What kind of emotion do you feel when you watch a scene on the TV when a man walking towards a deserted house with some eerie background music? You will feel a chill ran down your spine and expect something back to happen right? Your state of mind in that moment is uncertainty and fearful, this is because such scenes and music are associated with these negative feelings, since many horror movies are like that. This is what we called anchoring, a certain experience will trigger a certain kind of response. Let’s say now, we change the background music to some party rock and heavy metal, you will immediately change your feelings from fear to exciting!
Another example is to imagine a giant lemon right in front of you, it is bright yellow and when you cut it, the lemon juice oozes out on to the skin. Have you notice that you are salivating more now? That’s anchoring too! When you go swimming at the beach and you imagine yourself swimming with a background music from the movie Jaws, will you swim quickly back to shore, because the sudden fear that a shark might attack you anytime? Yeah, you have just witness the powerful effect of anchoring.
We can leverage the use of anchoring to motivate ourselves, set ourselves in the correct state of mind that will energize us to overcome obstacles and take actions to achieve your goals. A great panoramic picture of a calm blue sea can give you quick relief to reduce your anxiety and relax yourself. So you can use an internal image of the calm blue sea to help you to achieve that state of mind. Or you can find a picture of your dream car, and it helps you to motivate you to stop procrastinating and get on to make more money!
All you need is to identify the state of mind you want to be in. Here is how you create an anchor effectively:
- Decide the state of mind you want to anchor. Like being calm or motivated.
- Identify an anchor that you wish to trigger that state.
- Recall a situation or memory where you can experience that state.
- Activate your anchor whenever you experience that state, like when you feel happy, look at your family photo as anchor.
- Put the anchor away when your state of mind start to fade.
- Repeat again and each time do make the experience more vivid, you feel more happy every time you look at your family photo. This strengthens and amplify the effect of the anchor.
- Apply the anchor over the next few days and check that the state of mind occurs.
- Repeat again and again. Apply it whenever you have the opportunity.
- There you have it! A new anchor!
Anchoring is an interesting technique used by psychological experts and only recently used for personal development in this area called Neurolinguistic Programming Techniques, which optimize our minds into the state where we can perform effectively. To learn more about anchoring techniques, here are some great books that I personally reference to regularly: Unlimited Power : The New Science Of Personal Achievement
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