ANCHORS - THE KEY TO MISERY AND MOTIVATION!

 

 

‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes’.  Marcel Proust

 

 

In 1968, a cruise ship, the Blue Dove, ran into trouble.  Its engines had seized and the boat was floating listless in rough weather risking the life of crew and passengers.  But how had such powerful engines broken down?  The answer lay in a relatively small device that had uncoupled at the rear of the vessel some hours earlier – unknown to the crew, one of the anchors had accidentally released and been dragging behind the vessel.  As the ship was trying to outrun bad weather, the Captain had ordered fast engine speed.  The increased speed, coupled with the dragging anchor, placed such tremendous strain on the engines that they had seized up.  Such a huge ship rendered helpless by a small piece of iron on the end of a chain – a simple anchor…

 

Another ship, The Boudica, purposefully used an anchor, and it saved the vessel and all on board.  While near a port in the Caribbean, the ship was hit by a terrible storm.  The port was too shallow to risk entering, and with the wind so strong, there was a chance that the ship would be run aground as it tried to enter the bay.  The only choice was to anchor outside the port and weather the storm.  The large anchors were released and locked the ship in place as the rough weather pounded it.  After a few hours, and thanks in large part to the securing anchors, The Boudica came through the storm unscathed, much to the surprise and delight of crew and passengers alike.

From the two stories above, we can see that anchors can be an absolute godsend, or they can be the cause of terrible disaster – it’s all in how they are used. 

 

And just like ships, we too have anchors – emotional anchors – that either keep us powering towards our goals or prevent us from really experiencing the life we want.  It’s all in how we use them…

 

What is an anchor?
In answering this question, think for a moment: have you ever wondered how come some people remain totally motivated to go to the gym, day after day, while others last a week or two at the most and slink slowly into apathy?  What about how some people love a particular food, while others absolutely detest it?  Or, how is it that one person can be obsessed with a particular style of music and another hate it?

Well, the answer lies in the creation of anchors.  An anchor is simply an individual emotional interpretation of a situation fixed in our nervous system.  An anchor is set when a person interprets an experience as being either positive or negative.  When this happens, emotion is attached to this interpretation (or meaning) and the memory of the event is stored in our nervous system.  If the individual has experienced and interpreted similar experiences in a particular way before, the new anchor is lumped with the others, creating a powerful unconscious motivating or de-motivating force in our lives.  This group of linked anchors is known as a gestalt.

 

How come it works this way?
It works this way because at the most basic level anchors are the language of the unconscious mind, and the unconscious mind’s job is to propel us towards the things we like and keep us away from things that we interpret as being bad for us.  You see, in a fundamental way, life is about avoiding pain and increasing pleasure.  We interpret experiences as either painful or pleasurable (and we scale them from really painful all the way to absolute pleasure) and store these as memories in our nervous system.  Whenever we experience something, our faithful unconscious mind’s job is to search the database of pleasure and pain to see if the new experience is the same as, or similar to, past experiences.  If it is, then it is linked with those memories and labelled ‘painful’ or ‘pleasurable’.  Our unconscious mind then either propels us towards the experience (in the case of pleasure) or makes us feel repulsed (in the case of pain). 

 

But how we interpret things may not be the best for us
A very true statement – you see, many of our anchors were set when we were very young.  So, a lot of the things that we see as pleasurable now were set when we were two, three or four years old.  The same goes for things that we view as painful.  I don’t know about you, but it seems a pity to have our lives directed at 40 by decisions we made at 4 years old. 

 

An example of this is a friend of mine named Mike.  When he was about three years old, his mother gave him some fruit cake, which he happily enjoyed eating as he had done many times before.  On this occasion, however, a fly flew in his mouth and he started to choke.  With the help of his mum, the fly was removed.  As Mike looked at the dead fly on the table, he thought it looked just like the sultanas in the fruit cake.  He felt sick and couldn’t eat fruit cake from then on.  He had created a powerful negative anchor – linking pain to fruit cake.  Mike is now 40 years old and feels queasy at the sight of fruit cake – making it difficult for him to eat out at cafes where such food is served.  At 40 his life was being negatively affected by a single five minute incident he had at age three – over 37 years ago!   

 

How do I get rid of negative anchors?
Like Mike, many of us have anchors that no longer serve us positively.  Perhaps we felt scared when we went to school on the first day and made an anchor that everything new was painful.  So now, when we face the prospect of a new job, a new relationship or a new situation, we feel uneasy and avoid it – leaving us locked into a situation where we never progress.  To get rid of these types of negative anchors, we need the help of someone who has specialist skills in this area.  Coaches, trained appropriately, are able to help you uncover these negative anchors, collapse them, and guide you to make new and empowering ones.  They do this by leading you through a process of getting in touch with the emotion that is surrounding the anchor, and then helping you to change the memory, unhinging the emotion and collapsing the anchor.  Once the emotional charge is gone from the memory, it no longer holds power over you.  You are then free to create a new, positive anchor.

 

But what about creating positive anchors?
Once you decide on something that you’d like to set as a positive anchor (e.g. eating more healthily or exercising daily) you just need to follow the process we use to make all anchors – in other words, you need to experience the situation, interpret it (as pleasurable this time) and use positive emotions to ‘anchor’ the memory in your nervous system.  Your coach will help you do this so that the anchor is firm and strong (they may do it a number of times to build a powerful gestalt).  Then, without effort, you will be drawn towards the things that you really want – and success will finally be yours!  Exciting isn’t it?

 

 

Copyright C Change Coaching 2008©

 

C Change Coaching approves the reproduction of this article so long as it remains unchanged and contains the following subscript:

C Change Coaching is an emotional wellness and life coaching company specialising in helping people uncover and eliminate negative emotions, decisions and issues to empower them to achieve success in all areas of their lives.  To find out how C Change Coaching can assist you to do this, visit www.cchangecoaching.com.au.