Anyone who learns NLP and pretends to master NLP must learn and master visualization. In NLP, we often refer to visualization as hallucination, which simply means to attend to inner experience as opposed to outer experience. You’ll also hear the terms “uptime” and “downtime” referring to the same phenomenon. “Uptime” means attending to outer experience and “downtime” means attending to inner experience.
So let’s go to our tips. But before we do, you must know two things. First, it’s important for you to master visualization for your own purposes, or self-improvement. It will also be important when you begin to model experts more closely and have to create representational models identical to theirs. Secondly, mastering visualization will enable you to effectively guide someone else to a specific representation or model.
So here are our 3 tips for more effective visualization:
1. Enrich your sensory experience. The term “visualization” points directly to the visual system and can mislead us into thinking visualization is exclusively a visual ordeal. When you hallucinate, to use our NLP term, include as many sensory representations as possible. Include sounds, such as voices, environmental sounds and others. Include hallucinatory physical sensations, such as temperature, touches and others. Also include tastes and smells whenever possible. When you do so, you’ll find that your visualization will have a much more potent emotional effect on you.
2. Involve movement. When appropriate, use your physiology to express with your body what you’re visualizing. If you’re imagining yourself running, it will be more effective if you stand up and breathe strong. If you’re imagining yourself relaxing, it will be more effective if you’re lying down. Manifest in your body the emotions associated with the visualization. Sometimes, you might even vocalize when this happens. Countless times I’ve found myself letting random sounds out of my mouth to intensify the feelings.
3. Enhance detail. You must train yourself to add detail to your visualizations. You’ll achieve much stronger results when your visualizations are in greater resolution. Notice the actual color of what you’re seeing. Notice where specifically on your body you can feel the wind blow. Notice from which side of your head you can hear a train’s whistle. Not only will this enhance the emotional results of your visualization, but it will also sharpen your thinking.
Visualization is a fundamental of NLP. As with all fundamentals, you must practice, practice, practice. It’s something you must do with passion and without stress, every single day in order to achieve results. To follow the farm analogy, you must sow and care today to reap the harvest tomorrow
But it’s easy. Not only easy, but fun. Plus, you’ll get incredible other benefits from visualizing. Don’t trust me on this; check for yourself.
About Martin Messier
Martin, Many thanks for this and the guidance on finding ‘SMD drivers’. I can see that I and my clients will benefit greatly if I’m much more precise about this. I used to just vaguely ‘mush up’ all the SMDs together, having a random go at brightening, intensifying, distancing, etc. But just yesterday, after years, I suddenly noticed with myself that there’s one key visual that lessens negative impact greatly for me, compared to all other visual variables: it’s turning things from colour to a vague, grainy black & white. This seems to give more ‘relief’ even than distance. I’m guessing this is what you eman by a personal ‘SMD driver’/ I’ll follow and practice your posts on this. Thanks, Mell