Help: Please Let Me Know How You Phrase Your Words.

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Hello,

Could anyone do me a favour and tell me which one among A), B), C) in the each group as below, you prefer choosing when you phrase your thoughts by intuition. This is going to help me verify some points illustrated in a book named the Structure of Magic by Richard Bandler and John Grinder I am reading.

I hope at least three persons could tell me their options, and the more people the better. Many thanks in advance!

(If you think it is irrelevant to psychology, that's fine. I'm really curious about your options.)

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1. I understand you. (This sentence can be possibly expressed differently by different people, and all of "A), B), C)" mean "I understand you." What option you would likely or tend to choose when you say, "I understand you".)

A) What you are saying feels right to me.
B) I see what you are saying.
C) I hear you clearly.

2. Describe more of your present experience to me.
A) Put me in touch with what you are feeling at this point in time.
B) Show me a clear picture of what you see at this point in time.
C) Tell me in more detail what you are saying at this point in time.

3. I like my experience of you and me at this point in time.
A) This feels really good to me. I feel really good about we are doing.
B) This looks really bright and clear to me.
C) This sounds really good to me.

4. Do you understand what I am saying?
A) Do what I am putting you in touch with feel right to you?
B) Do you see what I am showing?
C) Does what I am saying to you sound right to you?

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@iclearwater,

1) choice B. Truthfully though I would likely say, I get what you're saying.

2) choice C

3) choice C

4) choice C. Quite honestly, A and B don't even make sense to me.

1 Reply

@Sturgis,

Agree with all. Your choice on #4 tells my you are not a New Age hippy.

1 Reply

@roger,

I think I'm past the age of being new age anything.
(never got the hippy thing right other than appearance and occasional rule breaking)

0 Replies

Thank you both of your help.

1 Reply

@iclearwater,

You aren't quite grasping the full meaning of what they were saying...yes, that's said tongue in cheek. If you really want to see for yourself (yes that's tongue in cheek as well), start truly listening to the pattern of what people are saying.

Their point they made was that people experience life in different ways (visual, feelings, auditory) and that one of those ways is usually the strongest.

This 'primary way of experiencing life' then affected the words they use when they express opinions. And if you talk to them in the language that they experience life in the most strongly...you are more likely to explain things to them in a way they can understand, or influence them.

In reality they are pointing out something that every other psychologist espouses - if you want to influence someone, talk to them in their language. Their idea was just another tool to help folks identify what their language is.

In the west, Visual is by far the most common 'primary experience'. But even for those people, they will use the other forms of experience in their speech. Then, some people are equal across visual and feeling/touch. Some people are situational dependent (eg feeling at home with family vs visual at work) no matter what their primary trait.

This of course, was just one of their many ideas.

Observation will be your best friend if you want to work out for yourself what is right, and what is wrong. By that I mean honest observation of yourself and others, but particularly of your inner self first, then others - because you have the most information on yourself.

I remember 20 odd years ago, when some trainer and work said 'you are not who you think you are, but who others think you are'.....quoting some idiot psychologist who never sufficiently understood self esteem, taking responsibility for who you are, nor working to better yourself (who you are, as opposed to your financial status). Back then I didn't understand enough to articulate why it was wrong.

2 Replies

@vikorr,

Thank you for your input.

Quote:

You aren't quite grasping the full meaning of what they were saying

What make you think that I don't grasp fully the meaning of what they are saying in the book about this?

Quote:

If you really want to see for yourself (yes that's tongue in cheek as well), start truly listening to the pattern of what people are saying.

I agree. Pattern or bench line is important. Remember in the thread about the body language, we were talking about more lines required in order to possibly analyse a character of person.

Quote:

In the west, Visual is by far the most common 'primary experience'.

No sure if it is limited in the West. I think the five sensory systems are common among the human beings, and I assume it is irrevant to cultures, races, geography, etc.

Quote:

But even for those people, they will use the other forms of experience in their speech. Then, some people are equal across visual and feeling/touch. Some people are situational dependent (eg feeling at home with family vs visual at work) no matter what their primary trait.

That's possible . But I assume the ratio of people who have the equal different sensory representational systems among the three are small, and very small, if such people exist.

They could be excellent in all of three visual, kinesthetical auditory systems than other people. A great painter can be an excellent pianist, and athelet as well. I still assume there are differences about three sensory systems in one person. I think equal is relatively equal.

Quote:

This of course, was just one of their many ideas.

Not sure I undersstood your words about this correctly. Do you refer to Richard Bandler and John Grinder? I'm not sure this is one of their own ideas.

I found they collected different theories from different well-known psychologists, psychotherapist, and linguist like Noam Chomsky; Bandler and Grinder selected and labeled them with different names as NLP techniques or tools. For examples, anchoring is probably derived from Pavlov's Dogs; Double Binds from Gregory Bateson.

Some people denounce NLP is pseudopsychology, but I don't think so, as those tools they use are on the basis of scientific theories and effective practice of some psychotherapists. I think Bandler and Grinder effectively greatly reshuffle and reorganise them, and apply to the arsenal they call NLP.

Probably you know these way more than I do, so I am not going to belabor to that.

Quote:

I remember 20 odd years ago, when some trainer and work said 'you are not who you think you are, but who others think you are'.....quoting some idiot psychologist who never sufficiently understood self esteem, taking responsibility for who you are, nor working to better yourself (who you are, as opposed to your financial status).

I'm not sure I understand your words above. Would you rephrase your words or clarify?
Do you mean that some trainers tended to wrongly define other people without truly understanding them especially their self-esteem?

2 Replies

@iclearwater,

Quote:

What make you think that I don't grasp fully the meaning of what they are saying in the book about this?

From how you phrased your responses/questions - it is clear to me that you are a visual person. You don't quite grasp how sensory/feeling people phrase their words. Auditory you are closer to. But because you find it hard to get in touch with your sensory side, you phrase some of those responses in a less than normal way. This means people would feel uncomfortable with the odd phrasing, and avoid such...it affects your survey.

As a point of note, one of the reasons I came up with the six zone (logic, instinct, creative, memory, social, individual) was the use of words associated with them...something that I came across in an book on NLP.

The interesting part is that people use words/phrases to describe other people, or describe their behaviour that can easily be divided into those zones, and the use of such words/phrases also roughly match the location in the brain that those people are using .
http://www.brainwaves.com/brain_information.html :

To be clear, you'll note that there is some overlap into words people use to describe their sensory (touch, vision, hearing etc) experience of life:

Instinctive/feeling: (mid to lowest part of the brain)
- uses a softly, softly approach
- a sensual person , touchy/feeley,
- a deep person/ depth, that was very deep
- a very grounded person/earthy
- carrying a heavy burden (heavy is not only a sensual word, it evokes imagery of low to the ground)

Logic/Visual: (upper part of the brain, with planning being highest part of the brain - and planning calls on the use of the logic / planning parts of the brain)
- light headed,
- head in the clouds / day dreamer (look into the location of the part of the brain that is responsible for dreaming)
- foresee / see 3 moves ahead / visionary
- clear headed

Individual / Social:
- he took a step back (back is into the individual zone) from the situation
- looked back into history, left behind..., reared up, retreated (away from the <social> conflict),
- He stepped forward (into the social zone) / backwards <away from the social, into the individual>
- forged ahead
- leaned forward / away from
- I ran into <you run forward, in this case, into a social meeting>
- bulldozed his way<this is imagery of unstoppable forward momentum into a social environment>

Memory/Creative (I'm sure you'll figure which is which. Some even has overlap, as the brain is want to do, when responding to something)
- you reached the right / correct answer
- you're being left behind
- you're not in your right mind

Etc. Ie. the descriptors can be used by people and be used to describe the nature of people and is used to describe peoples behaviour.

Quote:

No sure if it is limited in the West. I think the five sensory systems are common among the human beings, and I assume it is irrevant to cultures, races, geography, etc.

The 5 senses of experience are common to all humans, blindness and the like aside. You misunderstood what I was saying about visual being the primary experience, or strongest sense.

0 Replies

@iclearwater,

Quote:

I found they collected different theories from different well-known psychologists, psychotherapist, and linguist like Noam Chomsky; Bandler and Grinder selected and labeled them with different names as NLP techniques or tools. For examples, anchoring is probably derived from Pavlov's Dogs; Double Binds from Gregory Bateson.

Some people denounce NLP is pseudopsychology, but I don't think so, as those tools they use are on the basis of scientific theories and effective practice of some psychotherapists. I think Bandler and Grinder effectively greatly reshuffle and reorganise them, and apply to the arsenal they call NLP.

Probably you know these way more than I do, so I am not going to belabor to that.

You likely know more about NLP than I do, if you spent any amount of time looking into it. I went on a different journey. One of my strengths is the ability to 'connect' things / join the dots, so to speak. So I read very widely, taking away things that made sense to me, and joined the dots from a lot of different areas.

For example, about NLP, and whether it works or not, it is helpful to look into hypnosis / self hypnosis, and also into the Bell Curve...which two concepts explain why stage hypnotists target an audience, rather than an individual, and also why some individuals rave about the benefits of hypnosis, while others go 'it works sometimes' and still others go 'it doesn't work at all'. NLP is in a very similar boat to Hypnosis (and stands on dodgier ground)...but they did get some things right.

Quote:

I'm not sure I understand your words above. Would you rephrase your words or clarify?
Do you mean that some trainers tended to wrongly define other people without truly understanding them especially their self-esteem?

No, the trainer was quoting a psychologist. Anyone who thinks they are defined by what others think of them...has issues. What others see in us, is a reflection of who we are, but not who we are. I even remember reading a review of his book on Amazon, though I don't recall the books name now. Needless to say, I never bought his book.

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I think I am an auditory person.

- Previously I was confused why I would tend to frequently repond to "I heard what you said"(which means I understood what you wrote) in my mother tongue if it is translated in English literaly in a post. When I consciously realised this, I was puzzled and asked myself how could I possibly respond in this way, as I responded to what I read (visual) in a post.

- In the thread about arm-crossing, when I responded to you, I found myself wrote "hear hear, I can echo much about what you said".

When I saw what I typed, I felt surprised, and said to myself, "Hold on, what happened?" Because I found the incongruity about my expressions (auditory) and behaviour (reading). I tried to find better expressions but failed. It is not because of the limitation of my English vocabulary, but I felt the "echo" and "hear hear" just exactly fit my feeling.

I also told you I frequently dialogue (auditory) with my inner world.

- My English is at least little bit above the average comparing to my peers here, and other languages as well. (I don't try to brag that I have a gift in languages.)

I am born and live in the south. I have way less southern accent than other people. When I told people I am originally from the south, many of them said they couldn't detect that.

When I travelled domestically to another place in the north for just a few days, and I came back and took a taxi, the taxi driver asked me where I am originally from. I asked him to guess. He exactly told me the city I travelled, though the wrong answer. Of course the alien accent soon faded, since I left.
...

1 Reply

Quote:

What others see in us, is a reflection of who we are, but not who we are.

In their book, Bandler and Grinder said " a map is not the territory" time and again. I was thrilled when I read the words in the first chapter of the book.

Of course, the quote is not creation of the two NLP gurus', as they admitted but from another person they cited.

I had thought the words in Buddha's scriptures about the philosophy of the world being in illusion was nonsense and self-brainwashing for dimwits. When I understood "a map is not the territory", I felt I was so ignorant about the Buddhist scriptures.

I really like their books that help me a lot with my understanding to the world for each chapter I have read so far.

Sorry for my rambling.

0 Replies

My favourite colours are the different shapes between black and white. I paid and asked an artist for a painting just in black, and white. I don't enjoy other colours that much, though I think blue skies, green grassland, red roses are beautiful. I am not sure if this is relevant to my type of sensory systems or just my taste. - If you would like to analyse me.

1 Reply

@iclearwater,

Quote:

I think I am an auditory person.

Well, your auditory examples were clear as well (but very few people have this as a strength). Your 'feeling' examples were quite poor.

Reading doesn't count as a primarily visual experience just because you need to see the words to read them. It's like saying someone speaking to you must cause you to primarily experience that event as auditory...and that you can't visualise what they are saying, or can't get a feel for what they are saying.

1 Reply

@iclearwater,

Quote:

My favourite colours are the different shapes between black and white. I paid and asked an artist for a painting just in black, and white. I don't enjoy other colours that much, though I think blue skies, green grassland, red roses are beautiful. I am not sure if this is relevant to my type of sensory systems or just my taste. - If you would like to analyse me.

From colours? What value would anyone get out of such? Quite frankly, I would say only get analysis if you need help, or for the sake of interest.

My personal viewpoint is take responsibility for who you are (your beliefs, goals, principles, values, self esteem, positive character traits etc), work constantly to grow as a person, keep learning till the day you die.

I have time for 'self is an illusion', as it points to a very important lesson in life...but I have no time for using that as an excuse to not act, nor to better yourself. Self may be an illusion, but it is a necessary one. Understand the illusion, and take control of what it becomes, because it either becomes nothing, or something (and if it becomes something... are you shaping it, or letting it grow willy nilly). Both have consequences.

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Whistle while you work.

1 Reply

@vikorr,

Quote:

Well, your auditory examples were clear as well (but very few people have this as a strength). Your 'feeling' examples were quite poor.

I am a normal person with normal visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory, olfactory representational systems. I am able to have empathy, and can feel people.

The point that I highlighted my hearing is I have been surprised what I found about myself. It seems to me that my hearing is dominant or stands out among the five sensory systems in myself. As to the feeling examples, I don't think there are any obvious cases to state here. When people die, I am upset; When people smile, I would smile back. I can detect/feel if some people don't like me or like me without speaking--This is usual, so I didn't think those were worthy of saying here.

Probably more people are visual type. But there are also many people who are very sensitive to hearing, such as musians, tuners, people who have a gift in languages. I would say the auditory sensitivity of theirs are way stronger than mine.

Quote:

From colours? What value would anyone get out of such? Quite frankly, I would say only get analysis if you need help, or for the sake of interest.

I was wondering if I am a visual person that I am supposed to be more sensitive about the colours, but I more enjoy black, white. I only wanted black, white in the painting I paid for. I was asking whether this was helpful to you for analyzing my sensory systems, instead of characters, goals or anything.

I think I clearly understood myself about goals, characters, but I wanted to check if you could have detected more about my visual system for my verification in case I missed anything as I am reading a book which is relevant to this.

1 Reply

@ekename,

Whew thank you!

0 Replies

@iclearwater,

Quote:

I am a normal person with normal visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory, olfactory representational systems. I am able to have empathy, and can feel people.

The point that I highlighted my hearing is I have been surprised what I found about myself. It seems to me that my hearing is dominant or stands out among the five sensory systems in myself. As to the feeling examples, I don't think there are any obvious cases to state here. When people die, I am upset; When people smile, I would smile back. I can detect/feel if some people don't like me or like me without speaking--This is usual, so I didn't think those were worthy of saying here.

Probably more people are visual type. But there are also many people who are very sensitive to hearing, such as musians, tuners, people who have a gift in languages. I would say the auditory sensitivity of theirs are way stronger than mine.

This sort of reply is why it's hard to tell if you understand what they were saying, which had three simple parts:
- one sense is usually the strongest
- your senses find their way into what we speak (and consequently that sense will come through strongest in their speech)
- if you wish to be understood by them or influence them, speak in their language

They weren't saying that you only experience life through one or two senses - the did state that people experience life through all their senses...so I start wondering why you wrote the above.

Quote:

I was wondering if I am a visual person that I am supposed to be more sensitive about the colours, but I more enjoy black, white. I only wanted black, white in the painting I paid for. I was asking whether this was helpful to you for analyzing my sensory systems, instead of characters, goals or anything.

I think I clearly understood myself about goals, characters, but I wanted to check if you could have detected more about my visual system for my verification in case I missed anything as I am reading a book which is relevant to this.

You're confusing what your primary senses are, with the relative strength of your senses, and/or the amount of joy/pleasure you get from your senses.

Also, it's not a question I would not ever encourage a person to ask of another. Decide for yourself who you want to be (for example, from traits that you admire in humans), and work towards:
- strengthening those traits in yourself
- strengthening your sense of self / self acceptance (this is not done relative to others)
- accepting your weaknesses as a human (this is part of strengthening your sense of self - knowing you can't be perfect. No human can be), even as you work to lessen those weaknesses (we can never fully remove all weaknesses)

Note: if that clashes with 'self is an illusion has value', note also that I believe 'self is necessary'. You can work to accept every part of your self (I'm not sure if any human has ever achieved this, perhaps Buddha or someone similar) even while acknowledging it's illusion. That line though, starts a different philosophical discussion.

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Quote:

This sort of reply is why it's hard to tell if you understand what they were saying, which had three simple parts:
- one sense is usually the strongest
- your senses find their way into what we speak (and consequently that sense will come through strongest in their speech)
- if you wish to be understood by them or influence them, speak in their language

They weren't saying that you only experience life through one or two senses - the did state that people experience life through all their senses...so I start wondering why you wrote the above.

1. What you wrote above are also what I basically understood too. You commented that I don't understand them. Then could you specifically point by point tell me how my comments conflict with their meanings?

Not. Bandler and Grinder don't instruct the reader to sense, but speficially teach the reader the method --to notice the predicates, those verbs, adjective, and adverbs with exericises in their book. That's why they said NLP is learnable. Did you read their book named the Structure of Magic?

If you are not sure whether I fully understand their meaning, I wonder why you never directly ask me to elucidate that for you so you can verify, but try to interpret my words? Is there anything that blocks you to ask me directly?

Your words conflicts with each other. Previously you said I don't fully grasp and now you said it is hard to tell. Is it hard to tell" same with "I don't full grasp"?

I wonder what type of person about sensories you think. Previously you told me that I am visual.

You also told me in the West most people are visual. I wonder why you do say "in the west", don't you think the five sensories are universal among the human beings if people are physically healthy?

2. Not all people realise or completely understand themselves. Sometimes outsiders could have a better observations when the persons themselves. That's why Buddha refers to the person reach the enlightenment.

And that is why psychotherapists can work on their clients, but the clients cannot work on themselves.

If you don't look in a mirror, you would hardly not notice there is a smear on your face in such a case. Can you possibly sense that?

In the hypnotic induction, if the hynotists don't tell the client most people would even notice their hearts are beating.

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Though you have made some summaries about Bandler and Grinder. In order to prove I understood them, and I still can prove myself.

Quote:

Meta -So What

SPEAKING THE CLIENT'S LANGUAGE ---Page 16

This is the subtitle in Chapt 2, Vol 2. They specifically pointed out speak the client language.

Quote:

Exercise Matching Predicates

This is how they instruct reader to identify people's language.

Quote:

Client (visual) My husband just doesn't see me as a visual valuable person.

Therapist(kinesthetic): How do you feel about that?

Client(visual): What?
Therapist(kinesthetic): How do you feel about your husband's not feeling that you're a person?

Client (visual): That's a hard question. I just don't know.

At page 19, they illustrated the problem if a client and a therapist speak different languages, it would be difficult for them to efficiently communictae. The therapist didn't realise the client is visual type, and was unable to cope with the expressions of the client's.

Thus, the therapist would very likely to loose the trust or rapport from the client.

For the languages in the book, certainly Bandler and Grinder don't refer to English and Chinese, Japanese, German, etc. The languages refer to the sensory-based experessions:
Auditory: hear, loud and clear, sound,
Visual: see, a picture, big, red, small, square, etc.
Kinesthetical: feel, touch, softly, hard, etc.

These coments without quoting are my own words and understanding. And I don't copy from the books.

Do you still think I don't understand them or I assume I understand them? If so, you can test me with your questions.

0 Replies

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