Jananas

Do you see, feel, or hear things? Neuro-linguistic programming is a theory built around how the words people use to communicate about the world provide clues about how they interpret their environment. There are three main ways to process information – visual, auditory, and kinetical.

• if something is clearer now, then you are using a visual representation to process the information
• if that ring’s true for you, then you process information through auditory pathways
• if grasp hold of a concept, then you process information kinetically

NLP itself goes into significantly more detail how you can read a person’s behaviour, breathing patterns, eye movements, etc. in order to get a complete sense of how they are interpreting their environment. For the sake of this blog post and given the direction I want to take my ideas in, I’m going to focus solely on language and its clues.

Over the last few months I’ve been observing my language. It provides clues about what sense I’m using to pay attention to and process the world around me. I’ve also been observing the people around me and how they process information (according to verbal clues). These can be very subtle clues but I think that it is important to pay attention to.

Why is this relevant? Because I believe that we often miscommunicate with people because we are using different processing pathways. We can provide better explanations if we can target examples to the natural way someone processes information. I.e. if you “see” an answer, then I should provide you with a visualization of the problem at hand. The more effectively we can communicate and interact with people, the bigger a difference we can make in the world and the faster we can get things done.

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