Neuro Linguistic Programming Terms and Definitions
NLP Glossary of Terms – S
Second Position
Relating to a Perceptual Position: Second Position describes our point of view in a specific situation. Second Position is usually someone else’s point of view. (First Position is our own point of view, Third position is the point of view of a dissociated observer.)
Sensory Acuity
This relates to observational skills. Having Sensory Acuity means that we can notice things about our person’s physiology that most people would not notice.
Sensory-Based Description
Describing someone’s verifiable external behavior in a way that does not include any evaluations, but in a way that just relates the specific physiology. “She is happy,” is (in NLP terminology) a hallucination. A sensory-based description would be her lips are curved upward at the end and her face is symmetrical.
State
Relates to our internal emotional condition such as a happy state, a sad state, a motivated state, etc. In NLP we believe that the state determines our results so we want to create states of excellence.
Strategy
A specific sequence of internal and external representations that leads to a particular outcome.
Submodalities
These are distinctions or subsets that are part of each representational system that encode and give meaning to our experiences. Ex: A picture may be in Black and White or Color.
Surface Structure
A linguistic term meaning the structure of our communication, which generally leaves out the completeness of the Deep Structure. The process is Deletion, Generalization and Distortion.
Synesthesia
A two-step strategy, where the two steps are linked together with one usually out of awareness such as, “I want to see how I feel”.
Syntactic Ambiguity
Where it is impossible to tell from the syntax of a sentence the meaning of a certain word. Often created by adding “ing” to a verb, as in “Hypnotizing Hypnotists can be easy”.
