auditory, because it is the sensory world of sound he is most used to. Other people in the NLP world would note that this can be misleading, that it is more accurate to say that people move between different PRSs all the time: so our composer may be ‘auditory’ when he is thinking about his music, but perhaps ‘visual’ when out buying clothes. This mixed PRS scenario seems more likely, though it renders the concept of a primary (and therefore usefully predictable) representational system redundant.
Why does a PRS matter? Well, NLP says that if we can know how people are representing their world to themselves at a certain time, it allows us to have greater rapport with them, and with rapport comes influence. For example, imagine you want to buy a new hi-fi. Your old one looks tatty and you’d like something more up-to-date. You have a certain image of the sort of thing you want. So you go into a shop and ask to see some new hi-fis. You are told, ‘We don’t have any: this is a health-food shop.’ You go into a hi-fi shop instead and ask the assistant, ‘I’m looking for a new hi-fi. Can I see some? There are some nice-looking ones in the window.’ The assistant knows which hi-fi has had the best write-up in the magazines, which one performs better than all the others. So he tells you the name of the model. You ask him what it’s like, and he says it sounds amazing. He talks about cones and speaker types, gold connectors and hi-fi specifications. You ask to look at it, and he takes you over. He talks more about the sound quality, but somehow you just aren’t getting excited. On another shelf you spot a great-looking system, and become animated. What about that one? He tells you that the sound isn’t anywhere near as good: the speakers aren’t of the same spec, and the quality of the amp is inferior. You’re confused, you don’t know what you want. You leave and say you’ll think about it.
A sales assistant who knew about PRSs would have handled this very differently. In the story above, the assistant’s PRS as regards hi-fis is understandably auditory: he has worked in the business too long to be bothered about what the machines look like. He can easily hear the difference between a good and a great system and wants to pass on his enthusiasm. You, though, are primarily motivated to find something which will look great. The way you expressed your opening question to the assistant should have told him that. You’re using a lot of visual words. You’re looking for a new hi-fi. You want to see some. You like the nice-looking ones in the window. But because the assistant is stuck in his own PRS, the sale doesn’t
get made. You’re confused, and feel disappointed. He should have listened to you, and then taken you to some great-looking hi-fis he felt were good enough sound-wise for you, and you’d have left happy.
I am very interested in sales techniques, and I do believe that often the customer will tell you exactly how you should sell him the product. Salesmen often make the mistake of having a set approach, and as a rule are nowhere near flexible enough to let the customer dictate the easiest path to a closure. Interestingly, the same miscommunication can happen in relationships. After all, this is all about the presence or absence of good rapport. For example, a wife complains that her husband doesn’t tell her he loves her often enough. The husband can’t understand this because he comes home with flowers or buys gifts more than any husband he knows. One way of looking at this paradox is to point out that the parties seem to use a different PRS when it comes to what they feel is important in expressing affection. The wife might need to hear nice things more than see presents or flowers, whereas the husband, more ‘visual’ in this instance, thinks that ‘seeing evidence’ of affection is more important. It might be a big help if both could appreciate this, so that one or both could change their behaviour without feeling they were being treated unfairly. And is this not a common fault? How many of us take the trouble to work out how those we love feel loved? We tend to act in a way we would appreciate, but this may be way off the mark.*
So far so good. As with the above example, we can see that the words we use might give some clue as to which RS (let’s leave out the P) we might be using. In fact, NLP does claim that the predicates we use directly connect with the RS we are experiencing. In effect, the person who says ‘I see what you mean’ is being literal: he is describing the fact that he is able to make a clear picture of what you are talking about. People using the auditory RS would say instead something like ‘Sounds good to me’, and a person thinking kinaesthetically might use the phrase ‘That feels right’. Therefore in order to gain better rapport with a person, you are advised to use the same type of predicates to match their RS. You are literally ‘talking their language’, according to this thinking.
While this might seem acceptable to a point, it sounds like the sort of thing one would have to view in perspective. We are beginning to cross the line into NLP magic, where faith, or credulity, might gently beckon. The NLPers also tell us that you can identify these PRSs by the eye movements of the person. Ask someone a question that necessitates them searching in their mind for an answer, and you will often see a movement of the eyes. That might be a dart off to the side before re-connecting with your gaze, or it might be a lingering rest high in the air as a person enjoys some brief reverie. The direction will apparently tell you what is going on in their heads. Here is the chart as taught by NLP:
The chart points out the meaning of eye movements as seen when looking at a person opposite you. Even the most rampant NLPers admit that the chart does not apply to everyone; rather, it represents a rule of thumb. However, they would argue that whatever a person’s pattern is, they will stick to it. The abbreviations signify the following:
AC – AUDITORY constructed sounds K – KINAESTHETIC feelings
VR – VISUAL remembered images AR – AUDITORY remembered sounds AD – AUDITORY digital (interior dialogue)
Looking straight forward, in this model, is a second cue that ‘visual constructed’ processing is happening. ‘Constructed’ means just that the sound or image is made up rather than something from the memory. So, if you try accurately to remember the interior of your bedroom as a child (pause from reading this for a moment and put the book down) you should find that your eyes wander up and to the side. Probably to your left, according to the model (visual remembered). Then, if you imagine what your current front room would look like with completely different decor, and really think about what that would look like, you should, according to this model, notice that your eyes shift across to facilitate the image (visual constructed). Similarly, if you listen out now for the softest noise you can hear outside, you should find your eyes move to the side on a level with your ears, rather than up and to the side as with the visual representations. This seems to tie in with a natural tendency to move your head to one side to hear better.
While this may seem a little esoteric, I do think it’s fair to say that it seems to be reflected in what we glean during many interpersonal exchanges. If you ask someone if she fancies meeting your parents and she looks down for a moment before saying ‘yes’, you know that she had a moment of feeling unsure, weighed up some uncertain feelings or asked herself if that’s what she really wanted. You might even want to say, if you’re as nice as I am, ‘Don’t come if you don’t fancy it’, having picked up on a flash of uncertainty from her. If, on the other hand, she looks up for a second before agreeing, it seems more as if she gave it a split-second’s thought but didn’t have any conflicting feelings. So while I do find that the general thrust of the above picture is borne out in real life some of the time, I’m unsure about how reliable or useful it really is. Much, in other words, may rely on the initiated observer looking for signals that match his expectations.
This eye movement hypothesis has been tested many times by scientists, and routinely it is shown not to hold up. However, it is difficult to know whether this is because the claims are not true or the tests were not conducted fairly; NLPers naturally blame the experiments. The tests normally go as follows. The subject is not told what is being looked for, and is asked a series of questions the scientist believes will elicit a clear visual, auditory or kinaesthetic process. For example, he might ask for a kinaesthetic response – ‘What would it feel like to swim in noodles?’ – and note where the subject’s eyes then move. Problematically, a question like this could of course elicit a visual response first (the subject pictures himself in noodles) or even an auditory one (the subject repeats the question to himself or runs through an answer), which would theoretically cause a different eye movement before the expected ‘kinaesthetic’ one. Although the ‘correct’ movement then might follow, this may not be noted in the results. Without examining the exact protocol of the experiments, it’s very hard to tell how effective they are at testing these claims. Equally, though, if they are this difficult to test by observers who are trying to take as objective a stance as possible, one could argue that they can hardly be called reliable by biased NLPers who are making no such attempt. My suspicion is that if eye movement was really as reliable as NLPers say, there would be far more positive results in tests.
However, undoubtedly some people do seem to conform to eye movement patterns with notable reliability, so an awareness of the chart is perhaps worth having in the back of your mind. Fans of The Heist should watch again the sequence where the interviewed participants are remembering the list of memorized words they learned at the seminar. I had taught them the linking system, which means that each jump to the next word relied upon a bizarre mental image. Every time, you can see them remembering
each image pretty much according to the NLP model. It’s almost a textbook demonstration.
Similarly, tests have been carried out to see whether or not we really do feel more comfortable with people who match our representational systems. Again, they have failed to show that such a matching increases levels of rapport, trustworthiness or effectiveness. Indeed, one researcher found that therapists who matched their clients’ language were in fact seen as less trustworthy and effective. But again, it is difficult, without knowing exactly how the tests were carried out, to know how effectively any number of other factors which could have contributed to these results were eliminated. The same difficulty crops up with pretty much any research into these rather subtle interpersonal issues.
We must be careful, though, not to think that this means the claims of NLP should not be properly investigated – with, presumably, the collaboration of NLPers and scientists who can arrive at an experimental procedure with which everyone is happy. NLP is a big business and worth taking seriously for that reason alone, although it was never the ‘paradigm shift’ Bandler and Grinder perceived it as. The course I attended was large (four hundred people) and highly evangelical in its tone. It reminded me a lot of the Pentecostal churches I had attended a few years earlier. Although I enjoyed much of the course and certainly got into the swing of it, the parallel with the church made me rather uncomfortable at times. One manipulative technique I found in both was the ‘we can laugh at ourselves’ mentality. NLP gurus or the happy-clappy leaders of a charismatic church will sometimes stand on stage and encourage their congregations to have a good old giggle as they themselves parody the nuttier excesses of their respective scenes; and as everyone laughs in response, any quiet reserve of intelligent scepticism in the room dissolves into nothing, and the scene is made safer and free from dissent. Now, other NLP courses may eschew the hype and theatricalities, but tend to make the opposite mistake of getting bogged down in technique. Both Bandler and Anthony Robbins package their goods primarily as an attitude, and clearly use the evangelical hype to render us as emotional and suggestible as possible in order to make sure that a) the message hits home and b) we want to purchase future courses.
In the fifth century BC, the Sophists travelled throughout Greece earning their living by imparting advice that would lead to political success. They gave lectures and took on pupils, charging huge fees. They taught young politicians how to persuade crowds to believe what they wanted them to believe. The Sophists bragged of their ability to convince a person that black was white, and to give satisfactory answers to questions one knew nothing about. They used clever word artistry and baroque metaphors to confuse and quieten their opponents, and were not interested in seeking truth. They responded to the public’s desire to succeed without expending any effort or gaining any knowledge, merely by emulating success and cleverness. It’s a very old business.
At the end of my course, which lasted only four days, I was given my Practitioner certificate. I didn’t have to pass any tests or in any sense ‘earn’ my qualification. In many ways the course was about installing a ‘go for it’ attitude towards changing oneself or others for the good, so somehow, any sort of formal test would have seemed disappointingly pedestrian. So the four hundred or so delegates, some of whom were clearly either unbalanced or self-delusory, were set free after a highly evangelical four-day rally to potentially set themselves up as therapists and deal with broken people under the banner of NLP. We were told that after a year we should contact the organization and tell them why we should have our licence renewed. If we had been using our NLP creatively, they would send another certificate for a second year of practice. Because spending those few days in the company of hundreds of would-be NLPers had put me off ever practising it as a profession, I didn’t think to contact the organizers again. But after a year or so I got a letter reminding me to call them to talk about sorting out a new certificate. I ignored it, but a short while later received another communication saying that they would be happy to send me one anyway if I would get back in touch. The ease with which they were happy to dish out their certificates struck me as suspect, and again I ignored their request. Not long after that, a nice new unsolicited certificate dropped through my letterbox, qualifying me for another year of practice.