Here’s how to run the pattern with your client:

1. Grab some cash (I personally love hundred dollar bills)
2. Show the money to your client
3. Ask: “How much is this worth?” This will interrupt the client’s pattern. Your client will say “One hundred dollars.”
4. Then, crumple up the money, spit on it, toss it behind you and then step on it.
5. Ask your client: “Do you feel like that at times?” Observe client’s reaction.
6. Pick up the money, open it up with care and attention, and show it to your client once more.
7. Ask: “How much is this worth now?”
8. Client will answer: “One hundred dollars.”
9. Hold out the bill in front of your client so (s)he can see it clearly. Future pace by saying: “And anytime you see a hundred dollar bill, no matter what’s happened to it, you’ll remember that it’s still worth a hundred dollars.”

This experiential metaphor is incredibly powerful. Allow the client to go through the experience and draw his/her own conclusions without explaining anything.

Do you know anyone who got run over by life and needs a self-esteem boost? Test this pattern and let us know in the comments how it worked out.

Hear it from the horse’s mouth!

And the answer is pretty straight forward:

No.

Can’t really tell you why.

Doesn’t bake my noodle all that much.

Formal or stage hypnosis, that is.

Trance phenomena continue to fascinate me. If trance = hypnosis, then I’m interested. But I believe a notable distinction exists.

Here in northern Brazil, umbanda is very much a part of people’s life. Adepts of this Afro-Brazilian religion get together in “terreiros”, where they celebrate their devotion to “orixás” and other entities. This celebration involves drumming and percussive dancing that leads most participants into trances.

Is that hypnosis?

Perhaps.

Sensory hypnosis? Or kinesthetic hypnosis?

Not sure…

But hypnotic language patterns, in my opinion, are the least interesting phenomena of trance available.

How many trances can you identify in your day-to-day life?

Go read it.

But before you do, just check out the gist of it. Tom simply points out that, in order to effect change, you must:

1. Become aware that some pattern isn’t serving you.

2. Take complete responsibility for the pattern and changing it.

3. Have a clear outcome in mind as to what you want.

4. Get leverage on yourself to make sure that change is a must (taken from Tony Robbins).

Once and only once all these criteria are met can you apply NLP techniques to interrupt patterns and condition new ones.

But don’t take my word for it. Go check it out.

Each new author brings a new label for what, in the end, proves to be the exact same activity: programming new instructions into our own subconscious mind.

So, if that’s what you’re trying to achieve, use ANY of them in varied ways until you find the specific, tailored way that works for you.

Below, I’ve included a standard eye accessing cue chart that will help you record these. If you’re an advanced student of NLP, you’ve come across images similar to this one countless number of times.

Eye accessing cues are just a model. The co-founders don’t intend to make them an absolute truth in any way. 

With that said, they generally clue us in correctly in which representational system the other person is processing.

But let’s learn how to calibrate using eye accessing cues.

The way to do this is to ask questions that elicit the use of specific representational systems.

So you could ask the person:

“Remind me, what was the color of the second house we looked at?”

Pay attention to the person’s eye movements.

If the person is right-handed, (s)he will normally look up and to the left to access this visual cue.

Attention! Often times, the person might first repeat and re-hear the question in their mind prior to accessing the answer. Should (s)he follow that process, (s)he will first display a different eye movement pattern. This does not discredit the eye accessing cue model. It simply means that you need to pay close attention to all the processes that person follows before reaching an aswer.

Use questions to effectively calibrate how the person accesses specific sensory information.

So now, let’s go to the drills! Remember, you MUST practice to become proficient.

Drill 1: Come up with 5 questions you can ask to calibrate eye accessing cues for each representational system.

Drill 2: Apply! Ask each question to at least 20 people over the upcoming week and calibrate their responses.

Drill 3: Observe people’s eye accessing cues in every day conversations. 

Drill 4: Play around with eye accessing cues yourself. Try to visualize while looking down. Try talking to yourself while looking up. Try to elicit a feeling while looking sideways.

Of course, let us know how you experimented in the comments.

Here’s the story in a nutshell: during his conversation with her, she repeated a few times that, for her to get over cancer, “her whole world would have to turn upside down”. Grinder then proceeded to arrange an acrobatic flight for his client with a pilot friend of his.

His client went into remission.

Now, let’s be VERY clear here…

I AM NOT SAYING THAT NLP SERVES AS A MAGIC BULLET THAT WILL SOLVE EVERY PROBLEM IN HUMANITY. IT IT NOT THE PANACEA THAT SOME PEOPLE MAKE IT OR WANT IT TO BE. THIS MIGHT NOT WORK IN EVERY CASE. IT MIGHT HAVE WORKED BY LUCK.

Now that we’re over with the NLP-religion disclaimer, let’s move on.

What I find interesting in the example is the possibility to impact neurology and belief systems through the keen design of concrete life experiences.

If you want a gajillion more examples like this one, you MUST read Phoenix, a book written by David Gordon about Milton Erickson’s behavioral patterns of intervention — which are, in my opinion, as interesting if not more than his hypnosis work.

The problem with talking in therapy is that it’s talk and it requires rapport and trust in the content and/or process being offered to you by the therapist (I know, I know, we don’t do content in NLP).

The power of real experience in NLP

Now, real experiences provide UNDENIABLE material the client is now FORCED to assimilate and process.

If someone you believe to be your enemy saves your life, the impact on your neurology will significantly differ from someone else telling you: “Deep down, he’s a good guy…”

It’s the significant difference between building products from specs vs. building products from prototypes.

Every belief is grounded in references. A reference is either:

1. Real live experience
2. Hallucinated experience
3. Another set of beliefs (for which the same analysis holds)

Needless to say, beliefs built from real live experiences have infinitely more power than those of hallucinated experiences. You can use the second as a piggyback to get to the first, but nothing beats having the first.

Imagine an athlete who wants to develop the belief “I can win races”. He can visualize all day to build his confidence, but eventually, he’ll have to win a race for the belief to take root.

Why games are so effective in NLP

Another set of experiential devices you can  design to effect transformation is games.

Games offer microcosms, experiential metaphors, of real life situations in which new learnings are needed.

For instance, the game Cash Flow by Robert Kiyosaki offers a brilliant metaphor of the path to take to achieve financial independence. And all this learning happens without you having to “believe” in anything except in your ability to achieve it.

The game itself teaches you.

The same holds for the New Code games designed by John Grinder. What’s most interesting about those is that many of them generate kinesthetic learning, often lacking in our development.

Nothing beats experience

Nothing, and I mean nothing, beats real, live experience.

How can you apply this principle to your own life and in your coaching of your peers and/or children?

There is a subtle line between anchoring and interrupting someone’s pattern. 

If you try to anchor too forcefully, you’ll end up breaking their pattern.

If not, you won’t set the anchor effectively.

Wow!

New word!

What could this possibly mean?

John Grinder and Carmen Bostic St Clair, in their book “Whispering In The Wind”, state the following:

Grinder and Bandler were alert enough to appreciate that the choice of terms in this new universe of discourse for the meta discipline NLP had to meet certain criteria. First of all, these terms had to be relatively transparent to the user.1 Secondly, if they were to use terms already associated with some of the phenomena in psychology and more specifically, in clinical psychology, they would drag along with them unwanted and undesirable associations.

For example, we would be hard pressed to argue convincingly for the term anchoring in lieu of the term conditioning except for precisely the unwanted and undesirable theoretical baggage the term conditioning has attached to it. [[the bolding of terms is mine]]

Grinder and Bandler’s solution was the creation of a vocabulary (in some cases) wholly unassociated with previous work to allow a fresh perspective on the patterning being coded. History will determine whether this was an effective solution to the issue they confronted.

What Grinder and Bostic St Clair reveal here is that, essentially, anchoring = classic conditioning, at least in the co-founders’ minds when they set the term.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Pavlov’s famous experiment with dogs.

Anchoring works quite the same way. Perhaps a bit more sophisticated, since human beings are more sophisticated than dogs.

In a nutshell, we use anchoring in NLP to elicit desired responses from people. When I say “desired”, it can be either by the subject or by the practitioner, depending on the type of relationship developed.

OK, so what exactly is anchoring?

Anchoring, generally speaking, consists in associating an external stimulus to an internal response.

Wow, jargon. Let’s go with concrete examples…

Example 1: associating a touch on the shoulder with the person’s feeling of happiness

Example 2: associating a certain look on your face to the person’s state of laughter

Example 3: associating a certain song with a moment in a person’s life

Starting to figure it out?

External stimulus —> Internal response (which can be a feeling, a thought, a belief, and so forth)

An anchor is like a button you can push to summon back specific states. It’s kind of like an icon on the desktop of your computer. All you have to do is double-click on it to bring forth the program with which it is associated.

Same goes with a link on a webpage. Click on it and you’ll bring forth the webpage to which it links.

How does anchoring work exactly?

Anchoring happens naturally and constantly in our lives.

Stop for a second and think of a song you’ve heard a lot in your life.

If you have it, stop reading for a second, go listen to it and then come back.

What happened?

Your mind started drifting back to the times when that song was playing, didn’t it? Could you remember one of the first times you heard that song?

That’s a great example of anchoring. We do all the time. As one of my trainers said, “You cannot not anchor.”

Any external stimulus can summon back memories and associations. Songs, specific smells (like freshly baked bread or pies), temperature, textures, among others, are common examples of anchors that operate in your life.

Hmmmmm, anchoring and calibrating are really close…

Yes they are.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts on calibration, or have previous experience with NLP, you know that calibrating consists in observing the association between an external cue in someone’s behavior and an internal process.

Close, isn’t it?

Calibration enables you to take note of already established internal anchors within someone.

It also enables you to get the timing right in effectively setting an anchor.

Before you can master anchoring, you’ll need to have mastered calibration.

Some practice drills

OK, let’s try some exercises, shall we?

1. When you hang out with a friend, pay close attention to the shifting of their states. Pick one empowering state, such as laughter. When you see them laughing out loud, open your eyes, mouth and face wide open while looking at them in a playful way. Do this naturally, without really forcing it or trying to call their attention to it, otherwise you might interrupt their pattern. The next time (s)he laughs, do it again. Then a third time. Afterwards, do a quick test… Open your eyes, mouth and face widely and observe if you can get the laughter response.
2. Watch George Carlin clips on YouTube. Carlin, and many other stand-up comics for that matter of fact, use anchoring to elicit laughter from their audience. Watch a few, identify the anchors he uses and post the link and the video time when he uses an anchor in the comment section of this post.
3. Create an anchor for yourself for laughter. Figure out a way to make yourself laugh on command. Then tell us how you do it so we can make you laugh as well!

In closing…

Anchoring is an essential part of your toolkit. It takes playing around to figure out how it works.

I fidgeted a lot with anchoring at the beginning. Didn’t really get it. I tried to copy other people’s style of anchoring without success. It took me some time to understand that each of us anchors others naturally and in our own way.

Take all the time you need to figure out yours.

You’ll be glad you did.

NLP newbies often want to start learning language patterns and hypnotic language to persuade others to do what they want.

They think that the real power lies in those language patterns.

BS.

or Caveat Emptor: Language patterns don’t top the power hierarchy.

Want to get to serious persuasion horsepower?

Learn framing.