We have seen that we experience our world in the five (5) senses or modalities. See Modalities click here.

Part of or beneath the modalities, or breaking down the modalities even further, we find the submodalities or subdivisions.

So as we think of something we have or we own, we make mental pictures, have sounds and feelings of our front door. Now. As we make a mental image or experience of that front door, the thought will have certain attributes or qualities.

Examples of these visual attributes could be that the mental picture we make will have, or will be:-

                    Number of Images
                    Motion or Still
                    Colour or Black & White
                    Bright or Dim
                    Focused or Unfocused
                    With or Without Borders
                    Associated or Unassociated
                    Centered or Wide Angled
                    Size of Picture (Lifelike?)
                    Sharp
                    3D or Flat
                    Close or Distant
                    Location
                    Narrow or Panoramic                            

As we think of our front door, it may be accompanied by sounds, and it could be that these auditory attributes will have, or will be:-

                    Number of Sounds
                    Sources
                    Volume
                    Tone
                    Tempo
                    Pitch
                    Pace
                    Quality
                    Duration
                    Intensity
                    Direction
                    Rhythm
                    Harmony
                    Which Ear

As we think of our front door, it may be accompanied by feelings, and it could be that these kinesthetic attributes will have, or will be:-

                    Location in the Body
                    Breathing Rate
                    Pulse Rate
                    Skin Temperature
                    Weight
                    Pressure
                    Intensity
                    Sensations

As we think of our front door, it may be accompanied by tastes and smells, and it could be that these olfactory or gustatory attributes will have, or will be:-

                    Sweet
                    Sour
                    Bitter
                    Aroma
                    Fragrance
                    Essence
                    Pungency

Not all of these submodalities or attributes need to be in existence for an experience to be, nor does it have to be that an experience would have to have a visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory or gustatory modality, it would have some, but not necessarily all. In other words, when you think of our front door there may not be any sounds (auditory).

An experience we have of our own door as we run it through our thoughts, may be different from our experience of the front door to our old school.

When we elicit the submodalities of both experiences or thoughts, we will notice that the results or submodalities reported will be different. Perhaps we associate the sound of children shouting with the school front door, that there could be a sensation of fear or fun, a smell of disinfectant that is not in our thought of our own front door. Maybe the position we place the picture, the location is different.

These submodalities are our own individual experiences, and one person will report different results than another, and they are a construct. If we change these submodalities, make the picture bigger or brighter, the sounds louder or quieter, change the feelings, we can change the meaning, the result or the outcome of that experience.

A quick and efficient way of changing the submodalities and thus our experience is by the NLP Swish Pattern.