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

Now, in terms of the best way to teach you olfactory anchoring, what I’ve found, over the years, is that the secret is to take you through NLP anchoring first. This provides you with the perfect context for truly mastering olfactory anchoring, which, by the way, is so easy to master that not only will you be able to do it in one sitting but a seven-year-old could do it as well.

So, with that, let’s get to it.

There are five basic steps to NLP anchoring:

Step #1: Choose a state

This is where you set an intention for the emotional state you want to anchor. This will always be a conscious decision, based on the circumstances that you’re about to face, not what you’re currently facing. In other words, anchoring is a forward-looking process that’s proactive in nature.

For the purpose of this exercise, let’s choose a state of absolute certainty, as this is the state that you must be in when you enter any sales encounter.

Step #2: Choose your focus

This is where you close your eyes and go back to a moment in your life when you were feeling absolutely, positively certain. A perfect example of this would be the moment after you just closed a really tough sale, as a result of sounding totally awesome. For whatever reason, you were at your very best that day, and now, as you bask in the sale’s afterglow, you have that superconfident feeling—that feeling of absolute certainty where you know you can take on the world and close anyone who’s closable.

Once you’ve located that memory, I want you to create a vivid picture of it in your mind’s eye. I want you to take in the whole scene, so you can see all the players who were there, looking just the way they looked, including how they were dressed, how their hair was styled, and even how the room looked.

Creating an internal picture like this, where you’re looking down at yourself from above, involves being in what is called a disassociated state, and it’s a crucial aspect of goal-setting and self-motivation—inasmuch as it allows you to see yourself completing a certain goal or task or an even more complete vision for your future. However, for the purposes of setting an anchor, there’s an even more powerful way to use this internal picture, which I’ll get to in a few moments, in step four.

Step #3: Choose your physiology

This is where you’re going to change your physiology to match the exact physiology of the state that you’re trying to anchor. For example, in this case, you’re going to make sure that you’re standing certain and holding your head certain and walking certain and talking certain and even breathing certain, so that literally every aspect of your body, including your most minute gestures and facial expressions, is resonating with the emotion of absolute certainty.

If you think it’ll help, you can even take the picture from step two and actually put it in motion, so you’re now seeing yourself in a movie, and you can use that as your model as you adopt the physiology of absolute certainty.

Remember, being shy or bashful with your physiology is not going to serve you at this point. Quite simply, this is one of those cases where more is more, not less is more, and that goes for your focus too, as you’re about to see right now, in step four.

Step #4: Intensify your state

This step involves using your five sensory modalities—also known as your five senses—to take the picture you’ve created in your mind’s eye in step two and use your brain to manipulate it in a way that intensifies the feeling of absolute certainty that it creates inside of you.

First let me take you through the five sensory modalities, which are:

Visual: this is what you see, both externally, in the real world, and internally, in your mind’s eye. In the latter case, the picture can be from a memory, or it can be something that you’ve created yourself using your imagination, or it can be a combination of the two.

Auditory: this is what you hear, both externally and internally, and with the same permutations as above.

Kinesthetic: this is what you feel, both externally and internally, and with the same permutations as above.

Gustatory: this is what you taste, both externally and internally, and with the same permutations as above.

Olfactory: this is what you smell, both externally and internally, and with the same permutations as above.