Anchoring Part 1
As an admitted self help junkie through the years I’ve been fascinated by the notion of
Anchoring. The idea that states are associated with physiology, and the environment, to such a degree that just being in the right room, or making a certain face will drops you right into that state. The info that comes up on Google when I do a search for anchoring demonstrates that the NLP community still has a very limited view of this broad and expansive subject.
The idea that anchoring can be reduced to the simple technique usually marketed in an nlp seminar is foolish and frequently packaged in an unrealistic and pseudo-scientific way to justify the $1500 price tag on your average seminar. The idea that associations elicit states is so universal that to reduce it to the practice of scratching your nose or touching someones shoulder every time they are in a positive state is simply too shallow so serve as an effective description of this concept.
So does this mean that all you have to do to quit smoking is create an anchor for yourself, fire it once, and be finished forever?
NO. The stronger the association the harder it is to stop. Creating an anchor to a resourceful mindful state will certainly help, but you will need to use it over and over and not expect some magical technique to undue the addiction in your body and mind instantly. Unfortunately, for the lazy, you will still need to exercise self-discipline and control.
Not that the conventional technique doesn’t work… far from it… it works too well. However I’d be a liar if I told you it worked in the first two minutes you meet someone every time, unless the person you are trying this move on is particularly susceptible to this kind of thing… and I assure you everyone is not. This is doubly true for doing anchoring work on yourself. Some will get incredible results immediately other will have to build up the strength of their anchors over time. This technique is such a basic part of human nature though that given the right amount of effort and time anyone can build for themselves a highly effective anchor. There is actually no significance between the notion of Anchoring and the more generally accepted idea in psychology called Classical Conditioning discovered by a rather famous Russian scientist with a fabulous beard named Ivan Pavlov .
Anchoring or conditioning is happening every moment of every day… any physical space/enviroment, body posture, facial expression etc is going to bond with the strongest emotional state often associated with it. For every place in your life, every face you make, every move you make is for better or worse directly entangled with the state your most often in when you enter that room, make that face etc.
Take notice to the way your daily habits and physical actions correspond to your inner states … you may find that a nagging negative emotion you’ve been trying to overcome is really just an anchor that you fire the same time, same place every day. As long as the state you want to elicit has weaker associations than the feelings you have already anchored to a particular place… you won’t be able to escape those feelings without avoiding firing that anchor.
The key to understanding learning, behavior, and influencing your own emotional state lays in understanding the connections between the physical component of your being… and the emotional. In the next few posts about anchoring I’m going to be going over some of my own uses of anchoring in slightly more novel/useful ways than I usually see online and in seminar… hopefully the you’ll find a use for this broader more expansive understanding of anchoring your daily life.
-Chris
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