Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which is commonly abbreviated to NLP, is essentially about the pursuit of excellence and also relates to the ability of humans to understand the concept of reality. Out of that fascinating study of what reality means, the concept of NLP anchors was born. A very powerful idea that once understood can be harnessed to literally transform our experience of what is happening around us.
It sounds like a difficult concept at first, but it’s really not. 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.
So hopefully you can see that it does work, and when it is done correctly it works exceptionally well.
What do you need in order to be able to use this phenomena for yourself ? Basically, you just set up anchors by associating unique triggers to certain states. When that state occurs, you need to trigger a special anchor. To make it clear what is meant by an “anchor” and a “state”, an “anchor” could be an object, either physical or imagined, or anything accessible with our 5 main senses. The anchor is then used as a trigger to connect to a particular emotion which is the “state”. In order to ingrain the new or preferred response, the process needs to be repeated several times . After that, the state will be firmly connected to your trigger, and this means whenever the anchor is used the preferred state will be accessed.
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. Most new skills can appear to be difficult during the early stages of practice and this NLP anchor technique is no different, but you can know for sure that it does work. When you have mastered that, it will very likely give you a taste to look deeper into NLP to see how else it can improve your life.
NLP anchors
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