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

Are you thinking that I’ve lost my mind a bit? I mean, feelings that tumble and spin and have colors and fireworks shooting out of them? There’s no denying that it sounds a little bit wacky, don’t you think? In fact, I’m the first one to admit it! But here’s the thing: do you think I would really waste your time and mine going through all this when I have more than enough other things to write more directly about than just the Straight Line System, which I invented?

All these little adjustments you make, using the power of your mind, will, in fact, intensify your state even further, which is crucial, because you can only set an anchor when you’re at the absolute pinnacle of a state! (This strategy alone won’t get you there, but it sets you up for olfactory anchoring in a very big way.)

Step #5: Set your anchor

Now we’re at step five, which is where you actually set your anchor. What this entails is taking the intense state that you’ve just created and linking it to a word or mantra, or to some external sound or sharp feeling, like clapping your hands and screaming the word “yes”—which was when the entire process had begun to break down for me.

It started with my struggle to find a sound or a word or a movement that felt extreme enough and unique enough to serve as an anchor that I could fire in any situation. For whatever reason, nothing felt right, nothing felt profound—until, one day, it did.

Just how I came up with the idea to use sense of smell I don’t fully recall, although it definitely had something to do with my memories from childhood. You see, as an adult, it never ceased to amaze me how even the slightest whiff of something that I had smelled during my childhood—a freshly cut grass field in the Catskill Mountains during summer camp, low tide at the jetty where my dad took me fishing, or the musky, mothballed scent of my grandma’s house—was enough to send the most powerful memories rushing back, to the point where they viscerally hit me.

Once I hit upon the idea of using the sense of smell to set an anchor, it didn’t take long to find the perfect product. There were two requirements:

1It had to be a scent that was extreme enough, unusual enough, powerful enough, and pungent enough to meet Bandler’s criteria, yet still be pleasing enough to the nose to not gross me out or become its own negative anchor.

2It had to have an unobtrusive delivery system that was portable, practical, and personal to me—meaning, I could easily slip it into my pocket, remove it without fanfare, and then use it to fire off my anchor without the scent escaping into my surroundings and impacting the people around me.

The name of the product I found was BoomBoom. See what this is at www.boomboomenergy.com.

BoomBoom came in a sleek black tube about the size of a ChapStick, so all I had to do was unscrew the top, give myself a blast up each nostril, and, just like that, I popped into my ideal state.

It was an amazing breakthrough for sure, although the breakthrough it paved the way for was considerably more amazing, and what truly turned olfactory anchoring into the foolproof state management strategy that it is today.

So what was this second breakthrough?

Well, simply put, I figured out a laughably simple way to eliminate steps two, three, and four from NLP’s five-step anchoring process, leaving behind a leaner, meaner, and infinitely more user-friendly two-step process that I officially dubbed olfactory anchoring—because of the odorous centerpiece on which its foundation was built, namely BoomBoom.

To explain exactly how I did it, let me go back a step:

After I became a master practitioner in NLP, I spent the next six months trying to set an anchor for myself for a state of certainty. But, no matter how many times I tried, when I got to step four—which was using the five modalities to intensify my focus—things began to break down.

The problems started with the memory I chose to focus on. I figured what moment in my life had I ever been more absolutely certain than on that magical Tuesday evening when I first drew the Straight Line on my trusty whiteboard? I’m talking about the moment I described in detail in Chapter 2, where my window of clarity opened. I couldn’t think of a time when I felt more absolutely certain about anything.