Your mind doesn't just store pictures and sounds — it stores how big, bright, close and loud they are. Those qualities carry the emotion. Change them, and the feeling changes with them.
Every guide hands you a list of sixty submodalities and tells you to test them one by one. Nobody tells you which one actually moves you — because it is different for every person. Our free assessment walks you down the ladder in minutes and names your driver: the single dial worth reaching for in every technique from here on.
Completely private. Nothing you enter is stored, sent or seen by anyone — it runs entirely in your own browser. At the end, if you would like to, you can choose to share your result with Coach Rajiv on WhatsApp, and that conversation stays strictly between the two of you.
Submodalities are the fine qualities of your internal experience — how bright, large, close or colourful an inner picture is, how loud or fast an inner voice sounds, where a feeling sits in your body. If the senses (sight, sound, feeling) are the modalities, submodalities are their settings. They carry much of the emotional charge of a memory or thought, which is why adjusting them changes how the experience feels.
Bring to mind a memory you love. Notice it is probably large, bright, close and in full colour, likely moving. Now think of something mildly dull from last week. That one is likely smaller, dimmer, further away, likely a still image with the colour drained out. Same mind, same machinery — different settings, and a completely different feeling.
That is the whole principle. The content of a memory is fixed; its structure is not. When you take a picture that troubles you and push it away, shrink it, drain its colour and make it still, the emotional grip loosens. When you take a picture of something you want and bring it closer, brighter and into motion, it pulls harder. This is the engine behind much of NLP, including the swish pattern and the intensity that makes anchoring hold.
Here is what most guides leave out, and it changes how you should use everything else on this page. Published submodality lists run to sixty items or more, presented as a flat checklist — as though each one does a predictable job. They do not. The effect of a given submodality is personal. Making an image black and white weakens the feeling for most people, yet for someone whose happiest memories are old photographs, it can strengthen it. There is no universal key.
With two exceptions. Distance and brightness travel reliably across people, because they copy how the physical world actually behaves. Something close and bright is something arriving — a truck bearing down on you gets larger and brighter as it comes. Your nervous system reads near-and-bright as this matters now, and far-and-dim as this is over. Everyone shares that wiring. It is precisely why the standard swish makes the new picture closer and brighter, and why it works so consistently.
Which leaves a practical question nobody has answered for you. If most submodalities are personal, and there are sixty of them, how do you find yours without spending an afternoon testing every dial? The answer is not to test them all. It is to test them in order of likely impact, and to measure what happens.
Work down this order. In most people, the driver is found in the first three rungs — and once you find it, you can stop.
Rather than reading about the dials, turn them. This walks you down the testing ladder on one experience of your own, scoring the intensity before and after each change. Whichever dial moves your score most is your driver — the one worth using in every technique from here on. Nothing you enter leaves this page.
Six changes, about four minutes, one personal answer.
Bring one experience to mind.
Choose something with a mild charge — a task you keep putting off, a mildly awkward memory, a small worry. Please do not use trauma or anything severely distressing for a self-test; that belongs with a qualified professional.
How strong is the feeling right now?
Zero is nothing at all. Ten is as strong as it gets. Trust the first number that comes.
Distance
Now rate the feeling again, with the change in place.
Put the picture back the way it was before the next test, so each dial is measured on its own.
Your driver submodality
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These numbers are your own subjective ratings, not a clinical measure. They are useful because they are yours — and because the biggest mover is the dial worth reaching for first in any technique you use next.
Knowing your driver is the start. Knowing what to do with it — in an anchor, a swish, or before a moment that matters — is where it pays off. Send your result to our team and we will talk you through it.
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Your result is private to you — nothing was stored on this page. If you would like to, you can share it with Coach Rajiv on WhatsApp, and that chat stays strictly between the two of you.
These separate people who have read about submodalities from people who can actually use them. Each one is a mistake waiting to happen, and each is easy to avoid once named.
The moment you ask "is the image bright?", you have put brightness in the person's mind and half-answered it for them. Offer both poles instead and let them choose.
Not: "Is it in colour?" Instead: "Is it in colour, or black and white?"Some submodalities are digital — they are simply on or off, like colour or black and white, framed or panoramic. Others are analogue and run along a range, like distance, size and volume. Digital ones you flip; analogue ones you slide until something changes.
Digital: colour, associated, framed. Analogue: distance, brightness, volume.This is the error almost everyone makes. A kinesthetic submodality is a physical sensation — warmth, pressure, weight, a tightening. The emotion is what that sensation means to you: it is the output, not the dial. Change the sensation and the emotion follows; reach for the emotion directly and you have nothing to turn.
Submodality: tightness in the chest. Emotion: dread about the tightness.Submodalities do not scale in a straight line. Enlarge a feared spider and it grows more frightening — up to a point. Keep going until it fills a city, then a planet, then the solar system, and it stops being frightening and becomes absurd. The dial passed a threshold and flipped. Practitioners use this deliberately; beginners hit it by accident and wonder what happened.
Watch for: intensity rising, rising, then collapsing into the ridiculous.Submodalities are grouped by sense. These are the ones worth knowing — the dials you can actually reach for.
| Sense | The Settings You Can Change |
|---|---|
| Visual | Brightness, size, distance, location, colour or black and white, focus, still or moving, framed or panoramic, associated or dissociated. |
| Auditory | Volume, pitch, tempo, tone, rhythm, direction the sound comes from, continuous or intermittent, whose voice it is. |
| Kinesthetic | Location in the body, intensity, pressure, temperature, weight, movement, texture, still or spreading. |
Two visual distinctions do more work than any other. Associated means seeing a scene through your own eyes, inside it, feeling it fully. Dissociated means watching yourself in it from outside, at a distance. Simply moving between those two changes the emotional intensity of almost any memory.
This is submodality work in its simplest form: find the settings, change the ones that matter, and check the result.
Choose a memory or thought with a mild emotional charge to begin. Save the heavy material for work with a trained professional.
Notice its structure. Is the image big or small, near or far, bright or dim, colour or grey, still or moving? Is there sound? Where does the feeling sit? This step is called submodality elicitation.
Adjust a single quality and notice what happens. Push the picture further away. Drain the colour. Turn the volume down. One dial, then check.
One or two settings will change the feeling far more than the rest. These are your critical submodalities — and sometimes a driver submodality, one change that shifts several others at once.
Leave the useful experience bright, close and vivid. Leave the unhelpful one small, distant, still and quiet.
Clear your mind, then bring the experience back. If the new settings hold and the feeling has shifted, the change has taken.
Practitioners build on the basic move with a handful of named methods.
Systematically drawing out the full structure of an experience — every setting, across every sense — before changing anything.
Comparing two experiences side by side — one that works, one that doesn't — to see exactly which settings differ.
The few settings that carry most of the emotional weight. Change these and the feeling moves; change the rest and little happens.
A single setting that automatically pulls several others with it. Find the driver and one adjustment does the work of many.
Taking the structure of a resourceful experience and applying it to an unresourceful one, so the second inherits the feeling of the first.
Stepping into an experience to feel it fully, or stepping out to observe it at a distance — the fastest intensity dial you have.
Because submodalities sit beneath so many other techniques, learning them makes everything else in NLP work better.
Only two travel reliably across people: distance and brightness. They mirror how the physical world behaves — something close and bright reads as urgent, something far and dim reads as finished — so pushing an image away and dimming it weakens the feeling for almost everyone. Every other submodality is personal, which is why the effect of colour, size or motion has to be tested on the individual rather than assumed.
Test in order of likely impact rather than working through a list of sixty. Rate the intensity of an experience from zero to ten, then change one dial at a time — distance first, then brightness, association, size, motion and colour — re-rating after each. The change that moves your score most is your driver. In most people it is found within the first three.
Because they do not scale in a straight line. Enlarging a feared image makes it more frightening, and only up to a point — push it far past that threshold, until the spider is the size of a planet, and it becomes absurd rather than frightening. This threshold reversal is sometimes called a blowout, and it is the reason "just make it bigger" can backfire.
No, and this is the most common confusion in the subject. A kinesthetic submodality is a physical sensation — warmth, pressure, weight, tightness. The emotion is what that sensation means to you, so it is the output rather than the dial. You change the sensation and the emotion follows; the emotion has nothing there to turn.
Modalities are the senses themselves — visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and also smell and taste. Submodalities are the finer qualities within each one: not just that you see a picture, and how bright, big, near and colourful it is. If the modality is the channel, the submodality is the setting on the dial.
Visual: brightness, size, distance, colour or black and white, still or moving, associated or dissociated. Auditory: volume, pitch, tempo, tone, and where the sound seems to come from. Kinesthetic: where a feeling sits in the body, its intensity, weight, temperature and movement.
A critical submodality is a setting that carries most of the emotional weight in a particular experience — change it and the feeling shifts sharply, while other changes do little. A driver submodality goes further: adjusting it pulls several other settings with it automatically, so one change does the work of many.
Mapping across means taking the submodality structure of an experience that works well and applying it to one that doesn't. You elicit the settings of something you feel confident about, then rebuild a task you avoid using those same settings — so it starts to carry the same pull.
Contrastive analysis is comparing two experiences side by side to find exactly where their structures differ — a belief you hold firmly against one you doubt, for instance. The differences show you which submodalities are doing the work, and therefore which ones to change.
The idea that mental imagery has qualities, and that those qualities relate to emotional intensity, is well recognised — vivid, close imagery tends to feel stronger than faint, distant imagery. NLP's broader claims are treated with caution in mainstream psychology, so submodality work is best used as a practical tool for self-management and coaching rather than as a proven treatment. For distressing memories or trauma, work with a qualified professional.
Submodalities put to work — shrink the trigger image, explode the new one, and change a habit.
NeuroLink a chosen state to a signal — and use submodalities to make that state strong enough to hold.
NeuroThe wider skill of choosing your state, which submodality work gives you direct access to.
Reading about the settings is one thing; finding the driver submodality in a real experience is a skill you build with practice. Learn it on a certified NLP programme with an NLP Master Trainer.