Dropping Anchors in NLP

Of course one of the fundamental elements of NLP is to provide a person with a lot more choice to make the decisions that he or she will be able to improve upon. Within this concept are what are known as “anchors” and before explaining what dropping anchors in NLP means or “collapse” an anchor, it would make sense to explain what an anchor is, and how it is applied in NLP terms.

An anchor is a concept that derived from an experiment conducted by Pavlov. Most of us would know about Pavlov’s dogs and what he did with his dogs has led to this “anchoring” philosophy. Pavlov rang his doorbell and showed his dogs a piece of meat. He then rang the doorbell again, sometime later, and again showed his dogs a piece of meat. On a third occasion he rang the doorbell and watched as the dogs started salivating, almost as if they had actually seen that piece of meat again, except that this time, they hadn’t.

This is what caused Pavlov to deduce that his “stimulus-response” theory actual worked. In this example the “doorbell” was the anchor. He had established an anchor for the dogs. Any time a person is in an intense state, and when at the peak of that state a stimulus is consistently applied, that state and the stimulus are connected neurologically, resulting in an anchor that will be continually produced each time the stimulus is set off.

We can further relate this to a salesperson who may have failed at making a sale many times when he has gone out on a call. If we find that the salesperson becomes negative more frequently when he ventures out on a sales call, it may be that he is recalling all of the previous times that he failed. This is a situation where the anchor can be collapsed or dropped, and as a result of that the potential for the salesperson to forget about those previous failures is enhanced.

The process of dropping anchors in NLP involves taking a negative state and integrating it into a positive state. Doing this provides the person with enhanced neurological choice. In the case of the salesperson, if it was found that the two things (sales and failure) were linked, the association can be dropped in favour of a positive one, allowing the salesperson to feel good about sales too.

There are special techniques for dropping anchors in NLP, that can be used to achieve this transition and they should be applied as soon as the negative anchors are recognized. For every individual to be able to achieve the greatness they want is paramount, and if the simple process of dropping anchors can achieve this state, it must be tried at all costs. It is a vital part of the NLP process, and will make all the difference in the results one can expect to achieve.