When people are emotionally and physically at a low ebb, we often say that they are in “an awful state”. In the same way, we recognize that to make the most of a challenge, we must be “in the right state of mind”. What is a state of mind? Quite simply it is all the thoughts, emotions, and physiology that we express at that moment; the mental pictures, sounds, feelings, and all the patterns of physical posture and breathing. Mind and body are completely interconnected, so our thoughts immediately influence our physiology, and vice versa.
Our state of mind changes continually, and this is one of the few things about it we can rely on. When you change state, the whole world out there changes too. (Or seems to.) We are usually more conscious of our emotional state than of our physiology, posture, gesture and breathing patterns. In fact, emotions are often considered to be beyond conscious control; they are the visible tip of the iceberg. We do not see the whole physiology and thought process that lies underneath and supports the emotions. These are the submerged nine tenths of the iceberg. To try to influence the emotions without changing state is as futile as trying to make the iceberg disappear by sawing the top off it. More will simply surface, unless you spend an inordinate amount of energy holding it underwater, and this is what we often do, with drugs or willpower. For us, the mind leads, and the body follows obediently. Thus habitual emotions can be stamped onto a person's face and posture, because the person does not notice how the emotions mould his or her physiology.
Try this experiment. Take a moment to think of some enjoyable experience, a time when you felt really good. When you have thought of one, think yourself back into that experience. Spend a minute or two re-experiencing it as fully as you can.
As you enjoy these pleasant feelings, look around you, notice what you see and what sounds you are hearing as you re-live this memory.
Notice how you feel. When you are ready, return to the present.
Notice the impact this has on your present state, especially your posture and your breathing. Past experiences are not gone forever; they can help you feel good in the present. Although the sights and the sounds of the past are gone, when we mentally re-create them the actual feeling is still as real and as tangible as it was then. So regardless of what you were feeling before you read this paragraph, you have just put yourself in a more resourceful state.
Now, by contrast, think back to a slightly uncomfortable past experience. When one comes to mind, imagine yourself back in it again.
Back in that situation, what do you see?
What are you hearing?
Notice how you feel.
Do not stay with this experience for very long; return to the present and notice the effect this has had on you. Become aware of how you feel after this experience compared with how you felt after the previous one. Notice too your different posture and breathing pattern.
Now change your emotional state. Do some kind of physical activity, move your body and switch your attention from the memory to something completely different. Look out of the window, jump up and down, run to the other side of the room and touch the wall, or bend down and touch your toes. Pay attention to the physical sensations of moving and to what you sense in the here and now.
This is known as changing state or breaking state in NLP terms, and is worth doing whenever you notice yourself feeling negative or unresourceful. Whenever you remember unpleasant memories and access unresourceful states, your entire body takes up these negative states and holds them as patterns of muscle tone, posture, and breathing. These physically stored memories can contaminate your future experiences for minutes or hours. We all know what it is like to “get out of bed on the wrong side”. People who suffer from depression have unconsciously mastered the ability to maintain an unresourceful state for long periods. Others have mastered the ability to change their emotional state at will, creating for themselves an emotional freedom that transforms the quality of their lives. They fully experience the emotional ups and downs of life, but they learn, move on, and do not dwell on emotional pain unnecessarily.
As we go through life we continually move through different emotional states, sometimes quickly, sometimes more gradually. For example, you may be feeling quite low and a friend telephones with some good news. Your spirits lighten. Or maybe it is a bright sunny day and you open your mail to find an unexpectedly large bill. Mental clouds can cover a real sun.
We can influence our states, rather than simply react to what happens on the outside. In the last few minutes, you have felt good, then uncomfortable, then . . . however you feel now. And nothing has actually happened in the outside world. You have done this all yourself.
Elicitation is the word used in NLP to describe the process of guiding someone into a particular state. This is an everyday skill under a different label, for we are all greatly practiced in putting people into different moods, or bringing them out of moods. We do it all the time by our words, tonality and gestures. Sometimes, however, we do not elicit what we want. How many times have you heard a phrase like, “What's the matter with him, all I said was . . .”
The simplest way to elicit an emotional state is to ask the person to remember a past time when he was experiencing that emotion. The more expressive you are, the more expressiveness you will elicit. If your voice tone, words, facial expression and body posture match the response you are asking for, you are more likely to get it.
All your efforts get results. If you are trying to put someone in a calm resourceful state, it is useless talking in a loud, fast tone of voice, breathing quickly and shallowly, and making lots of fidgety movements. Despite your soothing words, the other person will become more anxious. You need to do what you say. So if you want to lead someone into a confident state, you ask him to remember a particular time when he was confident. You speak clearly, in a confident tone of voice, breathe evenly, with your head up, and your posture erect. You act “confident”. If your words are not congruent with your body language and voice tone, he will tend to follow the nonverbal message.
It is important too that the person remembers the experience as if inside it, not watching dissociated from the outside. Being associated in the situation will bring back the feelings more fully. Imagine watching someone else eating your favorite fruit. Now imagine yourself eating the fruit. Which is the more tasteful experience? To elicit your own states, put yourself back in the experience as fully and as vividly as possible.
Calibration is the NLP word that means recognizing when people are in different states. This is a skill that we all have and use in our everyday lives, and one that is well worth developing and refining.
You distinguish the subtly different expressions as others experience different memories, and different states. For example, when someone remembers a frightening experience his lips may become thinner, his skin paler, and his breathing more shallow. Whereas when he is remembering a pleasurable experience, his lips are more likely to be fuller, the skin color more flushed and breathing deeper, with softening of the facial muscles.
Often our calibration is so poor that we only notice someone is upset when he starts to cry. We rely too much on people telling us verbally how they feel, instead of using our eyes and ears. We do not want to calibrate from a punch on the nose to know that a person is angry, nor do we want to hallucinate all sorts of possibilities from a twitch of an eyebrow.
There is an exercise in NLP training that you may like to try with a friend. Ask your friend to think of a person he likes very much. As he does this, notice his eye position, and angle of his head. Also notice his breathing: is it deep or shallow, fast or slow, high or low? Notice too the differences in facial muscle tone, skin color, lip size and tone of voice. Pay attention to these subtle signs that are normally disregarded. They are the outward expression of inner thoughts. They are those thoughts in the physical dimension.
Now ask your friend to think of someone he dislikes. Notice the difference in these signs. Ask your friend to think of one, then the other, until you are sure you can detect some differences in his physiology. In NLP terms, you have now calibrated these two states of mind. You know what they look like. Ask your friend to think of one of the people, but without telling you which one. You will know which one it is by reading the physical cues you have already identified.
It seems as if you are mind reading . . .
So we can refine our skills. Mostly we calibrate unconsciously. For example, if you ask a loved one whether he or she would like to go out for a meal, you will know intuitively, immediately, before they open their mouth what the answer will be. The “yes” or “no” is the very last step in the thought process. We cannot help but respond with body, mind and language so deeply are the three connected.
You may have had the experience of talking to someone and getting an intuition that he or she was lying. You had probably calibrated this unconsciously, and you got the feeling without knowing why. The more you practice calibration, the better you will become. Some differences between states will be slight, some will be unmistakable. As you practice, subtle changes will become easier to detect. The changes, no matter how small, were always there. As your senses become sharper, you will detect them.
Emotional states have a powerful and pervasive influence on thinking and behavior. After eliciting and calibrating these states, how can we use them to become more resourceful in the present? We need some way of making them consistently available and stabilizing them in the here and now.
Imagine the impact on your life if you could switch on your highperformance states at will. Top performers in politics, sports, the arts, and business must be able to be resourceful in the moment. The actor must be able to commit himself to the role when the curtain goes up, not an hour before, or half way through the second act. This is the bottom line of professionalism.
It is just as important to be able to switch off. The actor must be able to drop his role when the curtain falls. Many people in business become highly motivated, achieve great things, yet burn themselves out and become unhappy, lose their family life, or in extreme cases, suffer from a coronary. Managing our states needs balance and wisdom.
We each have a personal history that is rich in different emotional states. To re-experience them, we need a trigger, some association in the present to elicit the original experience. Our minds naturally link experiences, it is the way we give meaning to what we do. Sometimes these associations are very enjoyable; for example, a favorite piece of music that brings back a pleasant memory. Every time you hear that particular tune, it evokes those pleasant feelings. And every time it does that, it strengthens the association.
A stimulus which is linked to and triggers a physiological state is called an anchor in NLP. Other examples of naturally occurring positive anchors would be favorite photographs, evocative smells, or a loved one's special expression or voice tone.
Anchors are usually external. An alarm clock rings and it is time to get up. The school bell signals the end of playtime. These are auditory anchors. A red traffic light means stop. A nod of the head means yes. These are visual anchors. And the smell of newly laid tar might take you back as if by magic to a childhood scene where you first smelt it. Advertisers try to make their brand name an anchor for a particular commodity.
An anchor is anything that accesses an emotional state, and they are so obvious and widespread that we hardly notice them. How are anchors created? In one of two ways. First by repetition. If you see repeated instances of red being associated with danger, it will become anchored. This is simple learning: red means danger. Secondly, and much more important, anchors can be set in a single instance if the emotion is strong and the timing is right. Repetition is only needed if there is no emotional involvement. Think back to when you were at school (that's a powerful anchor in itself), and found that something interesting and exciting was easy to learn. Facts that did not interest you needed a lot of repetition. The less emotionally involved you are, the more repetitions are needed to learn the association.
Most associations are very useful. They form habits and we could not function without them. If you are a driver you already have an association between a green light turning to red and moving your feet in a certain way on the pedals. This is not an operation you want to have to think about consciously every time, and if you do not make that association, you are not likely to survive for very long on the roads.
Other associations, while useful, may be less pleasant. The sight of a police car in your rear-view driving mirror is quite likely to start you wondering about the state of your car, and what speed you are traveling at.
Other associations are not useful. Many people associate speaking in public with anxiety and mild panic attacks. The thought of an examination makes many people feel nervous and uncertain. Words can act as anchors. The word “test” is an anchor for most schoolchildren to feel anxious and not able to give of their best.
In extreme cases an external stimulus can trigger a very powerful negative state. This is the realm of phobias. For example, people who suffer from claustrophobia have learned a very powerful association between being in a confined space and feeling panic, and they always make that association.
Many people's lives are unnecessarily limited by fears from their past history that have not yet been re-evaluated. Our minds cannot help making associations. Are the ones you have made and are making, enjoyable, useful and empowering?
We can choose the associations we want to make. You can take whatever experiences in life you find most difficult or most challenging, and decide in advance what physiological state you would like to be in to meet them. For any situation you are unhappy about, you can create a new association and therefore a new response by using anchors.
This is done in two stages. First, you choose the emotional state you want, then you associate it with a stimulus or anchor so that you can bring it to mind whenever you want it. Sportsmen use lucky mascots to harness their skill and stamina. You will often see sportsmen going through small ritual movements that serve the same purpose.
Using your resourceful states through anchors is one of the most effective ways to change your own and other people's behavior. If you go into a situation in a more resourceful state than you did in the past, your behavior is bound to change for the better. Resourceful states are the key to peak performance. When you change what you do, other people's behavior will also change. Your whole experience of the situation will be different.
Cautionary note. The change techniques in this chapter and throughout this book are very powerful, and this power comes mainly from the skill of the person who uses them. A carpenter can make superb furniture with precision tools; the same tools in the hands of an apprentice will not get the same results. Similarly it takes practice and work to get the best sound from a fine musical instrument.
In the course of training many people in these skills, we have seen the pitfalls in applying these techniques for the first time. We strongly recommend that you practice these techniques in a safe context, like an NLP training seminar, until you are confident, and your skill levels are high enough.
Here are the steps for transferring positive emotional resources from past experiences to the present situations where you want them to be available. You may want to get together with a friend and ask him or her, to guide you through these steps.
Take some comfortable position in a chair, or stand where you can consider the process in an uninvolved way. Think of some specific situation in which you would like to be different, feel different and respond differently. Then choose a particular emotional state, from the many different ones you have experienced in your life, that you would most like to have available to you in that situation. It can be any resourceful state—confidence, humour, courage, persistence, creativity—whatever comes intuitively to mind as being most appropriate. When you are clear about the resource you want, begin to find one specific occasion in your life when you felt that resource. Take your time, noticing which examples come to your mind and choose whichever one is most clear and intense.
If you have chosen a resource, and it is difficult to remember a time when you experienced it, then imagine somebody you know, or even a fictitious character from a film or book. What would it be like, being them, experiencing this resource? Remember that although the character may not be real, your feelings are, and these are what count.
When you have a specific instance in mind, real or imaginary, you are ready to go to the next step, which is to choose the anchors that will bring this resource to mind when you want it.
First, your kinesthetic anchor: some feeling you can associate to your chosen resource. Touching your thumb and finger together or making a fist in a particular way works well as a kinesthetic anchor. I see a very common one on the squash court when players touch the side wall to bring back a confident feeling if their game is going badly.
It is important that the anchor is unique and not part of your ongoing behavior. You want a distinctive anchor that does not occur all the time, and so does not get associated with other states and behaviors. Also you want the anchor to be discreet; something you can do without being conspicuous. Standing on your head might work well as a confidence anchor, but would get you a reputation for eccentricity if you were to use it to help you make after dinner speeches.
Next, the auditory anchor. This can be a word or phrase that you say to yourself internally. It does not matter which word or phrase you use as long as it is in tune with the feeling. The way you say it, the particular voice tone you use, will have as much impact as the word or phrase itself. Make it distinctive and memorable. For example, if “confidence” is the resource state that you want to anchor, then you might say to yourself, “I am feeling more and more confident”, or simply, “Confidence!” Use a confident, voice tone. Make sure the resource really is appropriate to the problem situation.
Now the visual anchor. You might choose a symbol, or you can remember what you were seeing when you did feel confident. As long as the image you choose is distinctive, and helps to evoke the feeling, then it will work.
When you have chosen an anchor in each representation system, the next step is to relive those feelings of confidence by vividly re-creating the resource situation. Step forward or change chairs as you associate fully into the experience. Putting different emotional states in actual different physical locations helps to separate them cleanly.
In your imagination, go back now to the specific resource state you have chosen . . .
Remember where you were and what you were doing . . .
As that becomes clearer, imagine that you are right back in it now and that you are seeing what you were seeing . . .
You can begin to hear whatever sounds you were hearing and start to re-experience those feelings that were so strong a part of that experience . . .
Take some time and enjoy reliving that experience as fully as possible . . .
To really get back in touch with your full body sense of your resource state it often helps to act out your activities in that moment again. You may want to put your body into that same position, doing the same things that you were doing (only if appropriate) . . .
When those feelings have come to a peak and start to diminish, physically move back to your uninvolved position. You have now found out how best to recreate your resourceful state and how long it takes to do so.
Now you are ready to anchor the resources. Step into your place for the resource state and re-experience it again. As it reaches its peak, see your image, make your gesture and say your words. You must connect your anchors to the resource state as it is coming to its peak. The timing is critical. If you connect them after the peak, you would anchor going out of the state, which is not what you want. The sequence of anchors is not critical, use the order that works best for you, or fire them simultaneously. Sometime after your resourceful feelings have peaked, you will need to step out and change state before you are ready to test the anchor.
Use all three anchors in the same way and the same sequence and notice the extent to which you do indeed access your resourceful state. If you are not satisfied, go back and repeat the anchoring process to strengthen the association between your anchors and your resourceful state. You may need to repeat this a few times and this is worth it to be able to have that state when you need it.
Lastly, think of a future situation where you are likely to want that resourceful state. What can you use as a signal to let you know you need that resource? Find the first thing that you see, hear, or feel that lets you know that you are in that situation. The signal can be external or internal. For example, a particular expression on somebody's face or their voice tone would be an external signal. Starting an internal dialogue would be an internal signal. Being aware that you have a choice about how you feel is a resource state in itself. It will also interrupt the habitual, anchored response. It is worth anchoring this awareness to the signal. The signal then acts as a reminder that you can choose your feelings.
After a time, if you keep using the anchor, the signal itself will become an anchor for you to feel resourceful. The trigger that used to make you feel bad now becomes one that makes you feel strong and resourceful. Here is a summary of the basic steps of the process.
Anchors need to be:
Timed just as the state is reaching its peak
Unique and distinctive
Easy to repeat exactly
Linked to a state that is cleanly and completely re-experienced.
Anchoring Resourceful States Summary
You can now use these anchors to summon your resource state whenever you wish. Remember to experiment with this or any other NLP technique to find the way that works best for you. Keep your outcome in mind, (feeling more resourceful), and play with the technique until you succeed. Some people find that simply making their gesture (“firing” their kinesthetic anchor) is enough to produce the resource state. Others want to continue using all three anchors.
You can use this process to anchor different resources. Some people anchor a different resource on each finger. Other people connect many different resource states to the same anchor to produce a very powerful resource anchor. This technique of adding different resources to the same anchor is known as stacking resources.
Anchoring and using your resourceful states is a skill, and like all skills, becomes easier and more effective the more you use it. Some people find it works dramatically the very first time. Others find they need to practice to build their competence at doing it as well as their confidence that it does indeed make a difference. Remember the learning model. If anchoring is new to you, congratulations on passing from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence. Enjoy this stage as you become consciously competent.
Resource anchoring is a technique for increasing emotional choice. This culture, unlike some, believes that emotional states are involuntary, and created by external circumstances or other people. The universe may deal us a mixed hand of cards, but we can choose how and when to play them. As Aldous Huxley said, “Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you”.
Anchors can be chained so that one leads to another. Each anchor provides a link in the chain and triggers the next one, just as the electrical impulse flows from nerve to nerve in our body. In a sense, anchors are a mirror on the outside of how we create a new neural pathway in our nervous system between an initial trigger and a new response. Chaining anchors allows us to move through a sequence of different states easily and automatically. Chaining is particularly useful if the problem state is strong and the resource state is too far away to reach in one stage.
For example, think of a situation where you feel frustrated. Can you identify the consistent signal that triggers this feeling?
A tone of voice in your internal dialogue?
A particular sensation?
Something you see?
It can often seem that the world is conspiring against you, but you can control how you react to the conspiracy. And the feeling of frustration is not going to change the outside world. When you have this internal signal, decide which state you would like to move on to. Curiosity perhaps? And from there maybe to creativity?
To set up your chain, think back to a time when you were intensely curious, and anchor it, perhaps kinesthetically, by a touch on your hand. Break state, and then think yourself back to a time when you were in a very creative state and anchor that, perhaps with a touch on another place on your hand.
Next, take yourself back to a frustrating experience, and as soon as you get the frustration signal, fire your anchor for curiosity, and as the feeling of curiosity is peaking, touch your anchor for creativity.
This establishes a neural network of associations that moves easily from frustration through curiosity to creativity. Practice it as many times as you wish so that the connection becomes automatic.
Once you can elicit, calibrate, and anchor different emotional states, you have a tremendously powerful tool for counseling and therapy. You and your clients have quick and easy access to any emotional state. Anchoring can be used to assist clients to make changes remarkably quickly, and can be done in any system, visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.
Now what would happen if you tried to feel hot and cold at the same time? What happens when you mix yellow and blue? What happens if you fire two opposite anchors at once? You feel warm or green. To collapse anchors, you anchor an unwanted negative state (call it cold or blue), and a positive state (call it hot or yellow), and fire the anchors simultaneously. After a short period of confusion, the negative state is changed, and a new and different state comes into being. You can use this technique of collapsing anchors with a friend or client. Here is an outline of the steps; make sure you establish and maintain rapport throughout.
Collapse Anchors Summary
One way of thinking about what is happening is that the nervous system is trying to engage two mutually incompatible states at the same time. It cannot, so it does something different. The old pattern is broken and new ones are created. This explains the confusion that often happens when the two anchors are collapsed. Anchors allow experiences to be available by consciously using the natural processes that we normally use unconsciously. We anchor ourselves all the time, usually in a completely haphazard way. Instead, we can be much more selective about what anchors we respond to.
Human experience only exists in the present moment. The past exists as memories and to remember these we have to re-experience them in some way in the present. The future exists as expectations or fantasies, again created in the present. Anchoring enables us to increase our emotional freedom by escaping from the tyranny of past negative experiences and creating a more positive future.
Change Personal History is a technique for re-evaluating troublesome memories in the light of present knowledge. We all have a rich personal history of past experiences that exist as memories in the present. While what actually happened (whatever that was, for human memories are fallible) cannot be changed, we can change its meaning for us in the present, and therefore its effect on our behavior.
For example, the feeling of jealousy is almost always generated not from what actually happened, but from constructed images of what we believe happened. We then feel bad in response to those images. The images are real enough to cause some extreme reactions, even though they never happened.
If past experiences were very traumatic or very intense, so that even to think about them causes pain, then the phobia cure in Chapter 8 is a better technique to use. It is designed for dealing with very intense negative emotional experiences.
Change Personal History is useful when problem feelings or behavior keep recurring. The “Why do I keep doing this?” type of feeling. The first step in using this technique with a client or friend is, of course, to establish and maintain rapport.
Experiencing a situation in advance is called future pacing in NLP, and is the final step in many NLP techniques. You step into the future in imagination with the new resources you have, and experience in advance how you wish it to be. For example, the future pace in Change Personal History is to ask the person to imagine the next time the problem situation is likely to recur. As he does this, you calibrate to see if there is any sign of a slip back into the negative state. If there is, then you know there is more work to be done.
Future pacing tests if your work is effective. It is the nearest you can get to being in the problem situation. However, the real test of any change is the next time the person encounters the problem for real. Insights and changes can easily get anchored to the psychological consulting room. Learning gets anchored to the classroom, and business plans to the board room. The real world is the real test.
Secondly, future pacing is a form of mental rehearsal. Mental preparation and practice is a consistent pattern that is found in all top performers: actors, musicians, salesmen, and particularly sportsmen. Whole training programs are built around this one element. Mental rehearsal is practice in the imagination, and since the body and mind form one system, it prepares and primes the body for the actual situation.
Giving the brain strong positive images of success programs it to think in those terms, and makes success more likely. Expectations are self-fulfilling prophecies. These ideas of future pacing and mental rehearsal can be used to learn from every day, and to generate new behavior. You might like to run through the following steps each night before going to sleep.
As you review the day, choose something you did very well, and something you are not so happy with. See both scenes again, rehear the sounds, experience them again in an associated way. Then step out of them and ask yourself, “What could I have done differently?” What were the choice points in these experiences? How could the good experiences become even better? You may well identify some other choices you could have made in the not so good experience.
Now replay the experiences fully, but with you behaving differently. What does this look like? How does it sound? Check your feelings. This little ritual will build in choices. You may identify a signal in the not so good experience that will alert you the next time it happens, to use another choice that you have already mentally rehearsed.
You can use this type of technique for generating entirely new behavior, or for changing and improving something you already do.
This is the more general technique to use if there is some new behavior you want, or one that you would like to change or improve. For example, you may want to improve at your favorite sport. Watch yourself in your imagination behaving the way you would like to, hitting the tennis serve just right for example. If this is difficult, watch a role model doing the behavior. Take the director's chair of the inner film. Be Steven Spielberg in your imagination. Watch the scene as it unfolds before your inner eye. Stay dissociated as you listen to, and edit the soundtrack. You are the star as well as the director. If there are any other people involved, notice their responses to what you are doing.
Direct the scene and edit the soundtrack until you are completely satisfied, then step inside that image of yourself and run it through as though you are doing it. As you do this, pay particular attention to both your feelings, and the responses of the people around you. Does this new behavior represent your values and your personal integrity?
If it does not feel right, go back to the director's chair and change the film before stepping back into it. When you are happy with your imagined performance, identify an internal or external signal that you can use to trigger this behavior. Mentally rehearse noticing the signal and going through the new behavior.
The new behavior generator is a simple but powerful technique to use in your personal and professional development. Every experience becomes an opportunity for learning. The more you do this, the faster you move toward becoming the person you really want to be.