Thursday, January 21, 2016

Digging up the ENTIRE anchor

There's actually a giant caveat in the whole "anchor collapse" thing. So big you could drive a ship through it.

It's really really easy to fail to get in touch with the entirety of the motivation behind one side - especially when it's a far mode thing.

Sunday, January 10, 2016

On Anchor Collapse and Actually Deciding

"Collapsing Anchors" is a neat concept. For the non-hypnotist readers, "anchoring" is basically just NLP's renaming of "classical conditioning". Pavlov "anchored" the anticipation of food to the stimulus of a ringing bell.

"Collapsing anchors", in short, is firing two different anchors at once so that they interact and stuff changes. It's usually talked about as a "mind hack" you can use to "get rid of" "negative emotions" and replace them with "positive" ones. As if you have a bucket of sadness and a bucket of happiness and you just pour them both into the bigger pot and the happiness "cancels out" the sadness until all the sadness is gone and left with happiness.

In real life, it's much more context dependent than that, and much more general as well. A more useful way to think of it is to take two mindsets that aren't sure how to coexist and introduce them to each other until they learn how to play nicely together. A confidence anchor doesn't "cancel out" a fear anchor, it's just giving you a chance to figure out how to be confident in that (formerly) scary situation. It's a chance to take whatever useful bits from one mindset and apply them to the other. This integration is necessarily an active ingredient in many protocols that focus on higher levels, and it should fold in naturally when the broader context dictates.