Coaching with NLP For Dummies®

Creating and Using Mental Maps

NLP offers a commonsense view of human psychology. The NLP Communication model illustrated in Figure 6-2 explains how people create their mental maps.

Figure 6-2: The NLP Communication model.

All people, including your clients, go through the process Figure 6-2 illustrates. Specifically, they:

1. Gather specific types of information about an event through each of five senses.
   • Visual: sight.
   • Auditory: hearing.
   • Kinaesthetic: touch/feeling.
   • Olfactory: smell.
   • Gustatory: taste.
2. Filter the information in three ways:
   • Distortion.
   • Generalisation.
   • Deletion.

   See the later section ‘Filtering information’ for more on these filters.

3. Create an internal representation, or map, of the world around them.

   Internal representation refers to the pictures you see and sounds you hear in your head or the feelings that are generated within you, in response to the information you take in from the world around you. These sights, sounds and feelings are what's left of the information after passing through the filters.

4. Create a state of being that is a combination of their mental and physical states.
5. Behave in response to their state.

   For example, if you're feeling anxious, this feeling affects what you observe, the words you say and the sound of your voice.

Preferring one ...