158 Part III: Opening the Toolkit
you want to boost your confidence to perform a skill on the sports field or
make a speech in public.
Of course, NLP isn’t going to turn you into an opera singer or Olympic ath-
lete overnight – NLP can’t give you the competence to perform skills you
don’t possess – but anchoring techniques can help you to access your innate
resources to be the very best you can.
Changing negative anchors
Sometimes you need to have a way of changing a negative anchor. As a
simple example, you may want to change a destructive habit. A slimmer who
reaches for the biscuit tin every time they have a cup of tea has created a
negative anchor. Drink equals biscuit. Or an office worker who feels anxious
each day when going into work, because they once had an argument with
their boss, may be heading for a stress-related illness.
Desensitising yourself
One of the most common NLP approaches to releasing a negative anchor is by
desensitising. To start, you need to get into a neutral or disassociated state –
and then you introduce the problem in small doses. So if the issue is the slim-
ming one mentioned above, you need to get first into a strong state when
you’re able to say ‘no, thank you’ to fattening foods. Then practise being
tempted while staying in the strong state. Essentially, you need to develop
new habits.
Collapsing the anchor
Another strategy is to collapse the anchor by firing off two anchors simulta-
neously – the unwanted negative one plus a positive one. You release the
negative anchor while holding the positive one for another five seconds. The
negative state is collapsed, making way for the positive one to remain.
Jane was recently divorced and won custody of the couple’s two young chil-
dren. She felt uncontrollably angry every time her ex-husband called to make
arrangements to visit the children. In turn, the children were becoming very
anxious about weekend visits to their father and his new partner. Romilla
worked with Jane to collapse the negative anchors and replace them with
a series of positive ones so that she was able to manage a strong and open
dialogue with her ex-husband whenever she had to look at him face-to-face or
hear his voice on the phone (unwanted negative anchors). In this way, she let
go of the power he held.
Lengthening the anchor chain
You can move through many different emotional states in a single day.
Anchors often work well in chains, with one trigger leading to another.
