Improving The Quality Of Your Life

The following guest post has been submitted by John Allison from Technology for Living and serves as a follow-up for “Anchor thoughts and ideas, how to“.

In addition to desirable anchors which take us where we want to go, just about all of us have anchors in place that do nothing but get in our way. Most of us have had to live with them for some time. Learning to un-anchor what you don’t want will only multiply the effect of the anchors you do want, because you won’t be being pulled in every direction.

The methods

I’ve found three basic methods for dealing with unwanted anchors:

1. Downplay and/or delay the reaction, so as to make the anchor weaker
2. Play with the anchor’s traits to work it loose
3. Re-work the anchor to serve a useful purpose

Note that these can be used together. Playing with the anchor’s traits blends well with both of the others, so let’s start with that.

Play with the anchor to work it loose

In NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) parlance, the traits of the anchor are called submodalities, a fancy word for talking about the aspects of the anchor. Each sense you have has several submodalities. A thorough list can be found here or in just about any decent book on NLP techniques. For starters, I’ll list a few for each sensory type:

Visual/seeing:

• Brightness
• Contrast
• Proximity (how close the “picture” is to you)
• Richness of color
• Whether or not you see yourself in the”picture” (1st person vs. 3rd person)

Auditory/hearing :

• Volume
• Pitch
• Timbre
• Content/specific words
• Buzzing, or any other “sound effect”

Kinesthetic/touch:

• Heat/cold
• Pressure
• Tension
• Affect on breathing
• Physical gestures of any kind

Olfactory/smell:

• Intensity
• Direction
• Increasing or decreasing

(Taste is much the same. There isn’t a lot of literature on smell and taste for submodalities, simply because the others seem to be so much more powerful)

Work that anchor loose.

Say, for example, that you keep getting a flash image of a disturbing scene in your mind. Say you get really unnerved whenever it happens.
Obviously the anchor is not serving your interest. Especially if it is preventing you from executing something that another (deliberate) anchor prompted or reminded you to do. Here’s what you do when you see that image pop up:

• Get a good look at it. Unpleasant it may be but you want to be sure that the image doesn’t leave your consciousness. If you forget about it, you can’t un-anchor it.
• When you have opportunity, get a little time to yourself and bring the image back to the front. It probably won’t seem so threatening now, but that’s not going to save it now
• Since this is a picture, we’re going to start playing with the image. Let’s start by making the image darker. Turn down the brightness. That usually reduces the intensity of the emotion attached. How about how close it is? Does moving it farther away help?
• Alternately, and along the humor line, you can try playing with the content. J.K. Rowling was on to something when she wrote about the “Riddikulus” spell: If you can find a way to make the scene you are looking at something you can laugh at, that will go a long way in itself.
• Keep playing with it until you feel that it’s really, really weak.
  Once that is done, you can do what you like with it, but I found it very satisfying to hit it with a wrecking ball. Hammers, 10 ton weights or anvils a la Looney Tunes make for a great image because it enables you to laugh at it, thus asserting your power even more.

Re-work the anchor to serve you

Or, “What better way to vanquish an enemy than to make him an ally?”

This one is a little more sophisticated, and requires some creativity.
Let’s take an example from my own life: I had a harmful anchor which involved a tensing of my arms and shoulders and my voice in my mind saying “Don’t anger me!“. This was not something that I wanted to keep around, but I thought I might be able to re-work it to serve. So, I changed the physical traits of the anchor to an expansion of my arms to each side, palms facing forward, and I changed the words to say “I will not anger.” It took one or two times for the new “settings” to stick but eventually, it worked. That anchor still works for me to this day, reminding me not to give in to anger.

As I said, this one takes some creativity, and in my experience not every anchor can be re-worked to serve. But, if you find one that will do the job, then I suggest going for it, as it will save you the effort of putting in an entirely new anchor…half your work is done already.

Downplay or delay the reaction to make it weaker

Last but not least we have my least used method. Anchors work largely because it sets up a closed loop: The anchor triggers a thought and/or emotion, which is bound to the anchor. The theory is that when the anchor triggers, you minimize the effect of the trigger, or try to go for a delayed reaction. This will work, but it has a couple of flaws which lead me to use the other methods more:

• The very nature of these anchors makes it hard to delay or downplay the reaction, basically making it a fight on their turf.
• This method does not have any method of turning the anchor to your advantage, and lastly
• You are reliant on the triggering event/person/whatever to use it.
  As such, it’s trial-by-fire until you finally manage to wear it down.

All of that above leads me to prefer the others, simply because to me it would be like trying to pry something loose with my bare hands when there’s a crowbar handy.

The ball is in your court now

Experimentation is the only way to find what works best for you. When you hit upon a winning formula, you’ll know it. I suggest taking notes, because once you find that winning formula, you’ll find that it tends to keep working for other anchors as well.