How is it possible to learn NLP in virtual worlds when you have to calibrate facial expressions, and body language during training? Well the key is in listening to voice tone, and noticing the linguistics and also knowing how to design feedback channels for the work you want to do with them. In 2007 I created an NLP workshop entitled ‘Making Sense of NLP’ which ran for a 3 hour period on a weekend day. One of the things I did to first check if they could make visual representations is get them to think about their real life self as it was now and make change to that image, such as standing up or changing an item of clothing or posture. I then got them to feed back to me in chat what changes they made and what difference it had made to how they thought of themselves. I not only asked them to change what they saw but also to change it to a more enhanced version of themselves to ensure they focussed on the positive.
The next thing I did was to introduce them to the idea of sub modalities and how to elicit them using the standard list of what was inside other’s pictures of a time they felt really good. Each person got to ask a partner what the qualities of their images were like when they were thinking of something good. What I found is that people in the virtual class room were surprisingly compliant, and were able to follow the instructions really well. I walked around the virtual groups just as if I was an assistant, as I had been in real life helping people with questions if they needed clarity or assistance. The difference between a real life seminar and the virtual were becoming less defined as it felt like I was actually there with my students in real-time. In many respects, not having the distractions of the body language and the facial expressions helped them to focus more keenly on the topic of eliciting sub modalities which was basically an imaginary task in real life that could be translated very aptly into the virtual realm.
To bring this idea even further, we began to elicit the modalities of motivation using the tools to represent the size, shape colour, texture and movement of the structure of motivation. Not only that we began to construct more enhanced versions of their motivation that people could actually interact with and share, by walking into it and letting other students walk into their 3D representation as well. This was great for being able to ‘step inside’ the mind of another person’s model of the world as related to how they viewed motivation. This is not possible in real life as we can only imagine what is going on, where as in Second Life, we could literally see what the other person was seeing and experience what they were experiencing. Richard Bandler’s confusion to understanding is a similar process whereby one person maps the sub modalities of their confusion over to the other person’s map of understanding – which as you can imagine – does get very confusing. However after having done a virtual reality version of a sub modality mapping exercise, people were in a much better position to understand how other people get confused.
Nina Lancaster’s Second Life Avatar – trains virtual NLP Students how to elicit sub modalities of motivation at The Healing Pool virtual class room.
