In introducing today’s part on Eye Accessing Cues in NLP, I would like to ask you to recall one of those interrogation scenes whereby a prisoner is been questioned about the truth. Have you witness one of those scenes? If you have, there will be a part where the focus shifts to the eyes of the prisoner. It is as if the eyes is hiding or telling something.
But it has become an acceptable truth that our eyes or rather, the movements of our eye balls does tell or hide something. This is the beauty of eye accessing cues in NLP. Where the eye balls move when a person thinks or talks, indicate a general mode of thinking. Let us explore further.
Fundamentals of Eye Accessing Cues
When the eye balls look upwards, the person is assessing a visual image in the mind. When the eye balls look laterally, the person is trying to access an audio sound track. When we look down, we are generally accessing our feelings. In eye accessing cues in NLP, these three modes of imaging refers to visual, auditory and kinesthetic modes.
In eye access cues, we also want to look out for eye movements to the left and right. Assuming you are facing someone. If you notice someone’s eyes looks to the left, he or she is trying to create an image, sound or feeling. Looking rightwards, indicate a recalling mode. Thus when someone looks diagonally up and to the right, he is trying to visually recall an image.
Conversely, when someone looks diagonally to the left and upwards, he is trying visually create an image. Some people call the latter’s case lying. This is what interrogators are looking out for when questioning their inmates by starring at them while asking the questions.
The diagram below is a summary of eye accessing cues is NLP.
Uses for Eye Accessing Cues in NLP
1. Understanding the learning modes of individual.
Learning eye accessing cues in NLP can help us better understand what kind of person we are dealing with. By offering the eye movements of a person in a conversation carefully, we will be able to pin point a person’s preferred learning mode. For example, if a person always looks up when talking, that is a person who learns best with visuals. In ensuing interactions with this person, it would be good to use more visuals for effective communication.
2. Accessing the correct mode of learning at the right time.
When a task or occasion calls for a feeling or kinesthetic mode, it would be appropriate to move our eye balls down to access our emotional domains. This is especially crucial in communication with feelings. In order to be effective communicators, empathizing with someone’s feelings is crucial. We can most effectively feel others by looking downwards.
3. Detecting false information.
Our eyes are dead giveaway when try to lie or conjure up a story. In order to use eye access cues effectively to detect false information, be attentive to the movement of eye balls when chatting with someone.
Your Experiences with Eye Accessing Cues
Before this post, did you know about eye accessing cues? Have you tried using this tool to analyze other people? How about your own usage of this tool to enhance creativity? Share your stories on eye accessing cues with us.
Hi Jimmy,
Eye Accessing Cues is very interesting, but the practical applications work in highly controlled situations only.
For example, it never did work for me to detect lies of others. It is not always clear what the right position is of an eye ball and the movement of the eye ball is always slightly faster than the actual reaction ( speaking, moving your body, face expression )
However, it helps me a lot to visualize better and remember what other people have said.
Example:
Move eyes to remembered auditory and ask yourself what somebody told me yesterday.
Move your eyes to imaginary visual and ask yourself which way to take tomorrow to the airport.
Move your eyes to kinesthetic and wonder how great this make your feel …
Thanks for sharing
marc van der Linden recently posted..What meaning do you give to your life?
Hi Marc,
Agreed, eye accessing cues is a very dynamic activity. It does take practice and experience to become a good eye reader. I think knowing the scientific basis behind eye movement is good. With this form of knowledge making eye contact becomes more relevant and powerful to make communication more meaningful. For example, if you are talking to someone who always look downwards, you know that they are really speaking with feelings. This make having empathy for people so much more relevant. Better connections and relationships can be built.
Hi Jimmy,
This is great, I learned about the eye movements from reading about body language as most of us know, non-verbal communication is more important than verbal communciation. Although some times it is hard to distinguish between all the cues. It takes practice that is for sure. ;) Thanks for sharing my friend
Dia recently posted..Things to be grateful for in life
Yes Dia,
Eye accessing cue can be tedious in the beginning. But once you start practicing and noticing more intently, you will get better. In the end, it about reading patterns of the person you are talking to. Where does the person look often when they talk to you? Don’t have to be fixated by every eye movement. We are after the character of the person. If the person constantlu visual create, you know not to trust that person so much.
Hey Jimmy,
It’s my pleasure to meet you and your blog. I found it through the recommendation of Adrienne Smith:)
This is an awesome topic to learn about especially due to its practical importance in our daily lives. We all use these eye accesing cues, mostly unconsciously.
I was part of some interogatories a while ago and the way their eyes react is different from person to person…criminals without experience or a simple witness are afraid to maintain eye contact for a long time..they are usually very scared and the dominant move is downwords.
On the other hand others are very confident and their eyes work like a laser. It’s more difficult in these situations to notice if they lie or not.
I found the diagram very useful and studying the eye contact is a cool experience although every person has specific ways to move his/her eyes. I now realize that knowing your tips can help us visualize better and access different feelings…visualising seemed hard for me in the beginning but now it’s getting better :)
Thank you for sharing! Keep up the awesome work here.
All the best,
Radu
Radu recently posted..Create online business success using these 8 habits
Hi Radu,
Sometimes when we are after ideas, all we have to do is to look upwards more often as we brainstorm and think. When we do that, we are triggering creative domains of our brain to work more. Hence more ideas. Walt Disney used to have a seat that forces someone to ly down facing upwards. In his meetings for ideas everyone adopts this seating posture to trigger more creative ideas.
Hard to imagine that all the movies we see when interrogation happens, the investigators are simply looking at the eye ball movements. That can tell a lot about what people are saying. I think all police officer are trained in this skill. Many criminals are as well.
Hi Jimmy,
I came across eye accessing cues when I read a little about NLP.
I used to try astrology to analyze people when I was younger. Nowadays it serves as a rough guide for me. But if I really wanted to analyze people or to know what they are thinking, feeling or what they would do, I would just simply divine the outcome. This is the best way to fully gauge the Tao of a person in my experience because you not only gauge their thoughts and feelings, you also know their goals and motives.
That said, when I need to think on my feet, I use my observations and intuition to gauge a person in conversation. Seeing the usefulness of eye accessing cues, I might just incorporate it into my approach so I can pick up more details.
I have a question. Are the eye accessing cues accurate for people from all over the world from all walks of life? Or does it only apply to certain people in certain circumstances?
Thank you for sharing this lovely article!
Irving the Vizier
The Vizier recently posted..The Nature of Worry
Hi Irving,
Generally speaking, the patterns of eye accessing cues are the same across all cultures and races. But there are exceptions when people access other modalities of their thinking when they move their eye balls. For example, some people have been known to trigger more feelings when looking up. By and large the pattern is the same across the board.
I like the way you accessing people’s Tao through your intuitive methods. I believe that this is a more powerful way to asssess people. Somehow, our feelings are the routes to the soul of the person. Physiological methods like eye accessing cues are more hardwire techniques that can be used to confirm what our hearts tell us.
Sometimes I’ll catch my eyes darting off into one direction or another as I’m thinking about things. I’ve tried to note what I was thinking and what direction my eyes went to.
Have you ever tried to move your eyes to the wrong side and come up with a constructed audio or visual image? I’ve tried that and I can tell you that it is much harder than letting your eyes move in their natural way.
Steve recently posted..The Problem with Overnight Success Stories
By and large, eye accessing cues works as how I described. I do know of instances that people can activate different modalities of learning when looking contrary to the norms.
Thanks for writing Jimmy. I find this area very interesting. One can usually tell when someone is accessing feelings because they look down. What I find with people is they will sometimes use words indicating if they are seeing, hearing or feeling in addition to moving their eyes in corresponding positions.
Hi Hiten,
Eye accessing cues are actually very powerful. It can help to detect what people are thinking and feeling and it can also help us think and process things better.