Sunday Snippet: WORK SMART BUSINESS: Lessons Learned from HYPNOTIZING 250,000 People and Building a Million-Dollar Brand

Today’s Sunday Snippet is from the self-help book WORK SMART BUSINESS: Lessons Learned from HYPNOTIZING 250,000 People and Building a Million-Dollar Brand by Jason Linett. WORK SMART BUSINESS was published on January 27, 2019.

The Snippet from WORK SMART BUSINESS by Jason Linett

ANCHORING

My daughter is only three-months-old, and she is deeply asleep. I’m supposed to be out catching up with friends. My wife and I have travelled thousands of miles away to be there for a friend’s wedding, and she is already in the hotel’s lobby with our friends. I’m supposed to put our little girl in the stroller and head down to the lobby, but again, she’s asleep. She’s sleeping on me. I’m on the hotel bed on my back, and there’s a little face with her eyes closed inches away from my face. There’s that half-smile babies are known to do while sleeping.

Time stood still. Nothing else mattered.

My phone was within reach, so I texted a photo of the situation to my wife. “Have fun, I’m good up here” was all I had to send.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and breathed a long, slow, relaxing breath as I exhaled. I wanted to hold onto the deep connection to peacefulness and my love for my daughter. I wanted to hold onto this sensory experience.

I focused on her sleeping weight on my chest and the sound of her breathing. With my eyes closed, I repeated the slow, focused breath, taking in the full experience.

More than seven years later now, I can close my eyes, breath that same, focused breath, and fully bring back the kinesthetic experience.

It’s more than just the breath. I can feel the muscles in my body melt and stress drain away as I repeat this focused breath.

Behold, the power of anchoring.

The results can be magical, though it isn’t magic.

You already know how to do this. You hear a song on the radio and the memories of what you may have experienced as you first heard the song come back to your mind. A smell comes into the environment, and it triggers the memory of locations or people you’ve been around before.

Anchoring is the art of connecting one sensory verifiable experience to another sensory verifiable experience. Our experiences are based on associative memory, and this naturally-occurring phenomenon is one you will learn to do on purpose.

Everything is a “state.” You have a state of frustration. You have a state of happiness. You have a state of hunger. You have a state of satisfaction. There are states of pleasure, success, exhilaration, and learning. Do a search online for research on “state-dependent learning.” If students are relaxed as they learn new information and they can achieve the same mental state at the time of exams or tests, they’re more likely to recall the information.

Some would label to be like Dr. Ivan Pavlov studies on classical conditioning. He rang a bell to make the dogs in his laboratory salivate as if they were about to be fed. The extra level to this makes it different is the hypnotic ability to tap into the mental and emotional states, not just behaviours.

Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, is credited for the understanding that “neurons that fire together, wire together.” This is known as Hebb’s rule. As two parts of your mind activate at the same time, they link together creating a new connection.

Anchors should be simple yet specific. The posture of my chest muscles and the deep slow breath is the anchor I can use nearly a decade later to bring back the same mental state of timelessness, love, and relaxation.

A “best practices” tip is to combine two sensory elements for your anchor to be specific. A deep breath and the squeeze of a fit. A shift in visual focus and standing upright. A smile and a clap of the hands. The position of your hands holding the golf club and the posture of your shoulders. Anything can become an anchor. You can train your actions to “Be Hypnotic” in addition to doing a formal process of hypnosis.

Anchors become effective either through repetition or through intensity. When I close a successful sales phone call, I smile and clap my hands once. It’s a silly ritual, yet to be fair, I’m in a room by myself. I close another sale, I repeat the ritual. When the phone is dialling to follow-up on a potential contract, I repeat the ritual, and now I’m “in the zone” to be receptive to the needs of my client to navigate the sales process. I built this anchor through repetition.

When my daughter was asleep on my chest, it only took once or twice to build the anchor. The positive intensity of the experience was enough fuel to build the connection.

Your environment can also become an anchor. Through a brief bit of self-hypnosis, I’d close my eyes and imagine the threshold of the doorframe exiting my office could act like a cleansing mechanism. I conditioned my mind to expect that passing through the doorframe would release the “business time” mode I was in to have a clean slate for the next part of my day. This mental exercise is how I leave the office with as much energy as when I first walked into the space. This is also a big part of the appropriately compartmentalized world I’ve built. When it’s time to work, it’s time to work. When it’s not, I’m present to the world around me.

Bring your thoughts to a specific positive memory. If it helps to close your eyes when you do this, that’s fine, assuming you’re not operating heavy machinery. Relive the experience with your sensory awareness with as much detail as possible. What can you hear? Are you connecting with specific images? What’s that feeling in your body? Are there any smells coming to mind?

You’re about to learn what I call “the anchoring sandwich.” Between two moments of increasing the state of mind you’re generating, you’ll establish the anchor. Turn it up. Build the anchor. Turn it up even more.

Go into that positive mental experience with as much sensory awareness you can create. There’s no right, and there’s no wrong. However, you experience this is what’s right for you.

When you feel you have it near the peak, create a specific anchor. The specificity is easy as long as you choose two sensory actions. A breath and a fist. The squeezing and pulsating of a finger and thumb.

As you hold onto that positive state you’ve created, establish your anchor, and turn it up even more. This is the sandwich. Turn it up, anchor it, and turn it up even more.

Now break the state. Disconnect the anchor and shift your physiology and focus elsewhere. Look somewhere different. Move your body. Now repeat the entire sequence again.

It’s as if you’re installing a new software program in your mind. As you’re creating it intentionally, the method is to use repetition. Run this sequence several times, and then put it into use. Fire off your anchor in the scenarios you choose for it to be effective.

Eventually the “technique” of this falls away. The more you make use of this method, the better it will work for you. The better it works for you, the less you’re going to need it. You’ve conditioned the new automatic response.

Our brains are hard-wired to establish new neural connections, and the skill of anchoring will empower you to build these connections on purpose.

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Author Jason Linett appears on The Segilola Salami Show on the 19th of February 2019 to talk about his journey growing his million dollar empire.

Please leave a comment below, I would love to know what you think about today’s Sunday Snippet