210.07 - VAK and Submodalities

I’m too damn tired to be polite about this right now. I’m waaaay opinionated on this, but I’ll give you some takeaways.

What’s VAK and VAKog

VAK stands for Visual Auditory Kinesthetic (physical touch and emotion), along with the much neglected olfactory (smell) and gustatory (taste.) Through the powers of Bandler and Grinder on their shit - we now believe people have a preferred representational system, and because of the wonders of the design of NLP they designed their own framework for disproving their own crap.

How Do We Use The Bullshit

First off - don’t use eye accessing cues. Just watch body language - the direction someone looks while talking is just superstition.

Secondly - don’t try to find your subject’s preferred mode - it’s ripe for self-suggestion that they have one. Some folks do have varying degrees aphantasia - but that’s more a problem of not using visual (or any sensory) systems.

If you’re describing imagery, you can remember to rotate through VAKog to make your imagery more vivid.

What’s a Submodality

A submodality is just… changing how you see a VAK representation. Want to make an experience more vibrant? Tell them the beach is coming into focus, or the waves are becoming louder. Is it a ‘warm’ memory? Make it warmer. Make it cooler. Shift a memory from unpleasant to pleasant.

What’s VAK missing?

Ripping this off of Binaural Histolog as usual, but you’re missing out on balance, interoception (relaxation/excitement/hot/cold), and chronoception (time.) Also - we can borrow from our aphantasia toolkit, too.

If we felt goofy and we wanted to suggest thoughts leaking out of a cup - we could describe it in our usual ways by suggesting feeling the cup become lighter, watching the fluids spill out, and hearing the splash over the floor. Or, we could know that the cup has a certain weight, maybe a pound, that would slowly decrease over time. Eventually - the ice would change state from solid to liquid as well, beginning to spill out the bottom of the cup, leaving the space inside of the cup filled with air.

While I probably wouldn’t use thoughts or fluid leaking out of a cup for anything practical, the first example demands the subject to visualize - the other invites them to think about it any way they like.

Or - for a cheat code, just ask your subject how they think about something during the pre-talk.