Fun with space

Photo: Power lines by shoothead


One universal human characteristic is the tendency to sort and organize our understanding of the world spatially. We are born into space and time, and our internal world is build around space and time too.

If you watch someone talking they will tend to gesture to where information and objects are in their imagination. Some of these gestures may be in corporal space - pointing to parts of the body when referring to emotions for example. Other gestures may refer to where they imagine events in the past or future to be, or to concepts that float somewhere in mental space.

As quantum physicists say time is what keeps everything from happening at once, and space is what keeps everything from happening in the same place.

There is a huge amount of information available for people willing to observe, and you it can be used in all kinds of ways, in teaching, sales, therapy, communication and influence.

In this article I am mostly interested in ways to use the tendency of the mind to code in space to explore characteristics or self concept.

For a long time in NLP people have used the tendency to code time spatially. A lot of people think o f the past behind them, or to the left and the future ahead, or to the right. Like anything else in NLP there are plenty of individual variations in these patterns.

This resulted in people explicitly laying out time as a line along the floor, which can be walked on to explore conceptions of the past or future, and stepped off to get some perspective on the whole flow of time. This has great application in planning, coaching and therapy.

Recently I stumbled across another related idea. You can code a quality spatially along a line. For example confidence, or patience, or playfulness. Choose what you would like to increase.

If you imagine a line stretching in front and behind you. Where you stand is your current level of whatever quality it is. If you take a step back that quality will diminish, and if you take a step forward it will increase.

To play with this I recommend starting slowly to explore along the line. Take a step back, and notice how your sense of the quality can decrease. Why back? Because most people find it easier to imagine regressing in terms of their desired qualities than progressing.

So take a step back, and notice the difference. Then take another step back, and notice the difference. Then step forward again, and again. Doing this begins to establish the sense of control of these qualities, and builds a relationship with intensity of the quality and the distance along the line.

Once you have the sense of control, then you can begin to walk forward beyond your baseline level. Keep walking forwards and backwards, playing to develop an increasing sense of freedom on what is personally possible for you with this quality.

The aim is to familiarize yourself with new levels of a particular quality. At different points along the line you can ask yourself what it would be like to be in a particular situation.

If you have a small space to walk in then you can imagine that a short distance is a large change in quality. If you have a big space you can still imagine that a small distance is a large change in quality. Establish the relation between distance and quality firmly, then walk way beyond your old limits...

Ideally you come off the line with a new baseline level for the quality, and greater choice and comfort at a whole range of different levels.

Now as I write this up I have had another idea of how to use this concept. But I will need to test I before I write it down. So while I test my new idea, you are free to test this one. You could pick curiosity as a quality to explore. The further you walk the more curious you can become as to what my new idea is!

OK so I am keen for you to come back and visit my blog, but curiosity is genuinely a great quality to develop, for all kinds of reasons.Of course you do not have to go with my recommendation, just be curious enough to wonder what quality could you really enjoy sharing sharing with the world?