can let yourself concentrate on your work now. You think about
the day ahead and anticipate your first meeting. You know the
person you are meeting and you decide to pay more attention
than usual to the outcome you want to achieve from this
meeting. You start to get quite excited about the possibilities for
the future. You think about the journey you have to make to get
to this meeting and make some contingency plans in case there
are any holdups. You also plan how you can use the traveling
time to good effect.
En route to the meeting you get stuck in delays, but you
realize there is nothing you can do about them so you use the
time as you had planned to think of other things. You think about
the weekend and how good it has been and how resourceful you
feel now because of it. You get to the meeting with little time to
spare and it goes much as you expected—you are well on your
way to achieving not only the outcomes that you set yourself but
also ones that you had not anticipated.
You arrive at your place of work and there is a stream of
messages, so you decide to work through the urgent ones and put
the rest out of your mind until you have got through the other
high-priority issues for the day. This helps you to focus your
thinking. The phone rings and you hear the voice of a colleague
who seems frequently to talk to you about problems—you are
privately amused at how someone can center their attention on
the negative aspects of life so consistently. You listen with
empathy and he seems to become more positive over the
duration of the call. You feel very fortunate to have the work you
have and to be surrounded by people who make your days so
rich and entertaining. You arrive home tired but satisfied with the
day and ready for a relaxing evening.
Our days are governed by the associations we have chosen
(often unconsciously) to make with the various kinds of events
we encounter. We make associations throughout our lives—the
question is whether they lead to the kinds of outcome we want
for ourselves or whether we are making our lives a misery
because of what we are choosing to think about our
circumstances. Given that what we choose to think is one of the
single most powerful influences on the outcome of a situation,
this is one of the most significant ways in which we can
We make associations
throughout our livesTAP INTO YOUR INNER POTENTIAL: ANCHORING 191