Thursday, May 22, 2008

Collapsing anchors

Anchoring is the process in NLP of attaching a stimulus to a response, a sort of kindly Pavlovian conditioning.

So for example, we ask a client to imagine a positive experience then touch their arm or hand as that experience reaches a peak of intensity.

Collapsing anchors is a process whereby we anchor a negative experience to one stimulus, say our client is in a negative state:
  • we touch the knuckle on the index finger on their right hand to anchor the negative state.
  •  We then ask them to think of a positive experience and when that experience peaks we touch the knuckle on the middle finger on their right hand.
  • We then fire both anchors at the same time. The positive and negative states both seek to be present in the client's physiology at the same time.
  • Typically we will see the client go through a state of confusion.
  • If the positive state is large enough, the client will end up in a positive state.

Collapsing anchors is a principle that is used in the NLP coaching model, and the NLP Meta pattern.

Shawn Carson
We then fire both

No comments: