Way of the Wolf: Straight Line Selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence, and Success

In other words, we know what a depressed person looks like and we know what a happy person looks like; and we also know what an angry person looks like and what a loving person looks like too; and we all know what an impatient person looks like and we know what a calm person looks like. It’s all very logical.

Now, let me ask you another state management question, albeit from a slightly different angle. Let’s say you were in a depressed state right now, and I offered you $50,000 to act happy for the next sixty seconds. Could you do it?

Yes, of course you could!

It would be as simple as consciously making certain obvious changes to your physiology, ones that you had used countless times in your life, since you were a little boy or girl.

However, what if I offered you $100,000—no, make that $1 million—and asked you to make the same changes to your physiology as last time, albeit with one important difference: this time, I need you to maintain a happy physiology for the next eighteen hours straight. Could you do it?

No way.

No matter how hard you tried, you simply couldn’t pull it off.

It’s impossible.

To be clear, this has nothing to do with you being weak or strong or anything of the sort. It’s simply the way human beings are built, as a species.

You see, while it’s true that we can, in fact, make ourselves feel any way we want at any given moment, that moment is fleeting—giving us a window of opportunity that’s anywhere from five minutes to maybe an hour at most. After that, you’ll slowly start to settle back to whatever state you were in before.

Now, if any of this stuff still seems foreign to you, here’s a quick exercise that will really clear things up. Ready?

Okay, I want you to think back to all the times in your life when someone asked you to manage your state, and you actually did, but you called it something else at the time.

For instance:

How many times has someone said to you: “Keep your chin up!” or “Put on a brave face!” or “Look alert!” or “Keep cool!” or “Smile and act polite!” or “Don’t lose your temper!”

See my point?

The reality is that we’ve all tried to manage our state at various times in our life, and sometimes we were successful and sometimes not. The goal of anchoring is to eliminate the “not.”

So, with that, let’s get specific.

NLP’s first leap of logic was based on the idea that human beings could proactively manage their emotional state with near 100 percent success by directing their focus and their physiology in a specific way.

The second leap of logic was to combine this concept with classic Pavlovian conditioning, as in: Pavlov’s dogs.

Remember Pavlov’s dogs?

As the story goes, sometime around the turn of the last century, a little-known Russian scientist named Ivan Pavlov conducted an experiment involving a starving dog (very common, at the time), a juicy piece of meat (almost impossible to find, at the time), and an extremely loud bell (very common, one would think, although who really knows).

Either way, the experiment’s protocol was simple:

Present the starving dog with the juicy piece of meat, while simultaneously ringing a bell. This he did.

Not surprisingly, the dog instantly began to salivate at the sight of the meat, while the sound of the bell was merely coincidental to him, at least at first. However, what Pavlov quickly noticed was that as he kept repeating this process over and over again, it didn’t take long until the dog would start to salivate just from the sound of the bell. The sight of the meat was no longer necessary.

The reason for this, Pavlov concluded, was that each time he repeated the experiment, the dog’s brain would develop a stronger link between the sound of the bell and the sight of the meat, until, finally, the link had grown so strong that the mere act of ringing the bell would be powerful enough to trigger salivation.

In NLP, the ringing sound of the bell is referred to as an anchor, the act of ringing the bell is referred to as firing off an anchor, and the process by which two formally unrelated items become linked together in this way is referred to as setting an anchor.

The most common state that salespeople will try to set an anchor for is a state of absolute certainty, and the most common anchor they’ll choose to try to link it to is a combination of shouting the word “yes” and simultaneously clapping their hands.

Now, if you’re thinking that screaming the word “yes” while executing a single clap of your hands doesn’t seem quite as intense as tempting a starving dog with a piece of juicy beef (while ringing a bell that’s loud enough to wake the dead), then you’re in the same boat that I was: feeling frustrated, skeptical, but still hopeful for an answer.