Maree's Blog

Coding your internal and external experiences

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27 March 2016

(Like the bar code on your supermarket items)!

To really achieve something – a goal or an outcome, it has to come from within you. You have to see it, hear it, feel it and maybe even taste and smell it. Before achieving your outcome, you have to represent the experience as if you have already achieved it.

This is the inner experience we have at any given moment, which relates to five categories of sensory experience: the visual sense (V – seeing), the auditory sense (A – hearing), the kinaesthetic sense (K – feeling), and the olfactory (O – smelling) and gustatory (G – tasting) senses. In NLP, these senses are known as representational systems – how we re-present our memories and experiences back to ourselves. Often we are not aware of these consciously unless they are brought to our attention.

We take in external information from around us using our five senses, and then these five senses are used internally to process and store this information. We can internally see pictures, hear sounds, feel feelings, smell and taste.

As you are reading, imagine that you are describing the experience to me.

Auditory: Listen to your internal dialogue. What are the words you are saying to yourself as you are reading? What is the tone and pace of your voice?

Visual: What are you seeing? How are the words appearing as you read? What internal pictures are you making?

Kinaesthetic: What are you feeling? Maybe the chair you are sitting on, and the warm or cool temperature of where you are sitting?

Olfactory: What are you smelling? Maybe some food cooking, coffee or tea, or some flowers in the room?

Gustatory: What are you tasting? What is coming to your awareness about your sense of taste?

As you become aware of how you are codifying your experiences, your awareness of how you ‘do’ the world will grow. As your awareness grows, so do your choices in life. By changing some of these sensory experiences (or not), your experience or memory of the experience can change.

When I work with someone who has identified a goal they want to achieve, I want them to code it internally through their senses. Our brain cannot differentiate fact from fiction. Therefore, creating the experience of something before it occurs allows the brain to code it as fact, as if it has already occurred.

Imagine that you want to have an attribute or strength that you have observed in others, or have experienced yourself in the past. How these are codified can be replicated, so that you can recreate them for yourself as if you are having that experience now.