You can also use anchoring in the context of an organization or a corporation. They are just like families, basically. If you know ahead of time that a group of people is going to get together and they've been meeting for years, they're going to disagree in patterned ways. One of the things you can do is to meet with each of them individually beforehand, and establish a covert non-verbal anchor to change the most salient irritating parts of their non-verbal communication.

Some people have voice tones that when you hear them you just feel bad and disagreeable, no matter what they say. Nobody could continue to talk that way if they had auditory feedback loops. If they could hear themselves, they would talk differently. I guess it's a protective device.

Bullfrogs do that. A bullfrog makes such a huge sound, it would deafen itself if it heard itself, because its ear is so close to the source of that loud noise. The nerve impulses for the sound, and the nerve impulses from the muscles that make the sound, arrive at the brain 180 degrees out of phase and cancel each other. So the bullfrog never hears itself. And it seems like a lot of people I meet operate the same way.

Another thing that often happens in a corporate situation is this: Somebody becomes so excited about a point they want to make that he begins to really push and gesture. Suddenly the person on the other side sees the pointing finger and the intense look on his face and that triggers an anchored response in them. Away they go. Their response is partially to this human being in this time and place, and a whole lot to other times and places—anchored by the excited face and the pointing finger. Human beings operate in what we call a "mixed state" most of the time. If I ask you to look around and find someone in this group who reminds you of someone else, I will guarantee that your responses to that person will be a mixture of responses to them here and now, and old responses to whoever it is they remind you of—unless you are very, very careful and clean in your responses to that person. You are all sensitive to that process; it's called a "contaminated" response in TA, and it's a common way that people respond.

Woman: Does it make any difference whether you touch the right or left side of the body when you anchor kinesthetically?

There are fine distinctions—there's a lot of artistry. But for the purposes of doing therapy, you don't need to know about them. If you want to be a magician, it's a different game. If you want to create artificial credit cards that aren't there, and things like that, there are certain useful kinds of distinctions. But for the purpose of doing therapy, kinesthetic anchors are adequate, and either side of the body will be as good.

Sometimes it helps to be able to anchor tonally. Virginia Satir anchors tonally. She has a certain tone of voice she uses whenever she does change work. She talks in a regular tonality for six hours, and then suddenly she changes her tonality. When she uses that tonality, boom! that's it. The people change. Erickson has a special tonality he uses when he wants people to go into trance.

A lot of people in trance have their eyes closed. What does Erickson do for anchoring at that point, since he's in a wheel chair and he can't reach around and do kinesthetics? Close your eyes for a moment. I'm going to talk, and as I talk I'm going to move my head back and forth. I want you to notice whether you can detect the spatial dislocation of my voice, even from this distance. If you can, fine. If you can't, you detected it unconsciously I'll guarantee you, because that's one of the major anchoring systems that Erickson uses with people who have their eyes closed in trance.

All of those will work. The choice you make about what system you anchor in will determine the kind of response you get. If you want to involve the person's consciousness, anchor in all systems. If you want to be covert and go around a resistant conscious mind, anchor in any system that is not represented in consciousness. If the person's predicates and their eye movement patterns give you the information that they are primarily kinesthetic, don't anchor in that system unless you, want their conscious resources involved. If you anchor that same person tonally, they will have no conscious representation of it.

We are going to ask you to begin with kinesthetic anchors. They seem to be the easiest to learn, and the most useful. You'll generalize naturally from those. You can anchor in any system. Pair up again, A and B. You are both going to operate in both positions.

A, your job is to do the following: Face B, and place your right hand lightly on B's left knee. Then ask an accessing question: "Do you remember the last time that you had a really good sexual experience?" Wait for an appropriate response. You've got to be able to detect a response before you can anchor it. As you begin to see changes, you begin to apply pressure with your hand. You observe the changes in the parameters of muscle tone, skin color, breathing, lip size, etc. As you detect them, let those actually drive the pressure in your hand. When the changes level out, then you just lift your hand off. Then you will have a perfectly timed anchor. Don't anchor initially until you can see a difference in your partner's response.

Your ability to see a difference depends on how forceful you are in amplifying what you are getting. If you do things like this: (low, slow voice) "Have you ever been really excited?" or (high, quick voice) "Have you ever been really sad?" that won't work as well as if you congruently say excitedly "Look, have you ever been really excited?" The more expressively you access, the more expressively they will respond.

Then you place your left hand on their right knee, and ask them "What in your experience is the opposite of that?" They will access whatever is the opposite, for them. As the changes occur, again you increase the pressure as you see the changes until they plateau, and then lift your hand off.