This YouTube interview (Boaz Fischer, May 16, 2021) features Peter Natre explaining psychological "anchoring" as an automatic stimulus–response pattern triggered by sensory cues (song, fragrance, environment, objects). The discussion gives examples of negative anchors (near-miss while driving, home/work bleed when working from home) and positive anchors (a relaxing chair, dressing in a suit), and recommends deliberately creating positive anchors (e.g., a dedicated business space) to improve focus and professional performance.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Naked Insider, where we have Peter Natre again.
Hello.
Great for you to be here.
It's great to be here.
We have a very interesting topic and in this video we're going to be revealing what's the number one use of anchoring to boost your professional expertise or business or yourself or success. So with that, what we've got to do is define what anchoring is all about. Absolutely. And that's where we turn to a guru. Peter, tell me, what is anchoring all about?
Anchoring is a very technical term for something that happens most of the time with us automatically and unconsciously. So an anchoring is a response pattern of behavior and emotions in response to some sort of an external physical stimulus. Now, that can be a song, that can be an environment, that can be a fragrance, that can be somebody's colored T shirt. Anything can become an anchor. And what happens is that it evokes a response in us that has been anchored.
Correct. So what we're talking about is a human behavior. Correct. Whether they know it or they don't know about it.
Exactly.
Can you, I mean, you mentioned about a person responding to maybe a fragrance, a song or something.
Yes.
Do you have another, for example, another metaphor or. Well, like what you mentioned early on, which is, you know, the bathroom.
Yes, absolutely. So there are, there are certain anchors that we have. We, most of us probably would not feel comfortable brushing our teeth outside of the bathroom, say in the kitchen sink, for instance. It's just not the environment. So we've anchored ourselves to brush our teeth in the bathroom. So these, these are the kinds of things that. And you might say that's a habituation. Yes, but it also evokes a feeling and it also drives behaviour. It tends to drive our behaviour. So that's actually a pretty good anchor.
And we're going to bring it and we're going to tie it up eventually to organization behavior. But before that, how do anchors are programmed?
Anchors are programmed by an external event coupled with an emotional input as well, too. Best way to describe that is if, for instance, you're driving down the highway and at one point a kangaroo jumps out at you and you hit the brakes and you have a near miss and you have an emotional reaction. Your heart starts beating fast and you go, wow, that's great, I really missed that. What will happen is that that incident will anchor itself. And every time you drive past that physical stage, you go, that's where I almost hit the kangaroo. That's where I almost hit the kangaroo. And the Emotion will play itself out, and the anchor will have been set. So obviously it's good because maybe that's where kangaroos cross. That's a. A good thing. But that is an involuntary setting of an anchor at that particular point in time.
And in this case, it's a negative anchor.
Absolutely. Because you're distracted at that point in time, going, oh, that's where the roo was.
Do you have an example of what could be a positive anchor?
A positive anchor is, for instance, the chair that you relax in. You basically go into that chair, you sit into that chair, and it gives you the ability to calm down, de stress from the. And have a. And have a. And literally decompress from the day. Another positive anchor is that every time you put your suit on or your business suit on, you strap on your business Persona, and that gets you set for your day. So anchors can be very, very positive. Correct. So how do they get triggered by the environment? Literally. So if you see something, smell something, hear something, taste something, touch something, have a texture of that sort of thing, each of those things can trigger an anchor response. So, for instance, if you are used to sitting. We talked about this earlier. If you're used to sitting in a particular location at work, that can then trigger productivity or other behavior or whatever it is. But that would be a very, very useful anchor to have. Yes, here I am.
Now, I was going to actually bring the subject of anchoring in terms of business contracts. So for me, for example, well, the fact we're in an office right now, but the ability to work from home and then now getting distracted.
Yes.
That is not what I call as a positive anchor. No.
And what people find is that there is a confusion that takes place where the home bleeds into the professional, and the professional bleeds into the home. And the two different responses that are elicited. The two different responses that are elicited are not necessarily compatible. So there would be things that you want to. That you want to express at work. There are modes of behavior that perhaps maybe your spouse or your significant other wouldn't necessarily appreciate if you spoke in that particular way with them at home as well.
So when you think about it, because what we do know, that people either know that it actually happens or they don't know that it actually happens.
Most of the time, people are unconscious. Unconscious of the fact that their anchors, they're setting anchors all the time. So when I know of people that drive to work and they look for the boss's car, and the boss's car then creates an anticipation or an anxiety. So that particular vehicle creates an anchor which elicits a response and that then sets the tone of the day for that person. Oh, my gosh, I'm going to walk. Personality.
Correct.
Here we go.
Correct. It could be any person. It could be maybe a person that they don't get on well with, could be a person who's toxic, it could be a person who's bullying, and we've talked about it in previous videos, but it's the environment that could set them off as well. Could be even the work, the specific work that they may not even like being involved or the team that they want that could set them off. So what are the consequences then for the person as well as the organization?
So we spoke earlier in another video about if you want to change behaviours, the quickest way that you change somebody's behaviour is you actually move their location.
Correct.
So they may be used to working at a particular location in a desk situation with the surroundings. If you move them to another location, which they've not been before, you literally have a window of time where you can change the behavior in that particular instance. So now all of a sudden, for instance, now that we're working from home, we're working remotely, we literally are changing our environment. So all of a sudden, all of those railroad tracks, as I call them, of productivity, all those railroad tracks of being able to focus on business, on the business at hand, now move into an environment where we're used to relaxing, playing with the kids or the dog or getting creative, getting cooking going or something like that, creating fabulous meals, that is now the anchor that we have. And we're expected to do business there.
Correct.
And then all of a sudden we do business there and then the experience of being at home changes as well too.
Yeah. So I look forward to, from my perspective, if you look at the discussions that we've had, especially with the uncertainty, the stress, the anxiety, all you're doing is you're having a person who doesn't really understand why he's behaving in a certain way that gives rise to certain behaviour which could be detrimental to the organisation without them really knowing why they're behaving that way.
Well, most people aren't aware that their environment anchors their behaviour.
Correct.
And by doing that, they're creating more anchors with different random responses or random attachments to them that create random types of behavior.
Yes.
And one of the most obvious things would be, well, you know, people have become less attentive to detail or less inclined to knuckle down and focus when they're working remotely, those sorts of things. Correct.
So what is then the number one secret to utilize anchoring so you can boost your success?
So the thing is, being human, anchoring will happen. What we can do is to do it deliberately. And in another video we spoke about, if we are working from home, that we create a section of our place which is purely business. This is where we do our reports, this is where we do our work. This is where we do our teleconferences. This is where we literally focus in and do the business of doing our business. That then creates a deliberate anchor. And the more deliberate we can create that anchor, the more we can work with the human nature of being able to of using anchors. The more you energize that anchor with the energy of business, the more that you'll be able to focus in on and do what you need to do.
So the key here is actually setting up intentional, positive anchors so that can carry you sort of with energy and positivity throughout the day. That's absolutely because you'll hit roadblocks, there's no doubt about it. But it's a question of how you are able to react as a result of that.
Absolutely. It's the best way of doing it.
Oh, yes, exactly. Well, I hope you like this video. If you've got any comments, feel free to let us know. We will be coming with another set of videos soon. Very good, Peter. Thank you again.
