Cornelius's In Some Ways

NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming mainly concerns itself with the pursuit of excellence but is also interested in unravelling the concept of what reality means to us individually. Whilst delving into that concept of reality, one method emerged that is designed to allow you to explore and perfect varying states of mind, in order to anchor yourself in them and it is known as an NLP anchor.

At first glance this philosophy looks like it might be difficult to grasp but given an explanation it really is easy to understand. If you have ever studied the history of psychology then a quite a well known example of this concept would be Pavlov’s dogs. The experiment involved a bell being rung every time a meal was laid out for the dogs. So after repeated occurrences of this every mealtime, the dogs became programmed to connect the sound of the bell with being fed. The proof of this was after that, whenever the bell rang it caused the dogs to salivate, even if no food was served.

I believe the illustration shows quite clearly how the dogs were easily programmed by sheer repetition of the two events happening together. Maybe you can think of some such associations in your life, we all have them and are often not even aware of how we have been programmed.

What do you need in order to be able to use this phenomena for yourself ? In essence the answer is to select a anchor of your choosing and then use it as a trigger and connect that to a particular state. The term “state” in NLP refers to the emotional response to an event, and an “anchor” refers to an object, any quantifiable reaction experienced by any of our major senses, or any action, that can become associated with that state. You need to repeat the process a number of times in order to solidify it, and after you have, the state will be fully associated with the anchor. So later, if you trigger the anchor, the state will be connected to.

As a suggestion the next time you get a happy feeling try to connect an anchor to that and then after it has passed try to practice using that anchor to reconnect to the original happy feeling. In this case an anchor you might try is squeezing the thumb and middle finger of either hand, repeat it several times during the happy feeling. This obviously will have to be practiced many times after the happy feeling has gone as well as during the happy moments, until it becomes a natural response but well worth the initial effort. The anchor NLP techniques might not seem that simple when you first do them, but if you keep repeating them you will see that they do work. After enough practice, you can move onto more advanced techniques. It is even possible to use two different anchors with two different states simultaneously.
NLP anchors
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