Chapter 9: Dropping Anchors 161
- Step inside the circle again.
With your hand in the anchored position, move into the circle; your
partner asks you to see, hear, and feel how the experience can be for
you now.
- Step outside the circle, back to your partner.
Relax... you’ve got it!
Repeat this exercise with more examples of your best state in order to
strengthen the anchor even further. When you need to access your confident
and positive state, you can imagine the circle slightly in front of you and take a
small, discreet step forward into it.Anchoring spatially
When you’re giving a speech or presentation in front of an audience, spatial
anchoring is a way of influencing your audience through anchors. When you
repeatedly do the same thing on stage in the same place, people come to
expect a certain behaviour from you according to where you move to on the
stage. A lectern is a definite anchor – when you stand at the lectern, people
expect you to speak.While presenting, you can deliberately set up other expectations with the
audience at different places on the stage. Perhaps you do the main delivery
from the centre point of the stage, but move to one side when you’re tell-
ing stories and another side when you deliver technical information. You
may have yet another space that you step to when being humorous or light
hearted. Very quickly, people come to expect a certain style input from you
according to where you position yourself.A Final Point About Anchors
Anchors may or may not work for you when you first try them. As with all the
tools in this book, you learn fastest by taking an NLP class or working with an
experienced practitioner. Whichever way you choose to develop your skills –
on your own or with others – simply give it a go.We encourage you to persist even if setting anchors seems strange at first.
When you do take control of your own state, you expand your options and
the result is certainly worthwhile. Being able to manage your emotional state
is powerful, just as the famous Rudyard Kipling poem ‘If’ says: ‘If you can
keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.. .’A fundamental NLP presupposition is that the person with the most flexibility
in a situation is the one who succeeds.