Anchoring

Make your everyday life easier and improve your client relationships by understanding and applying our natural conditioning mechanisms. Learn how to intentionally create empowering emotional responses and release limiting ones whenever you choose.

Anchoring is one of the most fundamental NLP techniques. It allows you to deliberately create stimulus-response connections. This enables you to store emotions and recall them when needed.

The Concept of Anchors

An anchor is a stimulus (trigger) that consistently evokes a specific reaction in a person. Unlike a reflex, this reaction is learned rather than innate. For instance, a certain song might be linked to the feeling of being in love.

Other examples include: the ringing of a phone, a nostalgic piece of music, traffic signs, vacation photos, the smell of fresh bread, a company logo, a slogan (“Just do it!”, “I’m lovin’ it”), or a familiar voice. Anchors influence our emotions continuously, but only those associated with intense emotional states have significant impact.

Recognizing your anchors—and replacing negative ones with positive triggers—is a powerful step toward developing healthy self-esteem.

Conscious anchoring extends Pavlov’s classical conditioning concept. Pavlov discovered that dogs began salivating merely upon hearing the footsteps of the keeper who fed them. Curious, he rang a bell before feeding the dogs. Soon, the sound of the bell alone caused them to salivate.

This phenomenon can be consciously applied to intentionally link a desired emotional state to a specific trigger. This means the state can be recalled almost on command through the anchor. Any sensory input can serve as an anchor — a gesture, touch, image, sound, word, or scent.

Video: What Is Anchoring?

State Management

The ability to influence our emotional states is crucial. It allows us to overcome fear and stress, and also to generate states like love and confidence.

Physiology

Our bodily processes play a key role in our emotions. They reflect our inner states. By changing our physiology, we can also change our emotional states.

Setting Anchors

Anchoring is one of the fundamental NLP techniques. It allows you to create stimulus-response links intentionally, enabling you to store emotions and recall them at will.

Learn more about anchoring techniques in the online seminar with our trainer Joerg-Friedrich Gampper.

Collapsing Anchors

This NLP technique is used to neutralize unpleasant anchors effectively. A strong positive anchor is fired simultaneously with the negative one, reducing its impact.

Chaining Anchors

In this anchoring technique, several anchors are fired in sequence. This creates a chain that can guide you from very negative states to highly positive ones.

Stacked Anchors