Our ability to create enduring and powerful anchors depends, in the first instance, on our ability to evoke powerful states!

If you don’t have a strong, powerful state, there is literally nothing to anchor and our anchors won’t be effective.

Thankfully, this is quite easy to fix.

It starts by shifting our thinking from anchoring as something we ‘do’ to others to something we co-create with others…

This is where many NLPers go wrong, in that they’ve been taught that anchoring is a technique we run on people. We don’t ‘run techniques’, we create powerful experiences.

Here’s a quick pro tip: When you anchor, you intentionally help train another person’s nervous system to create a new link between an event (called the trigger) and an emotion (the desired state we want to evoke).

In order to create that response in the other person’s neurology, we must pay exquisite attention to them!

Here are 3 simple things you can do today to help you evoke powerful states that are worth anchoring.

1. Make sure you have their attention when you go about creating an anchor. No attention = no learning. Seems obvious, but so many NLPers skip this step because their attention is elsewhere. So make sure you place your full attention on them so you can ensure they are following your instructions/suggestions as you are giving them and guide them into the desired state.
2. Don’t try and jump straight to a big state change in your first move; instead, if the gap between the state they are in now and the one you want them to be in is large, break the change down into a series of smaller state changes. It helps to create a chain of states where you move them, for example, from boredom to interest to curiosity to wanton desire. 
3. Go first! This means allowing yourself to be moved. Demonstrate to the person whose state you are looking to influence what the state looks like. Through the process of mirror neurons and neural entrainment, the other person’s brain waves and nervous system will begin to pattern you and go into state. So if you are telling stories or having a person access a memory, you can demonstrate through your verbal and non-verbal communication what the desired state looks, feels and sounds like.

Don’t worry if you don’t know where to start or how to do these things. Thankfully, we have tons of resources that can help.

As a special thank you for completing this quiz, I’d like to send you a series of helpful resources over the coming days to help you really hone your anchoring skills, starting with our complete ‘anchor like a pro’ checklist. With this checklist you can quickly ‘step through’ all the key steps involved in anchoring like a pro.

Enjoy!