By David Brodie
We all know - or at least have a general idea - how tall we are. I'm 5'7" but I find that this isn't always true. Sometimes I am five feet, sometimes I'm 10 feet and sometimes my height is so diminished it isn't even worth noting. It becomes relative to who I am speaking to/thinking about, and the situation in which I find myself.
The gist is this; my height is a fact, and that fact does not make a difference in the world of my mind if I have a skewed perception of it.
But what am I even talking about? As humans we perceive reality through three main senses, or modalities: our visual sense, auditory sense and kinesthetic sense.
These senses dominate how we interpret information in our mind. Visual people focus on the images in their mind, auditory people focus on sounds and kinesthetic people focus on sensations of touch and emotion (though we draw on all three).
Within these three modalities, we adjust our mental picture through submodalities. As a visual person, some of my submodalities include color, clarity and size. What we perceive becomes the images we play through our head, and those images affect how we feel, which affects how we behave.
The problem, or benefit, comes in misinterpreting reality and perceiving something entirely different. I'll be focusing on the visual modality, and more specifically the submodality of size - which is crucial for visual people in determining importance - in order to explain a method for instantly creating more joy and confidence, while lowering the amount of anxiety in your life.
But how does an image of a person's size affect you? In the presence of larger people we can often feel intimidated, diminished, unimportant, even an irrational fear of their ability to harm us.
When we are the larger person (in reality or in our mind), or can at least see ourselves in genuine perspective to the other person, we experience increased confidence, freedom of action, and relaxation.
The size of a person (or yourself) in your mind can be affected by the reality of how large they are, but also by status values such as qualifications (Ph.D., black belt in Jujutsu), position (boss, professor), attractiveness, etc.
Once you have accepted a perception of a person's size in your mind as reality, you begin to feel the effects of that perception in varying degrees. It makes no difference whether or not that perception is the correct interpretation of reality.
Many people are possessed of a limiting self perception in which they picture, and thus perceive, most other people as larger than them. This damages their ability to relax and behave authentically in the presence of those people who have been given greater mental significance by their perceived size.
Imagine yourself standing next to your favorite celebrity. Who is taller? In my head I look like a little kid standing next to Brad Pitt, and I can imagine going to pieces if I found myself speaking to him. In reality?
He's four inches taller than me. By realizing the reality of size and not accepting the mental interpretation, you take control of the way you feel, and by skewing it in your favor, you can achieve the famed feeling of being 10 feet tall.
There are several steps involved in making this work for you. The first step in doing so is to become conscious of those people/events/places in relation to which you become smaller and diminished. Some real life people I'm larger than but initially perceived as larger include the majority of my professors, my latest crush, my parents and my oldest brother.
The second step is to take control of your submodality and use it to your advantage; make them smaller in your imagination than you are. Make yourself a giant. The third step is to find empirical proof of either your greater size, or of the fallacy of their immense size.
This cements the feeling given by altering your submodality. For small people, obviously it's going to be hard to find yourself physically larger than the people in your head, but the knowledge that they are not as large as you imagine them is just as potent as finding out that you're larger. This can be accomplished by standing next to/near them and actually seeing the evidence, or by finding evidence of their real size (I Googled Brad Pitt's height).
However the best way by far is to actually see objective evidence of the two of you in relation to each other. A photograph is excellent, or for guys who have trouble with crushes or girlfriends, hug her from behind and look at each other in the mirror.
It's hard to let somebody walk all over you when you realize you're bigger than they are. Your mind cannot ignore this empirical proof and you avoid confirmation bias toward your limited self perception (only focusing on evidence that supports your belief).
So, how tall are you?
