Representational systems: re-presenting the world

One of the definitions of NLP "is the study of the structure of our subjective experience".  That includes the way that we represent (or re-present) our experiences of the world. 

You will be familiar with the idea that we pay attention to the outside world through our five senses:

seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting

These translate in NLP terms as:

visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory, gustatory

Sometimes you will just see the letters that stand for them:

V, A, K, O, G

Well, just as we see, hear, taste, touch and smell the outside world we also re-create or re-present those sensations in our mind, using our senses inwardly.

We use all of these systems, but we will tend to favour one over others.  This is what is known as the preferred representational system. 

Joseph O'Connor defines this in the NLP workbook as "the representational system that an individual typically uses to think consciously and organise their experience."

You might find references to representational systems in relation to learning styles.

For example a visual learner will want to see things (pictures, diagrams, handouts); an auditory learner will gather information from the spoken word, sounds, and noises; someone with a kinaesthetic learning style will want to learn through touching, feeling, holding, doing or practical hands-on experiences.

Increased awareness of these representational systems can help us communicate better with other people.  It can also make us more self-aware - perhaps of things that help us to learn, or get in the way of our learning.

Words that link to a particular representational system are known as predicates.  You can find out more about predicates here.