Shinota - Articles

ANCHORING - Do you know how to influence your/others moods consciously?

Ashok

Anchoring is the process of learning to hold on to any state of mind, especially those of which are crucial for success. It is a way of choosing the emotional state we want and finding a way of accessing it, when we choose. It may be a sound, an image, a touch, a smell, or a taste that triggers a consistent response in ourselves or someone else.”

- Sue Knight in “NLP at work”

What is the first thing a driver does before he starts the car in the morning?

My driver starts with a prayer and then touches the steering wheel, the car key and a god’s picture he has already installed in the car before he starts the car for the first time
every day. This is the way by which he brings in his resourceful state to drive the car irrespective of whatever that happened in his home that morning.

One of my friends used to wear a blue shirt for important meetings. He confided to me that his blue shirt brings him favourable results. Incidentally most of the times when he wears that shirt he gives his best and many times achieves what he wanted from the meetings.

Probably, he has anchored his state of best performance with that blue shirt and so he is able to immediately access that state when he wears that blue shirt. My driver uses the feeling of touching the steering, the key and god's picture as an anchor to trigger his state of calmness and alertness while he drives.

Probably, every one of us uses anchors in our everyday life to create a resourceful state or an uninspired state, which we may call as dull or boring state. We are so skilled at it that we do it unconsciously. With NLP, we can consciously anchor our best resourceful states so that we are enabled to give 100% of our capacity to what we do.

For business leaders who have to be highly inspiring irrespective of whatever the market situation is, anchoring serves as a powerful tool to bring in the dynamism, whenever they want, wherever they want, irrespective of the situation at hand.

Steps for Anchoring:

Choose a place free from distraction.
Choose an action, which you want to serve as anchor. It could be any action, like touching your index finger with the thumb.
Think of a highly resourceful state in your life, a time when you were at your best and which is strong in your memory.
Relive it. Relive as if you are going through that experience in full. When you are at your peak of experience, just anchor it with the action already chosen by you, which means just touch your index finger with your thumb.
Now, you shake yourself and break that state.
Breaking state is coming out of that situation by thinking of something else. It could be recollecting what you had for breakfast or the colour of the shirt you wore yesterday. You can do any thing like drinking a cup of water to break that state.
Repeat step 4 & 5 a few times.
Now test your anchor.
Fire your anchor, ie., press the index finger with your thumb and find out if you are able to relive the resourceful state which you have anchored.
If yes, then you have successfully created an anchor, which you can use to attain your resourceful state whenever you want.
If no, go back and redo steps 4 & 5 a few more times. Choose a different experience, which you can relate better if the previous one didn't work.