How to Walk in Someone Else's Shoes

John David Hoag describes an NLP technique called Perceptual Positions as a way to "create a very rich sense of another person's experience using only your own memory, imagination, physiology, and very slight shifts in your spatial location."

I've used Perceptual Positions myself and with my clients as a concrete way to increase presence, leave preconceptions behind, and gain in compassion and perspective.

First picture yourself sitting at a table with someone seated across from you. Anchor yourself by seeing through your eyes and hearing through your ears. Use all your senses to imagine every aspect of yourself in relation to this person, what you experience physically, what you think, feel, believe, say.

Second, mentally shift your position so you're in the chair sitting across the table. Anchor yourself there by imagining you see through the other person's eyes, hear through that person's ears. Notice what you experience physically, see, hear, feel, think, believe from this position about the person in the first position. Imagine addressing that person as "you".

Then, shift to a third position in space, slightly above the two people at the table, again anchoring yourself in this neutral observer position by seeing through these eyes, hearing through these ears. Hoag refers to this person as the "friendly visitor from outer space who has just arrived." Use the pronouns "he," "she," or "they" as you notice very descriptive details in the other two beings about whom you have no preconceptions or beliefs.

Hoag also suggests a fourth position is possible, "a synthesis of all the others, a sense of being the whole system. From this position you can see the genesis and effects of all the other positions and their interactions, and notice large patterns which transcend individual identifies, parts, and relationships."

Graphic from Vadim Kotelnikov: