If you’re an NLP Practitioner, you’ll know how important continued practice is to keep your skills fresh and improve them. Here are some ideas for practicing anchoring and sharpening your anchoring skills:
- Make a list of the visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and olfactory and gustatory anchors in your life. Use associated recall for resource anchors, dissociated review for unpleasant anchors.When could you use some of the already existing resource anchors, in ways you haven’t been doing up to now?
- Notice anchors used by other people. Include anchors they are using deliberately, and ones they are setting off without realising it.
- Set a relaxation anchor for yourself in multiple modalities. Go into a relaxed state, and as you feel yourself relaxing, say the word ‘relax’ to yourself in a calm intonation, use a special touch or gesture, and see an image that you associate with relaxation. When you’re ready, come back to full alertness, and test it. When could you use this anchor?
- Set an ‘uptime anchor’. Remember, uptime is when you are paying attention to what is going on around you – so this state is essential to getting results in NLP. Go into full attention and set your uptime anchor for each sensory channel separately. Then engage with all the channels simultaneously and set your anchor again. Keep on doing this until you are satisfied that it works. What situations could you use that in?
- Covertly set a visual anchor. When you’re engaged in conversation with someone, and they get into a very positive or resourceful state – either spontaneously or because you’ve conversationally amplified it for them – anchor that state with a covert visual anchor. This would be some natural seeming gesture like adopting a particular body position, a gesture, or a facial expression. Test it when they are back in a neutral state. When could you use that?
- You can also experiment with voice tone anchoring, with using a particular word or phrase, and with appropriate kinaesthetic anchors like a mock punch on the arm or a hand on the shoulder – whatever is appropriate to your relationship with that person. Notice the results you get, and think about the possibilities for using these anchors.
For more about anchoring, and that other great discovery of NLP for managing emotional states, submodalities, why not get my Kindle book Practical NLP 4: Submodalities and Anchoring?
© 2016 – 2019, Andy Smith. All rights reserved.