You can make finer distinctions, of course. There are certain kinds of unconscious data which are immediately available. I say "How's your left ear?" Until you heard that sentence, you probably had no consciousness of your left ear. When you hear me say that, you can shift your consciousness to the kinesthetics of your left ear. That is easily accessible from unconscious to conscious. If I say "What color shoes did your kindergarten teacher wear on the first day that you went to school?" that's also represented somewhere. However, getting at it will take a lot more time and energy. So there are degrees of accessibility of unconscious material.
Typically a person arrives in your office and says "Help! I want to make a change here. I'm in pain. I'm in difficulty. I want to be different than I am presently." You can assume that they have already tried to change with all the resources they can get to consciously, and they have failed utterly. Therefore, one of the prerequisites of your being effective is to have patterns of communication which make good rapport with their unconscious resources to assist them in making those changes. To restrict yourself to the conscious resources of the person who comes to you will guarantee a long, tedious, and probably very ineffective process.
By the way, here in this seminar there is no way that you will be able to consciously keep up with the rapid pace of verbalization that will be going on. That is a systematic and deliberate attempt on our part to overload your conscious resources. We understand that learning and change take place at the unconscious level, so that's the part of you we want to talk to anyway. The part of your functioning which is responsible for about ninety-five percent of your learning and skill is called your unconscious mind. It's everything that's outside of your awareness at a point in time. I want to appeal directly to that part of you to make a complete and useful record of anything that happens here, especially the things we don't comment on explicitly, which it believes would be useful for you to understand further and perhaps employ as a skill in your work as a professional communicator— leaving you free at the conscious level to relax and enjoy your experience here.
The point we're at now is "So what?" You have all had some experience identifying accessing cues and representational systems. What do you use it for?
One way I can use this information is to communicate to you at the unconscious level without any awareness on your part. I can use unspecified words like "understand" and "believe" and indicate to you non-verbally in which sensory channel I want you to "understand." For example, I could say to you "I want to make sure you understand (gesturing down and to the audience's left) what we've done so far." My gesture indicates to you unconsciously that I want you to understand auditorily.
You can also use this information to interrupt a person's accessing. All of you make a visual image, and see what happens when I do this. (He waves both arms over his head in a wide arc.) My gesture knocks all your pictures out of the air, right?
Thousands of times in your life you said something or asked a question of someone and they said "Hm, let's see," and they went inside to create a visual image. When they go inside like that, they cant simultaneously pay attention to input from outside. Now let's say that you and I are on opposite sides about some issue at a conference or a corporate meeting. I begin to talk, and I'm forceful in presenting my material and my system in the hope that you will understand it. After I've offered you a certain amount of information, at some point you will begin to access your internal understanding of what's going on. You'll look up and begin to visualize, or look down and begin to talk to yourself or pay attention to how you feel. Whichever internal state you go into, it's important that I pause and give you time to process that information. If my tempo is too rapid and if I continue to talk at that point, I'll just confuse and irritate you.
What often happens is that when I notice you look away, I think that you aren't paying attention, or that you are avoiding me. My typical response in stress during a conference is to increase the tempo and the volume of my speech because I'm going to make you pay attention and drive that point home. You are going to respond as if you are being attacked, because I'm not allowing you an adequate amount of time to know what I'm talking about. You end up quite confused, and you'll never understand the content. If I am facilitating a meeting, I can notice whenever a listener goes inside to access, and I can interrupt or distract the speaker at those times. That gives the listener adequate processing time so that he can make sense of what is going on, and decide whether he agrees or disagrees.
Here's another example: If you can determine what a person's lead and representational systems are, you can package information in a way that is irresistible for him. "Can you see yourself making this new change, and as you see yourself in this process, do you have those feelings of accomplishment and success and say to yourself This is going to be good.?" If your typical sequence happens to be constructed images, followed by feelings, followed by auditory comment, that will be irresistible for you.
I once taught a mathematics course at the University of California to People who were not sophisticated mathematically. I ended up teaching it as a second language. The class was a group of linguistic students who had a good understanding of how language systems work, but did not have an understanding of mathematical systems. However, there is a level of analysis in which they are exactly the same. So rather than teach them how to talk about it and think about it as a mathematician would, I simply utilized what was already available in their world model, the notion of translation, and taught them that these symbols were nothing more than words. And just as there are certain sequences of words which are well-formed sentences, in mathematics there are certain sequences of symbols which are well-formed. I made my entire approach fit their model of the world rather than demanding that they have the flexibility to come to mine. That's one way to go about it.
When you do that, you certainly do them a favor in the sense that you package material so it's quite easy for them to learn it. You also do them a disservice in the sense that you are supporting rigid patterns of learning in them. It's important for you to understand the outcomes of the various choices you make in presenting material. If you want to do them a really profound favor, it would contribute more to their evolution for you to go to their model and then teach them to overlap into another model so that they can have more flexibility in their learning. If you have that kind of sensitivity and capability, you are a very unusual teacher. If you can offer them that experience, then they can have two learning strategies. They can now go to some other teacher who doesn't have that sensitivity of communication, and because they are flexible enough they will be able to adapt to that teaching style.
A lot of school children have problems learning simply because of a mismatch between the primary representational system of the teacher and that of the child. If neither one of them has the flexibility to adjust, no learning occurs. Knowing what you now know about representational systems, you can understand how it is possible for a child to be "educationally handicapped" one year, and to do fine the next year with a different teacher, or how it is possible for a child to do really well in spelling and mathematics, and do badly in literature and history.
You can also translate between representational systems with couples. Let's say that the husband is very kinesthetic. He comes home after working hard all day and he wants to be comfortable. He sits down in the living room, kicks his boots off here, throws a cigarette down there, gets a beer from the icebox, grabs the paper, and sprawls all over his chair, and so on. Then the wife, who's very visual, walks in. She's worked hard all day cleaning house so it will look good, as a way of showing respect for him. She sees his stuff scattered all over the living room and gets upset. So the complaint from him is "She doesn't leave me enough space to be comfortable, man. It's my home. I want to be comfortable." What she says to him at this point is "You're so sloppy. You leave stuff lying all over and it looks cluttered, and when it looks cluttered like that I know that you don't respect me."