Create Your Destiny

Ever wanted to know what someone is really thinking when having a conversation with them?  If you’re interested in what’s going on behind the curtain so to speak, NLP eye accessing cues can provide you with some valuable insight. They are not hard and fast, error free rules that work 100% of the time – trust and intuition will always play important roles in effective communication. However, eye accessing cues can be pretty accurate and prove quite insightful once you learn to calibrate them on an individual basis.

The basic model indicates that a persons eye movements are associated and calibrated with the activation of different parts of the brain. These cues will occur when a person retrieves information that isn’t easily accessible from their conscious mind.

The basic parameters indicate that when someone is looking to their left while thinking of a response, they are recalling information, while if they are looking to the right, they are putting themselves into a creative mental state. The breakdown is as follows:

Looking up and to the left: Visual recall

Remembering what something looked like.

Looking straight over to the left: Auditory recall

Remembering what something sounded like.

Looking down and to the left: Accessing internal dialogue.

Often referred to as “that voice inside your head”. When you say things to yourself like “great job”, or “I told you so”, etc.

Looking up and to the right: Visually creative

Someone asking themselves “What would that look like if I saw it?”

Looking straight over to the right side: Auditory construct

An imagined sound. “I wonder what that might sound like?”

Looking down and to the right: Accessing feelings

Peoples eyes generally go here when pondering emotions, physical sensations, pain, pleasure.

Calibration: Since we all don’t access information in the same ways, proper calibration is essential in reading eye movements. Practicing with your friends can be a great way to test this out and become more proficient. Begin by asking a number of presupposing questions to see what their default responses are. For example, you may ask them how they would look of they dyed their hair hot pink. Assuming they haven’t done so, they would access the visually creative area of their brain to formulate such an image. Did they look up and to the right as you expected, or did they look somewhere else? Similarly, you can ask them to think about their favorite song. Did their eyes go straight over to the left as they recalled it? A note of caution: if you interrupt a person while they are accessing information it can throw them off. It is better to wait patiently and observe their eye movements. You can also learn a lot by watching TV talk and/or reality shows and taking notice of the eye movements that people make.

Notable exceptions: If someone has been practicing a particular response to a question, they won’t necessarily provide any accessing clues when reciting their well rehearsed story. Also, sometimes people don’t move their eyes when they talk. This can be due to social conditioning (“always look people square in the eye”) or the fact that the subject being discussed is either so well known or so recently accessed in their mind that there is no need to “look” for the information. Also, exercise great caution before assuming someone is untruthful. If you ask them something they have not thought about before they might have to construct a mental image of what you are talking about and thus would look to the right.

Conclusion: Even given these caveats, there is still a lot to be gleaned from watching people’s eye movements. With practice you will become a better listener and learn more about the people you interact with than you may have thought was possible.

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