Anchoring

When we repeat a task many times over, our subconscious eventually causes our body to automate that task for us. If you drive a car, you may remember how difficult it was when you first started to drive. Trying to learn how to handle the vehicle, remembering how hard you needed to brake, and attempting to memorize all the road rules seemed like an impossible task to master at the time. Over time however, you gained confidence, and driving eventually became second nature. This is an example of conditioning, where if a behaviour is repeated long enough, you will eventually adopt that behaviour as second nature, without the need for any conscious thought.

A person learning to drive, illustrating the concept of conditioning through repetition.

In NLP, anchoring takes the concept of conditioning a step further. With anchoring, what we’re essentially trying to do is associate certain behaviours and emotional states with certain actions. These actions can include internal actions or thoughts within ourselves, or external actions that other people perform. By associating these actions with various psychological states, we can essentially ‘trigger’ the psychological state by simply performing the action. This is similar to conditioning, but can be applied to interpersonal settings, meaning we can effect the behaviour of others as opposed to just ourselves.

A visual representation of anchoring in NLP, showing the association of actions with emotional states.

We can use anchoring to make a person happy when they are sad, or sad when they are happy. We can use it to make a person feel a strong lust or desire for someone or something, or even trigger sexual energies or feelings of euphoria. Essentially any emotional state that a person can experience, we can bring back to the person at any time, provided that we anchor that state correctly through an action. Now the action itself can be just about anything imaginable, so long as the person cognitively registers the action. The keyword here is cognitively. A person doesn’t have to consciously register the action, in fact it’s better if they don’t. A person can subconsciously register an action instead, not even being consciously aware that the action is taking place. So long as the person registers the action, we can associate that action with the mental state that the person is experiencing at the time. The process of associating actions with emotional states is exactly what anchoring is.

Demonstration of anchoring an emotional state to an action, such as tapping a pen to evoke happiness.

Now don’t think that you can simply go outside and start anchoring actions to emotional states and expect to see immediate results, because anchoring doesn’t work instantaneously. You need to condition the anchor over time, reinforcing it to the person as time passes by. You need to look for verbal and nonverbal cues as to whether or not the anchor has been successfully planted, and unless you have had prior experience in NLP, such a thing is very difficult without lots of practice and training.

Anchoring itself is an extensive field of study, and the example I gave you was the simplest I could possibly give without delving too deeply into the field in this post. All that you need to understand at this stage is that anchoring is about associating an emotional state with an action, and then bringing back that emotional state through the action. How you can practically achieve this, I cover in my main course.