We do this all the time without being aware of it happening. In situations we experience, anchors are created automatically . They help us cope with the world and makes us prepared for situations we have experienced before so we can respond in a way that serves us and protect us. An example of an anchored state is in case you have experienced a fire that became dangerous and you had to escape to safety. All the sensory elements of the fire you were exposed to became triggers. Just a hint of a sense of smoke will make you remember the whole episode and you will recollect the way you felt and the sensed emergency. Your pulse will likely increase, your mind will become clear and your priorities will likely shift to handle a similar situation that you had once you had the first experience. You are ready to take the actions needed to keep you safe. This is how the brain is wired since millions of years back.

But anchors can also be intentionally created to serve a specific purpose. An anchor is the association between a trigger and a state. The anchor connects an inner response to an external stimulus. The fundamental reason for that anchoring works is that all experiences are stored in the brain as a wholeness. When you recall a single part of the entirety, it will revive the other parts of the wholeness. Anchors can be shaped in any of the senses.

Modeling comes from the idea that success leaves clues. Modeling is also known as the strategy, the difference that makes the differences in your results. Find role models not only the one’s doing the same as you do, but everywhere there are traits worth mastering that fit with your passion, business and life. Instead of learning by trial and error, let’s find out what the best on the planet spent maybe 20 years to learn, refine and compress decades of thoughts and practice into a recipe.

 Then take action. Don’t wait until you have all the answers. It’s more important to act then to have the right answer. You can always tune your practice as you go.

 There are not many new things invented in the world. New groundbreaking ideas are to 99% unexpected combinations of existing ideas. 

No one has a true picture of the world and what’s happening. We all filter what we see through a lens of our experiences, what we learned from history and our beliefs of what’s right or wrong.

The way we think and process information and what we pay attention to individually is unique based on those filters

In essence, we pay more attention to how someone talks and what emotions they trigger than what they actually are talking about. That’s how politicians get away with what they are saying.

All of us have certain patterns we communicate by in speak and body language and we respond instantly when someone are using the same pattern.

Everything we see, hear and experience has to pass our very own particular filters of Deletion, Distortion and Generalization. These filters creates our very own blueprint of the universe.

Over the years, there have been moments and periods that I always will remember as they are related to crisis or emergency near me or someone close to me. I have vivid memories of what I did and where I was when John Lennon was murdered outside his home at the Dakota building in New York, now 40 years ago. I remember clearly the murder of the Swedish Prime Minister 1986, I remember 9/11, I remember when my Mom and Dad passed and I remember other significant episodes that happened in my life. Of course, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic will make its mark, but as for all the previous, I believe this is etched to the mind after the fact.

Although experiences like these are nothing you wish anyone to have, they are inevitable. The good thing is that for every experience, you learn about yourself. By understanding how you react in a stressful situation, you can create strategies on how to cope and to be better equipped and stronger for the next time. We all react in different ways, but to be able to help others; it helps to know how to manage you.

The Million dollar questions are “what am I not seeing right now? And “what else can be true?” In a traumatic or stressful situation, we tend to filter information more than normal and the only ones that resonate with our own scripts will stay relevant in our thought process.

I believe that you don’t have to experience the ultimate trauma to obtain self-knowledge. If I had realized the value of this early, I could probably have revisited a childhood experience to find out what my response would be. The good news is that you have an opportunity to learn your pattern and build a strategy that will help you cope with any situation before having to experience one.