EP55 Mindset Monday - Anchoring

This is the Empowered athlete podcast Mindset Monday 10 minutes with Kari Schneider to learn new mindset tactics and tricks to optimize your performance in sport, business and life.

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So anchoring is really key on my heart right now because I've come back from a major Tony Robbins seminar in Florida. So a life, wealth mastery. And yesterday I also did a pretty big business meeting with not only my Essential Oils team, but also a larger team as well. So we were doing a lot of work on belief systems and empowering beliefs and things like that. So one of the things that I really wanted to do was anchor positive experiences and emotions in now when you think of when you think of sports or life or all sorts of different things, there are different ways. We have anchors all around us. We see a yellow car with a white thing on top. We're anchored in to think that we have transportation. If we see a vehicle going by with flashing signals, we are anchored to think, oh, maybe a little bit of anxiety in that. What is wrong? So there's all kinds of anchors around us all the time, but we don't necessarily always have the skill or we've never been taught the skill as to how to use those anchors to work for us. Or maybe we have a lot of experience with how those anchors work against us or work with us negatively. So I'm going to give you an example and I'm going to give you a few key factors and some of the key anchors that I use personally, because trust me, with the kind of life that I've had and things that have gone on in my life, I need the positive anchors. I need a tool that to help me get to the state mentally and emotionally that I need to serve my best life, my family, my clients, and the world around me. So I know that one of the first experience or memories that I really understood about anchors was when I was in university. There's a few before that, but this is a key one. This is a major one that caused physical disruption for me. So my boyfriend at the time played Division 1 hockey at University of Colorado and University of Denver in Colorado, and he was in a bar fight and I was there with him and in this bar fight, frat guys and Hockey players got into this major fight. We weren't even old enough to be in the bar. And my boyfriend got in this skirmish at some point and without giving you all the awful details, he got stabbed. And I was the first responder. And when I say he got stabbed, he didn't get stabbed like once. And with a small flesh wound, he got stabbed so badly that major organs were involved. Like I'm talking lungs collapsed, intestines everywhere. The stuff like major, major trauma. And I was the person who, who was calling 911, who was holding his body parts off of the floor and all of those things. I was that person. So you can imagine the visual, you can imagine the sounds, you can imagine the emotions, the fear. You can imagine all the things that were going on at that given time. And we were in a bar, right? So there's music going on. So this whole experience happened. He survived. He ended up in major surgery. And it was very life changing at the time. However, that summer, after that experience, I'd be out with my friends and a specific song would come on the radio and I would almost start to shake. I'd have goosebumps, I'd have all these, these feelings. I'd be almost. I'd have to remove myself from a situation. I'd be shaking, I wouldn't necessarily be crying, but feeling like I had. And what was anchored in there was a song, an Ace of Bass song, go figure. That was on at the time when I was physically trying to keep my boyfriend alive and was faced with things I had never seen before. So literal. Blood and guts in front of me. And that song, I didn't even know it was playing, I guess at the time. But every time it came on for probably two years after that, I had anchored in these horrible feelings. And for some of you, maybe it's the smell of something, Some of you might be the sight of someone. But there are these anchors that we have. But if you understand how powerful they are from a negative experience, you can really, really embrace how powerful anchors can be for a positive experience as well and how you can use them for your benefit. Or we just need to manipulate the situation just a little bit in order to use anchors for our benefit. So I'm going to show you how a little bit here. So anchoring, first of all to define it really simply is the connection between stimulus and emotional response. So an anchor is the connection between a stimulus and an emotional response. Now you can pick what that stimulus is and you can anchor it even greater with multiple stimuli and that's the cool thing. So this is coming from this anchoring, that connection between emotional or between stimulus and emotional response is in realms called psychophysics, also nlp. So this is neuro linguistic programming. And they are very, very powerful. I've experienced them myself and they work very well in coaching, in life and parenting, in performance, in all of the freaking things that we really, really care about. So I've given you a couple examples. One personal negative example, the, the ambulance, the, you know, another one could be in Canada. We've got Tim Hortons. You drive by a Tim Hortons. That's a powerful anchor for a lot of people. They feel like they gotta pull over and get their coffee or maybe it's that positive feeling from the, the sugar or the warm fuzzy they get from coffee. So those are some key examples. But I want to give you some key factors for an anchor to take place and then you'll see kind of what you need to do and I'll tell you how. So there's an acronym called iTurn. So I and then the word turn. And these are key factors for an anchor to take place or to really have an effect and a long lasting effect for you, they need to have these factors. So I stands for intensity. So intensity of memory or emotion in that memory. If you've got something intense, that experience, intensity is key. And you can imagine from the example I gave of my boyfriend being stabbed in that life threatening situation that was massively intense emotionally, a massively intense memory. If I thought about it clearly enough, I could probably get goosebumps, go into a really tight fearful state if I went back into that memory in enough detail. So intensity, the T stands for timing. So the timing of when you do it in relation to the memory or the emotion. The U stands for uniqueness. So you're creating a stimulus that's very unique. And so for instance, flashing lights, you don't see flashing lights all of the time and that's unique. I don't see somebody get stabbed all the time. That's why those things are very unique and they're anchored very heavily. So uniqueness is important. And R, so you or I turn the R is replicability. So it's replicatable. You can repeat this thing over and over. So fortunately I can't repeat someone being stabbed over and over. I don't want that. But I can repeat the memory, right? So realize that in post traumatic stress or negative things, things can be repeated over and over. But if you know that about the negative, this is critical. You can do it with the positive too. So you can repeat something, have it replicatable and have that work for you. That's a critical factor. And then the last thing is number of times. If you can repeat something over and over and over again, you're anchoring something much more powerfully. So if you think of sport or you think of coaching, or you think of parenting or life or performance in the workplace, you want those anchors to be powerful. Okay, so those factors, I turn, are all the things you're looking for to make an anchor really powerful. All right, so the next thing, those are the key factors. Now I'm going to give you a way, a how to. To use those key factors. You're going to go to a place that's really, really positive. So maybe it's the memory of something amazing happening in your life. Maybe it's the experience you had when you accomplished a new skill that you had never done before. Maybe it is whatever it is, go to a visualization or a powerful, powerful memory that's very, very positive. Something that you accomplished, people you connected with, a loving feeling, a birth of a child, falling in love. Those amazing positive, positive situations and feelings. You go for something intensity with intensity and memory. So you think of that. Then from there you're going to use that memory to draw up those feelings. And at the same time you will use a physical stimulus. Maybe it's a musical, like my example, it was a song. I can think of many songs from the time I fell in love with my husband that will take me right back to that experience. Because those songs are anchored to an emotion. So once you have that emotion, you have that memory. Use the physical thing, whether it's a song, a touch, but something that's unique. A song is very unique, specific touch. Maybe it's the web between your thumb and your finger. Maybe it's touching your earlobes or pressure points that cause some positive stimuli. So rolling out the folds of your ears, touching the earlobes, rubbing your temples in circles, little things like that can be physical anchors or dancing up and down, like a physical jump up and down. We do a lot of that in Tony Robbins and it's fun, freaking awesome. And it really anchors positive emotions in a huge way. So once you've got that physical memory and then you're creating that uniqueness of experience, maybe it's a physical experience and that something that can be repeated. If you are doing something that's ridiculous and you can't do it in public all the time, it's not easily repeatable. And then lastly is being able to repeat it, doing it over and over, actually physically doing it three, four times in a row or with whatever your little system is. And then you've created something that can be an anchor that you can use anytime. So I do this with my athletes. I'll tell you one of the things I've done with a couple of athletes. I had an athlete who was a track and field athlete and they would get the anxiety of knowing they had to go into their event, but at the same time their event could be delayed all the time. So they had to be ready to go like that instead of knowing they were going to compete right at 2pm that could have gotten delayed to 3pm or 4pm so they have to re. Warm up and re. Get mentally focused. One of the things that they couldn't do very well was use caffeine. So when they wanted to wake up and use that as a stimulant, it gave them the jitters or upset stomach or things like that. So what we used, and we started this prior to the event is we used an oil, an essential oil that would open up their awareness, wake them up, also calm anxiety. We happen to use an oil called wild orange. And I had them repeat at times when they were feeling amazing, really positive going into the most focus in their training, repeat the smell of that wild orange. They did that enough times and anchored it enough that by the time they got to the meat and just had to reuse that particular tool and anchor it physically and they've done it in the past, that they'd calm their anxiety, awaken their focus, have that abundant focused feeling and ready to go mentally and physically for when they had their meat time without all of the anxiousness and jitters and fear of not performing. So it was an amazing tool for that athlete and it worked really, really well. When other tools weren't working, like caffeine or maybe just a mental focus, there was a physical and actual anchor that they could use and repeat. So some of my favorite physical anchors are. Sorry, favorite anchors. Overall, number one is physical movement. I have alarms set on my phone at periods in the day that I will have to actually move around. I do a make your move from some of the Tony Robbins events that we've done so much that at the bus stop this morning, I say to my 8 year old, make your move. She pumps her fists, jumps up and down and yells, yes. And all I did was say make your move. Just like that. Boom. I've anchored that in for her and she doesn't even know it. But I've got something that can put her in a positive state in a snap of a finger, just like that. I say one word or one phrase, make your move, and she does it. And that's anchoring it in. And it's further anchoring it in for me because she did it. Because she is so emotionally tied to me. I love her so much, she's my child. That seeing her do it even anchors it in further for me. So with connection with someone else is even more powerful. So physical moves, dancing, a physical pump of the fist, a jump up and down. We do those things all the time in sporting events. If you think about hockey, playoff game, guess what else is anchored in there? Not only the human connection. People jumping up and down and cheering. Then you've got the same freaking songs that they play over and over to pump up the crowd that is anchoring people in. But then those same people won't feel comfortable doing that same move in their own home. Go figure. But we can. We can use those same types of anchors that pump us up and make us feel really good. We whenever we want. So number one is physical. For me, I love physical movement. That's a huge anchor. Another physical form of anchoring is nature. Nature calms me, grounds me. That's an amazing anchor for me as well. So that's another one, a third one, which is a form of nature, end up being essential oils. I choose very specific essential oils. You know how powerful smell is. That olfactory smell spot is directly connected to your limbic brain. Your limbic brain is your center for emotion, for memory. So you can anchor very, very powerfully with smell. I choose essential oils that are going to do certain chemical responses. But you know, you've got anchors for, let's say, banana bread. I know my husband has an anchor for that. Or your grandma's cooking or something like that. We have those powerful smell or scent anchors. So essential oils is a third favorite, favorite tool of mine. Touch. Touch is another one. If I think of my little ones when they were small, everybody else, all our kids had blankies of some sort or stuffies. And that physical touch is a soothing anchor. So for me now, as an adult, I can't go and walk around with a stuffy. But my dog ends up being an anchor at home, petting my dog. The touch on my earlobes or temples or ears, or webbing of the hands, doing a touch like a mantra, touch. So this could be one that is a. We did a breath walk at one Point satana, touching the fingers, so touching the thumb to first finger, then second, then third, then fourth and then repeating that again. Those touches you could do anywhere if you needed to ground or anchor yourself into a positive state. And no one needs to know. Another one is breathing or breath work. Deep breaths, holding you can do box breath work where you in for four, you hold for four, you exhale for four, you hold for four and you can change those counts and that breath work while you're going into a positive state. And another one is guided meditation. So hearing or music. So when you are hearing. So I'm looking at different physical stimuli. Scent, hearing with music, physical movement, even taste as well. All of these things really and breathing, taking air in our life force. These all have very, very powerful anchoring capabilities. So those are the top five that I use. So hopefully you've got some key, key tools here with your anchoring number one being understanding that iturn acronyms. So you've got the factors that you can use for powerful anchors. You've got different anchors that I use. So six different anchors I gave you that are powerful anchors for me. How to anchor something. So they're using neuro, linguistic programming, nlp and that's where you're utilizing that powerful, powerful positive recall, positive experience and memory. And it has to be intense and then using that and drawing in with something that you can physically recall with and use. So key steps for you to use for anchoring. For those of you who have come through a powerful Tony Robbins seminar recently, anchor some of those experiences in. For those of you who did some training yesterday and came through with some empowering beliefs, some breakthroughs, some action plans, use some anchoring for that as well. For those of you who have a goal that's upcoming or ways that you want to ground yourself or create what you want in your life, use anchoring. So this is an incredible tool. It's so powerful for me that I actually changed today's topic to change it to this because it was on my heart. So hopefully you can use anchor now for me professionally, I have a business in essential oils. I coach in person and online. So if you need anchors on those two realms, I can help you. You can always reach out that way. And at the same time, I know that now you have the tools that you can use anchors in your life and you can recognize anchors that aren't serving you and recognize anchors that you can create to continue to serve you. So have a fantastic day. That's your mindset. Monday. Keep using this group. The empowered top performers, Facebook group or our podcast to serve you in the best ways you can and let us know. Let myself and Paul know how we can help provide value to you and serve you in your life. Have a great day guys. Happy Monday. Have a fantastic week.