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Travelling back in time seemed so farfetched to me until a sound of a musical piece which I was addicted to 10 years ago snuck into my mind triggering me to relive a moment in my childhood as I was walking down the boulevard on a Sunday morning. Something as simple as a song was able to move me mentally and emotionally years and years back. This left me wondering: can we sneak our way into our own minds and that of others? What happened that moment was an example of a technique called “Anchoring” one of the many branches of what we call “Neuro Linguistic Programming”. Natural Anchors happen to us all the time whether we are aware of it or not, but the question here is: Can we create our own anchors to drastically improve our lives from increasing our success at work to preserving the spark of passion in our relationships to persuading people with changing their beliefs? Fortunately, the answer is a definitive YES!

Neuro Linguistic Programing is basically a study which deals with thinking about your “thinking”; it is a way of coding excellence and deciphering the results that you want to achieve for yourself, for your business and for your LIFE!

Grant Achatz, one of the most influential chefs in America, reinvents both food and the dining experience by experimenting with the senses. One of the Key ingredients to his massive success at Alinea restaurant, a Michelin 3-star rated restaurant in Chicago, was the anchors he associated with his exceptional dishes; He aimed at infusing emotional elements in his dishes where for example, he would introduce oak leaves that were burning to infuse their smell and associate it with the dish he presented in order to make the customer relive a childhood experience leaving the customer wanting for more. It was these anchors that he created which paved his way for stardom.

“Anchoring” is a technique that not only helps you recall certain events from the past but also re-experience the emotions you felt back then. That is why it is a very powerful technique. It also helps you hold on to certain states when they are threatened by circumstances outside your control and by the dust of the running time plane that we live in. It is like a form of a cryotherapy for your precious moments in which you can choose to access at any moment that appeals or feels right to you.

Let’s consider this example for a negative anchor; somewhere in a work place, a manager sits with his employees only if there was a problem and all his discussions were usually a critical one; It was no surprise that the employees were excessively resistant to any plan proposed by this manager as this manager unconsciously linked his meetings and discussions with problems and criticisms.

Another scenario is the following; let’s say you work for a company and this company always held its weekly meeting on a Friday afternoon, a time where all the employees were basically tired and in a hurry to just leave home and go party for the weekend. This “wrong timing” was also a negative anchor for creating bad decisions that was based on the negative states the employees were in at that time where they will say or do anything just to end the meeting.

We need to watch out for the negative anchors that we are unconsciously and consistently creating in our environment. Let’s start creating positive anchors by first being aware of the wrong anchors we might be sending to others and second by learning the art of anchoring and learning the skills of Neuro Linguistic programming.

Now let’s take a journey into our personal relationships; we can create positive anchors that help us sustain the moments of love and passion for as long as we live. For example; we all know how everything is all “la-la-la-la” at the beginning of our relationships and where unfortunately this state starts to sizzle out and bury itself under the dusts of time. Take advantage of these moments by creating positive anchors so that they don’t frizzle out. For example, associate a specific song or a unique touch or a beautiful fragrance whenever you are feeling passionate about your partner and let this anchor be unique to this passionate state. Play this song or use this touch or put this fragrance only when you are in this state that you want to preserve forever. On repetition, this anchor becomes associated with this state so that whenever you listen to this specific song in the future, or use this unique touch or smell this fragrance, all the events of that special moment will be recalled along with the vibrant experience of all these passionate emotions.

Another powerful technique in Neuro linguistic Programming is understanding the META state of people in order to better persuade them and help them change their beliefs. What do I mean by understanding the “META STATE”?

Take two people for example and understand their mentality first. You ask the first person: what drives you to wake up every morning at 7 am and work till midnight? He answers, “I DON’T WANT to be poor, and I DON’T WANT to be homeless”. You ask the same question for the second person and he answers, “I WANT to save money in order to BUILD MY OWN HOUSE”.

The first mentality is a mentality that strives to do things just to “AVOID PROBLEMS”, the second mentality on the other hand, strives to do things just to “GAIN REWARDS”. The first doesn’t care about incentives while the second doesn’t care about problems. Neither is wrong, it is just their Meta state that gets them doing things. You cannot persuade the first person by giving him incentives, you can do it by listing all the problems that might be associated with his “not doing it” because his mind is focused on “Avoiding Problems”. And vice versa, you cannot persuade the second person by listing the problems but rather by giving him incentives as this will be the driving force for his accomplishments.

Neuro Linguistic Programming is a wide ocean in which we must train ourselves to surf it well! Because yes we can! We can sneak our way into our own minds and others to help change ourselves, and then others and then the future. Once we learn how to create positive anchors in our lives and once we strive to understand people’s mentalities before jumping into changing them, we can create a better future that will help us immortalize our precious moments and change the unchangeable.