ANCHORING

Anchoring refers to the process of capturing a specific state with a specific trigger. With anchoring you can isolate and manoeuvre portions of FA at different contexts. An anchor acts as a trigger or switch for a state.  The premise is, if at the peak of a state a sensory anchor is applied, the two become linked.  An anchor can be a touch, a movement, a tonal quality. It must be unique, distinct and induced at the peak of a state to be successful.  In NLP, Practitioners use anchoring to capture resource states either from a client’s personal history or present state with the intent of linking them to present and future contexts, where the resources would be needed.  The co-creators of NLP noticed Milton Erickson and Virginia Satir did this process using tonal anchors.  The theory of anchoring is often explained as stimulus response theory, which grew from Pavlov’s work.  The NLP Practitioner can also anchor natural states as they arise in a client so that the Practitioner can enable the client to access these states later in the session or in later sessions.

Anchoring is very useful for state control and changing clients’ conditioned responses to stimuli that arise in their daily life.  The Practitioner can set anchors in the client’s visual, auditory and kinesthetic systems.

The Four steps to anchoring
1. Have the person fully access a state
2.  Provide a specific stimulus as the state peaks
3. Break state
4. Fire anchor to test