How quickly can you change your mind?

How often do you find yourself saying, “Why can’t I stop doing ‘X’?” The ‘X’ could be eating junk food excessively, or getting upset over little things like being interrupted in traffic, or anything else that is not addictive in nature (eg, smoking, using drugs, etc.).

If you have a specific response to a specific situation, it is what we call an “anchor” in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). So let’s say every time you see a black dog you immediately get uptight, even if it’s one of those little teacup-sized bulldogs. At some point, probably when you were very young, a black dog did something that scared you to the point of black dog = fear. The black dog becomes the anchor.

Some of you may be thinking, “But there was no black dog in my past.” Sometimes our brain will do what is called a deletion. Basically your subconscious removed (at least the conscious mind) the event to protect you from reliving it over and over again, which in turn paralyzed you a bit. So his subconscious stores him in a special vault where only he can access to keep him out of harm’s way.

Change does not have to be a long and drawn out process.

Change happens in an instant. Someone jumps out from behind a door and says “Boo.” How long did it take you to jump up and freak out? Instantly, right? We don’t need a lot of time to make the change. And if it happens enough times, especially in short succession, we anchor the door to fear.

The good news is that change and anchoring can happen just as quickly. This is what NLP practitioners specialize in. They help people get rid of anchors that no longer serve them, or they install new anchors to help them neutralize old anchors each time they emerge.

NLP practitioners are becoming more and more frequent, but finding one can still be a bit challenging. NLP was the fame of Tony Robbins. You can read its books or listen to its audios to get a good idea of ​​how it works. There are many other sources, both in book form and in audio form, that may work better for you.

The moral of the story is that you don’t think that changing your thinking or a poor response to certain situations will take forever to change. It can be undone almost as fast as it was made.