January 22, 2020
NLP is a study of excellence that has generated a mode of thinking that is very different to your usual way of thinking. Imagine having the ability to think differently to other people and consistently produce the results that you want, creating the life that you want, would you find that useful?
One of the components of creating excellence and producing your desired results is the ability to get into and maintain states which are resourceful and empowering for you. In NLP, we use the term ‘state’ to describe someone’s emotional condition, for example a happy state, a sad state, a joyful state, a fearful state, a motivated state and a powerful state. The modelling of excellent behaviour with NLP techniques has identified that people who are really great at what they do e.g. in business, sport, education, parenting, relationships, all have one very powerful factor in common, they are able to maintain resourceful and useful states.
How would you like to be able to consistently create and maintain your own resourceful states on demand? Think about when you first woke up this morning. Did you immediately decide what sort of day you were going to have based on your state when you awoke? Perhaps you felt bad this morning and decided that today was going to be a bad day. I bet your day isn’t going so well? How would it be if you could change that state to one of motivation and happiness? What sort of day do you imagine you would have then? Imagine standing up to make that important contract pitch or presentation and immediately beginning to feel confident, self-assured and excited? How would you like to approach negotiations and conflict situations with grace and focus? Controlling your state is extremely useful across all areas of our lives and in NLP we achieve this through a process called Anchoring.
Anchoring is a process of stimulus response. Stimulus response was first documented by a medical doctor called William Twitmire in 1902. It was Bill who discovered the knee jerk response test. That’s the one where the doctor taps your knee with a small rubber hammer and observes the stimulus reflex response. At the same time as Bill noticed the stimulus response, he also noticed that when he simply told the patient he was going to tap their knee, the knee jerked without him touching them, a learned response to a specific stimulus.
In 1904, Ivan Pavlov did some research on the digestive system of dogs. In order to discover and understand the salivatory response of the dogs, Pavlov would show the dogs some meat and sound a tuning fork and the dogs would salivate. He then discovered that he could sound the tuning fork without showing the dogs the meat and their response would be the same, a stimulus response to the sound of the tuning fork, a conditioned behaviour.
The creators of NLP noticed that human beings could also respond positively to behavioural conditioning and so the process of anchoring was created. The big picture is that when someone is in an intense emotional state and an external stimulus is applied, the two become linked neurologically.
Within the science of NLP, we journey into a great deal of detail about how to anchor across all of our modalities, visually, auditorily, kinesthetically, by smell and by taste. We also teach a very specific and elegant process of how to anchor positive and motivational states for other people, as well as how to collapse down unwanted states using anchors.
It is possible to produce anchors for yourself. Here’s a little exercise for you to try right now. Let’s set a happiness anchor together.
Can you think of a time a specific time when you felt really, really happy? Just go back to that time now, float down into your body and see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt and really experience that feeling of total happiness.
As you are experiencing that state, just gently squeeze your right ear lobe. Hold onto the squeeze until the happy feeling begins to subside and release your ear lobe.
Repeat this process a couple of times using different examples of specific times when you felt at your happiest.
Now, give your earlobe a squeeze and feel the happy state return immediately. Congratulations, you can now feel happy whenever you choose to!
There are many, really positive outcomes that we can achieve with the anchoring process and during your Enhanced NLP Coach Practitioner Certification Training, you will be inspired by the big pictures and exhilarated by learning the details. We look forward to sharing with you and putting you in charge of you!
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