How to anchor our performance psychology

In a recent article, I cited a major line of research that suggests that we are more likely to make profound and lasting changes in our lives when we encounter new ideas and experiences while in new states of being. mind and body. For example, talking about overcoming a fear is of limited benefit. Dealing directly with the dreaded situation while repeating a stress management technique that keeps us calm and focused reprograms the situation so that over time we no longer associate it with anxiety. Although psychotherapy has been dubbed “the talking cure,” it is actually not through normal speaking that we effect our changes. Powerful and positive experiences accelerate the movement towards our goals.

As the Good Therapy site points out, one approach to psychological change emphasizes a redrawing of the maps we create of our worlds: Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Anchoring is a concept of NLP that has found considerable support in research when it comes to drawing our mind maps. Anchoring is a kind of stimulus-response learning in which specific life situations are associated with particular psychological outcomes. For example, I recently worked with an investor in the financial markets who struggled through periods of negativity and pessimism. At these times, he was not doing his usual research and was much more likely to not be in control of his positions in the markets. When we looked at situations in which this negativity occurred, it became clear that it was associated with physical fatigue and fatigue. In addition, he experienced particular fatigue when sitting at work for long periods of time and this fatigue triggered a stressed state of mind in which he felt chronically behind in his work responsibilities. His negative state of mind was ingrained in the positioning of his body over time.

When this investor acquired a standing desk equipped with a treadmill, he used periods of exercise at the desk to actively rehearse the mindset of opportunity. These states of mind became embedded in his state of energy, so that he could eventually put himself in the right state of mind for the job just by moving his body in the right way. The physical anchor created a new place on his mind map and gave him much more control over his productivity.

Most of us go from mood to mood, from state of energy to state of energy, from state of mind to state of mind in a seemingly random fashion. What if these transitions were themselves rooted in particular life situations? I worked with a woman who complained that she was concerned about her family who had rejected her. During the day, she found herself replaying conversations in her head, most of which were imaginary dialogues in which she expressed her anger towards her family members. She found that these concerns distracted and made her miserable, but she couldn’t prevent or break the loops of these imaginary conversations. When we took a step-by-step analysis of her situation, it became clear that her anger thoughts and scenarios started in the morning and most often started when she was in her kitchen cooking a meal or doing the dishes. As it turned out, she was in the kitchen, near the sink, when she received the hurtful and rejecting phone call from her parents. Feelings of anger and vulnerability have taken root in the cooking experience.

What if we have many anchor points, triggering moods, thoughts, and actions without our realizing it?

Anchors can hold us back, like in the kitchen example, but we can also create anchors that free us up, like in the case of the standing treadmill desk. The woman who had been rejected by her family created a meditation routine in her kitchen in which she imagined herself reaching out to her friends and family members and making herself available for them as support. While visualizing this, she remembered that it was her way of being better than those who had hurt her and she vividly imagined using her injury to become a better person. She found it stimulating and created a routine of using the kitchen phone to call friends, connect with them, and arrange visits. While in the kitchen, she listened to music which she found uplifting and meaningful. She moved her calendar to the kitchen to remind him of new activities. Over time, mental rehearsals and scheduled time with friends transformed the kitchen into its social hub. She found herself actively seeking relationships and not dwelling on past rejection. The kitchen had become a positive anchor, connecting her to a new place on her mind map.

The Science of People site refers to creating such an anchor as priming and notes that our associations shape our behavior in ways we don’t realize. As Vanessa Van Edwards points out, the simplest things you can do at TED Talks can influence what we hear and how we rate messages. When we become aware of our anchors, we not only have the possibility of disrupting negative primings, but also of building and instituting new positive ones. What if, for example, we identified five patterns of thought, feeling, and / or behavior that we wanted to experience more consistently in our lives, and then consciously created exercises in separate states of consciousness to experience those patterns? Could we discover that these positive experiences are triggered as easily as the negative ones? With enough repetitions, could many settings and meetings in our life become constructive anchors, preparing us for a positive psychology?

Few of us have consciously set out to fill our lives with positive anchors and prepare for them. The problem is not necessarily that our mindsets are too negative; is that they are too random. Yes, we do indeed operate on a stimulus-response basis like animals. What makes us human is the ability to program these stimulus-response connections to renew us and make us ever better.