Who’s actually in charge of that particular transportation vehicle? Of course that would be you. You’re in charge of your thinking, you’re the person in charge of what you do. You’re the person who creates the thoughts you have, you’re the person who can choose to think a thought or choose not to think a thought.

Now if you want to be in a really positive state, all you have to do is remember a time when you were in that positive state. Here’s an example, can you remember a time when you were totally motivated? If you would, why don’t you just stop for a moment and go back into the past and remember a time when you were totally motivated. Please remember a specific time and as you go back to that time now, go back to that time and float down into your body, into your body, right into your body, there you go and see what you saw, hear what you heard and feel the feelings of being totally motivated, totally motivated and feel the energy as it goes through your body, feeling totally motivated.

There you go, good now that is an example of being in charge of your state. Okay come on back, so you could at any moment choose to be totally motivated or you could choose whatever state you’re in. Now the interesting thing is you’re in charge of your brain, you’re the one who’s running the brain, you’re the one who’s driving the bus so to speak so you really do have the choice by simply paying attention to the internal representations that you use.

Now people have internal representations throughout the entire day, in fact everyone has a series of internal representations that go through their head on a regular basis. How do we capture those? Here’s the question, how do we capture those internal representations and link them so that they’re hooked up to a stimulus or to an anchor so that we can recall that state at will? Well that’s the process of anchoring.

Now with an anchor, we’re going to ask the person, ‘can you remember a time when you were totally Xd’ or whatever that state is; ‘can you remember a specific time?’ So we’re going to ask the person to remember a specific time when they accessed a certain state. And that state is really important, we’re going to catch that state, we’re going to watch the person as they go into the state and we’re going to catch the state as they go into it.

These are some things that I think you ought to think about when you’re working with a kid. First of all you want the learning strategy to begin in a positive state. If the student or you think of a time when you succeeded and felt good rather than failed and felt bad, you’re going to have a better learning strategy. Learning is really inhibited by having negative emotions and negative states in the person’s physiology at the time so you want the client, you want the child to access and then you want to anchor appropriate resources.

You want to chunk appropriately. I think you want to chunk down the task that you’re working on to avoid overwhelm. Chunking down means getting specific enough so that we’re not overwhelmed about everything. Like, “Oh I’ve got all this homework to do”. “Well what specifically?” Then chunk down and begin to get with working on each of the segments of the homework. Then recycle or go external till you can represent the smaller chunks so as to sequence and prioritise them.

You want to get appropriate feedback relative to the task being learned, which means the feedback that the student receives needs to be relative to the task that the student is learning. You want to make appropriate comparisons that give one a feeling of accomplishment. Do not make any comparisons to experts or to an ideal person, but to your ability in the past. So always compare your own ideas of ability, your own ability with the past and not to an expert.

There’s a couple of things, you need to avoid the dangers of exiting too soon. When you exit too soon when you’re learning something you get premature closure and I don’t know if you know, but I know a lot of people who’ve attained premature closure on a lot of different things. So exit when you’ve learned enough for now and when you’ve learned something well enough to get your outcome.

I think you also should avoid the trap of chasing clarity where you think, ‘I need to know everything about it and be totally clear about it before I proceed. Remember that all important decisions are made on the basis of insufficient information.

I think you should expect not to understand some things and I think those things that a student doesn’t understand can be set aside and you can come back to them later. I think you should avoid getting trapped in bad feelings about not understanding and remember too that understanding itself is a feeling.

• pictures
  Sounds
  Feelings
  Tastes
  Smells
  And self talk

That’s intimately coupled to a state which is (happy state, sad state, motivated state and so forth). That’s intimately coupled to the Physiology, so the relationship between the internal representation and the physiology ends up being the state, and the state is what we anchor in ANCHORING.

Relationship between the internal representational system and physiology is the state, and the state is what we anchor in NLP this is what creates behaviour. How do we be in charge of our own internal state? Well people are more in charge of their state than we give them credit for? One famous NLP quote is a presupposition and that’s “who is driving the bus”? that vehicle you have inside your head. You see you are in charge if your thinking, you choose to think or not to think a thought . Remember a time when you were in a positive state a time you were totally motivated? That is how you elicit it, this proves that you can be in a positive state at any time.

Everyone has a series of internal reps that go through their brains at any moment. How to link them up to an anchor to recall this state at will? This is Anchoring. Triggers can be like to dislike or a swish pattern. Can you remember a time when you were totally X’d? Can you remember a specific time?

Now what happens is that your internal representational system brings back the pictures, sounds and feeling of that time and as a result you experience the same state as you did at the time. When used like this you are able to bring yourself to a positive state at any time you need to.

Now to be able to go back to a time might not be something that you can do every time you need a state change. So Anchoring is using that stat and a stimulus or pressure applied to a part of your body.

Some people use the knuckle on your hand or your ear lobe, the process is to apply pressure at the peak of that recalled state. Some people even apply more than one state to one area this is called stacking. This gives a blend like a cocktail of positive resourcefulness at any time you need it.