When you have the ability to watch a person’s eyes move, identify the eye pattern and follow a conversation at the same time, you will then be able to elegantly identify the unconscious strategy for how they do something.
In NLP, a strategy is our recipe or formula for how we process information for a response. We have strategies for absolutely everything in life – for how we learn, decide things, get motivated, communicate, make purchases, fall in love… everything! And, these strategies are very unconscious to us – could you answer the question – what process does your mind go through when you are learning something new?
Probably not.
However, with NLP you can engage someone in a conversation about a time they learned something new and watch their eye patterns to see a sequence of accessing cues you will start to elicit their strategy. This will be 2-5 eye movements that start to loop.
When you know how a person unconsciously comes to their outcome you can then play the strategy back to them in order to be more influential.
For example, if I want my child to easily start her homework – I can identify her motivation strategy for doing something she wants and then feeding that back to her. It may be that when she is motivated to play, her eyes move first to Visual Construct, to Kinesthetic to Visual Recall. Based on this, I could guess with pretty good accuracy (and if I’m wrong, that’s OK, I just change my hypothesis) that she visually imagines what she’s going to play, physically feels the fun of playing and then visually remembers a time like this before.
So, I can use my daughters strategy back with her – I could say something like “imagine what it will be like to be done with your homework for today, what will that feel like? Amazing I’m sure! Remember what that is like, to feel so good about being done for the day and having more time to do what you really want”.
Strategies in NLP is a very interesting topic. We take something that is so abstract and watch micromovements of the eyes to ascertain a sequence or recipe for how the mind makes order of something. This is a tool that you’ll be able to use at home, at work, in sales, parenting, negotiations, with friends; and if you are really clever, with yourself!