Anchoring is an automatic stimulus-response system such that when some unique stimulus happens, you respond by feeling a certain way or you behave in a certain way.
Human beings are anchoring machines, which means most of our behaviours are knee-jerk reactions to what is happening around us. We automatically respond in a certain way based on things that are happening in our lives and for most people, this is totally unconscious. This is why Anchoring is really important!
If you would like to have control in your life or even if you would like more freedom in your life, if you want to have more choice in your life and have more discipline to achieve what you want you must learn to either leverage or overcome these automatic reactions.
There are two ways to do this. You can use good, old-fashioned discipline. This is the hard way. Just grind and focus! It’s great to stop yourself from doing things but that’s hard work. That’s because disciple, focus and grit only works on your conscious thinking, but anchoring is mostly an unconscious behaviour. How the heck can you use discipline to stop unconscious behaviour if you are not ever aware you are doing it? It’s impossible.
Your only other options, is to understand and utilize how anchoring works.
When you learn anchoring, you can change how you feel about what you do. Let me give you a business example. Do you know people who do outbound business calls – “cold calling” is the term we used to use.
When inexperienced sales people make outbound calls, they feel anxious because they are used to getting insulted when they call people out of the blue. When sales people call you without an invitation, and you aren’t expecting their call, you tend to get very pissed off. This is the main reason that sales people have such a bad reputation.
Many sales people tell me that when they do “cold calls” or “outbound calls”, they get a sick feeling in their stomach every time they pick up a phone. This happens even if it’s not a sales call! They just feel sick when they pick up the phone.
This is what we call a Negative Anchor in NLP. They are so used to being mistreated on the phone that it fires off that that negative reaction, so a good sales person will never pick up the phone unless they are in a really resourceful and powerful state! Why? to collapse that negative anchor.
However, when you learn NLP and understand how the Anchoring Process works, you can actually remove those negative feelings by collapsing them and have more flexibility. You can feel neutral, or even great!.
Imagine a sales person feeling good when they pick up the phone! It would change their life!
What about when you go into the gym, imagine feeling good when you start a challenge or approaching a challenging problem! What would that be like
Can you picture feeling good doing the things that most people dread doing like taxes and accounts. Understanding Anchoring gives you the flexibility to be able to feel good automatically.
However, there is so much more to understanding how the mind works and how change works than just understanding Anchoring. If you just know about stimulus response and anchoring it only represents a small part of the overall body of knowledge in NLP.
We need more than that to understand how change works and that’s what we cover in our NLP trainings. Anchoring is only one small part of this body of knowledge.
Anchoring may be really good to explain simple phenomena and simple behaviours and reactions, like people feeling nervous or anxiety or stressed, but it doesn’t explain more complex behaviours.
In the field of NLP this model of anchoring was developed and combined with some other ideas based on representation systems that resulting into a larger body of knowledge which is called Strategies. We can learn about this in the next post.
Clip from Fresh Coffee Coaching Episode 11 – NLP Easy Learning Toolkit Week 3/5 Watch the full Clip here
#anchoring #nlp #strategies #negative feelings
#FCC.E11.Clip1