The NLP Eye Accessing Cues

The NLP Eye movements indicate how a person is thinking - whether they are imagining a future or past event, internally re-hearing a sound or making up a sound, talking to themselves, or attending to their feelings.

Why pay attention to eye movements?

Being able to notice a person's eye direction movements - and to recognise what they mean for that particular individual provides information about how they are processing (or 'thinking' in the broadest sense of the term).  

Often even the person themselves will not be aware of how they are thinking yet it is available for the sharp-eyed and skilled observer.

So, let's say, you are explaining to a colleague how to do something and they say they do not understand - while looking UP to either the left or the right (indicating that they may be visualising or trying to visualise). This could indicate that they need you to demonstrate, rather than verbally explain, so they will be able to see how to do it. 

The 'Standard' Eye Directions

The 'standard' eye movement directions as mapped out by NLP co-developers John Grinder and Richard Bandler are:

(Imagine this diagram superimposed on the person’s face. So their Kinaesthetic direction is to YOUR left as you face them.)

Be careful - it's not 'carved in stone'!

These standard eye directions will usually apply in the case of normally organised right-handed people. But it is quite important to remain aware that this diagram is a starting point only. 

It would be lovely if we could take this map and know instantly what a person is doing internally. But people differ and not everyone will have the same pattern. Treat this diagram as a starting point only - and use your NLP observation skills to establish what they do. (Developing this skill is a fundamental part of our in-depth NLP Core Skills course.) 

So when your friend looks up to their left or to their right this doesn't necessarily mean that they are thinking in pictures - it simply means they are looking in this direction and doing something internally.

You have to establish what they mean using your 'sensory acuity and calibration skills'. (Another Practitioner skill - it is the highly developed ability to recognise these very subtle behaviours and to 'calibrate' or recognise what they indicate for the particular individual with whom we are communicating.)In other words when they look in this direction do they make pictures or do they do something else?  

Left or right?

So does it make a difference whether they look up to their left or up to their right?

Not for practical purposes. Most NLP courses do teach that when a person looks up to their left they are making pictures and when they look up to their right they are remembering pictures.

Now while this may be true for some or even many people, it's a highly unreliable process.Far better to keep things simple, recognise they are looking in one of the likely Visual Thinking directions, and then use the content of what they are saying and how they are saying it to gauge whether they are making up pictures are actually remember them.

This differentiation between looking up to the left and up to the right has given rise to the NLP Lie Detector myth:

http://pegasusnlpblog.com/nlp_lie_detector_technique

http://pegasusnlpblog.com/nlp-lie-detector-myth-again

And

There is another article on the NLP Eye Accessing Cues here

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