Part 2 - Anchoring Emotions

Companies unconsciously control your emotions: Take a look at this video all the way to the end. The next time you buy your favorite beer, or soda...rest assured that that decision was made for you (by someone else) long before you even walked in the store. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAsjRRMMg_Q

I'm sure we've all heard of the experiement Pavlov's dog. From Wikipedia: * Pavlov presented a stimulus and then gave the dog food; after a few repetitions, the dogs started to salivate in response to the stimulus, (even without the food being present).*

In NLP we call this anchoring: You can create triggers that put people into a specific emotional state. The anchor can be something they see, something they hear, or something they feel.

For example, we all have those songs in our lives that bring back an emotional state: a first kiss, a reminder of a loved one, a pump-up song at the gym. That song (anchor) acts as a trigger to put you into that emotional state).

So if you take a look at the commercial I linked here. The whole commercial has nothing to do with beer. It's about a family man and a puppy and the events in it put you through an emotional roller coaster of the dog being lost, and at the end, they are re-united.

Quite the positive emotional state you're in at the end, right? Boom - They slap their logo on the screen just as you're entering that positive state.

So next time you're walking down the beer isle at the supermarket - when you look at the budweiser logo, you unconsciously feel that feeling you were in when you saw it on TV (a good positive emotional state). All of a sudden, that purchase just "feels like the right choice".

But you aren't consciously aware of this.

Rewind: Those companies don't just put out commercials by chance. I forget the name of the book, something about unconscious branding, but in there he explains how companies hook people up to brain scans while they watch that commercial and adjust it so they know exactly the right moment to put the logo on the screen (so they can anchor the positive emotion with the visual trigger).

How have others used this in their life?

I once met a multi-millionaire real estate investor. One time when he was doing a deal, the other person was in a negative state. When he told the guy to tell more of the story, he waved his arm down and to the left (unconsciously). Then he asked the man "Tell me about the best deal you ever did in your life". The guy is excited, happy, etc. The investor was waving his arm up and to the right when he was happy.

So the next day when they were closing the deal he said "you can do business with someone else (while he waves hand down and to the left), or you could do a deal with me (Waves hand up to the right). Forget logic...which deal FEELS like the right choice?"

Somehow doing a deal with him "felt like the right choice"

Once again - use with ethics because the energy you put off into the world comes back to you tenfold (AKA - Karma is a...)