See it, hear it, taste it, feel it, smell it.

Rep (Representational) systems and sub-modalities are at the core of NLP, so let’s review and expand this topic: A rep system is how we perceive what comes in through our senses. We may see it, hear it, taste it, feel it, or even smell it. Whatever it is, we call it INFORMATION. The reason we call it information is that your brain interprets and uses it. If breakfast is burning, your first warning is the smell. The smell is information.

The beauty of rep systems is that they go way beyond how things get into your brain. You can recall and think about your experiences, and create new ones, with the power of your mind. Another phrase for rep system is sense modality.

Rep systems are valuable because they are the way our experiences are coded. They are the DNA of our thoughts and behavior. They are where it all comes from. We encode or absorb our experiences and ideas with rep systems. We call up this information through our rep systems. This is called accessing or retrieving the information. It isn’t always obvious.

Ask someone how they know something or why they did something, and they will give you a pretty limited answer. Most people will tell you that they just “know” something, or “felt” like it. But advertisers don’t spend millions of dollars figuring out exactly which sounds and images to put into a television commercial just for the fun of it. And manufacturers don’t spend millions on designing just the right shape, color, and smells of products and logos for their egos. It’s all about representational systems, and how they are loaded with meaning and motivation.

By decoding the rep systems of successful people, you can get access to secrets that have taken many years or generations to acquire. By decoding the rep systems of someone who is failing, you can become much more valuable as a success resource.

You can use rep systems to really change how you and other people react to situations. With an understanding of rep systems you can even create new techniques, because rep systems help you analyze the strategies of excellent people. You can look at each of their rep systems and see what is going on. Sometimes this is all it takes to create a system for excellence that you can use or teach.

The rep systems include our five senses. Here are the three main ones. They are what we see (called the visual rep system), what we hear (called the auditory rep system), what we feel (called the kinesthetic rep system). The other two senses may be needed at times. They are what we taste (the gustatory rep system), and what we smell (the olfactory rep system).

There are two factors that give rep systems great value in understanding and achieving excellence. The first is how we talk to ourselves, or hear what others have said. We call this the auditory digital rep system. The other valuable factor is to know which rep system a person favors. That is, which rep system do they rely upon most of the time. This is called the Preferred Rep System. Once you know what their preferred rep system is, you can make a better connection by using that rep system more.

The way a person sequences and selects rep systems is a strategy. There is a rep system strategy for everything we do. By becoming aware of this, we gain extraordinary flexibility and latitude for creating better strategies. One reason for this is that rep systems are so basic, that they afford us great leverage to influence the resulting behaviors AND the results in our lives.

The place to start is to learn what rep system the person is relying on the most at any point in time. You can use this rep system to have more influence and connection with the person. People will tell you what rep system they are using without even knowing it. The secret is in their words. If they talk about how things look, what they saw, colors, and other visual words, they are thinking in pictures quite a bit. They are mostly using their visual rep system. So that is their preferred rep system. If they talk about what they hear, how things sound, how loud they are, and other auditory words, they are emphasizing their auditory system. It is the same thing for feelings. If they sense that someone is dishonest, and have a gut feeling about what stock to buy, they are mostly accessing feelings. That is, they are in their kinesthetic rep system.

Years ago in the U.S., a conservative politician named Barry Goldwater used a kinesthetic phrase in his advertising: “In your heart, you know he’s right.” That’s pretty funny, because by the time he was campaigning, everybody knew that your heart pumps blood, and your brain knows things. But when people have strong feelings about something, they think they know it. This fact has been used by politicians throughout history. But Goldwater lost his 1964 bid for the presidency of the U.S., because the liberals used even more powerful feelings and images involving fear of nuclear weapons and grief over the Kennedy assassination. When Hitler was creating his speeches, he spent a good deal of time learning what got the crowds really excited. Of course, we’d like you to use rep systems to do good things, not to invade sovereign nations and sport a bad haircut.

Here’s another example: Let’s say you want to sell me a vacation package. Listen to this, and ask yourself what rep system I’m using. “I just don’t SEE how I can afford to take a vacation.” You heard the word see, as in visual. I can’t SEE how I’ll afford it.

Most people use the visual rep system more than the other two main ones, hearing and feeling.

This tells you that you must create pictures in my head of your wonderful vacation package. You know that pictures will especially help to influence me. But consider the internal aspect of seeing. I can’t see it because my concern about finances won’t let me see it. So when you talk financing, that is the most important point for the visual rep system. Show me how I’m locking in value while the cost will increase for everyone else. Show me a graph. Show me big, simple numbers. Make me see other people missing out and being jealous of me. Before long, I could be seeing a whole new opportunity.

Now let’s say my wife is there, and she has a great influence over my buying decisions, or maybe total influence. Listen for her rep system. “Honey, I’m UNCOMFORTABLE with us committing to something when your work is so FEAST or FAMINE.” This wife of mine is all about feelings. No wonder she lights up the room. Uncomfortable, feast, famine… When you’re coming up with things to influence her with, you’d better touch her feelings. She needs to think about how she’ll feel finally having some quality time with her feast or famine husband. On our vacation, she can look forward to sunshine, warm sand, and the plush beds and carpeting of the air-conditioned resort.

Did you notice which of those things were not from an external sense? Warm sand affects your senses through your feet. But where does the feeling of quality alone time come from? Inside! Hey, remember feast or famine. You’d better tell her about the amazing food. This is a huge lesson for influencing with rep systems. You should appeal to the internal sources as well as external. In fact, the internal sources may be many times more powerful than the external ones. This is because they are often about motivations and values.

NLP uses the term predicates for the clue words that tell you what rep system someone is using. Predicates, as you have seen, are words like see, hear, and feel. Predicates are not always so obvious, though. If I tell you I’m CERTAIN, I might be in the auditory digital mode. That’s the one where my internal talk is very dominant. But what if I not only tell you I’m so CERTAIN, but I also gesture forcefully with my fist. In that case, I’m telling you I FEEL strongly about it. Instead of knowing I’m right in my head, I know it in my heart; I FEEL it, and I want you to FEEL it, too. Are you with me, or against me? Feelings make choices very simple. So they can make your job simple. 

Body language can be very important. If someone cocks their head and looks kind of skeptical, that’s a sign that they aren’t hearing things that they can agree with. They may be taking apart what you said in their own heads, because you weren’t being analytical or logical enough for them. In that case, you need to build more trust so they can get into the feelings or images, or you need to offer up your most compelling evidence, that is, the facts that show that you are right. And keep working on building that trust. You don’t need to drop the other sense modalities, but you need to deliver the facts.

One of the Presuppositions of NLP is that we process all information through our senses.  In popular belief, our senses are seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting.  Contemporary research suggests that there are more senses than that, but here we only consider those five.  In NLP, another name for the senses is representational systems.

This nomenclature is not superfluous.  Information must be processed through at least one of the five senses.  If pictures are processed visually, then they should also be encoded and recalled as pictures or visuals in our internal representations.  That is why the senses are synonymous with representational systems: the format of the input should be the same as the format of the output.

If sounds are processed auditorily, they should be encoded and recalled as sounds or noises.  If somebody did not particularly focus on a sound, that sound might end up being more like white noise in the memory.  If feelings are proceeded kinesthetically, they should be encoded or recalled as sensations or feelings.  That being said, although these principles apply to smelling and tasting as well, their applications are not as prevalent as the other two senses, so we consider only the three aforementioned representational systems.  In addition, in a subsequent chapter, we shall be discussing synesthesia, which is the mixing of representational systems.  Those cases are the exception.  This roughly one-to-one correspondence is the general rule.

It turns out that sixty percent of Americans primarily process information visually, twenty percent of Americans primarily process information auditorily, and another twenty percent of Americans primarily process information kinesthetically.  These tendencies are not dormant.  They manifest themselves in our daily lives.  How so?  According to NLP, they manifest themselves in our words.  Matching someone’s visual, auditory, or kinesthetic way of thinking with your own words is a technique for establishing rapport.  On the other hand, mismatching them could create dissonance. For example, imagine a wife saying to her husband, “Honey, can you see us going to the club tomorrow?  I really like what I saw at the club.  The people appeared so friendly.  And I’d just like to describe the speaker as a picture of perfection.  Don’t you think so?”  Notice how many times she uses some form of the verb “to see”.

Now, imagine the husband responding, “Honey, I hear you loud and clear.  We are totally on the same wavelength here.  There was a crescendo of magnificence from beginning to end.”  Although the husband is clearly adept at using metaphors, his response may not have been optimal at establishing rapport with his wife.  His verbs, adjectives, and metaphors all relate to sound.  It may very well be that the wife primarily processes information visually, whereas the husband primarily processes information auditorily, but, if the husband is aware of the effect of representational systems on rapport, he may want to tweak his response to match his wife’s way of thinking more.

He could instead say, “Yes, I can absolutely see us at the club tomorrow.  The people not only appeared friendly.  They actually showed us their good will throughout the night.  I also found speaker’s presentation attractive.”

In this case, the husband communicates the same content to his wife, but in a different manner.  If you want to establish rapport, giving people back their words make them think you are one of them, and people tend to like people who act and think like them.  Representational systems illustrates something fundamental not only in people’s words but in their minds.Keep in mind that people may change their primary rep system depending on the subject or context, or even the exact point of the conversation they are in. So don’t think people have only one rep system. Be flexible and follow them into different rep systems. Also, it’s good to appeal to all rep systems, at times, during your discussion. 

In psychology, there is a thing called Neurological recruitment. This big phrase means that the more brain cells you can get to think about something, the more powerful it is. If you’re in an airplane, you want ALL the engines firing. Using more rep systems means you are influencing with more power. Emphasize them one at a time, but use all of the three primary ones: seeing, feeling, and hearing.

Another word for a rep system is a modality. You could say that sub-modalities are the building blocks of each sense modality / representational system. For example, imagine looking at a tree. Now how clear or fuzzy was the image? How bright or dark? How colorful was it? Since I asked you to look at the tree, we were using the visual rep system. The sub-modalities were clarity, brightness and color saturation.

Let’s try it with the auditory rep system. Imagine listening to the birds in the tree. How loud did the birds sound to you? How clear was the sound? Were they high pitched? Was the sound soothing?

In a way, you can use the same sub-modality to analyze more than one representational system. When someone says colors are loud, they don’t mean that the colors make a sound, they mean they are more dominating and bright, maybe too much so. When someone says a sound is sharp, they don’t mean you can cut with it, they mean it’s edgy, maybe even irritating. When someone says they feel blue, they don’t mean their skin is turning blue. They mean they are sad or maybe depressed.

Let’s do some kinesthetic sub-modalities. How do you feel about looking at the tree and listening to the birds? It is relaxing? Are you uncomfortable, because the exercise feels like work? Is it uplifting? Notice that we have made a really big change here. I could have asked you to imagine a breeze touching your skin, but instead, I asked for your internal reaction to the tree and birds. Both are kinesthetic, but this time we went for something that springs from you rather than touches you directly. When you tune into your emotions and your body, you notice things like a nerve center firing off feelings, or tension, or relaxation, or blushing. Together, these and many other sensations blend into an emotion, like attraction, feeling like dancing, romance, sexual arousal, or stress; but hopefully without the stress.

When a sub-modality is digital, what we really mean is that it contains information expressed using known symbols. You can take words that you have heard, and write them. Now they are visual. Put them in Braille. Now they are kinesthetic, if you know Braille, anyway. Put them on a giant billboard in Times Square, and you have added the size sub-modality. Light them up and you have added the brightness sub-modality. All those other sub-modalities were analogue. In other words, you can scale them up or down or in some other way, and they are still the same basic sound, sight or feeling. But if you take that billboard and add a bunch of letters to it, the digital message will not be the same. Make a red light brighter, it’s still a red light. Add fifty letters at random to your marketing slogan, and it doesn’t mean anything anymore. 

It’s easy to break a digital modality. But you can scale analog modalities a lot before you can no longer perceive them effectively. For example, you’d have to make a color so bright that it is blinding, or so dark that it is invisible. It is important to choose the right digital sub-modality. For example, we don’t recommend tasting Morse code. It would be very slow to get a message from caramel, strawberry… strawberry, caramel, strawberry, strawberry… Strawberry, caramel, caramel, strawberry. That was NLP in Morse code, and it was slow just saying the flavors, much less tasting them. I suppose it could be fun, though, even if you don’t know Morse code.