Eliminating Negativity. Could This Be So Simple?

“He just rubs me the wrong way,” said a friend of mine. We were talking about a mutual acquaintance who I liked and he did not. My friend said, “every time I even get near him I feel so bad.” Now, I don’t feel that way, but I was sympathetic. (And I know NLP Coaching so I know what the problem was. More important, I also knew what to do about it. We even teach it in our NLP Practitioner Trainings.)

Do you have someone in your life who rubs you the wrong way? Sure. We all do. But why does it happen and is it possible to make it not happen? Let’s talk about it.

Ivan Pavlov was a very weird guy. He’s the father of Behavioral Psychology. Did some experiments with dogs. So the legend goes, he would experiment with his own dogs.

He’d start by showing them a steak. Waited till the dogs salivated and then rang a tuning fork (you know those little 2-pronged forks they use to tune a piano). Eventually Ivan got the dog to salivate even with no steak. (Wow, what a money saver! Helps to keep the kids thin. Don’t tell my wife she might use it on me! He he he.)

Now, what Dr. Pavlov did, was he observed (around 1902-4) a very early case of stimulus response, which in NLP Coaching we call Anchoring. So, an Anchor is defined as a stimulus that captures a certain response and can also be involved in recalling it.

Now in NLP jargon, we would say that my friend was negatively “anchored” by seeing the guy who rubbed him the wrong way.

I think that it is important to know that an anchor can also be used to recall a good state for you. Think of one of your friends who, every time you see him or her, you feel really good. So, instead of it being a negative Anchor, this one is a positive Anchor.

Now, this opens up a whole new world of possibilities: Positive Anchors and negative Anchors. It makes one think of what is possible to do with this. Imagine. What would happen if we put a positive Anchor together with a negative Anchor? Well what happens is that (if the positive Anchor is of more intensity) the negative Anchor will collapse into the positive one.

In NLP we call this Collapse Anchors, and we use it to eliminate negative feelings which we call negative states. Useful. Because who doesn’t have negative states from time to time. We all do. All the way from small and insignificant all the way up to major stuff.

So, I knew what to say to my friend about the guy who rubbed him the wrong way. I suggested that the process that could help him was called “Collapse Anchors” and it could be easily done by anyone who was a competent NLP Practitioner. I told him it would take 5-10 minutes and he would be done with it easily. Plus the NLP Practitioner could see if there were other issues that were hidden from view that would make it unwarranted to let go of the negative emotions. We call this Ecology and we use the word differently from saving the environment.

So, we both ended up feeling better. I knew I could help my friend and he knew he could choose to not be a prisoner of his negative emotions.

The saying that, “there is nothing I can do, it is just the way I feel,” is just not true, and the millions of people who have taken NLP trainings and NLP Coaching training know this from experience.