Do you remember when you first learned about Eye Accessing Cues? I do. I thought it was one of the strangest things I had heard of. I was like “Really? So, you’re telling me that I can find out how someone is thinking by where their eyes go? Yeah right.” I had to see it to believe it. And, as we progressed with Eye Accessing Exercises in my Prac, I became a believer. Really. I found out that there was purpose behind our eye movements.

But, as I progressed into life… I found out that it was hard to learn and had little real life applicability.

Or so I thought.

Stemming all the way back to the late 1800’s – William James was the first to identify some meaning to eye movements. Then, from an NLP perspective, in 1977 NLP developer Robert Dilts conducted a study at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco attempting to correlate eye movements to particular cognitive and neruophysiological processes. Dilts used electrodes to track both the eye movements and brain wave characteristics of subjects who were asked questions related to using the various senses of sight, sound and feeling for tasks involving memory (right brain processing) and mental construction (left brain processing). As a result of these studies, and many hours of observation of people from different cultures and backgrounds, the NLP Eye Accessing Cues were developed.

While I thought this was great information, and very useful should a question about eye movements come up in a trivia game, when I first learned about it, I was befuddled as to where it would really come in handy.

So, with contemplation and curiosity I set out to find that answer. The answer that I have now and that I share with my NLP students is this “identifying eye accessing cues helps me to ask better questions”. Sure, I can also know if someone is getting a picture, hearing a sound, feeling something or thinking something – and that helps me to communicate – but I can ask better questions. Questions that are more direct and purposeful.

For example, a few weeks ago I was talking to a friend about a possible career change she is thinking about. She was at a stuck point and said to me “I just don’t know where to start”. As she said this, her eyes moved up and to MY right (Visual Remembered). And I asked her “can you remember being stuck like this before?” (based on our conversation and her eye movement, I presupposed that she was remembering a previous stuck time). She answered that yes, she had been stuck before and told me the pitfalls she had faced before and feared facing again. All of this from asking a question about what was happening inside her mind.

Depending on where her eyes had gone would change my question. Let’s look at some possible questions based on eye movements.

• Visual Construct: “What do you imagine happening?”
• Auditory Remembered: “Has someone helped guide you in the past?”
• Auditory Construct: “What are you hearing that tells you that?”
• Kinesthetic: “What emotions do you notice about being stuck?”
• Internal Dialogue: “What do you tell yourself about being stuck?”

As with anytime when I am presupposing (guessing) what is happening in someone’s mind, I might be wrong. I’m OK with that. Remember, no failure – only feedback. If have presupposed wrong, I drop my guess and try again. But, there is a good chance that if my question is related to the person’s eye patterns, it is going to be fairly close to what is going on.

Of course, there are other things that Eye Accessing Cues are good for – but for me, this is the thing that I do most with them – ask better questions!

So, how do you learn how to watch eye movement AND listen to a conversation? Well, start with TV. Turn the volume down and just watch eye movements until you can easily and unconsciously know what it means, then turn the sound back up and continue the task while you listen to words and watch the eyes. With practice, this skill with come quickly and have a lifetime benefit!

Remember – you can’t identify someone’s Primary Representational System from eye moments, its’ not a very useful tool for building rapport and it isn’t magic. What it IS, is a great tool for communication and understanding people.

Want to know more? We’ve got a great chapter in our 30 Days to NLP book. You can buy the e-book in PDF or for your Ipad, Kindle or Nook for only $19.95 – or the softcopy version on our website or on Amazon. www.30daystonlp.com. Hey, it’s a great book! And if we don’t tell you about it – how will you know???

Are you going to be on the look out for eye patterns?

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