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

Yet, on the flip side, I knew that the science behind NLP’s approach was sound, and that the payoff for cracking the code would be incalculable—not so much to me, but to the tens of millions of people who would be attending my live events over the next few years.

You see, unlike most people, I was blessed with a natural ability to manage my state at an extremely high level, so anchoring was really more of a luxury to me than a necessity.

Unfortunately, though, for every oddball out there like me, there are ten million normal folks whose natural abilities in this area lie on the opposite end of the spectrum. In consequence, I continued to experiment with a number of different strategies that could be combined with basic NLP anchoring in order to ratchet up its effectiveness. It took just a bit over a month, until I finally struck gold.

In the summer of 2009, I gave birth to a wildly effective state management technique that I proudly named olfactory anchoring. She was born weighing just over an ounce, and was just under two inches long. She was on the thin side, for sure, but perfectly symmetrical nonetheless. However, out of all her defining features, there was one in particular that stood out above the rest:

She stunk!

6

A SUREFIRE FORMULA FOR MANAGING YOUR STATE

FOR THE RECORD, I CONSIDER my discovery of olfactory anchoring to be one of those fortunate situations where I was able to stand on the shoulders of a genius.

The genius to whom I’m referring is Dr. Richard Bandler, the brilliant and wildly enigmatic scientist, visionary, entertainer, and hypnotist extraordinaire who invented NLP, in conjunction with linguistics professor John Grinder.

Focusing on inner-world distinctions such as belief systems, value hierarchies, and state management, NLP took the self-development world by storm in the early eighties and has played a central role in fueling the industry’s growth ever since.

The reason I began studying it was a desire to learn two specific strategies that NLP was particularly well known for at the time. The first strategy was a timeline regression, which was designed to help people crack the code of their limiting beliefs and replace them with empowering beliefs; and the second strategy was anchoring, which, as discussed in the previous chapter, was designed to help people trigger a peak emotional state at will.

In the end, while I had tremendous success at implementing the former, but the latter, as I explained, had come up seriously short. So it was that, in the summer of 2009, I began testing various ways to enhance anchoring’s effectiveness.

In early 2010, I struck gold.

In retrospect, I’m still not sure why it took me so long to crack the code for anchoring. After all, the difference between NLP anchoring and olfactory anchoring is only two strategies I added, each of which addresses one of the two crucial aspects of anchoring that Bandler considered especially vulnerable to being poorly executed.

The first vulnerability had to do with how intense you were able to get your state to at the precise moment when you introduced the anchor. The key, Bandler explained, is that you have to be at the absolute tippy-top of the state, in terms of the emotional intensity you feel inside, in order to successfully set an anchor. Anything less than that, and the anchor won’t set.

In terms of how this would relate to the certainty scale from Chapter 1, you’d have to be at an absolute, unequivocal 10, with no ifs, ands, or buts; only then, at that precise moment, when you felt the certainty literally bubbling up inside you, like a seething volcano, could you introduce an anchor and truly set it.

So that’s the first aspect of NLP anchoring that tends to trip people up: the difficulty of trying to artificially get yourself into a state of absolute certainty or, for that matter, absolute anything, as opposed to being there organically.

The second vulnerability had to do with the type of anchor you choose (the equivalent of the bell in Pavlov’s experiment).

As Bandler explained, not only does the anchor need to hit you all at once but it also needs to stand out in a dramatic way. A common, everyday sound or gesture simply won’t cut it. It needs to be extreme—the more extreme the better, in fact—and the more unusual the better too. In essence, you want to use something that’s going to hit your brain in an unforgettable way and literally shock your senses. That’s what a great anchor does, and it’s absolutely crucial that you have one. But don’t waste any of your time trying to find one. A little over seven years ago, I stumbled upon the world’s greatest anchor, and I’m going to be handing it to you on a silver platter in this very chapter.