Changing your state of mind – (Anchoring)

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Caroline

Did you know that you can change your state at anytime? That it’s entirely your responsibility for how you feel?

As much as it seems far easier to make other people take responsibility for how we feel or our mistakes and errors, it is entirely down to ourselves ultimately. Perception is projection and through this notion we learn that what we believe to be ‘real’ or ‘true’ is based upon the information we retain after our perceptions of the outside world have passed through a number of filters.

Our filters are how we take in information, through what we see, what we feel, what we hear, what we taste and what we smell. Our conditioning is what we experience in life from our environment, the people around us, experiences good and bad and they all have an effect on how we perceive and project our world.

Anchoring is a process of learning to hold onto the states that are crucial to success. It is a way of choosing the emotional state we want and finding a way of accessing it when we choose. An anchor is a stimulus; it may be a sound, an image, a touch, a smell or a taste that triggers a consistent response.

Anchors which you may already be familiar with are:

A favourite piece of music
A special perfume or aftershave
A specific touch
A taste of a memorable meal
The memory of a particular time in your life

So before all that swallows you up into a big hole like when you imagine infinite infinity…what is beyond the black hole, beyond that and beyond that, lets go through some simple steps on how you can change your state literally within a few seconds…

There are plenty of examples I could use here but common negative states would be stress, anxiety, low self esteem, lack of motivation be it at work, home, in our personal life. We don’t always have control over what happens around us, but we can certainly manage our response to it. Creating anchors is an excellent way of changing from a negative state, to a positive one.

Procedure for anchoring a resourceful state: (extract taken from NLP at Work by Sue Knight)

Choose a place that is free from distractions and make yourself comfortable.
Decide on a state/a feeling that you have experienced in your life that you would like to be able to access when you choose.
Choose an anchor that you can use whenever you want to access this feeling. It must be something precise and easy to use. For example, you could press your middle finger and thumb together on your left hand.
Now recall the memory of a time when this feeling was strongest for you. Check you are associated into this experience, experiencing it as if in your own shoes and not as an outsider.
When you are completely associated, allow yourself to experience what it is like to be in this experience, seeing, hearing and feeling it. .As you do so, touch your middle finger and thumb together for as long and only as long as you feel these sensations intensely. When you have experienced the feeling and the touch of your finger to thumb, release that touch. Now shake yourself and move in some way so that you bring yourself back to the present, which is called breaking state. Maybe think of the colour of your front door or what you are having for dinner tomorrow!
This touch becomes the anchor for the feeling. Repeat the process several times until you have a strong connection between the touch and the feeling.
Test the anchor. Think of something else and as you do so, touch your middle finger and thumb together in precisely the way you did when you were setting up the anchor. This is called firing the anchor.
Notice what happens. If you have set up the anchor effectively, you will recall the scene, the sounds and the feeling of the memory as if you were there. If this doesn’t happen, keep practicing, it may be that you weren’t fully associated when you set the anchor. Check that you use exactly the same anchor to recall the experience as you used to set it up in the first place. The sensations in an experience tend to rise and fade. Set the anchor just as the experience is reaching a peak, and remove it as soon as or just before the feelings begin to fade.
Now think of a future situation where you would like to have the feelings you have anchored. This time, as you imagine the situation in the future, fire the anchor. What do you see, hear, and feel now? When you do this successfully you are transferring your desired feelings, your resourceful state, to another and in this case future context.
Lean to do this for yourself so you can recall the resources you want, and use them when you need to.

Many public speakers use anchors to get into a state of confidence before going onto stage. It’s a brilliant way of managing those negative feelings and zapping them away!