Here’s how it works: whatever you do or say when you’re with somebody who is experiencing a strong emotion will become linked to the emotion in the other person’s memories. That particular action will be your anchor. At a later time, when you repeat it, saying or doing the same thing as before, this will stimulate the memory of the emotional state that person was in when the anchor was planted. How much of the emotion is reawakened, and whether the emotion is as powerful as before or just a pale shadow of a memory, depends on how well you managed to plant the anchor in the first place.
By making yourself aware of how anchors are made, you will also get a better sense of the anchors you plant in people unintentionally. The same goes for anchors you plant in yourself, like the one my friend almost planted in her bedroom. And, of course, you’ll also have a better chance of noticing what anchors other people plant in you, intentionally or otherwise. Anchors, like suggestions, are often used in the wrong way.
Unconscious and Negative Anchors
Jerry Richardson, mentioned earlier, gives a good example, in which a father notices that his son is sad, and hugs him. The father’s intention, of course, is to give comfort and support. The problem is that his hug has to have been used in a positive context before, that is, been anchored with positive emotions, for the positive emotions to be triggered when he hugs his sad little boy. But this father doesn’t have a lot of physical contact with his children. In fact, it only really happens when he needs to comfort them. So instead of this hug being associated with something pleasant, and the father being able to use it to counteract the negatives, his hug will be anchored with the negative emotional state, since that’s when the child experiences it.
If this happens a few times in a row, every time the father hugs his son, he will be putting him in a negative state, even if the son was happy to begin with. If physical touch is used only when somebody is sad, that emotion will be associated with the touch, whatever the intentions behind it are.
Unfortunately, we tend to touch people more when they are sad or upset. Richardson wonders if this might explain why so many people in our society don’t like being touched; they’ve simply learned, since their childhood, to associate touch with negative emotions. This is a frightening thought. We need to become more aware of our behavior, since the memory of how somebody behaved will be stored in our unconscious mind, along with the memory of the emotion we experienced at the time.
Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to make physical contact with somebody who’s in a good mood. In this way, you can help him when he feels less happy, by touching him and triggering his current, positive emotions.
Of course, an emotional anchor doesn’t have to involve any touching. I used touching in the example because physical contact is a common way of giving comfort and support, and because anchors using touch tend to be very strong. But as I wrote previously, anything we can perceive can make a functional anchor—a word, an image, a tone of voice, a particular gesture, a smell, a color, or a taste. Combining various sensory impressions in an anchor is even better. Instead of just saying a word, you do it with a specific tone of voice while making a gesture with one hand and touching her arm with the other hand. The more sensory impressions you can include in the anchor, the clearer and stronger it will be.
Altering Other People’s Mental States
You know that the mood you’re in, and whatever is going through your head at the moment, has a great effect on how you perceive the things you’re told, and whether you’ll find a particular idea wonderful or terrible. If you have an idea or a proposition you’d like somebody to listen to, and preferably agree to, you need her to be in as receptive an emotional state as possible. If she isn’t, and you don’t have the tools to alter her emotional state, you could end up in trouble. Establishing rapport is the most important tool for this. But even if you get her to like you and want to be open to your ideas, she might still be sad or upset about something you can’t do anything about. It could be something that has nothing to do with your relationship to her, maybe something to do with her private affairs.
Even though her intentions are good, the emotions she’s carrying around will still affect her attitude to your idea, even if the reason for her state has nothing to do with you. By using a positive anchor, you can alter her emotional state to make it more suitable for your meeting, at least temporarily.
You can also use an anchor to strengthen somebody’s emotional response to a certain suggestion. Like the car salesman who asks his customer, “How do you feel about making a deal right away?” and then simultaneously triggers an anchor to make his customer experience strong feelings of joy.
Anchors work because of the way we associate things that happen inside our minds—how we feel or what we’re thinking—to events in the world outside us. It doesn’t matter if the two are directly connected or not. This is how anchors are created, but it’s also one of the reasons why knowing how to use them is so important. If you meet somebody who is in a negative state, and you don’t know how to get him out of it, you run the risk of having your entire meeting become an anchor for his negative emotional state! Then, every time he meets you or hears of you he will feel slightly uncomfortable or unhappy, and he won’t understand why. That’s not quite the feeling you want other people to have for you, is it? It can actually have a devastating effect, both on your private life and on your career. Fortunately, the opposite is true as well: if you’re good at awakening positive, great emotions in other people, by using the skills you’ve learned from this book, you will make yourself into an anchor for these emotions. If the anchor is strong enough, all that will be required to trigger these positive emotions, or whatever the emotions you’ve planted are, is for somebody to mention you by name.
As I said earlier, you can plant anchors in yourself, too. This is a good way to give yourself a well-needed boost of any emotion you need. You could make yourself confident before a situation that would otherwise make you nervous, happy when you’re down, or energetic and determined when you’re feeling lazy, and so on.
You can also combine several different emotions into a single anchor. I have an anchor for myself that triggers a mixed emotion with elements of joy, pride, curiosity, some butterflies in the stomach, and a healthy dose of self-confidence. The effect is almost intoxicating. I trigger it every time I’m about to go onstage to perform one of my shows, and it gets me into the exact right frame of mind to allow me to give the performance my absolute best.
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Now, I want to teach you how to make your own anchors. I suggest you don’t just read this. Try it out for yourself at once. That’s the only way to make yourself understand how simple it actually is and how well it works. It may sound like magic, but it’s really no more mystical than the effect on Pavlov’s pooches. The fact is, it’s the exact same thing, just more fun and a lot quicker.
It’s That Human Touch
How to Plant an Anchor
Exactly what you should do (gesture, word, touch, or something else) depends on what you’d like to use and what the situation allows for. As I wrote earlier, touch is a strong anchor for most people, but some situations don’t allow for any touch beyond the initial handshake. Perhaps you’re simply too far from the other person to be able to touch him or her in a natural way. In situations like this you should get good results if you use a clear, accentuated gesture and say something. The gesture should be something you don’t normally do, like clapping your hands, a quick drumroll using your fingers, slapping your forehead, or a very distinctive facial expression.
What makes using a word so useful is that you can “hide” the word in your speech when you want to trigger the anchor. In fact, the word you use to trigger the anchor doesn’t even have to be the same word that you used to plant the anchor, as long as it sounds very similar and you intonate it the same way. An example of how words can be used along with body language to make an anchor:
To establish the anchor, you ma
ke a specific gesture or touch while saying (at the golf course, for example), “What a great swing!” Emphasize the word “great.”
To trigger the anchor at a later time, such as in a meeting, you make the same gesture or touch, while saying, “I’m convinced this will be a great solution for you. How do you feel about it?” Intonate “great” the same way you did when you planted the anchor.
An example of the use of similar words:
Planting the anchor: “Good job!”
Triggering the anchor: “We should go!”
In both cases, good/should are intonated the same way and spoken at the same moment as any gesture or touch you’re using.
Do you remember the car salesman? What he does, by saying something like: “I’m sure this will be a good solution for you. How do you feel about it?” (or a more direct version: “Let’s make a deal! Good!”), while tapping you lightly on your shoulder, is to make you feel something similar to the feeling you got when he planted the word “good” along with a tap to the shoulder. He did this while telling you an amusing anecdote, and you never noticed a thing. Now that you’re back in that emotional state again, you have an easier time understanding all of the benefits of making a deal right away.
In the same way, you can use anchors yourself to associate positive emotions with your suggestions and ideas. Of course, these should be emotions your suggestion awakens in you, as well. You should never trigger emotional states that aren’t justified in other people.
If you want to see examples of industries that have developed great expertise in this area, have a look at TV and newspaper advertising. Ads are also a good way to practice identifying anchors that we don’t think about, but ones that affect most of us. You’ll notice that the ads use more than just suggestion. They will also often exploit cultural and social triggers, like symbols, colors, and sounds, to awaken specific emotional states in you, in an attempt to associate the emotions you’re feeling with the product the company sells. The anchor for the emotional state is the product itself. It might not sound too devious to make people feel happy when they see the Coca-Cola logo. But you can just as well imprint an inclination to buy that is triggered every time somebody sees the latest Nike sneakers.
Look at the advertisements. It’s quite obvious there are some people out there who’ve never even heard of Spider-Man’s uncle.
The Pavlovian Bells, the Pavlovian Bells!
Finding the Right Moment
The easiest way to plant an anchor in somebody is to wait until he or she is in the emotional state you’re after. Let’s say it’s joy. When you notice something happening that makes him or her a lot happier than usual for a moment, like a good laugh at the movies or a hole in one on the golf course, you plant the anchor, just when you believe the emotion to be at its strongest. It’s important that you try to plant the anchor as the emotion is growing, or peaking. You don’t want an anchor that’s associated with an ebbing emotion.
When using this method, the problem is that waiting for the person to have the emotion that you want to make an anchor for can be very time-consuming. Besides, you run the risk of acting a bit like a stalker. The person in question will start wondering about your constant presence, and there is a limit to how much you can follow somebody around before you get tagged with a restraining order. But using natural emotional states is still a great method for planting improvised anchors. Make a habit of always making an anchor when you notice that somebody is very happy. Why not, if the emotion is there anyway? Even if you hadn’t planned it, you never know when it will come in handy later on.
So am I actually saying that you should be planting anchors in everybody you meet, the moment they have a strong, positive emotion? You bet I am. There’s nothing to it. Once you’ve tried it a few times, you’ll begin to do it automatically, with hardly any effort at all on your part.
But what if you don’t feel like waiting for somebody to end up in the emotional state you want to anchor? Then you have to make sure to trigger that state in her yourself! As you recall from chapter 5, emotions can be triggered in a number of different ways. Anchoring just happens to be less detectable, and quicker, than most of the other methods. The other methods will often awaken emotions by using associations of thoughts. Anchors and imprints function more like physical reflexes. But if you want to anchor joy in somebody, why not tell a good joke? Plant your anchor while they’re heaving with laughter. Or maybe you want to provoke a sense of “going for it”? Or belonging? Then start talking about it, and make her recall a time when she felt that particular emotion. Make sure you’re using the right sensory words to establish strong associations as you lead her into her memory. Make sure she’s having the emotion again. You might say something like:
“You know how you sometimes have an idea, that you just know you have to realize, or when you see something you just have to own at any cost? Know what I mean? When that feeling fills you completely, and you can’t stop thinking that you simply must have this thing? Or do this thing? Do you remember the feeling?”
Use your perception to determine when the emotion is at its strongest. It won’t be hard to see, as you already know what the physical signs of involvement and interest are: clear eyes, dilated pupils, changes in the skin tone in the face as blood circulation increases, and so on. Plant the anchor at the moment when the emotion seems to be at its peak.
Don’t worry about how to lead your conversation into having the other person relive an experience. It’s a common way of talking to people, and we use it all the time: “Do you remember…?” is a completely ordinary expression to use in any conversation. In everyday speech, we’re constantly triggering emotional associations in each other. You can explain to the person that you want to make sure he or she knows that the feeling is the result of your desire to have him or her understand your own feelings concerning the issue at hand, whatever it may be.
“… Do you remember the feeling? Can you feel it right now? That’s the exact way I feel about this.”
You can also use phrases such as the following:
“What’s your favorite thing about…”
“Can you remember the last time you felt…”
“Imagine that you…”
As the last phrase implies, you don’t necessarily have to be awakening an actual memory in the person you’re talking to. For, as you know, emotions can be awoken just as well by the imagination:
“Wouldn’t it be great if…? How would that make you feel?”
ANCHOR EXERCISE
To create an anchor in yourself (why wouldn’t you?), you would go about it the same way as when you’re creating one in somebody else: decide on an emotion and find a memory, or imagine an experience where this emotion is strong. Relive the memory, reawaken the emotion, and anchor it. Use the following looping method to make the anchor as strong as possible:
Step 1. Decide on the emotion you want to be able to trigger with an anchor. Find a memory or imagine a scenario in which that emotion is strong.
Step 2. Build up the memory or imagined scene, one sense at a time. First visualize the way things look, like buildings, people, colors, or lighting. The more detail the better. Then add any suitable sounds. Are there waves beating? Joyful cheering? Leaves rustling in the wind? Any animals making noise? Last, add any bodily sensation or scents, like wind, heat, sweat, or seaweed. Experience the memory or imagined scene from without, in the role of an observer, as you do this.
Step 3. Once all the different parts are in place, enter the memory or imagined scene and experience it from within. Take in the whole sensation.
Step 4. Just as the emotion’s strength is peaking, plant your anchor (make a fist and say “Never give up!” or whatever seems appropriate). Maintain the anchor for a moment as the emotion is peaking, then release it before the emotion ebbs out.
Step 5. Rest for a few seconds. Then repeat steps 2 to 4, but when you add the various sensory impressions, try to make everything a little strong
er than before. Make the colors more intense, the noises louder, the heat warmer, and so on. This way, you will also strengthen the related emotion. If you feel the memory can’t be made any stronger than it is, try a different memory that uses the same emotion. It won’t make any difference. Amplify the senses and the emotion each time, and anchor in the same way as before.
Step 6. Perform step 5 three or four times, planting your anchor in the same place each time. If you’ve done it the right way, by now you should have created a very strong anchor in your own mind.
Step 7. Now it’s time to try it out. First, get some rest. Go someplace else, so you’re not in the same place where you did the exercise. Once you feel relaxed, trigger the anchor (by clenching your fist in the same way, for example). If the anchor was planted properly, you will be filled with the emotion immediately. On cue. You can’t avoid it; you’ve just given yourself a physical reflex. It’s an incredible sensation. If the emotion is weak or doesn’t appear, you’ve either timed the anchor incorrectly or you didn’t manage to feel the emotion properly when you made the anchor. In which case, all you need to do is try again.
Practice, Practice, Then Practice Some More
Creating anchors in other people is a skill that takes practice to become effective. It’s mostly a question of getting into the habit of it, and getting the timing right, so that you establish the anchors at the moment when the feelings are at their strongest. But it’s easy to practice, just like with rapport. It’s just a matter of doing it whenever you can. The idea is for this to become an automatic action in you, just like establishing rapport is. And, actually, it really is an automatic action. The only thing you’re adding is the ability to choose to establish positive anchors and not negative ones, and also to be able to control what the actual anchor is to be.
The Art of Reading Minds Page 18