A nice story from my college days which is apt to discuss sub-modalities; Junior college days to be exact. The youthful creative mind was at it’s peak and these were the ‘Wonder Years’ in real sense. I had finally found my ‘Winnie’ but she was not quite staying in the same neighbourhood as was shown in the TV show. It required some 500 rounds of pedalling on my Hercules bicycle to reach her place. Well, not exactly her place. My school friend’s place who stayed next-door and shared the compound wall. The chemistry happened over that compound wall for a month or so.

This place was a nature-embracing locality with narrow lanes and green cover. It also had a typical small narrow bridge over a canal. You wouldn’t want to listen to your Walkman if you are going for a walk in that locality. The chirps were too compelling. It was mid-August in 1996 and Pune was only staring at grey skies but there wasn’t too much rain. But it was grey and green which made it romantically ideal.

Now the chemistry in the brain was also compelling and now it was time to finally cut loose and ask her out. I knew her Maths class would get over till 5.30 PM and she would reach the bridge at around 5.45 PM on her blue BSA SLR. The question was, how do I stop her? How do I talk to her? Possibly, I could have lots of logs of wood as obstruction on that bridge to make her stop. Maybe I could just lie down on that bridge claiming to be unconscious. Amazing! I was watching too many Bollywood movies, it occurred to me at that moment. So then, I followed a simple traditional way of sticking my hand out and asking her to wait and then complete the verbal ritual. It went fine! She said, “No, I wouldn’t want to go out with you”, but she said that with a smile. Some silver-lining to look forward to.

But then years went by and I was in the second year of my professional course. This day that I am talking about was the first day in college for first year students. Out of 80 colleges in Pune, the girl from the bridge over the canal had found my college. We looked at each other and said, “Hey!”. In our minds I’m sure we both said, “What the F***!”. But then it wasn’t that bad with the second-year students organizing Fresher’s Party and hence we kind of got to know each other better.

Yes, there was a glimpse of that chemistry, but we were doing a good job of managing it. Okay! She was doing a good job. My mind was fumbling, tripping, falling (in love… Ha Ha!) exponentially day by day. I used to see a very colourful picture of her in my mind every night before dozing off to sleep. I used to hear her beautiful voice in my dreams. In fact, I used to recollect everything she said to me every day before I went off to sleep and her voice was beautiful even though I was re-creating it inside my mind. The visuals and sounds gave me the most outrageously romantic feeling, source of which I claimed to be the heart. What I have just described to you are the sub-modalities or the descriptions of the senses (3 out of the 5) internally. When I say internally, it is basically inside the brain or the mind. So, your pictures will have the description such as colour or black and white, moving or still, framed or panoramic etc. Similarly, the sounds will have its own descriptions such as rhythmic or not, where is it coming from, and so on. You know, this is analogous to a mixing device with some fine-tuning buttons on it because what I am claiming, and which has been claimed a long time ago by so many people that you can change these descriptions by yourself in your mind to think of a person or a situation differently. But I’ll come to that later.

For the time-being, let us go back to the day when there were two days left for the big day, that is, the fresher’s party. I don’t know if it was intentional or unintentional, but the girl mentioned that she had a boyfriend. Until that time, I wasn’t aware of the saying, “Ignorance is bliss”. So out came my sad song cassettes. Yes, I had categorized my music that way. We didn’t have MP3s in those days, or probably they had just started. So you can imagine the kind of hard work that went into getting this categorization done. Damn it! I was so sad. I couldn’t sleep. The visuals and sounds and the feelings inside my brain were troubling me to an amazing extent. I was never known (at least to myself) as someone who could be emotionally shaken. By the way, I’d like to point out one aspect here. The visuals, sounds and the feelings had the same descriptions as they were earlier. Remember this point.

The big day arrived and it was one hell of a party. One of most exciting evenings in my life because that’s when the girl said to me that she had played a prank on me the other day. I didn’t know what to say to her. Would anyone categorize that as even a prank? It was too exciting and painful because I kind of had a bladder-burst like situation due to the excitement. The girl had finally asked me out by clarifying that little prank. Obviously, she didn’t have a boyfriend and now she was giving me this piece of detail while dancing in the party under the stars so that I can be her boyfriend. Finally as I was going to bed that night, I had my visuals in full brightness and colour, sounds probably in Dolby Atmos and amplified feelings beyond measure. The next day and for around one year from that day, I was walking two feet above the ground because I was in love. Surely, I had crushes in the past but I never had a chance to give a Valentine’s day gift to anyone. This was big. This was more than just giving a Valentine’s day gift. Clearly, I was in love big-time.

Now here is the turning point. One night my visuals turned black and white, the sounds had deceit, well actually the feelings had deceit all over them and I just couldn’t get to hear that beautiful voice in my head. Something had changed. I had found out that the girl actually did have a boyfriend. She had lied to me, almost for a year. She didn’t deny it when I confronted her. “I was confused”, is what she said. Clearly now I wasn’t walking two feet above the ground as I had hit the ground reality so hard. I came out of this so quickly. I was hurt and it took me some time to get some sense out of this but I was out.

I’ll tell you who wasn’t able to let go. Take your guess. No, I’m not talking about the girl. I’m talking about the other guy who was also hurt because he fell, not from two feet above the ground, but probably 50 feet. Not literally, alright! She had lied to him as well. I kept hearing stories about him for a year after that. Almost 20 years after this, I got to meet him sometime in August 2017. I remembered the same August of 1996 because somewhere the girl was anchored to August month and the fact that I was meeting this guy. Remember that word (anchor) which I will be referring to in future as well. It was a get-together organized by common friends and finally I got to know him better. Turned out that he is a nice guy and a little sensitive even today. I remembered one of the Rapport related pre-supposition and was probably said by Abraham Lincoln, “I don’t like that person, I must get to know him better”. Then I asked him a question which I always wanted to ask him after I learnt NLP and sub-modalities in particular. I asked him why he found it so difficult to let go of her. Even today he doesn’t have an answer. But I do! Turns out, he used to have similar visuals and sounds and feelings about her as I did and they had certain descriptions. Obviously not exactly the same in content. But yes, he had certain descriptions for all three, what we term as sub-modalities, specific to this context. The only difference was, my sub-modalities changed after I got to know about the lie, and this guy’s sub-modalities didn’t. They stayed the same for a long time after he found out. In simple words, what that means is the girl retained the same place in his mind even after separating with her. Not for me! That’s why we hang on to the same person.

Think of a person you love and elicit the sub-modalities (finer details inside your mind related to the visuals, sounds, feeling, for that matter even taste and smell if that is relevant). Now think of a person you hate and elicit the sub-modalities of that person. These two sets of sub-modalities would never be identical by any stretch of imagination. When your impression about the same person, situation or thing changes, what actually changes inside your mind are these finer descriptions. Let me prove it to you that this is indeed the case. Let’s say you’re having food and somebody talks dirty. I know most people would just stop eating because they have started imagining things along with the food that they are eating. Their sub-modalities of that food item have changed in a matter of seconds.

So if your impression changes, the sub-modalities change. Is it possible the other way around? Yes Sir, yes Madam! If you mentally change the sub-modalities all by yourself, you start thinking differently. And I did it one day. Took away the craving of drinking beer. Not for me, but for my friend who wanted to let go of beer. I still have this question of what led him to break-up with beer but I believe very strongly in one pre-supposition of NLP, “Respect the other person’s model of the world”. So I took away his craving by changing his sub-modalities of beer to sub-modalities of urine. He let go so quickly.