Martin Messier

November 17, 2023

NLP skills: reading eye accessing cues

One of the critical components of calibration is the ability to read and interpret eye accessing cues. Literally, the ONLY skill more important than calibration is observation.

Eye accessing cues are just a model. The co-founders don’t intend to make them an absolute truth in any way.

With that said, they generally clue us in correctly in which representational system the other person is processing.

But let’s learn how to calibrate using eye accessing cues. The way to do this is to ask questions that elicit the use of specific representational systems.

So you could ask the person:

“Remind me, what was the color of the second house we looked at?”

Pay attention to the person’s eye movements.

If the person is right-handed, (s)he will normally look up and to the left to access this visual cue.

Attention! Often times, the person might first repeat and re-hear the question in their mind prior to accessing the answer. Should (s)he follow that process, (s)he will first display a different eye movement pattern. This does not discredit the eye accessing cue model. It simply means that you need to pay close attention to all the processes that person follows before reaching an aswer.

Use questions to effectively calibrate how the person accesses specific sensory information.

Remember, you MUST practice to become proficient. With that in mind, here are four drills you can use to train yourself to calibrate eye accessing cues.

Drill 1: Come up with 5 questions you can ask to calibrate eye accessing cues for each representational system.

Drill 2: Apply! Ask each question to at least 20 people over the upcoming week and calibrate their responses.

Drill 3: Observe people’s eye accessing cues in every day conversations.

Drill 4: Play around with eye accessing cues yourself. Try to visualize while looking down. Try talking to yourself while looking up. Try to elicit a feeling while looking sideways.

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