It turns out that the way that each of us represents reality in our internal worlds is not identical. In fact, there are very many differences between individual perceptions of reality. For example - you might like to try this yourself - if you were to imagine a cow, in your mind's eye, what would come to mind? Is it an image? If so, is it two or three dimensional? Is the picture panoramic - in other words, could you walk around the cow in your imagination, if you were to try?

If you get a group of people to perform this exercise and then describe their individual experiences, you will come to realise that their internal worlds are far from identical. Some people do see things vividly, in full-colour and can easily manipulate the objects; others don't see a cow at all - and you can very easily demonstrate subtle differences in imagined visual, auditory and kinesthetic stimuli.

So what? Why does it matter that we all represent reality differently? Well, it matters a lot when it comes to communicating with other people - and that of course, is the stuff of life. We spend about two thirds of our waking time communicating - and generally, we do it quite badly. NLP can help us to understand why that is the case.

There are three specific difficulties we should consider when it comes to communicating with others:

- Insertions

- Deletions

- Distortions

An insertion is where we mentally put something into the communication that was not really there in the first place. A deletion is the reverse - i.e. we miss something that was actually communicated. The third difficulty - a distortion - can be more difficult to understand, but it is essentially a misunderstanding. In other words, the person listening makes a meaning from the communication that was not intended at all.

It's quite amazing, when you think about the scope for misunderstanding, in both verbal and written communications, that anything ever gets conveyed to another person properly.

But what can you do about these difficulties? Well, the most important things you can do is to learn how to listen. You might think that everybody already knows how to do that, but you would be wrong because hearing and listening are not the same thing. Hearing is a passive activity, but listening is an active one.

To learn how to really listen, you should practice Stephen Covey's Habit 5 - Seek first to Understand, then be Understood. Space does not permit a more complete treatment, but suffice it to say that most people want to do exactly the reverse - they usually want to speak first; and they want to be understood.

When you allow people to speak first, and really try to understand what is being said, instead of what you think is being said, then it can be truly said that you know how to listen. And, if you take this listening behaviour into each and every human interaction in which you are involved, it will absolutely transform your experience of reality.