One of the best tools to develop is the ability to take in a bigger chunk of data at once, and to be able to interpret this naturally.
Another example is Milton Erickson, a very famous hypnotist who is dead now, had childhood polio. One of the side effects was that he was initially deaf — and he trained himself to figure out how a person’s voice sounded by looking at their throat.
Pay attention to what creates differences in voice quality. Lips forward and tongue back tends to produce a deeper tone. Taking up more space in the mouth deepens the voice. Some people speak out of their throat, so that vibrates, some people speak from the upper chest, some from the diaphragm, and some deeper down. You can see the difference in how their body moves when they talk. This is actually surprisingly easy to see if you actually pay attention to how people breathe.
One way of increasing sensory acuity is to notice the energy in your body. How does it flow? Where does it start, and then where, and where does it end up? Where are you breathing at right now? How would a person who is happy or totally certain of an outcome be breathing? How would they be standing?
Talking about senses, most people think of the 5 senses — or VAKOG. Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Olfactory, and Gustatory. In NLP these are called representational systems or modalities. The primary ones are visual, auditory and kinesthetic.
If you want to increase your auditory acuity, grab two friends… have them sit pretty close together, close your eyes, and have them snap their fingers in the same location and you tell them which one did the finger snap. You should get between about 30-70% of them correctly to be learning the skill efficiently.
If you want to increase visual acuity, look down at the grass. Did you know that every blade of grass is a different shade of green? It’s true. If you don’t see it yet, look closer and see what distinctions you can make. These distinctions from NLP are called submodalities.
If you want to increase kinesthetic acuity, pay attention to your body. Put your eyes down and to the right and scan your body — what muscles are the most tense? What muscles are the most relaxed? Can you feel the weight of your body sinking down into the chair? The air on your skin? The feel of the clothes on your body? The blood moving through your left earlobe? 🙂