Using Submodalities to Amplify Emotions

Posted by Keith Livingston on July 9th, 2007 filed in Submodalities

Using Submodalities to Amplify Emotions

Today’s topic is yet more ways to amplify emotions. It is so important that emotions be powerful in our hypnotic suggestions and in our NLP work.

Now, the qualities of those sounds and pictures and feelings are what are important to us here. So, you might have a quality of a picture, for instance, in terms of its location, or its color saturation, or its size, or whether it is 3-D or flat.

The qualities of sound might be tone or location, rhythm. The qualities of a feeling might be where it is located in the body. Is it moving? Does it spin?

So, one of the things that we do when we step someone into an experience, for instance, where they have had a feeling that they want to have, like confidence. So, we step somebody into a time when they were massively confident.

And you say, “What do you see in your mind’s eye?” And they say, “I see this image of a man crossing a finish line, and he is in first place.”

(More text below video)

Change the Qualities of the Thoughts to Change the Intensity of the Feelings

Now, you can play with the sub-modalities of that image to see what it is that can really boost the power of it. You say, “OK. Take that picture and pay attention to the feeling. Move the picture closer. What happens to that feeling?”

Well, nothing happens to the feeling. “OK. Put it back. Turn the color up. Make it more colorful. What does that do?”

“Oh my gosh! That increases the confidence.” So, you play with the sub modalities, all of the qualities of those images, sounds and feelings until you get a quality that you can play with that really boosts the power of the emotion. You can play in all the rep systems, you can boost the power in all the rep systems, and this is an incredibly exciting and useful way to boost the power of those emotions so that our suggestions and our NLP processes can be even more effective.