Submodalities are the fine distinctions we make within each Representational System. They effectively help us to remember what we have seen, heard, felt, smelt and tasted both externally and internally through our imaginations.

These submodalities are essentially the smallest building blocks of each and every one of your thoughts. They can of course be visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory in nature.

Working with your submodalities can effectively help you to take control over your internal experience. In other words, it can help you to control how you interpret the world around you and therefore how you feel about these external experiences. As such, you can train yourself how to consciously influence the emotions you experience within at any given moment in time.

For instance, submodalities can be adjusted using brightness, distance, location, color, size, association and disassociation. Adjusting these submodalities as you think and reflect upon a particular experience will help you to effectively strengthen or weaken the emotions associated with that experience. As such, you are effectively able to control how you process and respond to your environment.

• Read more: Understanding Submodalities