Submodalities

Amber, a counselor in Ypsilanti, Michigan, emailed me. She asked, "What could I add to my practice to be more effective with my clients?"

Amber, I really had to think about your question. There are so many tools to choose from. I'm sharing a tool that I use daily. I hope it ups your game with your clients.

Everything that happens in your mind can be described using our five primary senses… sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.

These five senses are also known as modalities.

• visual = sight

• auditory = hearing

• kinesthetic = touch

• gustatory = taste

• olfactory = smell

These modalities are how we represent reality. In other words, we encode our experiences of reality in our minds using modalities. This means that every experience we have is made up of at least one modality—probably more.

For example, think of a time when you had a great dinner with another human being. Think of that memory as a file that contains all the encoded information about what you saw, heard, felt, tasted, and smelled during that dinner.

Modalities can be broken down into even smaller parts called submodalities. Submodalities are the characteristics of each modality.

Let's do a short exercise that will help clarify what I mean. Remember a time when you saw a beautiful sunset. As you think of that image in your mind, ask yourself these questions…

• Is the image in your mind a still picture or a movie?

• Is the image in your mind in color or black and white?

• Is the image in your mind life-size, smaller than life-size, or larger than life-size?

• Is the image in your mind seen through your own eyes, or do you see yourself in the image?

Your answers to these questions are the submodalities of the image you are visualizing in your mind.

I primarily concentrate on the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modalities (also known as VAK).

By changing the submodalities of a memory, we change how the experience is processed in our minds. When we process an experience differently, we feel differently.

For example, a client shares with you that every time she tries to start a conversation with a stranger, she hears her mother say in a harsh tone of voice, "Don't talk to strangers!" In turn, this prevents her from meeting new people.

Since she hears her mother's voice and it stops the behavior she wants to do (meet new people), we are dealing with the auditory modality. Therefore, you would want to change the auditory submodalities of her internal representation. You can do this in many ways. Here are some suggestions...

• Turn the voice down.

• Change the voice of her mother to that of Donald Duck.

• Move the location of where she hears her mother's voice, so it comes from some other place.

• Have her think of a song that makes her confident, and play that song loudly in her mind to drown out her mother's voice.

You will find that changing different submodalities will produce various results with different humans—every human is unique.

How vital are submodalities?

I help clients change submodalities during every session. In fact, we all change the submodalities of other humans every time we communicate.

When you implement submodality work into your client sessions, your impact will be much greater in less time.