How Are Submodalities Useful in My Daily Life?

This is exactly the question that appears in my coaching alliances time and again and to finding the answers to which I’ve devoted many a step in time along my coaching path of life.   So here’re some of the findings mostly my dear clients, but even I at times, have found.  I hope they’ll benefit you somehow!

Well, one of my coaching conversations revealed that my client didn’t know how he breathed.  So to help him discover, which was important in the context in which we found ourselves by then, I decided to give him the following guidance:

• Place your hand on your chest and observe your breathing for a few seconds.  Does your hand move or not?
• Now place your hand on your diaphragm and observe your breathing for a few seconds.  Does your hand rise and fall along with the pattern of your breath here?
• Now repeat with your hand on your belly.  Once you find out where you actually breathe, you’ll have a useful starting point.
• Now observe: is your breathing fast or slow?
• Is your breathing deep or shallow?
• Are your inhales short and exhales long, vice versa, or equally long?
• Do you inhale with your nose and exhale with your mouth, vice versa, both with the nose, or both with the mouth?
• Can you hear yourself breathing?
• If yes, can you hear your inhales but not exhales, vice versa, or both?
• How loud is your breathing?
• Is it smooth or wheezing [as do people who have asthma]?

These questions will reveal submodalities.

Another beautiful example of how you can use submodalities is when you are self-diagnosing a health problem – and perhaps assessing whether it’s serious enough to see a doctor, or preparing for how you’ll explain it to the doctor, or considering what to do next.  Let’s take pain as an example.

• Where exactly is this pain located?  Be as precise as possible when pinpointing it.
• How intense [strong] is it [perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10]?
• Is it static or does it even seem to be moving?
• If it feels like as if it were moving, where does the movement start, go, and finish?
• Does the movement have a direction?
• How does the pain get from the place of origin to the destination [if it seems to move]?
• Is the pain continuous [dull ache] or intermittent [throbbing]?
• Does the pain feel weighty [heavy] or weightless [light]?
• Does the pain have pressure to it?
• Does the pain feel warm or cold?  How warm or how cold?
• Does the pain have a sound?
• Does the pain have a color?  Or can you even see all the stars behind your eyelids?

These are the submodalities of pain.  Excellent for those whose heads [frequently?] give them migraines, whose backs or heads ache with tension, etc.   Once you know the submodalities, you can work with them.

Another example: do you always mislay your keys and then waste half and hour looking for them?  Well, where are the submodalities in that?

• First of all, did you take a mental picture of the keys on the surface where you last lay them?
• If you did, was that picture in color or black and white?
• How near or far from your face could you see that mental picture?
• Did you see it clearly or was it fuzzy?
• Did you see it right in front of your face, slightly up and to the right, slightly up and to the left, down on the floor, or in one of the bottom corners of your visual field?
• Was your mental picture bright or dark?
• Was the picture still or moving?

And some readers of this article will love this example! Do you ever talk to yourself – either aloud [perhaps when no one is around] or inside your head / body without you actually pronouncing any words?  Well, I’ve never yet met a person who wouldn’t.  But the fact is that this internal dialogue can well be nastily harsh, critical, or cluttered – and the most insidious thing is that we may not realize it, because it’s so much part of us that we’d never think of examining it, let alone treat our internal dialogue as the starting point to solving our problems!  So here go some submodalities that can help a person pacify their nastily harsh, too critical, or even cluttered internal dialogue:

• Where exactly is your internal dialogue – the voice inside your head / body located?
• How loud [on a scale of 1 to 10] is it?
• Whose voice is it?  Yours?  Your mother’s?  Partner’s, schoolteacher’s, or someone else’s?
• Is this voice high-pitched [shrieking or howling] or low-pitched [deep, resounding, reverberating]?
• How fast does it talk?
• Do you hear it in stereo or just through one side in your head / body [mono]?
• What accent does it have?
• Does it emphasize certain words?
• Does it sound smooth, rich, guttural, nasal, or grating?

As I said before, once you know the submodalities of anything, you are in the position of working with them = tweaking them.  How?  By playing experiments on yourself.  Turn the volume down a little.  listen now.  Is it more comfortable or less comfortable than it was originally?  Turn the brightness up a little.  Does this feel better or worse than the original?  Make the throbbing of the pain throb in longer intervals or at a slower pace.  Does this ease the intensity of the pain a little?  I hope you get the idea.  And the best benefit of working with submodalities is that you can do it anywhere and without the outer world knowing!