Man: Yes … How long does an anchor last?
A: I guess the easiest way to answer that is to say that an anchor lasts as long as it lasts … Some may only last a couple of days, others will last years … even a lifetime. Think of language. Many words will serve as anchors all of our lives …
A person I hadn't seen for about four years called me up and wanted me to help him with this problem. Now I had an anchor for trance that I'd set up with him years before, so when he came over I had him sit down, and I fired off the anchor and – boom – he was gone just like that …
The two major things that determine how long an anchor will last are, one, how unique the stimulus you use for an anchor is and, two, how well you make the association between the anchor and the experience. For instance, people get touched on their shoulders all the time, so the anchors I've set up with Jan aren't that unique and may not last long. If I had grabbed her left earlobe, the association might be more unique and therefore more longlasting. A squeeze on the shoulder will anchor up other representations that have occurred previously when she's been touched there.
One of the reasons that language is such a powerful anchoring system is that sounds we make with our voices have subtle but distinct differences. We all know that homonyms, words that sound alike, are not direct anchors. Words like 'see', 'sea' and 'C\ or 'know' and 'no', are ambiguous – that is, they anchor up more than one representation. Kinesthetic and visual anchors do the same thing. Touching someone on the shoulder or the knee can anchor more than one representation because touches there occur so often.
Another thing to keep in mind concerning uniqueness is context. If I say "I sailed the sea," there is much less ambiguity about what kind of representation I'm referring to because I'm putting the anchor "sea" into a context. The same thing works with other anchors. For example, as long as she is sitting in front of this group of people and sitting in this room and I raise my voice like this (raises pitch of voice) and I use this facial expression (smiles) and reach over and touch Jan on the left shoulder so she can see me, I may always get the response that's been anchored today. If I meet Jan on the street three weeks from now and just start talking in a higher pitched voice, I may not get the full response, because there are a whole bunch of other anchors provided by the change in context. That may change, however, if I also squeeze her shoulder and use this facial expression .. . Then I've fired off anchors in all three of her major representational systems.
It's always best to make sure you've got your anchors established in all representational systems, by the way. It really cleans up your work … We call that "redundancy" in NLP. Because you've got your anchor or your communications coded in all representational systems, it increases your chance of success.
Making sure that the association between your anchor and your response is "clean" is also very important. This has to do with congruency. For instance, if I am trying to anchor a certain experience in someone and all the time we're going through the process, the person has this voice in the back of their mind that's saying, "What's this guy doing?" or "This isn't going to work," then I'm going to be anchoring that voice, too. And it will be no wonder if my anchoring doesn't work the way I want it to. That's why it's so important to use your sensory channels for feedback, so that you can make sure that the person is completely and congruently experiencing the 4–tuple that you want to anchor.
Timing is also really important. If you want to make a clean, solid association, you'll want to establish the anchor at a time when the person is really experiencing or reexperiencing the state you want to utilize. Essentially, you will want to anchor when the experience or memory is at its peak or highest intensity. This will make sure that you've got only the experience that you want … Any other questions? (No response.)
A: Okay … Now I'd like to demonstrate one way to use anchoring … Once I've got an experience anchored then I can always use that anchor to bring the experience into the ongoing situation as a resource. That is, I can bring that experience to bear on what's going on right now. I've got a way now to be able to access it as a resource for just about any situation I want … For example, Jan, what do you experience when I do this … (Squeezes left shoulder and right shoulder at the same time.)
S: (Eyes shift up then down left. Breathing shallows. Eyes shift back up then down and to the right. Scrunches left side of face slightly, sighs slightly, looks back up and then down and left and starts to shake her head slightly back and forth) … I … well … I'm sort of confused … It's like I'm trying to take that one (Indicates left shoulder) and put it together with this one, but I … it's very intense …
A: Jan had begun the process of what we call "integrating 4–tuples." By firing off the two anchors at the same time, or "collapsing" the anchors as we say in NLP, I actually forced the two different representations, or 4–tuples, into the same time time and space, neurologically. This forces the creation of a new 4–tuple that is a combination or integration of the two that are going together. In this way you add resources to the problem state… . My guess is, judging from Jan's response to what I just did, that in this case the resources from the experience anchored over here (gestures to left shoulder) were not enough to help Jan resolve what was going on over there (Gestures to right shoulder). That's not at all surprising since they were just two experiences that I picked out, and the resources weren't tailored for the problematic state … and I'll show you how to do that in a minute …
What I wanted to demonstrate by collapsing these two anchors is the impact it can have. Could everyone tell there was something going on? … It was obvious to me through her changes in breathing, the asymmetry of her face, all of those eye movements, and so on, that Jan was doing a lot of internal processing. Most of it was probably going on at the unconscious level. Consciously, Jan experienced "confusion," which is very common when you are integrating experiences, by the way. She knew the two experiences were going together in some way … but at the end she shook her head, giving me the indication that she needed more resources to make a satisfactory integration … Now Jan, you would like to have more choices about that
experience (Gestures toward right shoulder) wouldn't you?
S: Oh yes. It's really frustrating.
A: [To Audience] Up until now none of you have known anything verbally about this experience (Gestures to right shoulder) but I'll bet most of you could guess that it was frustrating for Jan. (Agreement from the audience.)
A: In order for me to help Jan get more choices about this situation I don't even need to know anything verbally about the situation, as long as I have access to sensory experience. In NLP we call working in this way – that is, without content — "secret therapy." A lot of times people are shy, nervous or resistant about giving out the details of a problem, or they literally can't put the details into words, or they don't even consciously know them. Because we work with form in neurolinguistic programming, we can get around all that because in most situations we're not concerned with the content details … Now I'll continue working in this way with Jan to show you how it can be done. So what I want to do, to make the demonstration a little easier to follow, is to give this frustrating experience some innocuous, non–referring name … like some color, for instance … What color would you like to name this experience, Jan?