This is part 1 in my Build Your Super Power Series: Helpful Tools you can use Right Now. These are different tools and strategies which I teach my clients, and which I use myself too. You can find part 2 here.
The first tool I want to tell you about is Anchoring.
We create automatic anchors all the time. They show up as either a memory or a feeling that could be triggered by an event, place, smell or sound for example.
It can be extremely helpful to create conscious anchors so that you can get yourself into a positive state.
If this is the first time you’ve heard of anchoring, it might make sense for you to first read through all the points before you try it out for yourself.
I’ll break it down step-by-step for you.
Firstly, you need to decide what state do you want to anchor, for example being calm, relaxed or confident.
Then you need to decide on how you will anchor that state or feeling.
It works best if you choose an anchor that you can trigger by physical touch, like squeezing your earlobe, clasping your wrist or pressing your thumb and forefinger together.
Just make sure that you don’t choose a movement that you make often, it has to be something fairly unique so that you can trigger it on purpose and not accidentally.
Ready? Ok here we go and we will use confidence as our state of choice.
1. Get yourself into that exact state that you want to anchor. You can do this by closing your eyes and either remembering a time when you felt really confident. You can also imagine something that you are confident about, for example, that the sun will come up tomorrow. Make sure you really put yourself into the state of feeling confident and see what you see, hear what you hear and feel what you feel.
2. You will now squeeze your anchor just before you hit the top of that feeling. Sometimes it helps to imagine your feeling having an intensity from 1-10. Your scale goes from 1 which is fairly weak to 10 which is strong. So, you’d squeeze your anchor as soon as you get to 9. Hold your anchor for 2 – 3 seconds before you release it.
3. Now you need to do something else that will distract you (and your brain) before you carry on. It’s called break state. You can do anything – think about food, ask yourself a crazy question, sing a few lines from a song, count down from 10-1, recite a short poem.
4. You can test it now, to see if it worked. So touch your earlobe or wrist and check whether you are feeling that feeling of confidence. You’ll probably find that it is there, but it is very faint. Now you want to make it stronger.
5. Wash rinse repeat. Follow steps 1-4 a few times. Every time you do it, make the picture brighter, the sound louder and feeling bigger. Keep on doing it until you can easily feel it when you trigger it.
And there you go. You can continue to build on this anchor to make it even stronger and more powerful.
So, go try it out for yourself!
Watch out for the next installment in this series, where I talk about how to create and use vision boards.