What's up cuties? This is The Ritzu’s vibes Podcast, and if you're looking for that moment of inspiration that comes when you least expect it, then you're in the right place. In this space, we talk about what happens to us every day through a special lens, the martial path of the samurai, which that genius Ueshiba Morihei transformed into the art of Aikido. Don't know what I'm talking about? Then stay with me.
Do you want to convey something very important to someone who truly matters to you, and you want to ensure that the message comes across exactly as you have decided? But wait, how do you verify it? What if I told you there's a perfect system for effective communication? It's a method that uses the five senses and is called Representational Systems. Let's go! Did you know that once you identify someone's primary Representational System, you can leverage it to your advantage to enhance your communication skills? By working on your conversation partner's representational system, you can establish greater trust and effortless relationships. It took me years of coaching to understand how to apply it, not only in the practice of Aikido but also in my everyday life, and I thought it could be really helpful to talk about it.
In Aikido, it's essential to understand the person in front of us. Even though our communication is primarily physical, getting used to being touched and touching a partner can take a lot of time. Therefore, a fundamental element for me was understanding how the person in front of me manages their senses and consequently their approach to the reality around them.
Because each of us has a favourite sense and a sense through which we communicate. At times, we become aware of it unconsciously, but it's actually something with a very structured scientific approach. Were you already familiar with representational systems? Well, let's try to provide a definition.
The term representational systems refers to the ways through which individuals encode, organize, and attribute meaning to experiences acquired through the senses. It is through representational systems that people create their map of the territory and thus their reality. This concept comes from NLP or neurolinguistic programming, which is a model for studying intrapersonal and interpersonal communication with the goal of enabling individuals to achieve the most effective way of communicating and relating.
I studied a bit of NLP and its applications during my coaching course. It was crucial for me as an Aikido teacher not to project my mental map and expectations onto my students. I wanted to be as neutral as possible and capable of objectively analyzing their needs.
The worst thing we can do is treat our students as an extension of ourselves and demand that they do things as we expect, which is essentially the mistake we do with our children. As a teacher, I wanted to be a reference point that didn't create negative pressures. I considered it essential to delve into various coaching styles, and within this study, I was able to develop several methodologies that I use every day in the dojo and that everyone should use in their everyday lives.
The representational systems have always intrigued me, especially because on the tatami, it's the bodies that speak. The way they speak qualifies us as individuals. So, realizing that understanding the representational system, meaning the sense through which our interlocutor perceives reality, could radically change my way of communicating seemed extremely interesting and, above all, extremely useful to share with you.
So, let's delve into it. The experiences we live are read and evaluated by our brains through the five senses. As we were saying, each of us has a dominant representational system linked to a specific sense, and everything we experience will therefore be communicated with greater attention to a specific sense. The representational systems are essentially three: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.
Visual Representational System: These are individuals who speak very quickly, need to interact, and make you understand, providing you with a mountain of information all at once because they have to communicate quickly. They raise their voices because the faster you talk, the louder you speak, and they breathe superficially. They use a visual language like: have you seen this thing, keep an eye on this, I'd like to understand your perspective on this topic. Their keywords include seeing, obscuring, concentrating, vision, and looking. To give a glance, observe, imagine, and admire. They often memorize by seeing images and are less distracted by noises; they are less sensitive to sounds and have difficulty remembering verbally provided instructions because their minds tend to wander. Do you recognize yourselves? Some of you probably already do.
Auditory Representational System: These are individuals who speak at a moderate pace with a medium and modulated tone, diaphragmatic breathing, not superficial, not in the upper part of the lungs but lower, towards what we call the tanden, the center of our back. They have a harmonious tone and listen to sounds, words, stories, and how they speak to us with... hey, how does this sound to you? Listen here! This really resonates with me.
Their keywords include hearing, resonating, harmony, saying, dialogue, speaking, shouting, silence, announcing, sound, tone, melody, calling, whispering, concert, and dialogue. Auditory people, when speaking with someone, often move their eyes laterally and breathe in the middle of the chest. They often talk to themselves and can be easily distracted by noises. Some even move their lips when talking to themselves. They can easily repeat things to you, learn by listening, and usually love music and talking on the phone. They memorize through steps and procedures. They have sequences. Auditory people like to hear how they are doing and respond to a certain tone of voice or a set of words. They will be interested in what you have to say about your program, and their communication and verbal communication will be crucial, of course. I haven't imitated the tone of voice that goes up, goes down, etc., because I am the personification of the auditory system; practically everything I do is: does it sound good to you? When I read it, I thought, "They secretly watched me from above!"
Kinesthetic Representational System: These are individuals who speak slowly, have a low tone, and deep abdominal breathing. They experience sensations in relation to things and want to get hands-on. They say things like: give me your impression, what feeling do you have, I want to get my hands dirty in this.
Keywords include feel, pull, warm, touch, grasp, heavy, texture, viscous, grip, soft, urgent, impact. They will also spend quite a bit of time talking to themselves. Basically, a world of crazy people!
They want to know if your program makes sense; you have to give them time to explain what is being done and the reasons behind our questions. Paradoxically, their ability is very logical and analytical, and they seek clarification and understanding. I say paradoxically because someone guided by the body usually might seem more instinctive, but no, they want to engage 100% both body and mind in what they do.
The kinesthetic is the personification, for example, of my Aikido teacher. Seeing the description, I see his image—his very rhythmic and slow speech, the fact that he used movement for everything, his slow pace…
Representational systems are used because the moment we realize what our representational system is, we become aware of how we communicate, how we speak, and how we present reality to others. It changes a lot to ask you: "how does this sound to you" rather than telling you: "how do you see it." Our perception changes; "how does it sound to me," for example, immediately has an emotional flavour for me. I need to feel it on a visceral level because it changes radically. For instance, I am an auditory, so if you say to me "how do you see it," I stop at logic. I create a mental framework, precisely; I try to visualize that thing and understand it as it is presented to me. But if someone says to me "does this sound good to you," the brain is bypassed, and it immediately goes into the emotional sphere; it becomes an empathic way of asking how I perceive that situation. Since I am a logical type, I will still create a mental framework in my head, but while "how I see it" makes me focus on the structural aspect of the thing itself, "how sounds to me" makes me become part of that thing. It acts on my emotional sphere, and I'm saying this instinctively. I'm giving you an example that I hadn't prepared; I'm thinking about it now as I tell you, and it's absolutely true—the difference is the emotional sphere. Therefore, if we know our representational system, we will be able to understand how we communicate with others, and, of course, if we understand the representational system of others, we will be able to present things in the most effective way for us.
Something very interesting, by the way, to note is this: if we become aware of our interlocutor's representational system, we can adapt our language to the sensations to which they are most sensitive, so that our message is communicated to them as if it were their own. The moment they emotionally sense the essence of our message, they will empathize with it and make it their own, making it much easier for our thoughts to be conveyed and understood. Of course, this is not meant to be a way to deceive the interlocutor. The idea is not that, the idea is that I don't know if you have noticed, but essentially, we talk to ourselves; we don't really have interlocutors. Each of us has our personal monologue through which we experience our lives. I noticed this once: I had this student in the dojo, we were very close, and what I told her in the dojo often resonated in her everyday life, which made me very happy because I really wanted to guide her on some issues she was facing at that time and provide her with some thoughts. One day she comes to me and says, "By the way, what you said yesterday is fantastic because it really opened my eyes, and I understood this," and I said, "But really, no, because actually what I meant was something else, but what a trip you had". So, I realized that I had said things in the dojo, communicating a certain message, and my students had each understood what they wanted to understand from that message I was giving, adapting it to their lives, even to the point of thinking about something I had not considered at all. Whether we like it or not, this is what happens every day. We talk to our interlocutors, but to what extent are we truly understood? When we find someone who truly understands us, that's when we talk about elective affinities, soulmates, and so on.
The representational system is a way to bring our communications closer to fill this gap that exists; we cannot pretend it doesn't. We can continue with our personal monologue, which also represents a bit of our koan, to use martial arts terminology—the great difficulty of our lives: we talk to ourselves, fundamentally, we are alone, we live alone, we are born alone, we die alone. However, we are social animals; we want to be together, so we try to communicate, but fundamentally, we struggle. What’s the meaning of and what’s the meaning of all this attention we pour into knowing ourselves better, martial arts, zen philosophy…in short, all this new age stuff that has been thriving in recent years? Because we have the need to feel that we exist, that we are doing something concrete, that someone understands us. But it's difficult; these are paths that last a lifetime, and maybe we don't succeed at all. So, these are small modalities, the representational system, like many others, to try to get closer, to understand each other a bit, to put ourselves in others' shoes. As Elio Germano said, for example, everyone should study acting because putting ourselves in someone else's shoes would make us better people—how true, I fully agree. This logic of the theater is somewhat the same as Aikido's: being not only ourselves but also towards the other representational system. The representational system is a very practical approach because, as you know, I hate mental trips about discovery and universal cosmic enlightenment. Instead, this practical way is an attempt to better understand our interlocutor.
What do you think? What is your representational system? Comment on the episode post on Instagram and let me know if this episode has given you some insights and if discovering your representational system has changed something in your way of communicating. Leave me a DM to suggest ideas for upcoming episodes and to collaboratively develop future content. Especially if you're interested in discovering your representational system with a reliable and comprehensive test, send me a DM asking for the test to discover your representational system, and I'll send you what I did during my coaching journey.
Thank you for being with me, and I’ll see u in the next episode.