Anchoring – Reprogramming Our Subconscious Mind

Learning is a process in which new knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and ideas are learnt by the learner. Learning can be a conscious or unconscious process. In other words, we can learn fully aware that we are learning something new or learning can happen without our knowledge.

Ivan Pavlov accidently stumbled upon classical conditioning theory. He was conducting research on dog’s digestive system. He noticed change in the pattern of dog’s salivation process. Initially, the dogs would salivate (involuntary movement) when the food for brought before them. However, after a certain time he saw dogs salivating slightly even before the food arrived. This was due to the noises which came while bringing the food for example noise of food trolley being pushed.

To further test this theory, he started ringing the bell before the food was served. Initially, there was no response. However, after some days, they salivated at the ring of the bell.

To summarize, salivation which is an auto-response was triggered by ringing bell (external unconditioned response).???

Think about the sweet you like most maybe Jalebi, Gulab Jamun, Rasgulla, Laddu or Kaju Katli and pay attention around your tongue. You would notice slight salivation. It is an auto-response in humans as well. Thinking about sweets make you salivate slightly extra.

We had, in our previous articles, discussed how our subconscious mind stores information processed by conscious mind. Image, taste, texture and feeling while we eat these sweets are stored in our unconscious (or subconscious) mind. This associations happen knowingly or unknowingly.

Mother gives sweet to her child for the first time, ‘It’s a Gulab Jamun’. Child enjoys, eats playfully storing the information in his unconscious mind.

Mother sees a house lizard on the wall. She shouts and screams, visibly scared calling her husband to get rid of it. No one is telling the child that lizard is dangerous but the child is learning. Unknowingly, he is acquiring fear of lizard.

Humans have extremely high ability of learning. In an experiment there was a chimp baby and human baby both were growing up together. Scientists assumed chimp baby will learn from human baby. But the experiment was stopped because instead human baby was learning from chimp.

Lot of learning happens at unconscious level, unknowingly. Huge number of associations are being formed.

Why someone likes mangoes and other like apples? Does it have more to do than just the taste? A boy loved Guava but one day saw a very thin white worm inside it. Since then, he stopped eating Guava.

Feelings get anchored with people, things and situations. Mr. X wears one specific shirt for crucial meetings. He believes he is always successful in the meetings when he wears that specific shirt. Feeling good and confident about self gets associated with a particular shirt.

Mr. A is extremely reluctant to give a presentation in front of his seniors. He is extremely scared and he has neve done it before. Mr. A seems to be low on self-confidence. He is hesitant to take new responsibilities, tasks or challenges. He seems to be not utilizing his skills completely. However, Mr. A use to play cricket and was extremely good at it. He was a wicket keeper batsman for his college team and played some exciting games. He even got his team win single-handedly and shows those photographs sometimes only to his very close friends. Mr. A had experienced high self-confidence in the past. He has that state of mind but lost somewhere. Can you bring back that self-confidence, that state of mind in which Mr. A experiences peak state of mind? The answer is yes. State of mind is an emotional subconscious state. It is always there but he is not able to use it when he is performing other activities like giving presentations. Using NLP technique, we can anchor his confidence at any point in his body part or to a colour so that he can experience that state whenever it is required. Its like transferring the self-confidence Mr. A experienced while playing cricket in the past to giving presentation today. Remember that subconscious mind does not understand timeline. Every information stored in subconscious is present for subconscious.

Emotions are auto responses stored in subconscious (also known as unconscious) mind but felt at conscious mind. When you are watching a movie with highly emotional ending, you almost feel tears in your eyes. Some actually start crying knowing very well that whatever is happening on the screen is unreal. No one has actually died. However, because emotions are stored in your unconscious mind, when they get triggered, it subdues your logic. That is why it is said that we should not take any decisions when we are too happy or too sad or too angry. You may say something that you may regret later. Best is, wait for emotions to subside and when your logical thinking returns, then take a decision. You will end up taking logical action rather than emotional one.

In our article on Universal Modelling Process (NLP Communication Model) we had seen how state of mind is formed with the information we accept from our senses.

Anchoring is probably the easiest of NLP technique and we can do it on our own self and attain any state we desire.

Thank you.

#sanjaybgoel #apolloleadership #SubconsciousPower #unconsciousmind #hypnosispractitioner #hypnosistherapy #nlppractioner #limitingbeliefsystems #limitingbeliefscoach #powerofimagination #reprogrammingyoursubconscious #powerofsubconsciousmind #subconsciousmindpower #anchoringinnlp #classicalconditioning #anchoringemotions