A Pragmatic Guide To Communication & Change.pdf - NLP Info Centre

fold. First, the person begins to feel more at ease with you and is more likely to trust you:
"Ah! Someone who really understands me!" Second, you create an environment in which
miscommunication is much less likely to occur. This is because you leave no room for
contradictions between what you say or ask for and the internal experience - model of the
world-of the person you are talking with. Also, because you are more "like" him in his
experience, it is easier for him to "like" you.
Representational System Hierarchies
A person's preferred representational system is the one in which he generally makes the
most number of distinctions about the world. One way to determine which system a
person prefers is to give him the Representational System Bias Test (see Appendix 13 at
the end of this book). By tallying the scores as shown, you can determine a person's
representational system hierarchy." His preferred system will have a higher score than his
secondary system, and so on. This "ranking" of a person's representational systems has
some important ramifications. As demonstrated in previous examples, difficulties can
arise when two people who need to communicate each have different preferred systems.
This is especially true when the difference between the scores is large as in the example
below.
Person A: V-7 K-20 A-10 1)-13
Person a: V - 20 K - 6 A - 9 D - 15
47
44
Let us imagine that the well-intentioned counselor decides to respond to the above
situation by turning to the woman and saying, "It's obvious that you are upset. What are
your feelings telling you? Speak from your guts; share your emotions with us." In this
hypothetical example, the woman might reply with: "Well, I don't really know what you
mean. It just seems that everything I do is wrong. Things just aren't
45
what I pictured they would be when I got married, and my husband doesn't even seem to
care!"
The key to this interaction is in the woman's response to the counselor. She is being very
honest with him when she says she really doesn't know what he means. For him to persist
in asking her to "contact those feelings" or to "get in touch with her emotions" may lead
to a counterproductive session. This is a situation where using the same "language" as the
client could prove invaluable. Once he gains rapport with the woman, once she has the
sense that he really "understands" her, then he can begin to systematically alter his
language, "translating" the language of one system into another in order to effectively
communicate with both her and her husband. The next step is to teach the couple to speak
and understand each other's language. This can be done either overtly by talking about the
use of predicates or through example, by simply continuing to "translate" whenever
appropriate.
Functional Differences
It is perhaps the "mismatching" of predicates that accounts in part for the
confounding fact that "great" therapists can work miracles with some clients but
are almost totally ineffective with others. Preferred representational systems may
also play an important role in a therapist's choice of which psychotherapeutic